The purpose of this film in my opinion is to show the false ideas behind the rational and irrational consensuses. Like Professor Rickenback said, the irrational occurrence of General Jack Ripper created a slippery slope that triggered every possible “rational” action. The reason why I say “rational” is because when we really look at it none of it makes sense. For example, the reaction of the president when “Plan R” was presented to him shows a huge lack of sense and knowledge. He was unaware of such a plan yet he supposedly signed off on something that could kill millions of people. In addition, how could someone that isn’t the president put such a plan into effect? Cutting off all communications and stopping at nothing leaves no room for anything but the execution of the plan. It does not make it rational just because something like “Plan R” could be created and executed. It’s quite irrational once the ball gets rolling when you look at it from this point of view. I would also like to point out the fact that the entire team on the B-52 was reading off a manual!! They didn’t stop to think about why or what they were doing, they just simply read the manual and did as it said. This reminded me of what we have been talking about in class and how we lose track of ourselves. We become accustomed to certain things and no longer question it. Technology plays a big role in that because it makes life so much easier. Technology in this film could be seen when everyone in that dark room kept referring back to the “Big Board.” They depended on it to show them the information of the plan and to also calculate what they could possibly do. This in itself again seems somewhat “rational” but very questionable, technology could easily fail us and if it does we seem to be in a position where it will completely catch us off guard. Furthermore the only person that seemed rational was Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. He was the only one that tried to understand the present situation and the other surrounding factors that were attached to it. He also was the only one that communicated or at least tried to communicate with everyone. This again shows how the person who must be considered rational is the only person that cares to understand.

Simon Critchley believes that a poet is able to strip the world of everything leaving it in its “simplest” form. The ability to do so removes all the false and meaningless aspects that have been applied to it by us. We have applied these aspects to make it easier for ourselves, I like to think of it and compare it to a safety blanket. It makes life easier allowing us cope with the vast ambiguity of the world. It’s like Professor Rickenbach said, when we begin to think of things that are bigger than us, like the infinite universe, we tend to be thrown off. It’s too vast of an idea and our safety blanket no longer does the job because we’re not accustomed to the idea. However, Critchley states that it goes a lot deeper than understanding hard facts. It is the ability to allow yourself to feel, and then being able to put it down in words. Poets possess this ability, they allow emotions to drive them and find ways to empty it out onto their work. In addition, this has to do with “the sickness of the eyes” and how we overlook everything because we have become so used to it. Poets do not suffer from this “sickness” because they find value in everything. Granting them the ability to get to the core or the ideal meaning (capital M).

Although Critchley specifically mentions poets, in my opinion this ability and immunity to the sickness is not just something they possess. There have been multiple texts we have read thus far that try and accomplish the same thing. Clarice Lispector’s reading, “The Daydreams of a Drunk Women” attempts to do just that. Within this reading, the drunk women is used to compare the ideal meaning of her existence to the meaning that she gives herself. The ideal meaning at the time was to be a mother and wife, cleaning, cooking, and making sure everything at home was perfect. However, in her eyes this was not her personal meaning. This drunk women believed that she was meant to do more in life, she was an artist and held more value than the regular wife/mother. There are many emotions within her that caused her to suffer and yet she still finds comfort for herself when she looks at her own applied meaning. With this in mind my question would be, if one is able to possess such skill then what should one make of it? Should we stick with the ideal meaning that essential a higher power imposed on us or should we go with our own meaning? That’s where this concept begins to confuse me and leaves me at a “so what?” point.

The overarching idea that I felt like I was getting closer to in class was the idea of confronting or rather accepting absurdity to find true meaning. Looking at the reading Endgame by Beckett, absurdity is used to show us that somewhere along the lines meaning is lost and there is nothing left of it. Trying to find true meaning is impossible and it is through the use of absurdity that we can draw up that conclusion. As a class we were able to see how broken and fragmented the reading was, and we were able to see how through those cracks Beckett hoped to find some real meaning. Piecing together the fragments that made sense and getting rid of what didn’t. This right away reminded me of the reading Diary of a Madmen by Lu Xun and how he used the same sort of absurdity to show the wrongs in the Chinese feudal society. Through the use of cannibalism Xun was able to show how people were consumed by false meaning, resulting in them failing to realize the monsters they had become. They did not care for any human life but their own, essentially trapped in an internal hunger for something that isn’t even real. This absurd idea of flesh eating people was used by Xun to highlight the urgency for change and realization. Similarly, Beckett showed the lack of meaning in his lack of words and description. It was all very spotty and only flowed when the story of the tailor was being told. Which was the most important part because within that story we were able to see the sense of faithlessness coming from Beckett. The tailor explains how he is working on perfecting the man’s trousers and that six days is not enough, not even for god. God wasn’t able to create a perfect world and yet he is considered to be our savior. He failed to give real meaning to anything and left it up to us to decide what holds meaning and what doesn’t. The tailor on the other hand shows how he wants perfection, he wants the man’s trousers to fit and won’t be content until they serve their rightful purpose. It’s funny how the only smooth paragraph of the play holds this hidden message with so much meaning. The idea of creating fiction in order to create meaning also blew me away because it took me back to the very beginning. Shelly argued that only poets could help the world and now we see that the same idea is being applied to all these works of literature. Somehow literature could help us come to some sort of meaningful state and that is partially because of their ability to put into words what many cannot.

