Personal Projects: What I've learned from the Vision Trip - A Mixture of Words

A Mixture of Words

           Name: Kim Ho-Sung A

ID Number: 131048

In the Plane

As the 18^th wavers have successfully enjoyed their vision trips, now it is a fact to say that all KMLAians have experienced the various wonders of the journey. The wonders that we have gone through are individually unique, giving each and every one of us a gift. They say that these gifts are unattainable from the books that we read or the speeches that we hear from a lot of studies. I remember my friends saying that the vision trip had given them the motivational push to study, a broader knowledge of each universities in the U.S. or perhaps that it had really given them vision as the name suggests. These are all awesome gifts, but to me the vision trip gave me a single mixture of words.

 May 10^th, 2013 it was a warm sunny day as the sun was brightening our faces soaking them with its gentle heat. The sky was as blue as you can ever imagine. Basically it was a perfect day to go outside.

That day we had a schedule to visit Princeton University.

Princeton University Ivys

The pictures that came in to my mind are gothic looking buildings, some statues, ivies, and an alumnus. I met the alumnus during the tour campus as we were going to see the house of the president in Princeton. When I was awed by the colorful flowers surrounding the building he came next to me gazing towards somewhere. The depression was etched on his face. So I tapped him on his back and I asked him “You came to a prestigious school achieving one of the highest goals of your life, but you look depressed. Why is that?” He thought for a moment looking up into the clear sky and held out a book. It was his yearbook full of his photos and the events that happened during his school year. He pointed at the corner saying “Read this.”

"There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts. The bottom has dropped out - it looks to us like an illusion now, one of those illusions sustained only by the concentrated gaze of everyone in the room. Remove your gaze for but an instant, and the mirror falls to the floor and shatters."

- J. M. Coetzee-

             After reading this I gazed upon his face, curious. He looked straight through my eyes and said with a warm smile on his face “I forgot who I was and I’m losing myself. As we go forward we seem to forget that we are who we are.” Honestly I couldn’t fully understand what he meant. Even now as I gaze upon the little mixture of words I wonder. ‘We are a fragment of ourselves living on to be a whole.’

Watching Upon New York City

This may have come deeply to you or it may have not. It’s important that we as an individual should try to recall the gifts that we had attained from each of our vision trips. Try to remember the things that you felt most deeply to you. It may be the knowledge of each university you went to, the alumni you met or the single most spectacular scene of a particular place. I wish that the vision trip had given you the gift that influenced you in some way. In my case it was the mixture of words. In my friend’s case it was the knowledge of the universities. How about you?

P.S. Photos are all taken from the Vision Trip by ME... ^^

Journey Six: Nacirema, the moment of realization

Nacirema, the way we view society

Name: Hosung Kim A

Class: 10v1

ID Number: 131048

             Before I wrote the in-class response to the Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, I was half asleep. In a dizzy state of mind, I started reading about the Nacirema. It was hard to comprehend the cultures portrayed in the essay as it was way beyond my imagination of a proper culture. I knew that a global leader needed cultural relativism, a skill to understand other cultures even though they’re different or peculiar. But the cultures were too abstruse. “The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease.” I didn’t even know at first what this sentence meant! But after reading through some paragraphs my mind suddenly became transparent. Maybe I needed to write about how cultures of the Nacirema differ from the perspectives or ideals that the developed world has, like lookism. I was thrilled to have located the educational lesson in this essay. Even though we are developed technologically we still had things to learn from the undeveloped people such as the Nacirema. I spent a whole hour trying to explain how our developed culture had things to learn from the undeveloped part of the world criticizing our egocentrism. I was proud of my essay. And it didn’t take me a long time to know that all my ideas were bull shit.

The truth is always hard to realize. Who knew that the “North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles” was actually America. Nacirema was American spelled backwards! All I did in my in-class essay was to forcefully relate the facts portrayed in the essay and explain how we should learn from the various cultures of the Nacirema. And it turns out that the medicine men, holy-mouth-men, and the listener were all careers explained in an anthropological view. (I first thought they were psychos trying to earn an authoritative stance in the tribe by using  various ritual activities that made no sense at all) It was foolish of me to have interpreted the meaning of Nacirema in a biased perspective, thinking that our culture is much more superior in comparison to theirs. It shows that we, living in a society with advance technology are always looking down upon other cultures without thinking thoroughly about it. Who am I to have judged their cultures, who gave me the authority to define them inferior. These questions began to rise up in my mind, questioning the basic parts of my life.

             I read lots of books relating to the subject of behavioral economics which is also my major. Behavioral economics is basically figuring out how humans choose or view things in an irrational way. To sum up we have heuristics.

We make choices that are very simple without thinking them through. Until now, I always wondered how humans have made the wrong choices; I thought that we always had a proper perspective in viewing things. But now it’s apparent that we humans are not always rational. We tend to have an ego that our biased views are always the best views. Even though I studied the subject and believed that humans are not rational, the fact that I was still tricked is the evidence that I still possess a short perspective in viewing the true nature of an object. That’s what occurred in reading the Nacirema. The bias in seeing the Nacirema as an inferior culture gave me a lesson to think before I judge.

             But, then a question rose in my mind again. ‘How did the author trick me in such a way?’ While reading the whole essay not even a single doubt had raised in my mind that Nacirema was actually implying the cultures of America. Perhaps it’s because I was half-asleep, we may never know but I remember being awed by the usage of vocabulary and the abstruse structure of the sentences. These features had made the essay much more academic and had increased its credibility. And while I was focusing hard to understand the sentences, the author was laughing behind my back. Furthermore, the effective use of rhetoric contributed in shading the true meaning of the essay.

