Hola Amiguitos!
So it wasn't a New Year's Resolution or anything like that, but I did make the commitment to put up a blog a week. Sadly, this commitment has already been broken. But hell if I will let two weeks go by without a blog; I know vast multitudes were greatly saddened and dismayed by the lack of a blog last week, but fear not, for the voice of our generation has arisen to write anew. Huzzah! Crickets...
I thought that this week I might try something different and write a book review. Let me reiterate that I mainly write this blog for me, but like to share (some would call it peddle) it with other people. So keeping that in mind, my book reviews will necessarily be half-baked, biased, and filled with masturbatory pontification. But take it as you may, I like books, some other people on the Internet like books, why not use the online medium to have useless discussions about them. I believe that to be one of the reasons the Internet was invented.
During this recent bout of unemployment between undergrad and graduate school, I have begun to read through some books I have laying around my house. The rule I made for myself is that for every piece of fiction I read, I will read a piece of non-fiction. This week I finished reading two books. One is called Man and His Symbols. The book attempts to explain the philosophy and "science" of Carl Jung, the father of psychoanalysis. The other is a novel by Ernest Hemmingway titled For Whom the Bell Tolls.
I'll start with For Whom the Bell Tolls. First off, part of me hates the way Hemmingway writes. When you read one of his books, you can just imagine this guy sauntering around Cuba, rum in hand, slapping asses of waitresses, fishing with grenades, being a real asshole. But then you come to a section in the book that makes an on-point description, and you have to give the guy credit as an author. Or you come to a part in a chapter where you just have to stand back and appreciate the character that Hemmingway puts so much of himself into. He stands as a symbol for the flawed but idealistic America of his time.
The book centers mainly on a plot to blow up a bridge during the Spanish Civil War. An American named Robert Jordan, who specializes as a dynamiter, joins a guerrilla band of Spanish fighters, falls in love, and, in fact, does succeed in blowing a bridge up (but sadly it doesn't happen until really close to the end of the book). That is all I will say because I don't want to give away the entire plot. The book isn't really driven by plot that much anyhow. It is driven mostly through the dialogue and ruminations of the main character Robert Jordan.
A unique part of this book is the way Hemmingway handles the translation of Spanish to English. A lot of the time he will write the literal translation of a Spanish phrase into English, and this gives the dialogue an interestingly foreign feel. Some of my favorite examples were "you will have to take death as an aspirin" and "he is much horse." He also uses the antiquated "thee, thou, thine..." to represent the proper feel of the Spanish language; a feel that is less democratic then our American y'alls and errbody.
The politics in the book is also a little interesting. Hemmingway writes some passages in which Robert Jordan has to explain American ideologies to the Spanish Republicans, all of which in constant comparison to the Spanish fascists. Jordan himself is part of the International Brigades, a group of international volunteer soldiers that fought for the Second Spanish Republic due to ideological reasons. So the book has some stuff to say for anyone who is interested in political ideologies. Yep, yep, yep.
Here is my succinct impression of the entire work: the book is a written example of what Hemmingway views as the true honorable man, framed within a weak theme of personal moral relativity. The theme bridges the relation to the eponymous John Donne poem.
"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee"
What the book has to say about my life is limited and thus I am bored by it. Killing other people kills myself, blah blah blah, I am not a good man and my enemy is not a bad one, blah blah blah, politics, politics, blah blah blah.
Overall 5/10
Next on our (who the hell is writing this with me? I meant my) list: Man and his Symbols. If you haven't heard of Carl Jung, that must be because he is pretty old. This book was written around 1960, and that time itself was near the end of Jung's life. Jung's philosophy is based upon the personal interpretations of our dreams, and the potential for our dreams to have a transformative power on our waking lives. He was good friends with Sigmund Freud, but they eventually had a falling out. Even more interesting, it apparently had nothing to do with cocaine (Freud loved the stuff, Jung maybe preferred nature walks, I don't know).
What I do know is that this was an interesting read. The book is comprised of six chapters, only one of which is written by Jung. The rest of the chapters are written by Jung's closest disciples. Though it can get into a bit of pseudoscience at times, I feel like the book has a lot of interesting things to say. Jung views the unconscious as a vast source of much of our identity. Analogously, he sees the conscious to the unconscious as a plant to the entire surrounding ecosystem. Actually one of my favorite metaphors that Jung uses is also plant-based. In describing why dreams would serve to help us, he compares a human being to a pine tree. A pine tree grows up towards the sun wherever it is, be it on fertile soil or on a wind-swept mountain peak. The pine tree always attempts to grow to be all that it can be within its individual environment. Like the pine tree, a human being, as a living entity, also grows to be what it can be within its environment. Dreams in this context serve the same role as sunlight to a pine tree; they are a stimulus to grow in the direction of which growth would be beneficial.
Some other interesting ideas from this book: the fear and anxiety in our society is caused by an increasing mentally dissociative state, consciousness is a recent invention and something that can be grown or diminished, and the symbols that humanity have created may share an actual physical basis in the brain (meaning we are hardwired for certain symbols). Jung was definitely a smart guy. He helped create the idea of the unconscious, the emotional complex (the reason I punch a wall every time my mom asks me a question), and introversion/extroversion. The problem is that sometimes his ideas verge on dialectical mysticism. Mainly he begins to (although he never says it) see the unconscious as God, the conscious as Human, and the meeting between them as a kind of perfected existence. Real poetic.
Now I will freely admit that I don't know shit. But at least I know that I don't know. For those of us that don't know, science is the only true bridge between our perception and reality that exists underneath it. As such I can't get on board with Jungian ideas such as synchronicity, which states that meaning can undermine cause and effect (look it up, this post is already too long).
All I have left to say in regards to this book is that a human being can ask two questions of the stuff that happens to him or her. One is how did this happen. That is a question science may be able to answer. The other is what does this mean? That question is one science can't answer because it is a subjective question. The point at which Jung looks at, the point at which these questions merge together, is a singularity. If our math breaks down at singularities in Black Holes, and the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity break down at the singularity of the Big Bang, how the hell are we supposed to combine these two questions of cause and meaning. We can't. Not now. Maybe in the future. Maybe not. Who knows. I don't. I'm hungry. Can't eat though. Have to go to the gym. Ya, I lift.
Overall 6/10
