In this I don’t think we can forget the question of “youth.” Can it ascertain the “true” threat?

Part of the point or the answer has to do with what Gawain believes to be true at a given time. Gawain, good knight as that he is, doesn’t trust the girdle. What if he had?

. . . if no better place,
Thank him who puts me loath to this revenge
On you who wrong me not for him who wrongd.

Here’s one of those areas where line breaks get in the way and where meter is beating sense, and also nonstandard orthography.

Thank, in other words, God for this, not me. Satan is beginning to rationalize.

Why? We can read “me not” as the end of the clause and put commas between “loath to this revenge” so the sentence would read “Thank Him who made me what I am for assailing you, who never did anything to me, sure, but it was Him who wronged.”

The “silva rerum” refers to a forest of things. The commonplace book has been referred to as a reflective journal, where, in practice, sections of work would be written down by the reader and commented on in a notebook, now, of course, in a weblog or a note tool.

In the first dialogue exchange between Satan and Beelzebub in Paradise Lost, we have Milton employing dramatic language, either self-directed or to his comrade. It goes like this:

If thou beest he; But O how fall’n! how chang’d
From him, who in the happy Realms of Light
Cloth’d with transcendent brightnes didst outshine
Myriads though bright: If he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope,
And hazard in the Glorious Enterprize,
Joynd with me once, now misery hath joynd
In equal ruin: into what Pit thou seest
From what highth fal’n, so much the stronger provd
He with his Thunder: and till then who knew
The force of those dire Arms? (84-94)

The first words uttered are significant because they expose the magnitude of change that has occurred after the war in heaven. Just those few lines, spoken slowly, and in amazement (to suggest the kind of utterance it actually is) are key to the relationship the reader may have with Paradise Lost. “If thou beest he; But O how fall’n” can be read in all kinds of interesting ways, numerous affects, speeds, and expressivity, given the readers take on the situation.

This would be a commonplace entry, involving reflections on the theme of reading, drama, and performance. Typically of the commonplace is its organization. It’s not just meant to collect thoughts, but those thoughts are meant to be found, revised, and rethought. Why collect otherwise; why should we write notes at all unless those notes serve some larger purpose?

Oppositions are important to Milton, to religion, and to polemic. Hell, for example, as place, state, and staging ground will rear back at the end of the text after Adam and Eve are removed from the place, state, and staging ground of Paradise. For Satan, hell is both a place to fall into, physically, sensually, and a state of mind or frame of reference. Satan will not repent. He says:

. . . Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (249-254)

Satan possess hell and refers to the mind as a “place,” habitable, motile: the state argument.

On his decent to Paradise, Satan observes the beauty he will never have back, this in Book 3. The idea of hell as mind follows the action. Thought follows Satan and all the torture that can bring with it:

Satan from hence now on the lower stair
That scal’d by steps of Gold to Heav’n Gate
Looks down with wonder at the sudden view
Of all this World at once. As when a Scout
Through dark and desart wayes with peril gone
All night; at last by break of chearful dawne
Obtains the brow of some high-climbing Hill,
Which to his eye discovers unaware
The goodly prospect of some forein land
First-seen, or some renownd Metropolis
With glistering Spires and Pinnacles adornd,
Which now the Rising Sun guilds with his beams. (3.540-51)

Satan’s wonder is like a scouts, who, tapping a hill sees a new landscape. This passage, much like the expression to Beelzebub, recalls that sense of observed change and surprise.
In Book 4 we read doubt in Satan and identify the surfacing of regret:

Yet not rejoycing in his speed, though bold,
Far off and fearless, nor with cause to boast,
Begins his dire attempt, which nigh the birth
Now rowling, boiles in his tumultuous brest,
And like a devillish Engine back recoiles
Upon himself; horror and doubt distract
His troubl’d thoughts, and from the bottom stirr
The Hell within him, for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more then from himself can fly
By change of place: Now conscience wakes despair
That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue. (4.13-26)

The commonplace observation should reveal the structures of the work. This last passage closes the state argument, at least for now and in this section. “The Hell within him” is an echo of “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” Satan carries “himself” with him no matter the place.

