My Final Paper

Yep, I'm still struggling. Today I plan on writing about class, stream of consciousness style, until some basic theme or focus comes about from all my rantings and when that happens I will have found my focus. Here it is. Drum roll please. The manifestation of my imagination and memory entwined together in the form of words on your monitor. Do not read on. My thoughts will most likely flow in a Joycean fashion.

themes. 20 minute lifetime, dulce domum, the myth or the eternal return/eternal recurrence, the world as myth and dream, life as fiction and language.

eternal recurrence is my favorite I think, being as how the 20 minute lifetime could be like a déjà vu of recurrence, or a parenthetically lived lifetime, or version of Plato's anamnesis. the eternal recurrence umbrellas the dulce domum as well seeing as how nearly every story and every life exists "to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time" otherwise we would never learn anything and, by a certain philosophy, never make it around the circle of time, through the underworld of night and back to the daytime to begin again and fin again repeatedly knowing everything as if it were new even though we've been here before. As Dr. Sexson says, you've all been here before, you're the same class I taught last year, and the year before and twenty years ago and we still haven't gotten it. But maybe we did but we're revisiting the place for the first time to say goodbye and move on, it's a loop from a singular point in all directions like a solar flare from the time line that Dr. Sexson is on. From his perspective we are a whir of the same people in the same events learning the same lessons over and over again, but perhaps we were gone for a long time and are just coming back to know it for the first time from a different perspective and that his time line is not the same as ours. Where he taught us all last semester we have lived out our entire lives, died, and have come back again to see the same thing from a new perspective. Like a reincarnation where the time line of the actual world is really only two seconds wherein our beloved professor is passing between worlds and we are his dream and through his dream are learning everything he can teach us in the best way possible to us. And since we have learned it once, we can die and be reborn the instant after we are born to live along side ourselves, and with ourselves but unrecognizable to ourselves because we are so different from being a lifetime ahead of the place we were. We could share the same classroom, even sit next to ourselves and be none the wiser since we are so far, a lifetime, or thirty lifetimes, ahead of our initial self. Learning again, the same things we were taught from a different perspective. But this is really all happening in a second. In another second when Alice wakes up and we are all snuffed out, where can we go to learn again but back to Alice in her new world and await for her to dream again.

Ah! "Dies" to switch tracks since I've concluded that stream. I will write more and blog after I have read this and turned it from a memory into an experience. Perhaps after analysis I can find another wormhole to slide down that parallels this one, but elaborates on it and enriches it.

For now, lunch.