[W]hat is a good image for your manner of making decisions? 

    So to begin the construction of this discourse, I tried to think of how I would emblemize my decision making process.  What came to mind was that I like to weigh my options.  A prime example of this is that when I'm at a foreign restaurant (Mexican, Italian, Asian...) it usually takes me twenty minutes or more to decide what I'm going to order because either my go-to dish isn't served, I didn't take my antacid medicine beforehand, or I'm attempting to decide if I want to expand my taste buds' world.  Given that, a set of scales seemed to be the best emblem for my decision making. Coincidentally, my Western Zodiac is the Libra.

    I Googled Libra and looked at the image results.  The constellation was unappealing to me; however, I was able to make connections between it and this discourse.  The first connection is that the shape of the constellation looked more like a kid's stick figure house to me.  The stick figure house is often a symbol of home, which is a symbol of family which then connects to the family discourse.  The stick figure-ness of the constellation also connects this image to another image in this gallery as well as to this page's title, "Mystic(ky) Family." 

     The punctum for me in this image is that the house has no floor, which suggests that I either do not have grounding or I have lost my grounding.  I know that I had grounding, which means that the latter must be in place (which the image also suggests as a house built without a foundation would likely have straighter walls than Libra's house shape).  Again, I can make two personal connections to this, but I will only make one here.  The connection I'll make here is that this foundationless stick-home looks much like the way that I feel about my graduate school experience--if I may be so honest.  I grew up a foundationalist, meaning I grew up believing that there is such a thing as absolute truth.  Somehow, I managed to get through a bachelor's degree in English without really being challenged about this view.  When I entered into graduate school and started learning about the theories of rhetoric, I felt like the floor had been pulled out from under me.  I'm still wrestling with the anti-foundationalist belief that truth is relative.  I can see where truth is relative in some cases, but I can't bring myself to believe that there are no absolute truths.  As such, my scales are unbalanced and/or broken, which makes my judgment that much more delayed.  For the time being; however, I take comfort in knowing that this broken stick house still barely shelters me as I finish this degree.

    An additional connection that I can make with this punctum is that the feeling of having the floor pulled out from under me is similar to how Tidus, the character that I play in Final Fantasy X, felt soon after the game begins.  When we meet Tidus, his world consists only of Zanarkand, blitzball, and family.  Zanarkand is a huge city, one "that never sleeps" (Martin).  There is always something to do in Zanarkand; however, playing in blitzball tournaments and practicing blitzball is about all that we see Tidus doing, unless it has to do with memories of his family.  Tidus does not have fond memories of his childhood.  His father was often drunk, critical, and boastful while his mother was so in love with his father that she neglected Tidus.  His father disappears ten years before the game begins (when Tidus is about six years old) and his mother soon dies of heartbreak.  This probably made Tidus feel like the ground had been pulled out from under him, but this feeling couldn't possibly compare to how he had to have felt when the entire city of Zanarkand was pulled out from under him.  At the beginning of the game Tidus is pulled out of Zanarkand and is dropped in a world where Zanarkand has been in ruin for 1000 years.  The player then watches Tidus as he desperately grapples for anything that was part of his Zanarkand foundation and anything that might suggest his ability to return to that world, as is evidenced by his brightened demeanor when he discovers that blitzball is just as big in this new world as it was in his home.  This grappling is much like my trying to reconcile my foundationalist background and my anti-foundationalist education.  Strangley enough, Tidus went through the opposite of my graduate school experience.  He came from relativistic world and entered into a more absolutist world; however; however, his beliefs weren't shaken by this new world.  

    Three additional connections can be made between Tidus and Libra.  The first is that, for the rest of the game, he has to be Libra for the other main characters, balancing their beliefs and trying to help them determine the correct path.  Also, for at least half of the remaining game, the player watches Tidus spend a lot of time weighing whether or not he should give up his dream of returning to Zanarkand. The final connection ties Tidus, the Sun, and Libra together.  Tidus is connected to the Sun through the Sun sigil and Sun crests that he must find in order to collect his celestial weapon.  According to Wikipedia (2014) (which references Gavin White' Babylonian Star-lore (2008)), Libra is one of the Mesopotamian Sun god's (Shamash) prized possessions.  I have not been able to get my hands on White's book to verify this reference, but I did find Resnik and Curtis' Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-states and Democratic Courtrooms (2011), which discussed an image of someone, believed to be Shamash, using a set of scales (p.18).  This does not adequately confirm that the scales are related to the Sun god, and can thus be linked to Tidus, but as this connection does not heavily influence the rest of this study, I feel that I can still make this suggestion.

