Disclaimer: This Will Seem Irrelevant. Read On.

What I am about to describe may strike you as being completely unrelated to class, to Quinn's work, to anything but me. But trust me, I feel that there are important things to be gleaned from this. Stick with me.

This weekend, I got my heart shat on. I mean unabridged, full-on heart break. Thursday night I stood in the snow with the girl I thought of as my "big love" (I have a hierarchy of loves in my life, the biggest being the one I fell hardest for, and the one I learned the most about myself from being with), and we went our separate ways. The back-handed irony of the whole thing is that all the loves of my life leave for Europe before we can really take off. This one is no different. Ticket to Spain, semesters away. I wouldn't have stopped her for a moment, but damn, I would wait.

I left that moment covered in snow, shaking, walking away like my legs were of lead. My heart hurt like it has never hurt before. I had to sing, I had to drink, I had to distract myself from my pain, my self-contorting lows, as is typical of men everywhere. Run, run from your problems, distract yourself with something else. How I managed to sleep at all is still a wonder to me, but it was only for a few hours. I woke up and knew what I was going to do. Friday, unshaven and sullen I walked into my tattoo parlor. "Bad night, gotta swap my one pain for another," I told her, the counter clerk. I didn't want more ink, I know what that feels like. It hurts, but I needed something novel. Helix in the left ear, please. It's about time I find out what it's like to rock a little metal.

"Deep breath in through your nose, out through your mouth. Ready? Here we go." There it went, sharp and localized, the needle through my ear. So much different than a heart hurting, that's a hurt that resonates everywhere in you, for days. But I exhaled. Zen. Endorphin-stoned. Instantly I felt better. I almost felt good. For a while, I forgot I'd even felt bad at all. I had foiled my lows, escaped from the captivity of my heart break momentarily.

Sound familiar yet? Wednesday's discussion comes to my mind. Humans do a lot of things to escape pain, avoid lows, distract themselves from their captivity. Drugs, screens, crime, one-night stands - they're all getaways. Ishmael describes his subject of expertise as captivity, and that Takers of all generations are captives to their own ways. For this reason, we cling to nicotine and reality TV, to distract us from the lows rather than to bring us to the highs. I'm no different. That's what I needed. A distraction from my lows. And, as far as I'm concerned, it worked. I'm mending, along with my ear.

Personally, I loved my macaroni pictures. Who's to tell me that I glued my pasta elbows to the cardboard pad incorrectly? Sure, not at all may be "good" art, in that what one creates may not always be aesthetically pleasing. But sometimes, the point of art is not to look pretty. The point is often to convey a message. And if the message to be conveyed is that all art should look the same (that there are rules, as South Park Teacher Lady above decrees), then the purpose of art has been defeated.

This comic, which I found on StumbleUpon (great resource whenever you want to find something random and blog about it), brought me back to one of the first sessions in class when we talked about the problems with the concept of "pre-writing." If one "pre-writes," then this implies that there are rules for how to generate ideas, which is entirely false. Ideas are free form, and manifest themselves without a strict adherance to any particular set of rules.

The dynamic that arises here is also present in Quinn's Ishmael. In the discussions between the Student and the Gorilla, they examine how prophets play such a critical role in our understanding of the world. Prophets, says Ishmael, show us how to live, that a right way exists based on some pretermined rules. Here, the prophet is the art teacher, and the listener is the student. The prophetic teacher tells the student how to do something very abstract - artistic expression - based on very concrete rules - what is right and what is wrong. In the book, Ishmael tries to deconstruct the predetermined rights and wrongs of the Student's cultural upbringing, which may be one of the most valuable analytical lessons one can learn. Because really, right and wrong are subjective, and left up to one to decided for him/herself.

Gorilla, the Prophet

I should begin by saying that I am not especially well versed in religious studies, particularly those of Islam. I can pick out Biblical names in a list, maybe paraphrase some of the stories associated therewith, but I am by no means a scholar. Upon starting the novel, I realized that Ishmael is a Biblical name, but that's the end of that story. I didn't know anything remotely beyond that.

So, I turned to all-wise Internet to save me from my ignorance. Here's what I learned. Ishmael is one of Abraham's two sons, Isaac being the other. In Christianity, Isaac became the more symbolic of Abraham's sons. However, in Islam the converse is true. Ishmael, (spelled Ismail in Arabic inflection) is the supposed ancestor of the Northern Arabs. He was a prophet. Jackpot. The name makes sense now. In addition, he aided Abraham in building the Kaba, an important Moslem landmark situated at the center of a mosque in Hajj, which has for its cornerstone a stone that is considered very holy.

So, implications for Quinn's novel. Whether an Moslem figure or a gorilla in an urban business complex, Ishmael is a prophet. Within the context of the novel, the gorilla is certainly this. He calls himself a teacher, but he is more than that. He possesses  an other-worldly knowledge about the workings of Taker and Leaver cultures, and passes them unto the anonymous student in prophetic fashion. Before Student met Gorilla, he essentially had no idea what to do or how to live, questions that prophets teach us. By the end of the novel, however, Student has made considerable progress. So his name is fitting in this sense.

In addition, Gorilla Ishmael is a builder of sorts, much like Moslem Ishmael who built the Kaba. The Gorilla provides Student with the foundation to begin changing the world, which is in effect, building something. A set of procedures, lessons, teachings - a manifesto of ways to spread this information to others in hopes of inducing change. Again, the name makes perfect sense.

Here's StumbleUpon's reccomendation for follow up reads!
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1ObtE9/bookseer.com/?title=Ishmael&author=Daniel+Quinn/

This too.
http://www.friendsofishmael.org/index.shtml

We Ain't Like Them Animals.

I came across this poster in the Prince Hotel in Girdwood a couple weeks ago. It attracted my attention for a few reasons. First, the bear is cute. But moreover, Cute Bear's speech bubble instantly reminded me of Ishmael.

Whether Bear knows it or not, that's a pretty profound statement. It hints, rather subtly, at the idea that humans have a destiny, a predetermined role to play in the world. We weren't meant to hibernate, because we were meant to do something outside the realm of the animal kingdom. At least in Ishmael's Taker philosophy, human destiny is to conquer the earth. And how can man do this if he is asleep for half the year?

Sleep when you're dead. That's a fundamentally Taker mentality. Because, isn't there always more to do? More to do now, so that there's less to be done later. Bear's statement, while fairly innocent on the surface, actually carries a lot of weight in regards to the mythology, the story, being enacted by Taker culture. Humans were never destined, were never meant to hibernate, because that's what animals do. And according to our story, we ain't like them animals.