"Herodotus tells us that the grave of Osiris was at Sais in Lower Egypt, and that there was a lake there upon which the sufferings of the god were displayed as a mystery by night." (The Golden Bough, p. 433)

This a belated blog about Thursday's splendid class, which dealt with eschatology and apocalypse(which may or may not be the same thing) and the unavoidable reality of sadness. The possible truth arises that we can only deal with sadness by attempting to transmute it into beauty. This isn't a justification or a vindication, it is simply all that we can do. And every now and then we actually succeed! It may be as Freud said, that we laugh to keep from crying. But then we have those indelible moments of crying and laughing at the same time--which it turns out there is nearly a word for: dacrygelosis, or alternate laughing and crying. Thank you Rio!

I also had a lightbulb moment when we were discussing Finnegans Wake, and the motif of female memory in mythology. How the male "forgets" when he falls asleep for the winter or dies or what have you. When he awakens, he has forgotten everything. But She has not. She has to make him remember that he is her lover, father brother... and this is going to go on endlessly and it makes her infinitely weary.

Well, it reminded me of this 40's Hollywood movie called Random Harvest, starring Greer Garson and Ronald Colman. Its about an amnesiac soldier who falls in love with a dance hall girl but then is hit on the head, remembers who he really is(a powerful industry tycoon) and goes back to his old life, forgetting her. She than goes to work for him, trying to make him remember. Talk about a tear-jerker! Anyway, I just realized that it was true; mythology is everywhere. Random Harvest and Finnegans Wake are united in common mythos, strange as it may be.

I am also going to be writing about the Orphean myth for my term paper, which makes me twitch with anticipation.