     The theme of day and night is also apparent in the second image in this gallery.  This image depicts a woman (probably some goddess of justice like Astraea/Virgo of Roman/Greek mythology("Libra (constellation)," 2014)) being divided by day and night, summer and winter, by the tropics (equator?) and the Antarctic (Earth's axis?), and by the earth and sky.  This image was much more visually appealing to me and reminded me of my attempts to balance fantasy and reality.  Sometimes I struggle with this balance.  Whenever I consume a good story, the story has a tendency to influence my behavior for a time that I feel is longer than what most people experience. However, this balance, or imbalance isn't the punctum for this image.  The punctum for me is that through optical illusion, the day and night are given human faces and genders.  The night is given a female face while the day is given a male face.  In Final Fantasy X the day is also given to the male lead, Tidus, and the moon to the female lead, Yuna, as evidenced through the crests and sigils needed to unlock each character's celestial weapon.  Even in Greek/Roman mythology, the Sun diety is a god, Apollo, while the Moon is a goddess, Artemis.  In a world of supposedly rising equality, why isn't the moon masculine?  I greatly appreciate the female softness that gets applied to the moon in these depictions, but who says that the male representation cannot bring forth a different but equally valuable mood in our perceptions of the moon (Or that the masculine moon cannot bring forth valuable moods in our perception of the male gender)?   

     To add onto this, why is a female depicted as the frame for Libra?  As a sort of response to this, the next image in the gallery has a man serving as the frame.  However, because the frame is composed of Christ and the cross, the difference of having a man as the frame of Libra is hard to determine. The punctum in this image is the emptiness of the scales.  According to the Bible, we have many sins that weighing against us, and Christ's death allowed for the scales to become balanced once more (because it is the belief in Christ/God that ultimately tips the scales to our favor).  As such, the scales should have things in them.  However, as what would fill them would be quite attrotious--sins on one side, blood on the other--it makes sense that the artist wouldn't have included them.

     The next image is of the symbol used on ambulances and at hospitals.  I put this image in this gallery, not because it represented my decision making process, but because it connects nicely with one of the memories I recount in the second half of this discourse.  Despite this, I can connect it to Libra by way of the shape being similar to the frame for the scales and by way that this symbol contains my other zodiac sign, the Chinese Zodiac snake.  I was always told that this symbol represented the Biblical story in Numbers (21:5-9) where the Israelites were speaking against God again and God sent them a plague of poisonous snakes.  The people then ran to Moses and asked him to intervene.  Moses consulted God who instructed him to construct a snake on a rod for the bitten to look upon to keep from dying.  The punctum in this image then is that this symbol does not match the description of the sculpture that God instructed Moses to make as it contains an additional snake and wings.  This discrepency can be explained because the symbol is actually tied to the Greek/Roman Caduceus, a staff belonging to Hermes/Mercury, instead of Christianity.  This symbol is also mistaken for the staff of Asclepius who was a diefied physcian in Greece.  (Friedlander, 1992, p.xi; "Caduceus," 2014) Even so, because of my connotation to this symbol, this image makes for a perfect addition to this gallery as my connotation connects to the following image.

 

"[Document] a scene that sticks in your memory from the childhood years of your family life."

    The image that appears next in this gallery depicts one of my memories from back when I was probably five or six.  I chose this memory for a reason that will be covered later.  I have no photos from this event, but I do remember having drawn this event at a later time.  This drawing is not the same as the one back then, but it has a lot of the same qualities that my drawings during that time had.  The people in it had no noses, no torsos, smiles that were far too large, females with long curls, males with short lines standing on top their heads, chairs that were always in profile and were constructed of simple lines, umbrellas never had their stems come from the center, and clouds made of swirls.  I chose to reproduce this drawing for two reasons, one was that constructing the drawing was part of my memory, the second is that it allowed me to talk about my family without talking about my family.  By this I mean that I don't like talking about my family.  What they think I should say about them and what I actually say about them doesn't usually measure up, so instead of offending them, I choose to be silent about them as often as I can.  However, I cannot be silent about family when doing a family discourse.  As such, I have settled with giving you a stick figure view of part of my family instead of a photo as a stick figure image leaves much to interpretation.  The sticky subject of my family and the stick figure drawing are also why I've titled this page "Mystic(ky) Family."    

    The memory depicted in this image is that of the time that I saw what I call a Moses cloud.  I remember that one summer day, my brother and I were playing in the plastic kiddie pool as my mother supervised us from her plastic blue chair under her large, white and blue, beach umbrella.  After a while, I started looking at the sky in the direction of the nearest highway.  Between us and the highway were a few hills and grass pastures.  From this direction, a grey cloud of smoke came floating overhead.  I distinctly remember that this cloud was made of smoke because plenty of smoke clouds had floated over our house before to the point that my mom had educated us about the visual differences between clouds of smoke and regular clouds.  I also remember that it was a cloud of smoke because I was pretty proud of myself for identifying that the cloud as smoke.  However, unlike any cloud of smoke that I had seen before, this cloud had bits of orange moving about in it, almost like fire sparks.  I remember my mother getting up from her chair and walking a short distance away to get a better view of it.  I'm sure something was said, but I can't remember what.  When my mother finished looking, she returned to her chair.  I don't remember watching the cloud disappear above the distant trees, but I do remember drawing this event at church the following Sunday.  At church, I had been learning about the story of Moses and how he and the Israelites were led through the desert by God in the form of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night (Exodus 13:21).  That Sunday, I realized that the firey cloud I had seen was not the same miracle as the one in the desert, but because it was a combination of the miracles, I still call it the Moses cloud.  

