The piece I chose is titled No. F and was created by Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese born artist in 1929.  This painting was created in 1959, right after Kusama had left Japan and moved to New York City because of her attraction to the social freedom and teeming postwar art scene.  The notion behind this painting can be seen in a series of her painting called “Infinity Nets” where she is displaying infinite repetition and infinite space.  Kusama used a hint of minimalism with her all white expansive canvas however put a twist on it and made it more personal by using intricately webbed, thick, impasto (the process or technique of laying on paint or pigment thickly so that it stands out from a surface) in order to show her own experiences through the painting.  The experiences she is allowing people to feel through this piece are childhood and now adulthood challenge with hallucinations.  As I looked at the piece from different angles you can really see the paint protrude from the painting.  This painting reminded me of my ceilings in my room, I’m not quite sure what the name of the material used for the ceiling is called but it has similar bumps and ridges just as Kusama’s painting.  And when I stare into the ceiling for longer than 60 seconds, it begins to move as if it somehow became it became liquid and as your eyes focus on one spot, your peripherals see nothing but this white rigidness as if there was no end to it, as if it were infinite.  I think that is the feeling that Kusama is portraying through No. F.  You are surrounded by infinite space.

Both the Black Panther Party Platform and SCUM Manifesto utilize radical language in order to effectively express their points.  Diction is extremely important in both the Black Panther Party Platform and SCUM Manifesto because choosing assertive, demanding and even vulgar language is what makes both pieces so radical and effective.  For example, in the Black Panther Party Platform, it was formatted in a list of 1-10 of what are basically demands because they are phrased, “We want”.  This is effective because the Black Panthers are referring to themselves as a “we” to show that they are a unified group and used the word “want” to show that they are not simply asking for power or employment or freedom from brutality but they are demanding it.  Word choice is also important in the SCUM Manifesto as seen through the use of words such as “completely” to emphasize her points about men and “incapable” to show that even if men were to try they would never be successful.  It is also important to note that Solanas is very blunt and to the point with her wording rather than being vague or using less aggressive language.  For example, when she says, “We’re at that stage now; if women don’t get their asses in gear fast, we may very well all die”.  When saying this she is literally saying if we women don’t do anything about our current status and position in this patriarchal society then we may as well just die because there is no point. The use of radical language in both the Black Panther Party Platform and SCUM Manifesto have proven to be effective in catching the attention of the listener and creating a response.

Kaitlyn Moriarty

My commute to Baruch starts with me leaving my room and walking to the elevator and pressing “L” to go down to the lobby.  As I leave the lobby, I make a right when I get outside and walk to 96th street.  I make another right when I get to 96th and walk towards Lexington Avenue.  I swipe my metro card when I get into the station and then I make a right to the downtown side and go down the staircase on my right.  I get on the train and get off at 23rd street.  When I exit the subway station I am on Park Ave S. so I walk straight down towards 23rd and Lex until I get into the Lawrence Building.  As I was walking to the subway there was a misty rain fogging up my glasses.  I noticed a man running to the 6 train and then I noticed a woman wearing a skirt and rain boots and first thought, “wow she must be freezing” and then thought, “wow what was she thinking?”  As I was walking I smelt the coffee carts and their various pastries and I smelt laundry from the apartment buildings along 96th street and I absolutely love the smell of laundry, it puts me in a good mood.  Besides when I was questioning the woman’s outfit choice, I was thinking about my day and how to go about it because I have to study for my BIO lecture midterm so I decided to stay after English and then go to the library, read half of my notes (which is when I realized the highlighter I had with me is dead and has been dead for like 5 days) and then I’ll come back and shower.  But as I was in English I began to get hungry so I had to factor that into my plan.  By the time I got to the station, the 6 train was pulling in and that’s always the best feeling when you get to the train in perfect timing because one time, on a day like this, I was rushing down the stairs to catch the train but the stairs were wet and therefore slippery and I literally slid down every step and pulled out like 80 hairs while doing so.  Across from me was a girl that looked like she was a little younger than me, her name was Selena.