In the video Ellul’s argues that in this modern technologically advanced society responsibility and freedom does not exist. He shows us our flawed idea of free will and illustrates the reality on how we just become this mass group of conformists. Ellul’s uses the example of traveling to show such lack of freedom. The inventions of cars and airplanes are believed to grant us some sort of freedom, the ability to go wherever and whenever we want plays into that idea. Yet we all seem to travel to the same places around the same time of year and fail to notice that. This really opened my eyes and I was able to compare it to our smartphones. Now a days the majority of us have Androids or iPhones and are madly in love with them. We are fed the idea that they leave the world to our disposal with all their abilities and new advancements. However, we could see that mass conformity through the apps we all have downloaded on them. Again one can choose to have these smartphones but at the end of the day we all use them for the same reasons through the same apps. In addition to this Ellul’s also points out how there is no such thing as responsibility. There are too many determining factors in the mix leaving out the idea of responsibility. It becomes a lot more complicated when trying to point fingers and most of the time responsibility loses its logic. I was able to make a connection to The Visit through this idea and through the death of Alfred Ill. At first I blamed the people of Gullen and had no doubt in my mind that it was all their fault. However, now I would take that back and say it is nobody’s fault. Everyone began buying on credit, claiming they would not let anything happen to Ill and started to feed into the new found wealth. The town and its people began to slowly conform excluding Ill. Once he passed away there was no way of holding someone responsible! It was a collective action that brought about this specific outcome. This then leads to the flawed idea of justice and how in certain instances, like responsibility, it loses its logic. Where and how could justice come out of this situation? In fact Ellul’s poses an almost identical example in the video. He uses the example of the broken dam and how no one is held responsible although everyone had some sort of impact on the outcome. They all had to do something with the dam and yet when it breaks no one is held accountable. Here responsibility loses its existence and logic once more.

Both the Un Chien Andalou and Ballet Mécanique videos seemed to have their own sense of logic in my opinion. There was no order to them and it was purposely made so that we could not apply any of our logic to it. What I mean by ‘our’ logic is the normal images and patterns were are used to. We could not understand the videos because they’re not what we are used to watching, usually videos have a beginning, middle and end or at least follow some sort of path. However in these videos everything is random and captured differently in order to completely throw us off. The whole idea of Surrealism and the other similar themes (Futurist, Creationist, and Dadaist) is to break away from the past and everything we hold value to. They each try to go back to a zero point hoping to break the normative and point us to what is true. In the Un Chien Andalou video, there was two parts that really stood out to me and reminded me of the futurist theme that we discussed in class. The first part was when the main male character was stripped of his past clothes and box that he had on him. He was forced to take it all off by his mirrored self and it was all thrown out the window even though he didn’t want to. This reminded me of the futurist idea of getting rid of the past and only looking towards the future. The second part that stood out to me was when the two main characters were happily strolling down the beach when they suddenly ran into these past items again. Here the futurist idea of getting rid of the past in order to look only towards the future is seen once again.

Similarly, the Ballet Mécanique video reminded me of the Dadaist themed video we saw in class together. Both videos were extremely random and the audio did not line up with the images at all. My favorite thing about this video was how it focused on capturing the machinery at work. It was all very zoomed in not allowing us to see what was being done but only allowing us to see the constant motion. This reminded me of what we discussed in class, the idea of factory workers losing themselves within the machines and that all sense of individuality was lost. The video captured just that and then sent out a hidden message to the viewer through the eyes that kept being portrayed. These eyes kept opening up and the only thing that came to my mind was “wake up.” It was as if the video was saying open your eyes by literally showing the action of opening one’s eyes. I would also like to point out the use of nature we see once again in both these videos. In the Ballet Mécanique video we see the swing in the middle of a forest, and in the Un Chien Andalou video we see not only the ants but the butterfly (could be a moth) in a couple of scenes. Bringing us back to previous readings that advised us to look into nature for freedom and to also go back to the beginning in order to restart again.

