While reading a textbook for my Theory and Practice of Nonviolence class, I came across a paragraph talking about Dorothy Day. Day was a nonviolent Catholic activist that is considered to many a modern day saint for the work that she did for many social justice issues including co-founding the Catholic Worker, supporting the grape and lettuce boycotts with the United Farmworkers Union, and going on hunger strikes to show the immediate necessity for change. Day got much of her inspiration from Gandhi and while reading about her own methods she used to be principally nonviolent, I came across a paragraph talking about her stance on celibacy. 

"Unlike Gandhi, Day was no prude. She chose celibacy for herself, but she did not demand it of others. "It is not idealism as against sensuality," she told Coles. 'God...certainly put us here to enjoy our sexual lives." When sexual love is genuine and faithful, it is a beautiful thing, she said. It is a "mating of spirit and flesh," a symbol of divine love. "It is the foretaste we have of heaven." But when sex is careless and exploitative, it "takes on the quality of the demonic, and...is a foretaste of hell."

-David Cortwright from Gandhi and Beyond, Nonviolence for an Age of Terrorism

Dorothy Day

I found this statement so riveting. Day was a strong Catholic, but was speaking about sex in a way I have never heard a religious person talk about it before. Like the quote states, Day did not have the same beliefs as Gandhi, and no where in the statement does Day mention that the act needs to be saved for a marriage between a man and woman. Day uses the word idealism in her statement and it reminded me of our class discussion on 'what is idealism?' Looking through my notebook, i have scattered notes on what different people thought it was. It could be defined as beliefs, ideals, a specific mindset, or habits of a group of people/individual. My personal favorite defined it as your own relationship to the world.

Day's ideology did not come from leaders of nonviolent action, such as Gandhi, and they didn't come from leaders of her religion, such as the Pope, but they came from her own beliefs. In Day's early life, she had a relationship with a man which resulted in her becoming pregnant and having an abortion. The Catholic Church certainly doesn't accept having sex without marriage and definitely believes that abortions are morally wrong. But, by reading this book about Day, I am taking away that she recognizes that things happen in life and her ideology reflects an authentic viewpoint from which people are able to relate to. Since these things happened in Day's early life, her relationship to the issues are different than the teachings of the church. 

Does that make her a 'bad' follower of the religion? Should she not be prominent figure in the church? The culture of the church would, I would think, say that she shouldn't be. The Theory Toolbox defines culture as "way of life". The whole idea is very interesting to me: why is Dorothy Day held in such high regard in the Catholic Church even though her personal beliefs and ideologies are different than what it is that they teach? And what is it about the culture of the church that makes it acceptable for some people, like Day, to be very outspoken about their differences with the Church, but doesn't give the same opportunity for others to do the same?

Who creates the meaning to what I am writing right now? It could be me, the one behind the keyboard, slaving away at creating something that will hopefully sound creative and intelligible. But it also could be you, the reader, picking apart my diction and creating a new meaning for yourself. Foucault argues that it is you. You are the one who takes the subject of the work, mulls it around in your head, and generates fresh ideas out of it. 

If you are the one who gets the privilege to tear apart my words and form something else, how am I supposed to feel? I suppose I don't mind. I have done it plenty of times before. But what is someone had wrote this template and I just filled in the blanks? Do I still get the credit? Are you deriving meaning from my work or someone else?

In one of my other classes we have been talking a lot about love letters. If you type that simple phrase into the Google search bar, the first website that pops up is called The Love Letters Collection. In essence, it is a compilation of letters that have been made anonymous. All the names and dates have been taken out, but the body of the work still remains. It is almost like a blank template for writing the one you love even if you are not romantic or creative enough to do so. This interested me. I always thought the idea of receiving a love letter was a nice one. Reading about the way someone cherishes and admires you would make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But what if you knew your special someone cheated and stole the template off the internet? Well, personally, I would be a little upset. I would think the feeling wasn't real. But the meaning still remains the same.

Despite the fact that your significant other didn't feel up to the challenge of choosing all the correct words to formulate a letter to you doesn't mean that the meaning behind the letter isn't the same. As a reader you would never know that some other lucky person received this same gift. So what is the true meaning? Fish asks the question, "Do readers make meanings?" in How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,  and I would argue that yes, they do.

Fish describes a scene in one of his college classrooms where students see a list of 5 linguists names on the board arranged in no special order, but end up analyzing them for an entire class period coming up with lofty  proposals that it was some religious or spiritual poem including an altar of some sort. Fish states "as soon as my students were aware that it was poetry they were seeing, they began to look with poetry-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes that saw everything in relation to the properties they knew poems to possess." Just like the students, the teary eyed love bird is going to read the letter with the eyes of delight. Despite the cliches and the empty adjectives, the person who receives the love letter will still think of it as individual to their unique love. 

The meaning of the letter in the end would be up to the reader to create. If the sender took a template off of the website, the receiver would have to look at it with a critical eye, finding the examples of their own personal love in the letter. It would be to the sender's advantage that the templates are so gushy that their sweetie would be so overcome with love that there would be no critical thinking involved.

<3

Click here for The Love Letters Collection website:

lovey dovey 
 

This past week I subscribed to Netflix. Yeah, I know I am a little behind the times but watching movies and TV shows would only make me procrastinate more than I already do. As a friend was showing me how to work it and telling me all the benefits of it, I began to get frustrated and overwhelmed. It was not until I browsed through the documentary section and chose a film that I was satisfied with my subscription. The movie I chose was 'Life in a Day'. The movie is a compliation of thousands of YouTube videos sent in on the same day, July 24th, 2010. 

I was enthralled when watching it. Seeing people's actions of making breakfast, brushing their teeth, and going to work. It was intriguing to see how most everybody in the world has such a similar story. At the same time, I was most intrigued by the juxtaposition of cultures. One clip would show an American man driving his Lamborghini to the store and the next would be a shot of an Indian man on a rickshaw dodging cows.   I enjoyed the movie so much that, as always when I am interested in something, I went straight to Wikipedia. While reading the section "Themes and Content", I was startled by what one of the producers had said. Director Kevin MacDonald saw the movie as a "metaphor of the experience of being on the Internet...clicking from one place to another, in this almost random way...following our own thoughts, following narrative and thematic paths." 

What? During my viewing I was captivated by the people and the actions they were doing. I was intrigued by the thought that the millions of others around me are not as different as I think. I was enticed by the display of the human condition. The comment made by the 'author' of the movie, the director, got me upset because I didn't agree with him. But alas, I remembered Roland Barthes. Barthes argues that the author doesn't seem to matter at all, and the analysis of the work can be done without any knowledge of the author and his or her intents on writing the work. 

I agree with Barthes. MacDonald did direct this film, but this film was a compilation of thousands of authors. There is no single author of this film. To understand this movie, one needs to understand the human life. We all are our own authors to our own lives, and MacDonald and his producers strung together bits and pieces of lives around the world. Since there are so many contributors to this piece of work, I would argue that it is not important to know the authorship, since all of us have a little authorship over it. We all are alive and could connect with this movie in one way or another through work, family, love, birth, and death. 

Click below to watch the film.
http://www.youtube.com/movie?v=JaFVr_cJJIY&ob=av1n&feature=mv_sr