The Severed Garden- The Doors

Wow, I'm sick of doubt
Live in the light of certain
South
Cruel bindings.
The servants have the power
Dog-men and their mean women
Pulling poor blankets over
Our sailors

I'm sick of dour faces
Staring at me from the tv
Tower, I want roses in
My garden bower; dig?
Royal babies, rubies
Must now replace aborted
Strangers in the mud
These mutants, blood-meal
For the plant that's plowed.

They are waiting to take us into
The severed garden
Do you know how pale and wanton thrillful
Comes death on a strange hour
Unannounced, unplanned for
Like a scaring over-friendly guest you've
Brought to bed
Death makes angels of us all
And gives us wings
Where we had shoulders
Smooth as raven's
Claws

No more money, no more fancy dress
This other kingdom seems by far the best
Until it's other jaw reveals incest
And loose obedience to a vegetable law.

I will not go
Prefer a feast of friends
To the giant family.

Taylor Ruth Baldwin

 Tumblr houses many creative people, one of which is Taylor-Ruth Baldwin. As Wired explains, she first started posting panels from her diary, and in a few months, she went viral. I really enjoyed her comics, more than anything I love what she tries to say in each of them. If you have any spare time, check her out here, she really is quite funny .

In the text, "What May Happen In The Next Hundred Years (published in 1900)," John Elfreth Watkins Jr. predicts what will happen in the next 100 years.  If you compare it with Aldous Huxleys book Brave New World, you can find many similarities. Like the fact that you will be able to travel from England to any place in the world in less that two days, and that there will be a machine for everything, but none of them are as accurate as the one about how there will be no wild animals, except in menageries. Menageries, are exactly like the place where Savage comes from, "a collection of wild or unusual animals, especially for exhibition*". You can see that Aldous Huxley was greatly influenced by the predictions of the people before him. Both talked about the improvement of machines, but one about how it will lead us to good, and the other about how it will lead us to changing the face of the human race. Two predictions, portraying the same idea, somehow bring us two totally different conclusions. One about a world a step closer to utopia, the other to dystopia.

* www. dictionary . com

Our Identity

 Our homework today was to write about our englihs class today. It started with our teacher talking about the things that people had posted about the day before. He then asked us what we thought made up our identity. Our responses ranged from environment to food, genes to dreams, and many other topics. Later on our teacher  told us to pick three that we think really makes up our identity and put a percentage on how important we think it is. Mine were experiences (30%), environment (20%), health (3%), genes (7%), personality (40%). After this, we were told to pick a geometrical figure that we think best fits our identity. I picked a parallelogram because although they have two parallel side, they also have angles that can always change, they can become a square, or a diamond, or even a flat line. That's pretty much all we did today.

Brave New World

I've just finished reading the book, "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley and was struck by how much our society is beginning to resemble theirs. When I had read , "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury, I had seen how our lives could turn into theirs in the future, but it did not seem very likely. With so much misery in our world, I would not be surprised if everyone just gave up truth and science just be happy. The book makes sense, engineering the working class to enjoy what they are doing so that they do not complain. Abolishing parenthood because it is too much responsibility, and resbonsibility always leads to sorrow. Engineering men so that they do not age,  raising the children so that they do not love. Lifting religion, because as Mustapha Mond explains, "'You can only be independant of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independance won't take you safely to the end.' Well, we've now got youth and prosperity up to the very end. What follows? Evidently that we can be independant of God." Although now we think of a world like this ridiculous and out there, governments have already begun hiding the truth, it's only a matter of time before they do it in the name of Happiness.

Flight

Sometimes I look out my window, and wonder what it would be like to just jump out and soar through the sky. What it would feel like to fly above the mountains, above the ocean, to feel the wind in my face, to be utterly weightless. Other times I wonder if we could fly, would we fantasize about a life like ours, controlled by gravity, and wish we could live like that? Would we appreciate what we have, or would we ask for more? Ask for less? This is why we dream, to fill in the gap that is created from want, we think that we will succeed in everything as long we set a goal. Once we get there, we set new ones because we realize that first one was not enough, it is a never ending cycle. My dream is to fly, not as a pilot but as a bird.

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
-Edgar Allen Poe