The giants are an ancient, vanished race whose fossilized remains are not mysterious bones or odd topography, but the lingering worship of their iniquity. The references to constructing idols and deifying the sun and moon which follow make it clear that Ælfric has both biblical and classical deities in mind. By describing the genesis of the false, mortal divinities of the Greeks and Romans (along with those of the Babylonians, Canaanites and wayward Israelites), Ælfric is repeating a connection frequently made in Old English literature between the opprobrious giants of Christian tradition and the gods of classical mythology.

Massive projects require the leap beyond the horizon of your own death. They have to be a message to someone who comes after, and very often to someone who comes LONG after. That person isn’t “us” — as you say, how could the builders have wanted that? But if we can at least grant that the architects of old possessed a decent set of wits, they knew from experience that the present isn’t eternal, that the horizon of the future is uncertain … and can’t we imagine, without too much of a leap of faith, that a project like Stonehenge is sent into that future in part to stabilize it, but in part also to keep an ever-receding present alive, even beyond the demise of those who inhabited it?

I’d also want to emphasize what is truly remarkable about a building project that takes several human life spans to complete: it cannot be an ad hoc, day by day labor, but takes planning that exceeds human time and mortal duration. That fact has vast significance when thinking about these architectures, especially in their design for long endurance. It tells us nothing about specific intent, I suppose — i.e., it won’t let us know whether Stonehenge was a fertility shrine or a ceremonial ground or whatever — but it will remind us that such architectures that from their start have inhabited a future more than a present reveal an ancient and enduring human desire.

This comes as a response to this question:

. . . Sylvia Huot asked a question that goes to the heart of the kind of thinking we attempt here at ITM: how to intertwine meditation upon past and future while retaining some confidence that we are doing justice to history?

I would ask this question because it goes directly to Professor Cohen’s mention of building projects in the context of mortality: do we know enough about the Stonehenge builders’ notion of time as both concrete duration and abstract companion. How did they, for example, express “immediacy” or “now” and “later”?

In our own world, time is a thing to watch closely, classify, and beat. Time is a ubiquity as a technological construct: it’s staring at me from the computer now as a personified bot of the interior mechanism. The processor is clocked and so is the heart and DVD drive. Time and death are related: we do call them “deadlines” after all.

The notion of mortality in the west is heavily shaped by conceptualizations of technological futures, generational landscapes and forecasts, and by religion. How heavily do these influence our inferences about the Stonehenge builders?

I was twiddling with Tinderbox in the office yesterday, beginning some notes on medieval literature, when Carolyn arrived and she asked a series of questions about the tool. This took us into some play with prototypes and adornments as a means of organizing materials.

Of course, when write ups come on educational tools, such as in the two posts below, the talk often attracts around web logs, wikis, social/collaboration tools, and courseware. I think Carolyn liked where the work went with the note tool as software for students to use in the classroom and afterwards as a means of study.

My students don’t think about this, but I monitor how they work and manage things. This past week many have lost out because they forgot, lost, or misplaced their evaluation sheets. I hand the sheets out and the students return the sheets with their papers so that I don’t have to print or otherwise produce more copies. If they don’t turn the sheet in, I wait for them to produce the sheet and then I evaluate. The point is, my students, or most of them, not all, are horrible organizers of their own learning narrative. IThis is a neglected aspect of Secondary schooling. don’t know what they do with all the things they take from the classroom, how they manipulate their materials, save to their harddrives, or tab their progress through reading and notes. They lose syllabi, ask for page numbers (really!), forget definitions, disremember dates, and neglect the relations between material and reality. They need, in three words, awareness of organization. Tools like Backpack are made for organizing, but my students typically don’t know about them and don’t think enough about digital tools for this self-service. The ability to search for an object is hard to do with a notebook, but if done well, and with some forethought, it can be an interesting journey. But self-evaluation with the use of tools is a key idea in learning (a quiz is just such a tool). Learning anything. “Where are the directions?”

Courseware can be used for ordering, but students must take the time to figure them out. (Here’s a note: we don’t really need courses to teach students how to use RSS. We need courses that teach people how to teach themselves and look for the potentiality of woodblock.) Library databases also offer means of keeping track of required items and services, such as topic/subject alerts, and even the browsers on their computers can serve track-keeping of the self in an instructional or life context. But this calls for an awareness and inquisitiveness on the part of the student into “how” and “why.”

