It's nice to be back. Not just to another Sexson class, which is always a pleasure, but to the English Department in general. Last semester was all finance. I learned about derivatives, stocks, bonds, money market funds, beta, duration, leases, and lephews. That was a bad joke, but dammit if an English major can't make it! It might take me awhile to get back in the blogging groove having been away from writing for so long (like 6 months, painful). At the very least, I must admit the concept of the nine muses greatly intrigues me. During high school, one of my history teachers was adamant that her entire class learn every single president's name. She accomplished this by teaching us the president song. Basically you list off every Harding, Coolidge, and Polk in a happy-go-lucky sing-song. To this day I still have the first two verses memorized (Washington through Coolidge) and I never actually bothered to learn the third verse. I mean, come on, who doesn't know Hoover through Obama? What Dr. Sexson said about the word 'music' coming from 'Muses' reminded me of the commander and chief roll call. I remembered their names through music.
On a tangential note, I do find Eroto the most interesting of the Muses. I guess you could say Colerage might have been communing with lovely Eroto when he wrote about his pleasure dome. What is a pleasure dome? I like to think it is a place you go to get a back massage and and maybe a mud bath. It certainly cannot mean anything more than that. My mind is pure in that regard. In Sexson's Shakespeare class we talked about something called a mind baby. This thought percolated in my mind and gave birth to a bunch of new fetuses--mind babies don't stop with one, they keep on going until they infect everything. You see, I read a book call "The Secret History of the World" by Mark Booth where the author actually talks about this very concept. To the ancients, the mind was more real than the physical world. Thus their thoughts were not their own, but thoughts of the gods. The Olympians were real, and they talked to you directly every single day of your life. Zeus was a distant sky god of authority, telling you to behave. Aphrodite whispered lustful nothings in your head. Dionysus may have told you to just let go. Artists, you could say, also had meaningful communication with the sublime muses, and since the ancients' thoughts were more real than the physical world, some could gain life of their own. Yes, thoughts could become alive--mind babies. South Park's trilogy "Imaginationland" actually did a pretty good representation of this. Anyway, these were some opening ideas. See everyone in class tomorrow.
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