     Now here is the punctum of this story: according to my mother, this never happened.  I have not asked my brother if he remembers this, but he was young enough that I suspect he would not remember it--assuming that this did actually happen.  Given that I've never seen an enflamed cloud at any other point in my life, I can't think of how the firey cloud would scientifically be possible without setting fire to other pieces of landscape, and I cannot remember watching the cloud drift into the distance, I too now wonder if it was real.  However, even if this event were somehow a dream, the fact that it may not have physically happened does not stop this event from being a memory that stands out in my mind.  In a way, this lack of place in physical reality is mirrored by my visual punctum--the lack of torsos on the human characters.  

    This memory calls to mind another memory that is represented by the next image in the gallery.  This memory is of a night some years after the Moses cloud incident.  I suspect that I was near ten years old at the time.  I was lying awake in bed and was looking at the bookshelf and brick wall that were a few of feet from the foot of my bed.  After looking at it for a while, I suddenly saw my shadow, standing at full height, walk out of the wall, toward the foot of my bed.  Scared out of my mind, I hid under the covers.  When I fell asleep I dreamt that miniature Alice in Wonderland characters were under my sheets stabbing me with little spears.  This memory also could not have physically happened, and yet because I distinctly remember hiding under the covers (I can even recall feeling my body go through this motion of covering my head with the sheets and the stuffiness that followed the covers being tucked over my head) and falling asleep afterwards, I couldn't call it a dream.  [Spoiler] This makes this memory resemble Tidus.  Tidus is a dream, but he has become more than a dream because he has been taken out of the fayth's Dream Zanarkand and given a realistic form.[/spoiler]  Reality is also at the heart of my punctum for this image.  Instead of being a photo of the bookshelf in my room with a silhouette drawn over it, this image is a collage made of a random brick wall, a random bookshelf, and a silhouette.  This means that this image all the more divorced from the reality of my experience.

    These memories stuck out in my mind because they influenced my confidence in my ability to perceive reality.  As my hope is to one day be a fantasy writer, the ambivalent ability to determine reality may come in handy as I create.  However, as Inception, Tolkien, various animes, and graduate school have taught me, I cannot hope to live in this world without knowing what reality is.

 

 

Final Fantasy X related image

    For each of my discourses I intend to have at least one image related to the game as creating a mystory about the game means that the game needs to be included in the discourse.  For this discourse, I chose the poster that features Auron.  Auron stands at the center of this image.  To his left, the background takes on a bluish tone and Tidus's back (with a blitzball) can be seen at the bottom amid a bustling crowd.  To the right, the background has a warmer tone, as pyreflies float around large, abandoned, ruined structures, and Yuna's back (with a barely visible staff) can be seen at the bottom.

    With Auron standing at the center of these two different worlds, he is visually much like the woman in the second Libra-related image and Christ in the third Libra-related image in my gallery.  This is fitting because in the story of the game, Auron is also the one who has to reconcile for Tidus the differences between Tidus' Zanarkand and Yuna's Spira.  However, Auron has a peculiar habit of withholding information in order to give Tidus the agency of building his own sense of truth--or as Auron would probably say it, so that Tidus can decide what his story is and how it will go.  This guiding portion of his character is much like the guiding characteristics of Christ to the Christians, of the user of the Libra scales to whomever's fate is being decided, and of parents to children (family).  

    There are two punctums for me in this image.  The first is the sword in Auron's hand.  Technically it fits with the theme as Auron's sword symbolizes his career as bodyguard while Tidus' blitzball represents his career as an athlete and Yuna's staff represents her career as a summoner; however, if Auron is a symbol of balance or is a bridge that unifies Tidus and Yuna's worlds/backgrounds, then a sword, which suggests cutting and separation, does not belong.  Additionally, the majority of this sword is placed on Yuna's side of the image which suggests that he will bring more damage (and separation) to her world than to Tidus'.  The second punctum (which might be more of a mixture of studium and punctum) for me is that the left half of the image is supposed to be [spoiler] a dream world [/spoiler] and yet it most resembles our modern day cities while the right half of the image is supposed to be [spoiler] reality [/spoiler] and yet it resembles a world of fantasy to us.  This means [spoiler] that our reality is their fantasy and our fantasy is their reality [/spoiler].  This then leads me to ask what is Auron really balancing?  Is he balancing their reality-fantasy or ours?