My Quest to the Brave and Reckless Gods

    I have to be completely honest. I am struggling in this class to come up with anything interesting to say or blog about! In the Oceans class, I feel like I can't shut up but here I've hit a road block. In fact it looked a lot like this road block in my mind!
    So I decided to do what any intelligent student would do. Which is go read my peers' work and see if I come up with any ideas from that. Naturally I picked to read Nick's blogs, which not only blew my socks off but also blew off my boots! His insight and passion for his subjects astounded and intimidated me. Nick's discussion of hypnosis was particularly interesting. I agree with him that probably all of of us have been hypnotized at least sometime in our life.  I admit to being hypnotized on a regular basis through reading. This hypnosis normally comes when I am reading novels that allow me to leave my consciousness and go to where my brave and reckless gods live. When I get there I allow them to go free and fly. The most amazing thing is that I am flying with them. Ironically enough, these novels that allow me to enter this place usually are about the gods in some sense or else I am drawing connections to these gods, specifically Persephone or Poseidon. That is why I chose to use them as my 51 items to memorize.
    When reciting my items for class last week, I was able to hypnotize myself in room full of other living breathing people. While speaking I no longer saw or heard any of my peers. In fact, many of you may have noticed it was hard for Dr. Sexson to get my attention for me to stop. It was hard and almost painful for me to leave my self-hypnosis state and come back into my conscious self. In Nick's blog, he talked about how he sometimes has epiphanies during class lectures. Well that was one for me. I will openly admit that I have before tuned out in classes (never in Dr. S's though) but never have I been so far gone that I could not hear or see the people around me. It was an amazing feeling. In fact just writing about it now brings me back to a shadow of that state.
    After experiencing that wonderful feeling, I spent this past weekend trying to figure out when else I have been so enthralled to feel it, even if I did not know I was hypnotized. My answer was, unsurprisingly, when I was a child. So I spent much of my weekend regressing to my childhood. Now it isn't possible for me to be childlike for an entire weekend but I did my best. In order to put me back to that state of mind, I watched multiple Disney movies and cartoons, including Sleeping Beauty, Atlantis, The Lion King, and Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella. Most of these movies, I haven't seen in years but I still remembered various lines and scenes as if I had just watched them the day before. And I should remember these characters as they were my imaginary friends. Why would I create someone knew when I could just expand on the friends that I had already made? So my BFFs were Ariel, Meg, and Mulan.

   









  


 I think that it is important that I not only realize that I remember more of how I was a child but why each of these movies appealed to me at this time in my life. When picking my movies for the weekend, I had an unlimited amount of choices due to Netflix and Hastings but these movies stuck out to me for a reason. So here goes my analysis of Disney movies.
    The first movie I chose to watch this past weekend was Sleeping Beauty. Why this movie appealed to me is pretty basic. For the Oceans class, we needed to displace a fairytale and I chose to use Sleeping Beauty. But upon watching the movie and reading the story out of Grimm's Fairy tales, I think that this story appealed to me because of its use of Fauna, Flora, and Merriweather. I may be very wrong in this but to me they seem to symbolize the Muses. Typically there is 9 Muses but within the realm of stories, the most powerful numbers are 3 and 9. And let's face it, 9 fairies would not have worked within the context of this story. So I am putting Fauna, Flora, and Merriweather on my blog hoping that they will continue to give me inspiration for the rest of the semester.

     The next fairytale that intrigued my conscious and subconscious this weekend was Atlantis. I think that this story appealed to me because of its ancient origins and the loss of its roots. No one knew any longer how the mysteries of their civilization worked, just as I don't know how the Eleusinian Mysteries work. But because of this cartoon, I now have hope that I will to find the answers to my mysteries. I think that in a closer relation to this specific class, Atlantis relates to it because we are all exploring our own Atlantis, which is the recesses and crevices of our minds and memories. We have all forgotten how to work the ancient tools that we employed as children. Through our quest to become adults, we have lost the ability to remember the things that we have forgotten, namely we have forgotten everything. So I encourage all of you to find the show that represents your Atlantis in order to hypnotize yourself into remembering the language that will enable you to use your ancient tools.  

The next stop on my quest through my childhood was to the kingdom of MufasaSimba. As we all know  I cry pretty easily so you can just imagine the waterworks that were happening during this movie. However, the character that drew my attention was Rafiki. He is the wise-old man that symbolizes the truth within all of us. Rafiki is my own personal Hoopoe. He shows that the truth is within all of us. Not only does he illustrate this with his words but he also makes his words memorable. No one ever forgets Rafiki! He is kind of like Dr. Sexson in that way. Simba was guided into remembering who he had forgotten he was just like Dr. Sexson is guiding us all into remembering our childhood and the things we have forgotten.
    Now I know that very rarely does Dr. Sexson have complimentary things to say about Disney productions but like in the other class, I have to defend them as having their place of importance in the literary world. I agree that often they have stereotypical attributes that are not beneficial for children and young adults but they allow us all to set free the brave and reckless gods within us. In fact I would even go so far as to say that these Disney characters have become our gods and heroes, in the sense that they have replaced the ones of ancient Greece.
    Now that I have finished with this post and have been re-reading my work, I am starting to wonder how this relates to the Oral Tradition. In my head it was all sort of jumbled together when I started but my hope and aim was that it would all come together in a linear sort of way. I think what my subconscious is trying to tell me is that in order to be successful at building my memory palaces and becoming a part of the Oral Tradition is that I need to submit to my gods, both Greek and Disney. After submission will come the phase where I can use them as tools within my memory palaces. So don't be surprised if for the rest of the semester, you read about my memorization objects being personified by Ariel, Hades, or Shrek.