When I went to the MoMA, this piece by Atsuko Tanaka really struck me for its simplicity and color choice. The description in the museum left a lot to my own imagination, so I began to think of it as the human condition. The red orb reminded me of an outsider in a world full of similar people, feeling destined to live on the outskirts of society while everyone else remains together in solidarity. Yet, it isn’t just the people in the painting, there are squiggly lines of connection between them all. Some touch the circles while some don’t, and they, too, are in blue and red. I think it shows a certain hope that connection can happen, even with the outsiders in our society and communities. While it has to make contact, the opportunities for connection surround all of us at all times, we just have to scoot a little closer to each other. It also struck me that each blue orb, while easy to consider exactly the same, have their own differences. The world isn’t so black and white that there are only the outsiders and the others. Even within the others there are differences. If we use our place in the world and our abilities to connect correctly, perhaps we can see the beauty in all of the differences between people, both big and small.

Manifestos use radical language to catch your attention. In order to be understood, you must first be noticed. If one is already a member of a marginalized group, one cannot simply say, “I deserve to be listened to.” and have it happen. One must take their words and use them to grab their audience by their shirt collars and shake them into understanding what is going on in their peripheral vision that they have previously ignored. The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Plan and the SCUM Manifesto both do this in different ways and to different effects. The Black Panther Party uses the outline and language of well known American documents to portray the point that they are both American and despised by Americans. It is a tactic meant to offend those who read it and feel that the documents have been appropriated, but also to remind them of the idea that “men are created equal” which we have since ignored when inconvenient. I think it is significantly more effective than the language of the SCUM Manifesto. However, both have their pros and cons. The SCUM Manifesto uses a form of radical language that I find a bit overbearing. I don’t like when organizations become so radical in their rhetoric that they begin discussing killing the oppressor. My personal preference, however, doesn’t take away from the fact that this is, indeed, an effective tactic. It allows the marginalized to assert power over their oppressor verbally and build up to a physical/political assertion of this power. The SCUM Manifesto certainly catches the attention of their audience and builds up the energy within their base.

She stepped out of her front door into the cool air. The door slammed behind her, as it always did, yet today it made her jump. The evening before, she laid in bed discussing the state of the world and how she wished she could just stay inside with her cat and her space heater. Yet, here she was, out in the real world again, heading to school. She walked down the long, straight path to the subway, and decided to stop in to get coffee at the local café. It wasn’t so much that she wanted coffee, but more that she hoped to use it as a warm up for the rest of the social situations that the day was certainly to bring. Disappointingly, her favorite barista wasn’t there, and the blonde girl behind the counter never had anything interesting to say. They exchanged the usual pleasantries, and she went on her way. She continued on the walk through the cold, windy air. Why did she even get this coffee? It tasted bitter, and she was already awake enough. After weighing the guilt of wasting her money, she decided to throw the coffee out. As she turned to the nearest trashcan, she ran face first into a hipster guy with a long beard. “Oh my god, I’m sorry.” Her face flushed and she recalled more and more of the reasons she had dreaded leaving her apartment. She put her headphones in and turned up her favorite playlist of only Sia songs. It took her back to the fall where she travelled all the way to Toronto just to see her favorite artist sing her favorite music. Sia had been there for her in all of the different times she needed it, and today was no different. Feeling a bit more optimistic, she walked down into the subway and made her way to the Manhattan-bound L train platform. The train rushed in nearly immediately. Since moving to the city, she had always loved the way it felt when a train flew past. It was a little bit dangerous, a little bit loud, a little bit exhilarating. She got on the overcrowded train and took a deep breath. She had always hated crowds, and every morning felt like a calculated risk, one she had to get through. Luckily, her trip from the Morgan Avenue stop to the 3^rd Avenue stop was fairly short. 15 minutes later, she emancipated herself from the crowd and exited the hot, sticky train, entering, yet again, the cool and crisp air. She recalled the days in which she lived in a town where everyone was far apart and she drove on her own through giant highways to get where she needed to go. Sometimes she questioned why she moved where she was so often uncomfortable, but, in reality, she relished the moments she was able to feel awkward and nervous. To her, they were chances to grow. She headed up another long and straight path from 14^th Street all the way to 24^th Street, still blasting Sia through her headphones. She arrived at school, and after all of this, felt at least a little more confident about the choice to leave her apartment that morning.

(Sorry this was so long, I had a lot of fun writing it!)

In working on this blog post, I had to first attempt to set aside my preconceived opinions about Freud. However, Freud’s ideas of sexuality being the driving factor behind family relations is both strange and problematic to me. Also, Freud carried many gendered ideas of family relations, such as boy children feeling more hostility towards fathers than mothers. We are too far into the age of understanding gender to accept this as fact. I think, though, that one can read this in an informative way if one moves past certain issues and thinks of these “sexual” impulses that Freud speaks of simply as those visceral, uncontrollable impulses that everyone feels in one way or another about things they care strongly about. So, choosing to completely disregard the area of the text in which one has secret sexual fantasies about a parent, I was able to recognize similarities to my life in the ideas of the changing views of parents and the “overvaluation of parents” which extends through life. I related a lot to the part where Freud writes, “the child’s imagination becomes engaged in a task of getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who as a rule, are of higher social standing.” In that pubescent stages of my life, I began to think poorly of my parents and attempted to find other parental figures at school, church, and in any other extra curricular activity. It felt like a normal process, and reading this, it seems like it was. However, now, at an older age, I have returned to valuing my parents very highly, which I read when Freud wrote, “the child’s overvaluation of his parents survives as well in the dreams of normal adults.” So, perhaps, what I was able to get out of Freud’s writing is that there are normal stages of relations to parents to go through, and that I had, too, gone through them.