Carolyn and I ran into a wall when we got to the adornment part of Tinderbox. I’ve subsequently figured the idea out and it is sort of neat. For British Literature, our oddly named course sequence for the learning of “English” Literature, I want to organize my thinking about the ideas I work with and the readings we cover in the course, creating associations, and keeping track of examples, because I feel that more is there to be had for myself. One of the ideas is Leadership, another Fealty, still another Christianity and Languages. Ideas is the adornment at the moment, although but could be abstracted even further, which may come soon enough. At the moment, the adornment Ideas, currently in color gray, is the region where notes on Leadership and Fealty are “stuck.” I’ve created containers for Beowulf and Marie at the moment and will be racking my own reading through Lanval and Beowulf, linking off to ideas and other text snippets as they come to me or are found.

It seems to me that students could also do this, working with their laptops, if they have them, in class and then reorganizing as they evaluate what they learn on their own time, (on laptops or desktops), generating their own systems of classification and application.

Why does Beowulf sail to the aide of his kinsmen? When a student thinks they’ve figured this out, in addition to wondering at the significance, any number of tools can be used to help develop the analysis and make it relevant to the relationship between Lear and Cordelia. The relationship can be a link away or somewhere buried in that notebook in the trunk of the car.

I’m tired of the “we can sell a lot of shit to Colleges and Universities because they really don’t know any better” attitude. Tinderbox sold itself.

Thus made their mourning the men of Geatland,
for their hero’s passing his hearth-companions:
quoth that of all the kings of earth,
of men he was mildest and most beloved,
to his kin the kindest, keenest for praise.

Swa begnornodon Geata leode
hlafordes hryre, heorðgeneatas,
cwædon þæt he wære wyruldcyninga
manna mildust ond monðwærust,
leodum liðost ond lofgeornost.

Beowulf ends with a bitter sweet taste. We’ve been through monsters; we’ve watched the Geats rise and sense that they will fall, change, suffer. There’s something about ends here, transitions, a sensibility about passage through time and space. We doubt our abilities and are anxious about having to face the world without the aide of the elves. It could be argued that we capture the proportions of time through story in this way and objectify the feel of transitions. Existentially, change itself “passes” because we mark it as a point. We don’t really experience extended periods of change. We celebrate moments, such as the death of a great leader, and then wake up to a new day and move into life as usual. Alternatively, we often measure periods of change by the moments that close them. A couple looks forward, for example, to the birth of their child.

There is a mental or cognitive topography to this mediation. One style of ethic may prioritize change, another may see to the clocking of moments in between as a way of managing or mediating well being. We can map the seasons as a way of measuring ourselves. Winter is a time of sleep or death or pause, Spring is an awakening, signaling the approach of a new Beowulf or Aragorn, who will rise and lead us to safety. Persistent anxiety disrupts the mental topography of the seasons. Constancy is ahistorical. “This never ends” means “this never began.”

The first appearance of Macbeth himself in Act 1, Scene 3 as he and Banquo are returning from their recent battle, our “hero” dons a red colored tartan. Banquo pales in comparison in his earthy browns. Lady Macbeth’s first appearance is even more impressive. Her brilliant blood red dress is simple in style, but slaps you in the face with impact. With huge bell sleeves and a trail behind her about two feet she appears to be dripping wet with blood as she reads the letter from her husband. Moving into Act III, as Macbeth and his Lady appear as King and Queen, both are carrying even more layers representing this color of extreme passion. Our lady now wears the same red tartan as her husband’s over her drippy dress while her King now wears an exquisite regal bloody red robe over his. The only time these two do not appear wearing red is the scene when Duncan’s dead body is found. Both Macbeth and his Lady have changed their garments to hide the bloody evidence. They both almost look like they’re in disquise. It’s easy to lose them among the chaos without their trademark color.

Susan Gibb on 3-D thinking:

I’m thinking that the multilayers of story within a hyperfiction piece lend themselves easily to 3-D, (I’m not talking 3-D animation here, but rather still on the storyboard layout and the eventual finished piece) and I can imagine it as similar to a universe where the objects (textboxes, or images, sounds, etc) are self-contained within an object, let’s say a cube–connected to appropriate other cubes that follow a story line–that can be clicked on, would come forward and open up to be read/viewed/enjoyed. Another click would send it back into the background so that another choice can be made.

How would I speak to some gray shade parked in my chair? What if the sun went dark or the night kept spinning over where the sun once shined?

Lear where are you when I need you.