The Initiation and Creation of Hammerknee

Pain...what a broad word that bears so much strife, bares so much blood, bares the broken heart; crushing fortitude, allowing growth, prevailing life. The universality of being injured dilapidates the soul, whereas pain is felt, the feeling of feeling that pain is compressed and adversely delineates the fragile wall of courageous endurance that, in indifference, can bleed worse than that of any wound.

We, as humans, of course carry our stories of pain with the zany zeal more accustomed to children at a carnival; yet we will throw a pathetic attempt of hesitancy in telling the story.

So there was my attempt...

It all begins two and a half years ago, when in the throes of full summer, a young man attempted and succeeding-ly failed in reserving the sanctity and health of his body. In a hope to save a life, the life of a fluffy, soft euphoric creature, the life of a young canine, the life of a puppy, he instilled the strict constitutions of pain firmly in to his heart for all of his short eternity.
This young puppy had forgone all warnings and strong commands to revel away from the flowing, watery destiny that hid in shadows and swirling currents. In mistaking gravity for firmness of foot, or rather of paw, the young puppy fell to the water, faster than Hades to the underworld, faster than headless Medusa...
The crashing water grew in noise tenfold, time faltered towards an inconsistent standstill, and the young man had no choice in his choice of action, for how could anyone let a puppy be swept away in a guilty torrent of apathy?
Leaping from his rock perch, he sailed in a plummet of adrenaline towards the young puppy thrashing miserably and desperately, inevitability rushing soon to wrap him in it's watery cocoon. It was in a sudden, startlingly flash of reality that the young man was made aware of his path of descent, a descent of doom in many ways. Boulders flickered haphazardly beneath the rifling, sun-specacled water. Boulders that were very real, very sharp, and just beneath the surface.
In that brief moment of staggering realization that all witness when en-route towards the despairing path of pain, the young man twisted his body as if hoping to change the unchangeable.
A splash to rival any krackenous monster, the young man came down with an arm around the puppy, while his right knee came down around the edge of one those boulders. Pain flashed, pain seared, pain as real as dragons, roared and racked through his body...
His knee had absorbed the very essence of brute force, his patella shattering apart, much akin to the shatter of ice on a frost-swept day. His vision swam as though trying to carry him from the watery clutches itself; the puppy howled in the indignation that only a young puppy about to drown could hope to.
The current pulled the young man farther away from the shore, but somehow, through the pain his survival took precedent and one arm stroking, the furious persistence of that sun-specaled water clinging to him as if he were Odysseus and it Calypso..
Crawling to land, and helped by the woman who's puppy had decided upon the day's aquatic adventures, he lay shuddering and gasping.
Thirty minutes later, his knee was being stitched up and he was sent on his way with cautions of a deep bone bruise and some bleeding, with no pain relief to be found or prescribed...
He sat awake for over 24 hours, in a pain that description could only hope to emulate, with only the soft, pathetic brush of tylenol to help appease his constant silent screams..
It was not till 32 hours later, after twisting the knee in a fit of an unavoidable lapse of balance, and no significant pain relief, that it was conclusively determined the serious nature of this injury...
18 hours later... lying in wait for surgery
4 hours later... so hopped up on anesthesia that recurrent warnings to breathe were more often than not, and the new addition of three screws to hold together that damn important kneecap...
The rest of that summer.... a loss of two jobs, the inability to walk, move his right leg, sleep on his stomach, popping pain pills like tic-tacs, and a complete unraveling of the social life of one who has yet to experience his first summer being 21. It was more than physical pain, it was a pain that was resplendently preserved through pain and the self-pity that accompanied with it.
A new respect was developed for the guys in movies, you know the ones, the guys who mobsters threaten to break their kneecaps...well all this young man can advise is keep those knees healthy!

