Posts tagged with boredom.
Not another brick in the Wall
I was dutifully typing out my notes and describe the basics here:
This is how the ancient Babylonians thought the world was created: The god Marduk, son of Anshar, got in a fight with Tiamat. Tiamat was both a goddess, a dragon, and a primordial sea out of which all things grew. I won't go into details about why the fight started. What's most important is that Marduk won, and after he did, he used Tiamat's remains to form the universe. He cut her down the middle, using the two halves to enclose the cosmos. He made her liver into the moon and her two eyes into the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He used her thigh to prop up the sky and her udder (which dragons had back then, I guess) to make mountains. Her ribs helped hold the waters of the world fast, and her saliva became clouds. The titanic, inert Mother Goddess was conquered, and her remains became the world. A new reality was built from scraps of the old.
In the Rig Veda (Hinduism's first holy text), the world and its occupants were created through a similar sacrifice. Purusha was a cosmic being with one thousand heads and one thousand feet. The devas - demi-gods of light - immolated him and used parts of his body to make the different castes of Indian society, as well as the animals. His eyes were turned into the sun, his breath the wind, his mind the moon, his head the heavens, his feet the earth. His ears became the three dimensions. It's a rough summary - the original story's been complicated by subsequent commentaries and complex layers of meaning. But at the core, there's a link between the creation stories of ancient Babylon and Hinduism. Taking into account other traditions - like the death of the giant Ymir in the Norse creation myth, and the transformation his remains underwent - archetypes begin to appear.
I was trying to come up with something to say about school, because most of what I've posted here so far has been about extra-curricular activities, hangovers, and the petty details of daily survival. There's a reason for that. "Academic" is a loaded adjective. For some people it must summon lofty images of higher education, of discovery and introspection and the quest for knowledge. I've always associated it with boredom.
Can you blame me? Generally, the first obligations we take on are academic. Starting in First Grade, young humans in this country are expected to spend their weekdays away from the comforts of home and subject themselves to the authority of strangers. With time, they learn to perform seemingly meaningless tasks under the threat of punishment. ("Punishment" may sound harsh for elementary school. But have you ever had to miss recess?) As they get older, these activities leak into after-school time, and soon weekends fall victim to academic obligations. Even in my last year of high school, when I understood (more or less) the role good grades would play in determining my future, the work we had to do never seemed less than onerous. No matter how many great teachers I had - and I had plenty - school would always be an unpleasant inconvenience at best. I did not hate the players, but the game. It was ingrained in my concept of education.
That's why I was grinding my teeth about this. Most of my classes this term cover interesting topics, and most of my professors are engaging. But they're still classes. I'm paying money to go to class, take notes, study, write papers, and do tests - but that doesn't make it seem like less of a chore. Part of being an adult means accepting obligations, realizing that unpleasant or unappealing tasks need to be performed in exchange for benefits. Maybe I'm being immature; but the mental image of a degree hanging on the wall fails to transform the essay I have due into a joyous undertaking.
I was typing up some notes from earlier in the week, focusing every particle of my being on how much I hated the task, how much I'd prefer to be somewhere with cheap pitchers of beer and attractive females. At some point, I got distracted from my meditation and actually read what I was writing. The notes were for two different courses, but they were very similar. On both pages there were lists of body parts being used to build the world.
How does that happen? How do two populations with different cultures, languages and locations manage to develop such similar narratives? Did these people all come from the same place originally? Was there some older, forgotten religion out of which they both grew? Or is it a story hard-wired into the human psyche? I didn't finish my notes. Instead I found myself looking up half-forgotten passages from the Prose Edda and Joseph Campbell's books.
I wasn't bored any more. I was re-reading texts and doing my own research. And not because there was a quiz the day after, or an essay due, but because I wanted to. I was learning new things - and the headmaster from The Wall wasn't screaming in the back of my head.
The saying "Can't see the forest for the trees," makes more sense now. It's easy to focus so hard on the task at hand that you miss the big picture. Yeah, I know, it's about as cliché as you can get. But the nice thing about clichés is, every now and then, they actually apply.
Tagged with
research,
excitement,
academic,
boredom
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BRYCE WARNES