The 6 train is almost ALWAYS delayed/slow/being held by the train dispatchers and will be moving momentarily.  What is that about?  Why is the most irritating subway one of the only two subways on the East side?  The girl across from me looks very tired, very glossy eyed, it is 8 am so it’s perfectly understandable.  She probably should do something about those bags under her eyes though.  She probably is a student considering the time she is up but she doesn’t look old enough to be an adult who has a career and responsibilities and she has a bag that can fit easily up to 6 notebooks.  It’s interesting you never know the story behind a person especially just by looking at them.

Freud is definitely well known and his work has been acclaimed especially at such an early time period, I do not fully agree with his psychological analysis of family romances and I also cannot particularly relate this to my family relations.  From reading his paper, it seems as if he is saying that once a kid grows older he also grows resentful of his parents and feels the need to free himself from them and replace them with “better” parents.  According to Freud, after you reach a certain sexual stage, a child is supposed to liberate himself from not only his parents, but also his siblings if he feels he is sexually attracted to them.  One aspect I do partially agree with is where Freud mentions the competition among siblings for parental affection.  I personally am not a middle child but I have many friends who have 3 or more siblings and they always complain of “middle child syndrome”.  I wouldn’t necessarily say my friends and their siblings are fighting for affection but definitely for attention.  I however only have one sibling and we never really have competed for much except maybe who got the better grade is honestly all I can think of.  Maybe according to Freud my brother and I would be considered a rare case because we are not only siblings but best friends and never fight longer than 30 seconds.  I also don’t agree with Freud where he says that when you reach a certain age you get to know other parents and start comparing them to your parents and realize your parents are lacking in certain aspects.  I feel like it’s the opposite of that effect.  I feel that most people would regard their parents as the best parents in the world, I know I definitely feel that way.

After reading Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, I feel like, to my understanding, one’s untranslatable self is the aspect of not knowing where you came from or how you’ve come into existence.  Whitman describes his physical features as if they have been born from nature, for example, “[his] tongue, every atom of [his] blood, from’d from this soil, this air”.  I believe this is the essence of the untranslatable self, we come from nature, we come from soil, we come from air, we come from grass, but what really even is air, what is soil, what is grass?  Did it come from God, does it belong to God?  Or perhaps it is “uniform hieroglyphic” where it grows for everyone no matter color, gender, profession.  Has it come from the breasts from young men, the white heads of old mothers, the colorless beards of old men, the roof of our mouths?  We don’t know.  Later in the poem, Whitman describes a spotted hawk who “accuses” him of his mindless chatter, and idle waiting.  Whitman responds to the bird,” I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable” and here I believe is where Whitman reveals his definition of the untranslatable self.  The rawness, and the wildness of one’s being.  Maybe he means untranslatable in the most literal sense where it is the part of us we don’t know how to describe, it is part of us and we don’t know why it is the way it is, why we are the way we are.

When reading Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Hope” is the thing with feathers, much of the plot of Jane Eyre and Jane’s feelings in the book can be related back to the poem.  “Hope” is the thing with feathers, in short summary, is saying that hope is a bird that stays in your soul and is always singing, meaning that hope is a constant force, and is strengthened when storms or hard times are near, and could only be weakened in the extremest of storms.  Hope is there in the coldest, hardest times, and will always be there for you, without asking for anything in return.  I think this feeling and sense of hope is extremely common throughout the novel Jane Eyre even though it is not always explicitly mentioned.  In the beginning, when Jane was still living at Gateshead and being mentally and physically abused, she still had the hope of going to school, getting educated and getting out.  This is similar to the part of the poem where Dickinson mentions that one can hear hope even “in the chillest land – and on the strangest Sea”.  The chillest land in this case is Gateshead.  Another moment where Jane feels hope is in her love for Mr. Rochester.  Even though there is a part of her thinking that a governess has no shot with her master, she has hope that Mr. Rochester can reciprocate the feelings that she has, towards her.  I believe that the bird of hope is what summoned up the courage to tell Mr. Rochester how she felt and allow her to stumble into all new territory.

