Saturday, December 10, 2005

Thinking too much

It's finals week. Or pre-finals week Weekend anywa. Amongst other things people are unsually sober this weekend. It's creepy. It's a new form of the sensation that a place it too quiet.

The other key tradtion of finals week, the first being sobriety, is thinking too much. Thinking too much in this case means following your intuition along a semi-logical chain of thoughts that leads you not only through the area off the beaten path that is the spawning grounds of inspiration, but past that into the rough areas where you can't even see the path and madness begins to close in. I am guilty of this myself.

In my last paper for this course I reached a moment of clarity and suddden insight through laborious overthought. I feel like I'm on the edge of one again in this paper, but in my attepts to snatch this etherial genius in my material claw I've come up with some really really weird theories. The weirdest is below. It's an excerpt from my raw raw raw outline for my paper. The Raw^3 outline is basically me brainstorming and typing out every thought that's even borderline worthwhile.

Prior to the war both men we’re arranged to be married in a typical Mclifestyle 1950s American way. After the war both of them have conflicts with their marriage. Fred has it revealed to him that he wasn’t with the right woman. Homer has is revealed to him that Wilma still loves him even though hes de craw!. In both cases woman is the means of clarity. So too is the bedroom the place of transition into clarity.
Bedroom as a womb? Fits with the rebirth thing
The Men have to come to see something more clearly. Woman facilitates this change. The critical point of change occurs in a bedroom in the company of a woman, but in neither case is it a sexual thing.
Is it really not a sexual thing? Passive implication? It seems unlikely given the era in which this film was made but that could be liberal bias.
After Man overcomes whatever his impeiment to clarity was he accepts woman into his life, the same woman that facilitated his clarity, and becomes happier for it. Men achieve this clarity by taking woman into the bedroom, exposing mans weakness, accepting womans help, and accepting woman into their life
Sex again, Lust is the great disarmer of the male mind, perhaps the fact that they make themselves vulnerable in the presence of woman in the bedroom, then by accepting woman achieve clarity is all a giant metaphor for physical birth expressed by the metaphorical rebirth of man. It’s an unusually raw form of metaphor for rebirth, but is a metaphor for rebirth nonetheless. Womb (bedroom) seed (man at state of weakness) Mother (woman who has completed man by bolstering him where he is weak) Father (Man who has accepted woman into his life) Child (Man with clarity) I like this one becomes seed becomes child through the actions of the womb and the mother. Weird pregnancy methaphor, weird Weird metaphor overall but possible. Also somewhat demeaning to the man, who doubles as the role of child. If this were a culture that valued the earthmother theory it may make more sense, but as is it seems off. The man is only father through the actions of the woman, and otherwise child. This could be a good argument for my "demeaning to man" thing, or jsut a refelction of my passive concern that I'm stuck in the inferior gender. It’s also possible that we’ve taken this train of thought too far.

Don't worry though, I have a much more reasonable argument readied as well. If I finish this paper with time to spare I'm going to write up a short version of the bedroom as womb earth mother pregnancy rebirth interperatation, but it'll be a personal intrest proposal, not a real paper.

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