In the reading “Diary of a Madman,” Lu Xun is using the same ambiguity and extreme approach as Kafka did in “The Judgment” to send a message to the reader that the Chinese feudal society must change. In class we discussed that these artists want and look to break apart the wrongs of their respective societies. Aware and unhappy with the way things are done Lu Xun takes to literature in hopes of “breaking down” the unjust feudal system. Using the nasty and extreme act of cannibalism to cause a reaction out of the readers. He expressed ideas like exchanging children to eat, the act of him eating pieces of his own sisters flesh and the man who dipped his bread in the blood of another human (Xun 252). This reminded me of Kafka’s use of the suicide and the hidden intercourse message that we all seemed to have overlooked. Lu Xun was aware with the injustice, he knew that the upper class of the Chinese system was brutally oppressing the lower. Although he also knew that he was not the only one aware and we can see that when he writes “I could tell at a glance that they all belonged to the same gang, that they were all cannibals. But at the same time I also realized that they all didn’t think the same way” (Xun 251). Here he is giving light to the conformity of the people into this cannibalistic gang even when they “didn’t think the same way.” They were aware of the issue yet stayed on the oppressing/eating side, that is why beforehand he states “They want to eat others and at the same time they’re afraid that other people are going to eat them” (Xun 250). It was survival of the fittest, eat or be eaten, and if you did not conform than you would be this madman that they refer to him as.

Lu Xun even explicitly asks for the change, saying “you can change! You can change from the bottoms of your hearts!” (Xun 251). He knows that change could come if people truly want and look for it. Again going back to “breaking” this system together and as a whole. Breaking the way things are viewed in efforts to show how it should be viewed. Lu Xun has hopes by ending the reading with “maybe there are some children around who still haven’t eaten human flesh. Save the children…” (253). Going back to the idea of pure forms and how the view of an innocent child is the right approach. Ambiguity and extreme approaches are used in both the readings in efforts to break the negative aspects of society. Ambiguity causes the reader to focus solely on the message the author is trying to convey and the extreme approaches emphasize the severity of the issues.

In my opinion, Frederich Neitzsche’s essay does a really good job at highlighting the concepts of truth and knowing we are starting to discuss in class. He talks about the deceptive “truth” created by mankind and the universe before its influences, in efforts to show the reader that there is a huge lack of meaning and understanding. Neitzsche opens up his essay with a short story which clearly was referring to our world and how we are the animals creating “truths” under the universe that surrounds us. He goes on to state that “one might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature” (Neitzsche 1). What he is trying to say that mankind and its knowledge mean nothing compared to nature because nature was around before everything and will continue to be around even after mankind falls off the face of the earth. Whatever mankind contributes does not and will not ever matter. He claims that this “invented knowledge” is just a way of mankind giving themselves meaning in the vast universe. Making humans sound naive and self-centered, even comparing them to a mosquito and how it probably thinks the world revolves around it as well.

In addition to this, according to Neitzsche humans are “immersed in illusions and dream images” of what is believed to be the truth. He is trying to show how they jump over the real meaning of everything and make up what they want along the way to make it easier for themselves. Through these “truths” they create a way of socializing, and here was where I was able to see the idea of categorization emerge once again. Those who believed in the invited knowledge spoke the “truth” and those who didn’t were “liars”. Neitzsche blames this outcome on the fact that mankind always wants “to exist socially” and therefore categorizes individuals into these groups. Humans lack the ability to think for themselves granting social constructs to dictate their beliefs and essentially their lives. Language was even meaningless in Neitzsche eyes, to him it was just another form of “stimuli” made up by mankind. All these factors led to the categorizations of culture, religion, and class that we have been continuously seeing in our readings.

Neitzsche’s way of thinking in this essay gave me a sense of realism, he was direct and looked at the truth that was right in front of him. He acknowledged nature but went deeper than that, he showed the flaws of the human race by illustrating his observation of the world in his essay. He touched upon the idea of knowing and how humans have been wrong since the beginning of time. The truths that they have created are simply made up and meaningless. I could see how literature is starting to take a turn because everything we have touched upon thus far is coming back to influence this change.

