The Three B's & Reclaiming my life

This summer I hope to write my own story. Maybe a better word than 'writing' would be 'riding'. After school lets out and I'm a college grad I plan on pursuing a bike tour around the western U.S. I've planned the trip around a concept that I call "the three B's"-- bike, books and brews. Some of you undoubtedly will think that this is a little too "hippie" for your tastes... well, maybe it is. Perhaps it is too cheesy for you. The open road, wind in your face, camping under the stars, all the cliches that Bozemanites claim to love. However, I hope to rediscover the West. Why is it that we only camp in the mountains and cannot feel as if we are in nature unless we are in designated nature areas? I have seen Whitman stopped and waiting for me and I will follow the American piper after graduation as I reclaim my faith/hope/love for the real, forgotten America. Along the way I will become increasingly sensitive to the epiphanies that intimate travel will afford me.

Although this class is a capstone and representative of the culmination of my college English Lit. major experience I want to end/begin with my own capstone... a heroes journey if you will. I plan on stepping off the porch of my Wyoming home (preferably at daybreak to give it some symbolic significance) onto my bike and riding off towards my own trials and victories as I pedal across the western states on the back-roads and highways.

I'm going to try and work in a lot of reading throughout the whole journey. Although you might think that I should be scouting all the "road-novels" I can I think I'm going to take a special interest in magical realism. To me it seems like magical realism is the perfect literature for the trip. Hopefully I can model my new found perspectives on one of the strongest characterizations of magical realism-- injecting the common existence with a splash of divine magic. Authors I want to read include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and Juan Rulfo. Reading these magical stories in my tent along side of some road will hopefully allow my perspectives to swing towards the fantastic.

Also, To fit in with my theme of B's, I'd like to try and map out some local microbreweries along the way and stop in and give them a taste. Even now the tastes of Pale Ale's, Wheat Beers, Hefe's, and Belgian White's pique my desire to get out on the road. I can only imagine hundreds of miles of biking will enhance the taste experience. All those flavors prancing on my taste buds will be a taste of divinity revealed.

Some people I tell this to definitely think it sounds silly. I'm sure they puzzle over my objective to "live my life like it's a book" but I think I'll find that it is one of the most satisfying experiences that I will have undertaken. Part of the reason I'm going is to slow down time. I'm so used from going to A-B in such a hurry (can I ever get to Z? even to Q?!) that it's going to be nice to slow the pace down of travel. By going slower I hope to expand my understanding of the vastness of America and in turn expand my knowledge of what inhabits that space. My goal is to never travel through a place and to say there is "nothing there". After a long time of being conditioned to the pathetic "real world" I ant to resaturate my life with divine magic and reclaim my feeling of humanity.

I'll probably look a lot like some of these bikes traveling down the road.

Blahg...

So I haven't composed a blog for a long time. In fact it's been 13 days. On my other blog it's been since Jan. 25th. Even in my classes I've noticed that I just haven't been devoting the same strong effort that I have in the past. Sometimes in the middle of class my mind wanders away. This is pretty embarrassing. In my last semester here at MSU I was hoping to stay motivated and avoid that dreaded senioritis that plagues so many students. It seems that I may be infected...

Wait! Don't give up hope for me yet! There has been a silver lining to the dark cloud of my motivation. I have recently diagnosed the site of my microscopic infection-- and I believe it is stemming from Eliot's Four Quartets. Ever since we began to look at the poems I have felt an overwhelming inspiration take over my mind. I began a poem largely inspired/stolen from Eliot and now it has taken over my life. Whether or not the poem is going to be "good" doesn't matter. It's just important to know that it is a life-drain.

The premises of the poem is rather simple. Two people, you and I, began in a garden hedged by two rivers (I won't tell you which two but leave it to you to figure out) and each walks in an opposite direction around the world. You walk east and I walk west. The length of the trip takes approximately 24 hours-- they leave at noon on one day and arrive back at the same place at noon the next day. However to put the poem in such a simple box would, I think, damn it to a simplicity that it seeks to go beyond. You'll see what I mean when it's done and you have read it.

This blog doesn't really seem to have anything to do with the topics of either class (I'm posting this blog on each class blog). I have mentioned that I'm inspired by Eliot's Four Quartets. Maybe that's where the thoughtfulness is-- tying my experience in writing to Eliot's. However, I don't really want to do that. I want this post to stand on it's own legs whatever they may be, I'm not really sure. I can even know that it won't come to some tidy conclusion after this (it's a little messy). I can look over the whole apology/justification/self-pity/thing because this is the paragraph I'm writing last even though there are two that follow it (have you ever wondered what authors composed first and last and in the middle or have you always thought they were writing the book as you read it?) In fact these are the last words I'm typing; the last period of the author falls in the middle.

In my past experiences with writing poetry that I really devoted time to it has been a trying process. It isn't even that I want to be writing but that I feel I HAVE to. I don't feel inspired to write all the time but when I do feel inspired, like in class, the poem just takes over. It's like having selective mono towards other literature pursuits. Another way to think of it is like a big sponge-- it just sucks up all the motivation that comes along when it comes along. This poem is no different... perhaps it is even worse.

I hope to finish writing it soon or, at least, get it to a point where the changes are so precise that I'm no longer under the burden of the large construction. Recently I finished one of the poems four sections-- a relatively large achievement considering it totals about 1/3 of the poem. When I get it done I will try to post it on the blog (the structure might be kind of hard to format in the blog... I'll probably have to give it some sort of preface). Odds are some of you won't like it or think it's all that poetic or whatever. Hell, I'm not sure whether or not I will like it. But, when it's done, at least I will be able to move on my life.

Background & Structure of "Burnt Norton"

For my portion of our group presentation I'm going to go over the background and overall structure of "Burnt Norton".

The title of the poem refers to a manor in Gloucestershire. I was doing some research on the building itself and found some cool info on another blog that states that "the property is essentially divided into four quadrants, like chambers of the heart, and Eliot naturally would have proceeded from an upper chamber toward a lower chamber, then looked down on the dry, concrete pools that he alludes to in the poem. Beyond the pools (which the owner says never held water), he might have turned right into the present-day rose garden." This concept of the four quadrants is kind of cool and seems linked to the notion of four quartets. It's kind of nice to get a bit of an image of how it is set up in order to see the manor for ourselves as we move throughout it in the poem.

The manor still exists and you can visit it and take a tour or even have a wedding reception there.

























Unlike the other poems in the "Four Quartets" "Burnt Norton" was actually published in 1936, about five years before the other poems, in a volume of called Collected Poems 1909-1935. At the time Eliot was working on a play called Murder in the Cathedral and many of the fragments that he removed from the composition of the play went into "Burnt Norton".

One of the important concepts to note in "Burnt Norton" and the whole of the Quartets is the emphasis of music on the structure of the poems. In the Western tradition string quartets have played chamber music which was considered by Goethe to be "four rational people conversing". A good way to think of the poems, at least "Burnt Norton", is a highly intelligent religious philosopher making an argument about the nature of time. At the beginning of Burnt Norton Eliot puts forward a sort of hypothesis that he tests throughout the poem.

Going along with the musical-structure theme many critics have found it appropriate to consider the different "sections" within each poem as various musical movements. In this way Eliot can blend the separate movements together to gain an overall statement. It is important to note in the poem how, as it progresses, Eliot provides contrapuntal themes to many of his earlier notions thus providing the different movements.

To sum up I will mention how the poem was received. It seems that "Burnt Norton" was received with mixed reviews. Some people thought that it beautifully captured religious and philosophical themes while other reviewers, such as George Orwell, thought that the use of religious themes harmed the piece.