Class Notes 10/14

Sexsonian Wisdom- The Bible is not rules to live by but a mirror of Identity

Aside- Look at Rio's ad for the football game. check it out.

# Blog Assignment-Go out & Engage somebody in a discussion of the bible. By engage we mean argue with them.

Blogs to Read- John on Samuel Becket, Emily on A River Runs Through It.

Angel & Alexa blogs for connections between Suzanna & Stevens

# On going blog assignment! How Has The Bible Influenced Literature?

Talmud Definition- Authorized commentary of the Torrah

Nichole Kraus Wisdom: Bend around to mirror the shape you've lost. U

"All the arts aspire to the condition of Music."

On Being assigned to Read Suzanna and Peter Quince at the Clavier

Preface

We'll take a poem
& make love to it Wallace,
As you too take your scripture
& temper too nature's rapture.

I. Wallace. (The Thief)

You play the flute & feelings too
& point to the simile of things
            Seeming,
       Nay, being to be;
The Old wanting the New
       The song that remains the same,
       The story that replays the game.

II. The Princess

The Nympthette, The goddess,
        Bathsheba
by her pool

All push the keys that bring the old in man
        to pillage,
nay, rape that which cymbals please.

II. The Broken Lock

The Portal
Which Pluto Plummets
With His Persephone
Visits wakeful sleeps
of young boys dreams

While a Professor's Pitched
Voice, Drenched Green & White,
Tells too, Is too, the same
Dream & Melody's
Of The Elders & Peter's Clavier.

III. Beauty's Truth

Is of the moment, as in the flesh,
as in the piety of Suzanna's praise

& not the lust which fouls foolish men
(to a dogs lick or the stiffened neck)

IV.  To this our bodies lay dying

But the spirit of our stories lives on,
In the Clothes of a Poem,

In an Urn that deserves an Ode,
In the Misery of Two;

The boys pitch that
provokes old art anew.

Love is the rook
between the two.

Why Is Reuben a Defiler?

Kings and Chronicles may be some of the stiffest reading but I did find something rather important in the Genealogies listed in Chronicles:

Now The sons of Reuben the firstborn of Israel (for he was the firstborn, but forasmuch as he defiled his father's bed, his birthright was given unto the sons of Joseph the son of Israel: and the genealogy is not to be reckoned after the birthright. For Judah prevailed above his brethren, and of him came the chief ruler, but the birthright was Joseph's) -I Chronicles 5 vrs 1 & 2.

But Why does Reuben not deserve his birthright? What did he do to deserve such a thing, and why does Judah Prevail over his siblings? BACK TO GENESIS!

I first noticed that something was amiss in the treatment of Reuben when I stumbled across the blessings Of Israel upon his sons in the 49th book of Genesis:

Reuben, thou art my firstborn,
my might, and the beginning of my strength
the excellence of dignity, and the excellence of power:
Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,
because thou wentest up to thy father's bed;
then defiledst thou it. He went up to my couch. -V. 3 & 4

I couldn't understand why the Reuben was decided void of birthright and also why he trusted Judah with Benjamin's Life and Not Reuben.....Something was fishy.

So I Strolled back through Genesis, Again!

And what I found begins in the 30th Book, Verse 9

"When Leah saw that she had left bearing"-

BUT WAIT! Later on, in verse 19, it says

"And Leah conceived again, and bore Jacob the sixth son."

I Read this and section between the verses multiple times before taking to the Internet for a few answers and here is what I got.

After Leah was considered barren of child her first son, Reuben, is off working in the fields when he comes across a Homeopathic drug called mandrakes which he gives to his Mother so that she can then again sleep with Israel. When the Barren Rachel finds out of this she goes and asks "Give me, I pray thee, of thy son's mandrakes" to which Rachel replies, "Is it a small matter that thou hast taken my husband? and wouldst thou take away my son's mandrakes also? Therefore he shall lie with thee tonight for thy son's mandrakes." to Which Rachel agrees causing Leah to run into the fields towards Jacob shouting "Thou must come in unto me: for surely I have hired thee with my son's mandrakes!" And this is why Reuben is stricken of his birthright and even considered a defilest of his fathers bed.

