Doin' the Cockroach

I'm jumping in to the fray over which Modest Mouse song is best in depicting suffering. I would agree with Sally more that "The View" brings up an excellent point of "if it takes shit to make bliss, well I feel pretty blissfully." I think we all can find some solace in that statement after reading about the unfortunate demises in the "End" sections of Ovid. In addition, Sarah's argument for "Cowboy Dan" has some interesting parallels with Job, but it's a story we've heard FAR too many times.

Modest Mouse's best song for suffering is by far "Doin' the Cockroach":

I was in heaven
I was in hell
Believe in neither
But fear them as
well
This one's a doctor
This one's a lawyer
This one's a cash
fiend
taking your money
Back of the metro
Ride on the
greyhound
Drunk on the Amtrak
Please shut up
Another rider
He was a
talker
Talking about TV
Please shut up
This one's a
crazer
Daydreaming disaster
The origin of junk food
Rutting through
garbage
Tasty but worthless
Dogs eat their own shit
We're doing the
cockroach yeah
Doin the cockroach yeah
Doin the cockroach yeah (alright,
not bad) [x3]
One year
Twenty years
Forty years
Fifty
years
Down the road in your life
You'll look in the mirror
And say, "My
parents are still alive."
You move your mouth
You shake your tongue
You
vibrate my eardrums
You're saying words
But you know I ain't
listening

I think one of the most terrifying feelings in life is when a situation is beyond one's control. In the song, Isacc Brock sings about somehow being in Heaven and Hell at the same time even though he doesn't believe in them. He expresses his frustration with the structures of capitalism and how we are living out our lives earning and dispensing money with no say at all. He points out how dogs eat their own shit with the hidden question of whether humans do the same thing. All of these factors that seems out of our control cummulate to the feeling of being a cockroach. If we agree that our larger environment is out of our control, aren't we nothing more than the lowest form of life on Earth? In T.S. Eliot's, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he compares his existence to a cockroach as well:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 60
And how should I presume?

T.S Eliot is "Doin the Cockroach" or rather Isacc Bruce emulated Eliot's suffering. Both writers ask the question, "How can we press forward in the face of insurmountable adversity?" Granted, these are Job stories to an extent, but there's one major difference: we can't escape the sufferings of life if we tried. We don't even realize how life begins or ends. No one will explain the middle to us. Literature, school, friends, and activities on the weekend are all variations of people passing the time because we don't know what else to do. There is no larger goal, other than to live as full and as busy a life as possible. We need to scurry around like a cockroach more, otherwise we'll get squished by unforeseeable forces. We can't control these forces. Worrying about it is futile. We can only wriggle about and define what life is to us.

Patience

First off, I'd like to apologize for not keeping up on the blog like I should be. The last couple of weeks have been busy. Too busy for my liking.

I've been thinking. The secret moral of the story of the class is patience. Through mythology, we learn to be patient with others and ourselves. If someone is feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders, it's perfectly acceptable because there are books upon books of people that have been in the same situation. Be patient because the world moves in cycles and your periods of down will be followed by periods of up. In Ovid's Metamorphosis, the heroes make the mistake of not being patient enough and then pay for their mistake at the whims of the Gods. If Icarus had been a bit more patient, he would've flown just fine. Proserpina and Eve impatiently ate forbidden fruits without thinking through the consequences. In one of the few stories with a happy ending, Pygmalion lived happily ever after with his statue because he was patient. Only the Gods are able to be impatient. Only they are allowed instant gratification. For the rest of us measly mortals, we must wait our turn.

Dr. Sexson is dolling out patience by the handfuls every time he interacts with us. Some people (myself included) are learning patience through reading thousands of pages of literature. Will what I read now ever help me in life later?

Others are searching for patience in their writing. Will what I say now be relevant in 3, 5, or 10 years? Now I'm sure Dr. Sexson will argue that whatever you write down is important, but let's be honest, the world has only so much patience. It is humanly impossible to read every work of literature ever written. But with the help of Ovid's Metamorphosis we can patiently realize that there is really only a set of stories that are being rewritten over and over again.

I just hope it means I have to read less.