-Kelsey Luks

My understanding of the “untranslatable self” is that there is something so big and unique and in need of celebration about each and every human which can’t be written down in words. The interesting thing about this is that Whitman is, in fact, doing his best to write down the intricacies of himself, yet finds himself unable to fully write it down. Whitman celebrates this untranslatability, though, and find it to be the best thing about being human. It reminds me of the way that we experienced, in class, the painting of the monk experiencing the sublime while looking over a large, ambiguous ocean. Whitman, in this same way, is introspecting and experiencing the same awe and fear and lust and confusion. The human experience is something so untranslatable, yet we so often try to parse it down into easy-to-digest explanations and quips. Yet, it’s not that easy. Instead of working to gain a handle on every aspect of humanity, perhaps we should follow Whitman’s lead and celebrate the largeness and ambiguity of each individual.

-Kelsey Luks

In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “‘Hope’ is a thing with feathers,” she describes the abstract concept of hope with a concrete metaphor of a bird. This bird of hope is stalwart and omnipresent despite hardships and adversity and never asks for anything in return. I thought that this poem was helpful in understanding Jane’s feelings towards her world. One would think that, in Jane’s life situation, it would be easy and understandable to just throw your hands up in the air and give up hope. However, Jane never does this. While there are so many instances of this exhibited throughout the entire novel, I think that this struck me most in the beginning of the novel when Jane speaks to her captor and caretaker, Mrs. Reed, after the incident involving the Red Room. Jane has the strength to speak her mind and follow a new path because she holds that same feathered hope that Emily Dickinson writes of. For me, when I read this passage, I couldn’t fathom how a character so young and so tormented could possibly show such strength and perseverance, but, in reading “‘Hope’ is a thing with feathers,” it all began to come together. Jane wouldn’t have been able to create a new life for herself moving to Lowood, advertising herself and moving to Thornfield, and eventually falling in love and becoming more fully her true self without this steadfast hope that there is more for her in the world.

-Kelsey Luks

Jane Eyre is a character who uses her voice, even during times when, perhaps, she should not. Jane is constantly being told that the outspokenness and bluntness with which she speaks is inappropriate for someone of her gender and age. Audre Lorde, a black lesbian feminist, states that “As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change.” In Jane’s world, separation and suspicion are two significant words which describe her relations with others in the beginning of her life. This can be seen throughout her story, but one scene in particular in which this is particularly demonstrated is during the interaction between Jane, Mrs. Reed, and Mr. Brocklehurst before she moved to Lowood School. Mrs. Reed says of Jane that she does not have “quite the character and disposition that [she] could wish.” Despite Jane being asked of herself, in previous pages, if she was a “good girl,” her differences in persona and Mrs. Reed’s statements of her created the same divide which Lorde speaks of. In this moment, it seems to Jane that hope has been obliterated for her future. However, Lorde states in her work, “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in crucibles of difference… know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.” Though Jane feels that there is no hope in this moment, it seems like her resilience up to this point in her life will help her follow along this path which Audre Lorde discusses; to take her past oppressions for her differences and become a stronger woman who values who she is and will break down barriers that those who fall into the mold cannot.

On a small, rocking ship

In the middle of a wide, blue-black expanse

Gazing into unimaginable depths

Incomprehensible amounts of water

I understand the sublimity in my life

When I was a child, I was afraid of water

I had nightmares where I would fall overboard

Dark, salty water would pour into my mouth

It would fill up my lungs until the blue black faded into the black of nothingness

Now, I stand at the edge of the ship

Staring into the water

Appreciating the obscurity

And the fear it strikes into my heart

The comforts of the dry land I know are all out of sight

And the power of the ocean

Fills my head with a yellow-hued high that doesn’t cost any money

-KL

(I decided to go for some free-verse poetry since we could be a little more creative)

It is valuable, when looking to examine oneself and one’s surroundings, to also examine the history that led to the state of contemporary times. Hundreds – if not more – of events have occurred in human history that have shaped the modern era. The Enlightenment can, perhaps, be viewed as one of the more significant ones. During the Enlightenment era, people turned from a blind faith in God and the clergy, to a scientifically-founded understanding of themselves and the world they were living in.

Society began to be shaken to its core. Kings and Queens were no longer seen as divine, but rather as mortals, like everyone in their realm. For the people of the time, this understanding was ground breaking. Peasants, no longer believing that God Himself reached down to place their monarch on the throne, began to revolt. The power of the individual and the importance of science and critical thinking took over.

I like to believe (or, perhaps, hope) that we are beginning a second Enlightenment era, in which we begin to relearn our collective abilities to question what we are told by authority and regain a semblance of autonomy once more. After a while, humanity began to drift back into their old ways of following authority and rejecting science in order to understand the world through the eyes of religion once more. Now, after only a few days of the presidency of Donald J. Trump, many of those Americans who followed blindly a man who promised unfounded things are recognizing that those in positions of authority are fallible and need to be kept in check by the general population.

One can only hope that we will continue along that strain as a country and stop silencing those who bring forth science and reject those who claim authority and quash the individual.