MSU English 213

These coincidences are insane!

If the saying “all that is past possesses our present” is true, it should be able to survive a good testing. Though it sounds good and I initially want to agree with it, I am a critic at heart. Throughout the semester we have read about what awful things can happen if you test the gods and I’m not about to make an example out of myself. I decided to wait until a clear chain of events would provide me with evidence that all my past possesses my future. I tested it and it’s true. Once I decided on this course of action it took me less than an hour to prove myself right.

Serendipity provided for me in the form of the wrong library book. I am beginning to suspect there is actually no such thing as “the wrong library book”. For the better part of a week my car was in the shop being picked over by mechanics with a fetish for perfection and was left to walk about Bozeman. I’m still unwilling to bike around the town of Bozeman due to my experience of being knocked off my bike by a truck several summers ago. So I chose to leave my modern technologically convenient mode of transportation for the use my own feet and of course the occasional cab ride or lift from a friend. I’ve noticed that walking everywhere fills my head with an uncommon amount of thinking in which I recognize the wild coincidences plaguing my existence. If my car had never hemorrhaged oil and required emergency maintenance then my Madeline mission with Elizabeth for her memory symposium would never have taken us by the library. If I had not been hit by that crazy woman in a rental I would have had my bike for transportation instead of rides from friends. If I had not been walking around for a week I might not have been aware of the marvelous coincidences which lead me to my experience proving the class theory true. Elizabeth didn’t have her library card and asked me to check out a book for her. It turned out to be the wrong book for her but it was certainly the right book for me.

Walkabout, by James Vance Marshall, connects perfectly with our classical lit themes in both form and purpose. A brother and a sister, white and from the south, are lost in the Australian outback, an area twice the size of Texas with 35,000 people and only two roads. A native on his own walkabout, performed as a means of passing into manhood, comes across them. While the older sister comes to terms with her own prejudices, the younger brother embraces his new reality. Death and change are clearly the themes of this journey. Both dieing and killing are examined from a moral perspective. In addition, the book is filled with classical references like Spartan rigor on page 56. Examples of Ambrosia and Metamorphosis are found on pages 25 and 76 respectively.

What struck me most about the connections between Walkabout and our class material is the description of the two siblings with their guide, where the kids differ but the book parallels with our material. The kids are described as being as many as 100,000 years apart from their guide based on an evolutionary position. This division between American and Aboriginal youth is as great as the difference between the Greek gods and the Greeks who worshiped them. The Greeks expressed their free will unless a god would take interest in them then they would no longer control their own destiny. The guide takes it on himself to keep the two lost Americans alive and to deliver them to safety. When the guide dies, the brother and sister bury him. The narrative describes the guide’s wishes for a proper burial which involves a platform and an above ground resting place. Despite the language barrier and the truly massive cultural barrier, both the American children and their guide have clear expectations on respecting the dead. This makes me see Creon’s burial refusal as all the more offensive.

I’m filled with questions which tell me more than their answers possibly could. What are the chances that the first thing after concluding my own walkabout would be for me to get my hands on a book with the very same title? How many things had to happen perfectly for this situation to occur as it did? Why would it take less than an hour from my project concept at your wifes meeting to an almost devine realization of my goal? Honestly, these coincidences are getting out of hand. They can’t be natural.

Our past possesses our present as both the answer to the question and the questions themselves. Our pasts are perfect for our reality and could have happened in no other way to bring us to the moment we are in. Every story, every record, and every bit of language is a puzzle piece to the world we live in today. They may fragment ever smaller and smaller through the ravages of time but their picture remains whole as long as we see how the pieces fit. This Greek mythology and literature is not a bunch of loquatious hokey-pokey but rather our herritage. Every character in every story we have examined has in their actions and language what we experience today and that will not change until humans are no longer human. Though most books would have accommodated my plan, this book was a perticularly profound fit. I’ll have to thank Elizabeth for correctly finding the wrong book because, honestly, what are the chances?

# posted by Mick @ 8:37 PM