My kneecap looking like Pac-Man




The Letter H---The creation of hammer knee

That Hottie Helen

So lets get the breakdown, the down low, the fast and skinny of a big ol' fat page out of Calasso's book. I took the random liberty to dig deeper into pg. 127 of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and boy oh boy, I hopped aboard that brain train and found myself speeding hap-hazardously towards Helen's birth/life/ and all the problems it caused. "The life of Helen marked a moment of precarious, fleeting equilibrium, when, thanks to the deceitful cunning of Zeus, necessity and beauty were superimposed the one over the other" (Calasso, 127). It wasn't Helen's various doing's that caused her trouble, it was the "deceitful cunning" of our good ol' serialrapist boy Zeus. And now back to what made Helen who she was, it was the combination, no not combination, but overlapping of necessity and beauty, creating a lady so fine that Calasso call's it one of "the most formidable theological gamble[s] of Zeus's reign"when he rapes Nemesis <-- what a name! Perhaps in the raping of Nemesis, Zeus in turn created a nemesis in Nemesis-- Calasso goes on to state that "provok[ing] a forced convergence of beauty and necessity was to challenge the law of heaven" (same page in Calasso). So Zeus was challenging his own laws? The cosmic laws?
But that challenge is what turned Helen's life into such a sad state of affairs... I mean here we have the most beautiful woman in the world and she can't even enjoy it, can't even swing her hips with over-emphasized sway without starting a bloody war! Calasso ends this little gem of a paragraph by saying that (me)n would go on fantasizing of her, long after she was gone. In that instance, did Helen leave behind a legacy of beauty? Can all pretty woman give thanks and praise to her who suffered quite literally as being the most beautiful woman in the world. (Makes me think how a Victorias Secret model would hold up next to Helen?) whoa... no wonder men still dream about it.
I know this section wasn't chalked full of startlingly wondrous and superimposed myths, but Helen is still referenced today as a comparison to great beauty So there has to be something more behind that story than what we know....like what Calasso just shared with us!!

That talk of Dionysus today in class and sharing such stories of being under the transcending  hallucinogenic spell of drugs/alcohol brought me back almost a year ago to this day where some friends and myself found ourselves quite suddenly (took a little while) under the trance of psilocybin in a day that I will never forget. Anyway I wrote a poem at the end of that day, still feeling the effects, that helped to turn that memory into the best day ever.  Here it is:

Kaleidoscope Skies and Wizard Staffs- A Journey

Glittering trees waved
tendrils of color
Waves, scattered with laughter,
and views of new worlds.

We were boys of the bog, taken
away from our troubles and swept
to the childish giddiness of
old.

Where cameos of adventure gripped
all; The Steen’s and Max’s, Beersti’s
and Dub’s, and of course Deucel.
We were us, scattered together
in the beauty of our world.

A world without apathy, a quintessential
paradise where weird waves swept us
too and fro.

Rivers of dead trees flowed as gently
as a laughing brook, flecked with
the deciduous yellows of Fall.

A Fall that melted into a pulsating
being, beckoning us, waving to us,
enveloping us.

Where wizards ripped openings
into the clouds, a magic that connected
us into a discordant harmony.

How the sky faceted into a jeweled
kaleidoscope, spinning a myriad of
pieced clouds into a hypnotically
translucent painting.

We were beautiful on the edge of our
own world, pioneers of life
that witnessed eagles as majestic
as the dragons of ancient lore,
carrying the moon to the heavens.

We were swallowed into it all, and
together we were lost in a place we
all hope to find again.

Photo by: Kjersti Johnson 

The Rig Veda

My creation story was the Rig veda:

related portals: Religion. sister projects: Wikipedia article. The Rig Veda is a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns counted among the four Hindu religious texts known as the Vedas. The Rig Veda was likely composed between roughly 1700–1100 BCE, making it one of the oldest texts of any Indo-Iranian language, one of the world's oldest religious texts. It was preserved over centuries by oral tradition alone and was probably not put in writing before the Early Middle Ages. The Rig Veda is considered to be oldest written book on the planet, and was likely composed between roughly 1500–1200 BCE. It is the earliest of the four Hindu religious scriptures known as the Vedas. It consists of 1,017 hymns (1,028 including the apocryphal valakhilya hymns 8.49-8.59) composed in Vedic Sanskrit, many of which are intended for various sacrifical rituals. These are contained in 10 books, known as Mandalas. This long collection of short hymns is mostly devoted to the praise of the gods. However, it also contains fragmentary references to historical events, notably the struggle between the early Vedic peoples (known as Aryans) and their enemies, the Dasa. The first of The Vedas.- Wikipedia also here is a little youtube video on it.

Pity of the Gods?

It is interesting to view the shift of religion over time as it relates to the Greeks, and then later Romans; how they changed from a shame culture to a guilt culture. How deities were renamed and viewed with reassigned roles. How they viewed their paths in life extrinsically and then suddenly (a few hundred years) intrinsically. Yet Calasso points out another regime that men went through pertaining to the gods, in fact a couple regimes. "Mans relationship with the gods passed through two regimes: conviviality, then rape (quite blunt isn't he?). The third regime, the modern one, is that of indifference" (Calasso, 52-3). Quite the shift if you stop and think about it... I mean "there was a time when the gods would sit down alongside mortals" (Calasso, 53). They were buds, bros, homies on the high-downlow! (Get it) Man and the gods were pals and then the gods got all shifty (ahhemm Zeus) and started raping people, and there was crying and bastards, blood and swans, and who's going to forget about that bull! And then (a few hundred/thousand years later) there is text, oral delivery, and outright devotion (or atheism) to it all. Makes you wonder what the dinner conversation would be like in this day and age if God, Allah, Muhammad, Buddah, Jesus (a mexican native), the Dali Lama (for kicks), and Jesus (the one with the sandals) all happened to swing in (on their way to bingo) on that forlorn Wednesday evening (right when you were about to watch your show!), and invite you to sit down over some chinese...? Most people would probably freak out, yelling "oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God."
Meanwhile God is like "Yes my child? Yes my child? Ok. What the (rhymes with buck) do you want!?"
...Ok, ok, sorry I got a little carried away there but you can see where the picture was going... and yes it was painted in a --insert verb-- way (didn't/don't mean to offend anyone).  I guess I was rather intrigued in the human emotion and its changes and adaptations over the course of millennia and how will change in the next hundreds of years?