-Kaitlyn Moriarty

Both of Audre Lorde’s pieces The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action and The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House convey a very strong message of speaking out against the oppression and your oppressor no matter the consequences.  This same idea is seen on page 35 of Jane Eyre when Jane retaliates towards Mrs. Reed after the meeting with Mr. Brocklehurst where Mrs. Reed explains that Jane is a deceitful child and must be watched closely and at all times.  On page 2 of Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, she explains that women who “still define the master’s house as their only source of support” are the one’s who fear the consequences of standing up for one self which is what Jane Eyre feels in most situations where she feels like retaliating.  She reminds herself that she would have no other place to live and that this living situation is better than no living situation however on page 35, that second thought goes away and she more closely relates to what Lorde’s daughter says in The Transformation of Silence,” if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from outside”.  This urge just burst from Jane’s mouth declares her dislike for Mrs. Reed and the fact that she is unhappy with the fact that she had called her deceitful.  After Jane was done, she explains that her “soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of freedom, [that she] ever felt”.  This feeling is closely related to what Lorde is urging her readers/listeners to feel, the “source of power within [oneself]”.  I think that Audre Lorde would be proud of Jane Eyre in this specific scene.

Although there have been many times where I have come face to face with the sublime in my daily life, the feeling of extreme awe and wonder that I felt when walking down the Santa Monica Pier in Santa Monica, California.  This was the first time that I had ever been off the East Coast so because of that almost everything I saw I thought to be amazing and superior to everything here in New York.  However when we got to the pier and I looked up and to my right, I saw THE most beautiful sight I have ever seen still to this day.  I have seen a beach before and I have seen mountains before but to see them together, coexisting in the same environment, literally blew my mind.  The beauty was absolutely breath-taking, I walked down the boardwalk fixated on my view, still unable to comprehend how nature could be so gentle yet untamed at the same time.  Whenever I look back at the pictures I took of this view I almost tear up because of how lucky I was to be able to witness a view that I could only imagine would be fit for a super-natural being.

Many aspects of today’s modern society were fueled by the Enlightenment such as the notion of constantly questioning everything around you or in the article’s words thinking “skeptically about causes and effects” and to “not take any assertion or truth on faith, blindly following the authority of others”.  Also, the urge for one to “trust [his or her] own judgments and [his or her] own senses” is an idea I apply every test that I take.  Although this is a small example I believe it expresses this idea perfectly; when taking a test teachers and professors almost always mention that if you are second guessing yourself on a question, it is wise to choose your original answer thus again enforcing that we should trust in our initial judgments.  Another aspect of modernity that was born in the Enlightenment was the shift of reliance for truth from divine revelation to “human forms of knowledge: science, statistics, history, [and] literature”.  The new-found “sense of equality of all human beings” that triggered the “demand for universal human rights” is the aspect that I would like to focus on in this response.  During the Enlightenment, the argument of whether or not “women were just as entitled to develop and exercise their minds as their male counterparts” rather than being limited to a life centered around childbearing and child-rearing.  Women began gathering at ‘salons’ where they would discuss intellectual matters with one another and they also began writing novels.  Specifically, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, was a well known Enlightenment woman writer, as well as a Mexican nun, who “became an eloquent advocate of the write of women to education and a life of the mind”.  The idea of women’s rights, birthed during the Enlightenment era was carried into modern day, now known as feminism.  Advocates of this movement stood and continue to stand for equal pay for men and women, equal political rights (such as women’s suffrage” and the extinction of the idea that women exist only to bear and then care for children.  There are countless numbers of organizations today that still fight for equality among women and men, specifically the National Organization for Women which was created in the 1960’s.  This organization was a vital factor in the passing of the 19th amendment which no longer allowed the denial to vote based on sex. The fight for equal treatment between men and women has been ongoing since the idea was introduced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.