But why is Judah considered great by his Father? And why is it that Judah and not Reuben is allowed to Take Benjamin into Egypt?  I'll save that for my next blog:)

Cheerio!

In respone to Sarah's Adam on a Bar stool

I have a friend who once upon a time, in the not to distant past, was a youth pastor. And he gave sermons to me in a small room on the third floor of a steeple church. And on this certain occasion that I want to share with you he told me about the Pastor he served under while he was a missionary. It was in Amsterdam. In the red district. In a makeshift chapel above the full glass windowed streets. The pastor, so the story goes, suffered from a very very difficult vice. He slept with women. Nonstop. And this isn't just before he found God or whatever formative cliche you prefer, either way its irrelevant; He was an unfaithful pastor, and husband. 32. 32 is the number that rumbles around an abysm of retraction not thought of  'til I read your story Knox and remembered. And I know that's the amount of women he slept with while married to his wife. that's the number of times he told his wife. It's the number of times he fell down on bent knees and cried forgiveness at this wife's feet. And it's the number of times she had forgiven him. And I doubt that his wife's understanding of the situation melted into the trivial terms of

"Men are tempted by women so women should learn to forgive them when they cheat. It's easier for a woman not to cheat because men don't try to tempt them as much and it's not fair that men should be held responsible when they do stuff like that."

 And while the bible may be descriptively interpreted that women are at fault for the evil of men, in know way does it Biblically say such a thing. In fact I find it extremely misandric nowadays, not misogynistic, to assert that the Bible says " It is, after all, the fault of women (namely Eve), that men are tempted to do evil." No longer is it being used as a mutilated translation of the wicked to enslave people in the belief that women are to blame for "our sins". But now, in our day, the same mutilated translation is being used to show that it is the fault of man for believing that women are all at fault for tempting men. And so goes the Prickly game of who is to Blame. The Weak of mind will always strive to suggest the simplest, apparent answer to questions which can only be understood through the struggling of wisdom into words. In Paul's words "The spirit of the Lord giveth Life, the letter taketh away."

Quiz # 1 Questions

1. Frye believes the Bible is U-shaped.
2. Why does Frye believes it is a comedy? Because it ends happily
3. Frye believes the bible is unified in terms of Imagery and Narrative integration
4. Four Kinds of Language according to Frye
    lowest 1. Factual or descriptive- newspaper
               2. conceptual or dialectic- mathematics, philosophy
               3. Persuasive or Rhetoric
   Highest 4. Mythic, Poetic, Literary
5. God as the male, and Israel is the Female
6. In a patriarchy, even men are women
7. The law of hospitality trumps the rights of women
8. "Feminine" is metaphorical speech while "Female" is a cultural standing
9. Couvade- French for men's jealousy of women's birth giving
10. What are Epistles- Letters
11. Ceres Eats Ladies Who Push Gods Away
      Creation
      Exodus
      Law
      Wisdom
      Prophecy
      Gospel
      Apocalypse
12. Which son was originally intended to be blessed by Isaac? Esau
13. What is a Lacuna- A missing part
14.What Levitical Law prohibits Rachel's father from searching the saddlebags beneath her? It is taboo to even approach a woman during menstruation.
15. (They provide genealogies that interrelate the Characters of the bible)- Ruth- continuity
16. What does Tamar dress herself as in order to have "Issue" (to have children) A Man.
17. The Bible preferences the least over the greatest.
18. The Problem of the ten commandments is that they are not their!
19. Traditional view states that the 1st five books are the Torrah, Pentautech.
20. What is Jedpr
Jehovah-The narrative poetic metaphoric writer
Elohist- The miracle writer
Dueteronomist- Deuteronomy writer
Priest- the genealogy and very descriptive writer
Redactor- The stealer of things!
21. How did Zipporah save Moses? She cut off her sons foreskin and held it between Moses' Feet.
22. Apocalypse means the "unveiling"
23. I AM THAT I AM
24. What was the punishment for the Tower of Babel? God confused the language of the people
25. Central Images to Fry- The Cave, The Mountain, Furnace, The Garden
26. Repetitive parallelism i the bible inspired Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Eliot
27. Who's Jane Eyre's favorite writer in the bible? The J Writer
28. What is the second major event in Jewish mythology? The Exodus
29. What year did the southern kingdom fall? 587 b.c.e.
30. Onon spills his seed.

