discontenttoday is my last day off and i think i might actually do some reading so that would make it not a day off at all but at least this way if i get work done on my day off i can feel extra special about myself.
see i started this book last night and something about it annoys me so i will have to keep reading it to figure out exactly why. it's about the american mythology of the frontier and the author seems to engage uncritically in the divvying up of western metaphysics into the male and female "principles" which then are accorded the usual qualities: reason and order to the male and death and the unconscious to the female. he then wants to say that the mythopoeic consciousness is one of "reasoning through metaphor," non-logically and via association, thus aligning this sort of activity with the feminine although he doesn't come right out and say it.
he also characterizes "the" (as though there were only one kind) indians at the time of conquest as being "closer" to the mythopoeic source of myth without saying whether this is his conception or rather his statement of how they were seen at the time. this of course lines up native americans with the intuitive and nonlogical which may well be the myth of the indian in frontier thinking but he seems to want to use this idea as an empirical given. but then of course he notes that there was a certain "order" in indian systems of thought as well while at the same time the wilderness (of which the indians were a part, natch!) tempted the european so used to "civilization" into "chaotic" disorder and violence.
does anyone else see how these categories leak all over the place or is it just me?
and furthermore (i'll stop soon i promise) he wants to place death on the side of the nonlogical world of dreams, of the unconscious and of the mythopoeic state of consciousness yet at the same time he references the "life" that is a part of the mythopoeic process.
i spy someone intent on drawing oppositions where there may be only oscillations.
what do you think?