My pal Tree and me

Just a quick snap on our stationary hike up a hill

Heros and Wars: An Ageless Parallel

Much talk in the first parts of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is of Heroes and how they applied/apply their enhanced attributes for the good (or sometimes not so good) of those fallen victim to the Fates. However a note of Plutarch's thoughts of "men who, for deftness of hand, speed of legs, and strength of muscles, transcended normal human nature and were tireless" (61). Does this not sound much like, if little, of the professional athletes that now grace our television sets, bedroom walls, and gleaming billboards? Perhaps the best analogy that I can provide at this time would be NFL players, moreover of two teams, full of heroes and villains, battling for an unclear but concise victory on the gridiron. Could you not say that the athletes, in the exact moment of battle, "never used their physical capacities to do good or to help others, but reveled in their own brutal arrogance and enjoyed exploiting their strength to commit savage, ferocious deeds, conquering, ill treating...whosoever fell into their hands" (61). That those players, "for them, respect, justice, fairness, and magnanimity were virtues prized only by such as lacked the courage to do harm and were afraid of suffering it themselves" (61). Can you all not imagine/remember/envision that 285 lb wall of muscle Safety dodging snarling blocks and swinging grasps? How he leapt, as if Medea herself had chagrined him the reins of her flaming chariot, and with a hit like thunder in a china shop bears down the Quarterback in a gasp and crunch of bone and muscle. The small, yet immensely huge, cry and dance of victory; pantomimes of ripping a chest open in the pure barbaric savagery the crowd goes wild for. But it is accepted and applauded, and in the background John Madden mumbles, very nearly incoherently, "Now that's how football is played!" Are these men "athletes on behalf of men" (61)? Mind you, not off the field, not away from the gridiron, but in the heat and thrall between the bursts of small silver whistles. In our society the Clay Matthews', the Marshawn Lynch's, are our revered heroes. Performing tasks that we only dreamed about in the park on sweltering hot afternoons, while we reared in our imaginary armor and helmets, all for the glory of the touchdown, of winning.

You can see where my mind is divided in this stage of the semester, with Myth following like a shadow sewed to the boots of time, never wavering, never faltering, but unobtrusive as a slap to the face. If there was (and there always is) anything to be gleaned from class today, it is that Myth lives in the very fabric of... there is no one word to encompass the eons of mythos and logos rippling out (as Scott so eloquently put it) from that first shatter of not knowing to knowing.
Could we all be Heroes in some form, however small? Does getting out of bed in the morning not reminisce of Odysseus's leaving of Calypso from Ogygia? Food for thought...

A side note to one of my earliest memories--

When I was of an age three years past my personal origins beginning, I was gripped...if not compelled, to climb the Mount Bathroom Vanity in our house. It was a long and treacherous trek, full of drawers, and nobs and unconscious fears of being discovered by the all-mighty Mother. When I had attained the summit of Mount Bathroom Vanity, I found myself gazing...well at myself. The mountain had an ability so that whoever summited it would find themselves staring at themselves ( I learned later this majestic piece of magic was termed as a mirror). Gazing was not enough for me though so I grabbed the sacred bottle of Perfume, the Holy-Grail of Scent, the feminine eau de Cologne. My young, sharp mind knew there was only one perfect use for this Perfume; what better to do than apply it upon the self-gazing piece and trace ancient symbols that could uncover the secrets of the universe (or the correct way to draw a cat). Feeling invincible in my lofty, scented euphoria I failed to notice the approach of the all-mighty Mother. The lash of her wrath was enough to curdle sour milk to cheese. It seemed that I was wrong in my quest, that Perfume found atop the summit of Mount Bathroom Vanity was not for delving and studying ancient symbols on the mirror. It was for making the all-mighty Mother smell of lavender fields and crisp mountain springs. It was in the moment of punishment that the Origin of Scent and all of its power (both stinky and fresh) spanked its way right to the forefront of my mind and learned and understood (if only minutely) not to mess with other peoples scents, least of all a woman's perfume.