Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Museyroom Explanation/Class Summary

Personally, I have loved seeing all of the Museyroom presentations these past few weeks. I think that everyone in our class is brilliant and deserves a big "A"! What was really intriguing is that all of us had the same assignment but have all taken it in amazingly different directions. This is a key aspect of why Lit majors are so great. All of us have listened to the same lectures, read the same books, and had the same assignments but all of us have found different avenues to channel our inspiration. Even though, I explained my Museyroom during class, I don't think that I did it justice. So here goes another shot at doing a better job....

 I initially chose to use a purse because I felt that doing a regular poster would not be as much fun as I could have with this assignment. But after I decided how to do, I just couldn't decide what to put in/on my Museyroom. I wanted to do something that was going to be significant to me but also something that wouldn't be boring to everyone else. The inspiration for the content of my Museyroom came in a flash. With my presentation, I was hoping to incorporate the see, say, and experience but I don't think it worked quite as well as I had hoped. Everyone definitely saw what I wanted them to see, I don't think they experienced it as I did. But then I think that is the point of the Museyrooms. The point is that it means something to its creator, and not necessarily to its secondary audience. In that sense, my Museyroom was an absolute success!
  When I started this blog, I was going to post all of the pictures that I put on my purse but on further reflection, I just want to put the words because my pictures don't really matter. Yours do!

  • Illusion
  • Demeter
  • Persephone
  • Wheat/Agriculture
  • Hades
  • Tartarus
  • Death
  • the Seasons
  • Initiation
  • Soul
  • Muses
  • Hero
  • Mythology
  • the Gita
  • Romance
  • Naive
  • Eleusinian Mysteries
  • See
  • Say
  • Experience
  • Orubourus
  • Life
To me these words contain the entire universe and if we have them in our memories, we have the entire world. Even though, everyone who reads this blog will know what all of these things are, everyone will have different images in their mind when their inner voice says the words. Everything in life can fit into at least one if not more of these words. Because that is the true memory system. The one that allows us to all build connections within our minds. These connections must be lasting, vital, and strong in order to survive. But if they are, then they will last forever. Just like the ideas of all of the words above have lasted for centuries and will last much longer than the memories of the you, me, or anyone else that we may come into contact with during our life. 

The final point that I wish to stress at this time is that what I have just said above is no different than what anyone else has said or shown with their Museyroom. We have all shown how the universe makes sense in our minds and how there are concepts that we deal with everyday that will live much longer than our personal memories or legacies. 
  • Quinten did this using the brain, not in its typical form but as a memory tool
  • Jenny did this by immortalizing aspects of people in the class but only the parts of us that related to her memory and not necessarily our own memories
  • Shelby did this by making a boxes of blogs. She had the entire universe in those boxes because it showed the infinite possibilities of what could be written on the walls
  • Parker gave us a demonstration of the powers of association with the unfamiliar
  • Levi took us back to our childhood when the whole world existed in our bedroom from the world of Narnia to the White House
These are just a few of the wonderful examples of how the entire world can be contained in such small things. I could have picked any person's Museyroom and been able to show how it contained the entire universe and was the same as everyone else's. But I think that we have not mentioned my next point as much as we should have. On Monday, Dr. S mentioned "our collective memory theater", which is a concept I want to explore. We have indeed built a collective memory theater as our theaters are starting to become interchangeable as Seth pointed out. He might have heard someone else's memory theater but he saw his own in his mind. Through this class, we have all combined our memories to a collective theater or even more accurately named, Dr. Sexson's Museyroom. All of us, as students of Lit 337 Spring 2012, have contributed to helping make Dr. Sexson's Museyroom a reality but we have just manifested it in our own ways but have all demonstrated the same things. We have demonstrated that everything in the world can be contained within our memories, even if we do not know exactly what everything is. Then to further compact the universe, we are able to give life to inanimate objects to make them contain the world with the use of words. This is the importance of the Oral Tradition. It is not to tell stories but to give us the power to have the entire universe at our fingertips if only we realize the power that we hold and figure out how it meshes with the various ways each and everyone of us sees through the illusion of reality. 

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