Ceres and Proserpina

Sexson asked me a little bit ago to look at how Shakespeare's The Tempest plays with mythology....well actually I asked him if I could write about how Shakespeare uses mythology in the last verse of The Tempest and instead he assigned to me act IV Scene I. He finished by saying something along the lines of how sublime the story of Ceres and Proserpina is.

Taking this as a not so subtle hint on the assignment I did just this and there has been three texts I've been paying close attention too. Two of course are The Tempest and Ovid's chapter in book V about Ceres and Proserpina. The third dwells in Frazer's Golden bow. While my "blog" on the the meaning behind the Tempest passages is not complete one thing I feel that is very important to write down is how Ceres and Proserpina represent how old gives birth to the new and that the new will ultimately become as the old, something that seems so obvious yet when reading Ovid's telling it doesn't always seem apparent. I feel there is definitely more to say yet I have not the words and I no not which muse to beckon to my aid....so adios!

Linda Sexson

For all of you who missed class last Thursday we had Linda Sexson as a guessed speaker. She is a Professor in the Religious Studies department and tells me that "she knows" Shaman Sexson as well.

Now onto the Lecture. Genius seems to travel between the Sexsons. I believed I learned more about the literal viewpoint of the bible in 75 minutes than I've ever known. In fact that 75 minutes probably supports about 3/4's of it.

Linda started out her lecture by pointing to the fact that she would be referring to women in two very different ways;

when she said "Feminine", it referred to the metaphoric or symbolic woman.

when she said "Women", it refereed to social and cultural distinction or roles laid to a "woman".

She did this all before saying:

"We never know if we are talking symbolically or historically"

Rolling her shoulders up to a shrug, raising her arms, her hands above her head, manifesting the towering bible over all of us.

"Adam and Eve is a symbolical story about Masculinity's rule over femininity"

She spouts, strolling to the blackboard, chalk in hand, where she begins drawing a rather lucid Sexson drawing of a man lying upon the ground. above him a rib floats in the air, with a string attaching it to the white silhouetted dummy lying down upon the board.

"Why does woman come from man"

She asks? Roaming up and down the rows of students. Wrong answer after wrong answer leads to silence.

"it's a metaphor for how everything feminine comes from masculinity"

Mayan asserts precisely. I turn to see her flip her bangs, shuffle her feet.

"YES. Adam and Eve is a symbolical story of masculinity's dominance over femininity. It's called a Couvade-"

She stops talking sharply. Scrape it across the board.

"French for "men's envy of childbirth"

And I realized that I am actually jealous of not being able to bear a child.

"The rib stands for femininity being taken from masculinity. Now, something about the Bible you need to know. All the gods stand for abstractions of human thought. As well the bible is a Patriarch, where masculinity is the head patriarch and femininity is everything that serves him. Everyone is feminine; most men or women are women, Kids, younger brothers, women."

She then goes onto explain how in Judges the Levite gentleman in Jebusites who gives out his concubine does it because he is the head of the patriarch, and everything else is "less" important than the provider.

At this point I became so enthralled that I stopped taking notes and listened. But she did clear something up for me

Lot and his daughters is a joke about how the two tribes (named after the sons) are incestuous!