Author: ava witonsky

Play

Posted on by ava witonsky

I loved Monday’s discussion about “playing.” I have never given much consideration to this integral aspect of human socialization and its role in culture. It is amazing that children today share something in common with children across the millennia– the  enthusiasm and knack for imaginative play. The most recent conversation I have heard about play in public discourse is the place of gender roles and stereotypes in toys. Toy stores are increasingly making their toy aisles gender neutral and targeting their games to all children. This ties into a comment someone made in class about play mimicking adult societal conventions; the sign that our games are changing is perhaps a sign of a societal change.

On Monday I was also grateful for the opportunity to learn chess & play it for the first time 🙂 The calculated nature of the game as well as the inverted color scheme helped unearth an aspect of “Through the Looking Glass” that I didn’t fully appreciate at first.

Wonderland

Posted on by ava witonsky

This is the first time I have ever read one of the Alice stories as well as any of Lewis Carroll’s works. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect given that it’s a book targeted towards children. Suffice to say that this story reminded me of the magic of the best children’s stories–– they envelop one like nothing else and reawaken the imagination.

The enveloping power of the author definitely contributed to the story’s heavy sense of unreality and the dreamworld. I found myself biting my lip and clenching my teeth at the intense – even frightening – inanity of the world through the Looking Glass. The lovely oddity that Alice first finds leads her into a strange, darker corners of the Looking Glass where time, space, and language all work in different ways. She must run to keep her place on the chessboard, fight to remember her name in the forest, and be prepared to rapidly launch from one reality to the next. Constancy and sense seem utterly abandoned in this world, but just as Plato’s Cave Allegory and Life is a Dream taught that we cannot trust our apparent reality, Looking Glass seems to clearly reflect the nonsense lurking just beneath the conventions of our reality.

short stories

Posted on by ava witonsky

Of the five short stories we read for this week, I enjoyed Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Secret Miracle” the most. As a Jewish woman with family members persecuted by the Holocaust, I felt personally close to the story’s setting. It made me question how our perception of time changes in certain circumstances; for instance, when we are confronted with death, life feels like a day. The excess of terror and anxiety that pervaded the narrator’s final days on earth successfully culminated in the final bargaining with God and the story’s somber ending. I am interested in how God or other spiritual figures play a role in subverting our sense of reality.

“Azabache” was an interesting story that presented an alternative reality in…an alternative way, or a way that we haven’t dealt with yet. Throughout the story, the male protagonist conflates his wife’s identity with the animals she loves so much-horses. He is aware of her eccentric obsession with the creature and seems to lovingly tolerate it until she is drawn away from their home and away from him. The patriarchal conventions he tried to constrict his wife with ultimately led to her (and the horse’s) slow, sinking death. This story’s deviation of reality existed within the alternate lives the man and woman led. They experienced such different senses of reality – his, a domestic fantasy – and hers, a confined, joyless prison, that their shared relationship could only culminate in disaster.

dreamworld

Posted on by ava witonsky

~i hope to write more critically in the future, but this ended up being a sort of socratic dialogue w/myself~

The world of dreams can illuminate more about reality than our waking lives. Which state of consciousness truly renders us the most perceptive? And if we had the chance, as Segismund seems to have, of operating in a “coddled” (II. xix. 2175) fantasy world, would we ever consider giving it up? Trading in blissful ignorance for truth is one of Calderon’s conflicts at play, and a worthwhile question for all of our lives. It is unlikely that all the mysteries of life should unravel in our time. Fate and free will, an afterlife, and the purpose of living – these unknowables propel humans, generation after generation, to devise a number of (potential) delusions: religion, astrology, the supernatural, morality. Do we have a responsibility to abstain from these fallible explanations? Or ultimately does it not matter which fabric of dream/reality we inhabit? For as Segismund asks at the end of Act Two, how can we know that life itself is not a simulation, a fever dream before the afterlife?

Life may be but a “shadow” (II. xix. 2175). More reality might exist for the eternal prisoners of Plato’s cave, safe in their opaque perception, than for the unshackled man who comes to perceive both worlds. A completely cave-bound existence provides the mind with consistent reason; knowing also of the outside earth imposes the impossible task of determining reality. Who reaps the better reward – comfort or truth? Definitive answer or infinite wonder? Maybe the Platonic question is best answered with a Socratic answer: I know that I know nothing.