September 27th

"No sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth opens out into a fan of a thousand segments. Here the variant is the origin. Everything that happens, happens this way, or that way, or this other way. And in each of these diverging stories all the others are reflected, all brush by us like folds of the same cloth."
-Page 147

This pretty much sums up how i've been feeling while reading Calasso. You think you start to finally understand something and then it opens up into a whole different reality. I found that if I try to think too hard about it then I sometimes overthink it and end up with a headeache instead of a solution. However, I also found that if i read a certain part over and over a couple times i start to make sense of it a little more. This quote is basically saying that myth is a fan of a thousand different segments. You can never fully understand it. You just have to take what you've been presented with and do the best with it. However, there are variables throughout myth and origin seems to be a huge one. Like the quote mentions, everything that happens in all these different stories happens this way or that way and if you look close enough all stories are just mirrored throughout time. This seems to always be present in myth; a reference to a past event of similiar results. Calasso also goes on to say that if  only one version of a mythical event is present, it is like a body without a shadow, and we must do our best to trace out the shadow in our minds. Basically, myth is what you make of it, and there are a thousand different ways in which you can look at something. We just have to do our best with what we have been given.

The main portion of class today was viewing and discussing Jennifer's blog. We looked at sections where she tied together everthing from class: Cadmus and Harmony to the Wizard of Oz to The Magus. It was very interesting stuff. We also briefly talked about how all heroes want to go home (Dorothy, Odeseus). We also took note of sparagmos and omophagia, which is the eating of raw flesh. Finally, we briefly talked about abduction and metamorphisism being a constant in myth in which somebody is taken away and changed.