Lumos 2006 Class Notes - Saturday - # 1

Ok, this has been a mental whirlwind ... some seriously packed speakers here, pretty exciting. This is going to be sort of a "highlights" of the stuff I went to today. There is still a ton to unpack ... 5 talks to listen to on CD that I did not make it to, another one I thought of that I am going to hop over there and order or order by email (the one on the "trickster" type) ... or maybe I'll just read the paper - there is a CD of data that was included with the packet that has all of the papers that were presented by non-"headliner acts." Amazing. I would suggest going to the Lumos website and see what deal they have going on as far as paper publication or download publication; their official deal with the presenters is publication of the papers. But for now, here are the highlights and we'll discuss more later (drop comments here about what interests you most and I'll be sure to dig especially for that in the CD of the papers). The Byronic Hero and the Gothic Fathers of Snape That is, Lord Byron's gothic hero. Pretty interesting. ... There are 3 types that influence Snape as Byron's gothic hero: The "noble outlaw" (Sirius Black), the "gothic villain" (Voldemort) and the Prometheus character (Dumbledore). The gothic villain is usually mysterious and handsome (as is young Tom Riddle, a charmer) - the Byronic hero elevated to a level beyond the human condition to a level that would usually kill such a hero; Prometheus is not gothic at all - his main crime is being kind or merciful ("I trust Severus Snape completely.") What interested me was the outlaw because that character contributes anti-social/solitude characteristics. Here Linday Ludvigsen (the presenter) noted the individualistic tendency of Slytherin house (vs the group identity exhibited in the other houses) in this development of Snape (influence of Black on a Slytherin). In the other 3 houses people hold each other accountable for how their actions affect the house standing as far as points especially. (In Slytherin they won't say "hey, that's wrong, don't do it and get us in trouble" they'll say "whatever you do is your business, just don't get caught). It really interested me because of some concepts in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger that my housemate Dom and I have talked about. Heidegger is a controversial figure, and there are some real reasons for that (including having been a member of the Nazi party) -- and I am not claiming all of his philosophy to be sound. But if you're like Dom, you look for the elements in a philosophy that, even if they are in a flawed form, once carefully separated from the flaws, are redeemable. Thus he take MH's 2 terms Daseign and Dasmann. The first is an individual being. The second is maybe closest to "group identity." Dom puts it "it is the someone new to be." In other words, in the group identity the sum is more than the whole of its parts because each of the parts is now given over to a new dimension of identity, that is being "a member of this or that particular group." I have always been cautious of the dasmann, the group identity, the "us" ... mainly because it usually seems to yield a them as an "excluded other." I have said in conversation that "the only safe dasmanns are those that are sacramentally-based, such as the mystical body of Christ in the Church, marriage and family (believing as a Catholic that marriage is a sacrament) etc. But this causes me to formulate a little more subtly because the dasmann of the houses is a good thing. As a Christian-Catholic interpreter I would say that, on the symbolic level, the houses, as institutions of a school of magic, can be "given" in the way the sacramental is. A lot of fine lines here: you can become wrongly prejudicial about even such divinely given dasmanns. Sometimes the reclusiveness of the Slytherin could be all right as a balance to an over-zealous group identity ... but not at Voldy's level (I think there is more meant to be a dynamic flow of give and take between individual identity and identity as part of a group ... and Voldy never had the other distinct thing, the trust thing of what Martin Buber talks about as the "I and Thou" relationship, which is not a group identity, but rather a relation to an other, but not an excluded other). Slytherin house did turn out more definitely dark wizards. That was more than a highlight of my thoughts interwoven with the talk ... I'm going to go get some food and write more later. I promise, there is a lot for of good stuff and fun stuff to come! (NOTE: See Comment 1 for a content amendment by Merlin to this post)