In “The Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels go on to describe the two classes of the time and how the oppressed broke away from the oppressors through unity. There were two main groups or rather classes that Marx focused on through the entire chapter. One group was composed of the Bourgeois, which were the high and wealthy members of society. The other group was composed of the Proletarians, who were the hardworking low middle class. However, Marx made an argument in his chapter saying that there was no such thing as the “middle class” since the Bourgeoisie were the ones who ruled everything. Anybody who worked and did not own land or rather an industry could not consider themselves anything but part of the proletarians. He states that this way of being “has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into paid wage laborers” (Marx Chapter 1). Everyone fell under the rule of the bourgeoisie, they controlled everything and therefore had the power to do anything they wanted. That’s why the proletarians worked long hours in these ugly factories for barley any money. Marx described these hard working men as “a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their laborers increases capital” (Marx Chapter 1). Basically telling the reader that they depended on this work and only found it if the higher ups benefited from it. Though as the chapter progressed Marx explained how the proletarians soon began to form what is called “unions” and through these unions challenged the bourgeois. Explaining to the reader that this movement was a ‘’self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority” (Marx Chapter 1). Eventually the proletarians were able to break down and overthrow the bourgeois through such unity.

This fits perfectly with Romanticism because the proletarians seemed to have no meaning when working for the bourgeois. They were only valuable if they could work to continue increasing their wealth. Romanticism argued and believed these human beings had their meaningful place in nature free from oppression and categorization of class. Nature was a whole in which they belonged to unlike the broken society they contributed to. If I were to take a guess in which direction this was going to I would say that we’re coming to a point of radical change. The oppressed are no longer unaware and are looking to take down their oppressors. Like Marx said it has been attempted before but now the only difference is these movements are backed by a majority overpowering the wealthy minority.

The Navajo Night Chant is a form of orature that is performed through dances and spiritual healing. Originating amongst the Native Americans, the chant served as a way to harmonize between earth and man while offering healing services. The goal of the Navajo night chant is to establish a connection between earth and man. Through the use of sand paintings and prayer sticks, the Navajo used this as a tangible link to nature that helped treat many illnesses.

This particular form of orature provided a strong link to the Native American community. The power of dance and chant kindled a flame for the culture of the people that was passed down through many families. Since the chant involves many people to be performed, this incorporates all the members of the community involved. Not only does the chant represent a link to man and earth, it also serves as a link between man and man. While the night chant is performed, people are required to come together and pour their emotions into the surroundings around them, providing a closer relationship amongst themselves. To those that encounter this chant, the values of spiritual renewal, socializing, and cultural reaffirmation is offered. Furthermore, since the Navajo use the chant as a form of healing, this brings forth the severe importance of preserving the earth and staying linked to it.

Overall, the night chant elicits a structural order amongst the Navajo people and nature. It demonstrates how man can take natures resources and turn them into a positive healing effect. The Navajo ceremonies emphasize a man’s ability to control their world, while balancing their responsibility to use that control in order to provide balance, respect, and healing. By doing so, the Navajo Night Chant goes beyond conventional healing ceremonies and incorporates art, medicine, religion, and science. The chant accurately represents the culture of the Navajo as it accentuates the central value of beauty.  Similar to Romanticism, the chant offers intense emotion as a source of aesthetic experience. Both the Navajo and Romanticism delve into the idea of natural and untamed settings, which are commonly shown through the Navajo chants. Romanticism attempted to evoke imagination, spontaneity and freedom, and this is just what the Navajo chants embodies.

Rosalia De Castro is exactly the same as the recent poets we have gone over in class. She uses the same themes of nature and believes it speaks to those who are willing or able to listen. In the poem “Some say plants don’t speak,” Castro uses specific words like plants, fountains, birds, waves and stars to create this image of nature and her surroundings for the reader. Illustrating nature in her work and then going to the extent of saying it spoke of her as this “madwomen” dreaming of eternal beauty. Castro definitely reminded me of Shelly and Baudelaire in how descriptive and kien to detail they’re. However, Castro is a lot more into nature and strays away from making the reader uncomfortable like Baudelaire. In this particular poem Castro describes how all these aspects of nature mock her for believing in their eternal beauty, and as she ages the beauty remains there. Going back to the idea of beautiful versus ugly within nature, separating what matters apart from what doesn’t. She shows, or at least tries to show, the reader that nature is this beautiful gift given to us remaining alongside human beings since the beginning of time.