course summary

This class for me has been an intricate enlightening process. Mythology had always been in the realm of interesting but useless knowledge to me and i honestly had no belief that the progression of mythological history could apply to the world we exist in today. For me, i realize how misconstrued that idea really was. As we read and discussed Ovid i began to see how modern language originates from ideas and events, people and actions from those who lived so long ago. Thousands of years of stories and actions and lives lead to produce artistic ideas musical theatrical language scientific ideas, all of which have resonated through every aspect of our world. Even the progression of idea throughout Ovid can be related back. The creation of our lives, innocence of new life and the using of those new lives by those of greater standing. All actions and struggle we experience in growing up in a world already inhabited by those who have taken our steps before us and wish to use our ignorance to their advantage. Then we come to the second section which revolves around the pain of initiation. Ovid describes this in the most graphic and brutal representation but the concepts remain the same and apply to us once more. As we mature past ignorance we then plunge ourselves head first into our world in order to find our way. Often times we do this with haste in order to grab that foot hold and escape our own ignorance which merely lands us into a knew realm were unfamiliar with that often leads to a painful experience that will help us grow. Thus is life, we plunge head first in blind hopes of reaching an unforeseen bounty of mental or physical gain with a chance of succeeding or failing painfully increasing our knowledge of our world to the day that we reach the final section 3  defined as apocalypse. This is where i learned another large concept i was unfamiliar with. Like many i assumed apocalypse was the end of all, a doom filled term that meant the extinction of all things in our world. I was again wrong. This final theme relates to our lives to me because we defined it as a revelation or revealing of what was once hidden. For me, this is interpreted as the final realization of ourselves. There comes a point in most peoples lives where after they have lived long enough and experienced enough painful initiations that they become self aware of their place and purpose. Apocalypse at it finest. This wraps around to one of the biggest points of my class experience that in order to experience the beauty of simplicity one must experience pain to its fullest in the form of life and initiation. Its all mythology, from ignorant beginnings, to painful rising, to an apocalyptic realization of a complex series of webbed ideas ultimately converging to form one beautifully displaced simplistic flow of life to be shared by all who exist under its dominion. Its a large realization i feel will help me grow as a student and a man in order to accept the pain of life with a more open approach of its means to a greater good. Simplicity, is beauty. Thank you professor sexton.    

The End Draws Near, Apocalypse. (my life as a mythic detective)

Now I have put an extensive amount of thought into what I can take from this course and how I can apply it to my world, and my conclusion may not be to the conformity style standard one might expect. I am not going to glorify our leader in the battle of knowledge as our god, but rather thank him for a unique trait I have come to gather from his teachings. You see quite simply my experiences have been a strange shift of poverty to middle class to my initiation transition of a comfortable lifestyle of meandering thoughts and loose fitted dreaming into hardened concentrated pain to a strange middle ground of work related devotion and pursuit to fulfill my ever lurking urge to know why we exist as we exist and where the next step lies. What this rambling of my present thoughts leads me to express is that I am going to thank our class based leader for opening my eyes to the beauty in simplicity. One might get caught on this statement and baffle at how all of our discussion on the complex structure of creation that lead us to our current existence could possibility be summed up to such a simple concept but allow me to elaborate for a moment and keep an open mind as I did. 

To me simplicity isn't going out and looking at a tree or gliding through a meadow of beautiful sprouting flowers and seeing all of the beautiful natural life. No, to me those characteristics fall under the anatomy of biology and its sprouting branches that define all things living and chemistry’s infinite capacity to make conjectures towards everything before and after and even during at a microscopic level. The sciences as I view them are indeed a thing of beauty but in more of a “wow, the structure of flow of the sciences are a beautiful design” sort of way. Beauty as I see it for the purpose of this piece is to recognize how the simple act of living is filled with its own complex weaving set of chaotic organization that some-how collaborates into the ever present and moving world around us.

How about a contradiction now eh? A little suspenseful regurgitation of a previous thought recovered in a way that contradicts my previous statement to make you question my credibility. Since I have started this shift in my mental meanderings, I have noticed a greater enhancement in the beauty of the natural world around me. What did I tell you? Doubt me now aren’t you considering I just told u that I didn’t believe in beauty in such a way as to be related to looking at daisies and bee’s, but then again maybe that isn’t how I am actually seeing it. No, in fact, the beauty I have begun to see is much more sinister in nature. It is struggle, pain, misery and death. The bee takes from the flower to create its bounty while at the same time spreading the plants seed. The cooperation continues with the death of the bee and its recycling into the earth. Concepts that we normally categorize so negatively I’ve begun to view in a different manner that relates more to myself than I could have ever imagined. These concepts are the driving force to everything. We absolutely must struggle we must experience pain to see beauty. That job you hate, those teachers who endlessly barricade u in with what seems and endless load of homework to the emotional cut of deficient family or friends or maybe that once thought special someone who changed your views on trust. All stories told a thousand times over and yet all unique to you and you alone. Simplicity is beauty. The simplicity of the average life. Lives of thousands you never once stop to ponder. The lives of those people who statistically are experiencing the exact same experiences you are right this moment. All these lives and all these experiences are not so unique in nature but unique to your nature. And this is where I come to my point. 

Life is not about going out and cutting down the beast or save the damsel in distress, finding the trove of treasure long lost to man-kind. It’s something so much more simplistic. It is suffering so that once the suffering has subsided, you can look around and see beauty. Beauty enhanced by those sufferings. Cherishing those small details in your life that makes the chaos organize into its beautiful structure. Spinning your own little tale as a being of mythological nature facing down the monsters of your work and your passions to form your beautiful endings. Or feeling secure in your nature and your moment of simplicity to have it run down by the next tragedy. To me, this is how I have viewed the process of mythic detective work. The keen eye of the explorer notices the finite details of the world and knows there place in the scheme of things, but the observant eye of the detective sees those details in a larger context. He sees the series of simple movements that build to the beautiful flow that is the human existence.