The Shrine

“The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses.” The true meaning of this sentence is merely explaining the fact about bathrooms. How rich families have various shrines, which are bathrooms and how the opulence of a house can be told by counting the number of bathrooms located in a house. The interpretation of this particular sentence is so simple. But by reorganizing the sentences and using professional words such as opulence, the author has achieved the goal of illusion. He made the readers feel small by using words that we usually don’t use such as opulence, hyper mammary and ablution leading our thinking process to other means rather than the true meaning of this essay. This is how the readers were mainly deceived by the author.

             But if we think about it further, the author may have used a different set of ideas while writing this essay. The fact is more shocking if we broaden our views in the interpretation of this essay. The nacirema isn't just limited to America. We also experience these daily routines as washing our faces or going to the hospital. How did the author successfully deceive all people by using different set of words with the same cultures?

The descriptive tone that the author has imprinted on his essay had tricked the readers to think this was an explanatory writing when it was actually a different view to the American culture. It shows that people do not think when reading or perhaps living. Thinking is a process where you first realize, relate, and progress. We all have read the essay which suffices the realizing part of our process. Next, we related the content of the essay with various experiences throughout our lives. Finally, the last step is where our thoughts may all go wrong. When we progress our thoughts the strange idea of an ego comes in play. We always try to reproduce information based on our own interpretation. I’m not suggesting that this is wrong but this usually limits the potential to spread out our thoughts into different perspectives. This is what happened exactly with the essay here.

             So to sum up Nacirema isn’t just an essay to put other people on tilt, trying to upset them like internet trolls. It shows us how we view culture on a superior, somewhat biased point of view. Even though the meanings and the descriptions were clear in the essay the majority has failed to realize the true meaning of this essay. Mainly because of the author’s usage of hard words, abstruse structured sentences, and the heuristics that we all have. The essay had made me realize the true meaning of thinking. In viewing cultures we must not judge them good or bad, as we are all wearing specific lenses of our own individual cultures. But we should rather try to see through the true meaning of the writers themselves. Thinking 'what were they trying to say?'

A Different Journey: "The Tell-Tale Heart" Why is it Gothic?

The Tell-Tale Heart, what makes it Gothic

Name: 김호성A (Hosung, Kim)

Class: 10v1

ID Number: 131048

One of the classic gothic short-stories written in the Victorian era is perceived as “The Tell-Tale Heart.” However the author Edgar Allan Poe, the master of Victorian gothic literature has actually focused on some different aspects of gothic. Mainly gothic suggests the combination of Science Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Romantic, Fantasy, and possibly Victorian. But Poe focused more on the psychological aspects of his characters as they were often described mad or insane. When reading “The Tell-Tale Heart” it is apparent in the story that the person who is narrating is with no doubt crazy. It is written as a first-person narrative of an unnamed narrator. So going into the details let’s find out what aspects does Poe’s short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” portray in terms of being a gothic literature.

There are some notable genres that are demonstrated in “The Tell-Tale Heart” such as being a horror story. The main plot of the whole story is basically killing an old man. The murder is committed through detailed planning and ends by disassembling the old man limb by limb. The horror doesn’t end here. The way of murdering the old man should be fairly noted as well. The narrator kills the man with a bed, crushing him under it. He traps him inside it and waits many minutes, until there is no heart beat to be heard. The idea of being concealed inside a bed and suffocating to death is frightening. Nobody I presume would prefer a death like the shown example. Even after that the murderer he tries to conceal the carcass by tearing it apart and putting it under three wooden planks. “First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.” A classic gothic horror story all the way.

The next genre to focus on is Romantic. In order to define Romantic the word “Passion” comes to mind. We often confuse Romantic with romance as the words are organized similarly. However the differences of these two words should be noted. Romantic is basically a mixture of strong feelings such as love or hate. It doesn’t necessarily mean love at all times, but if an emotion is expressed strongly and passionately we perceive these emotions to be Romantic. In contrast, romance mainly focuses on the emotion love as beautiful and ravishing. So how is Romantic shown in this story? Apparently the narrator has strong feelings for the old man’s eye which is the cause of the murder.

He describes it as an “Evil Eye” and shows his abhorrence by stating “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” On a normal person’s point of view this statement is very abstruse. How could a man commit a murder for a dislike of an eye? As we go on strong feelings about the man’s eye is splattered along the pages of the story. We can presume that the eye gave him a sense of vulnerability or weakness. A possibility would be that a power relationship might have been present between the narrator and the old man. The old man was the superior of the narrator and the eye was supposed to be the way of intimidating him or making him feel abject as an inferior being.

Finally we turn to the most important genre of all, Mystery. “The Tell-Tale Heart” could be explained with this one word, mysterious. From the beginning of the story the reader gets dragged into the story mysteriously by a conversation. The narrator suddenly and obdurately suggests that he is not mad. Also he tells you a story where he murdered a man. The story starts with a mysterious setting and evokes the readers to presume what would happen next. Another point to focus on is that the scenery of this incident is also mysterious as it is vaguely described. The ambiguous description gives a much more frightening and mysterious feeling for the readers. Furthermore, the dark environment that the incident takes place gives crucial information. The dark is when our eyes become useless and humans become dependent on other sources of light like the lantern. The narrator uses a lantern to see through the dark, but it has much more meaning to it. If we hold a lantern, the holder is able to visualize everything but the people who see the lantern are unable to recognize you. This creates an advantage of concealment over you. Relating to the story, the narrator feels a sense of superiority to the old man and his eye by holding a lantern as it hides his identity. Concealing one’s self is also an important issue on this particular story.

Concealment can be found all over “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Even from the beginning the narrator tries to hide the fact that he is mad. Going on he uses a lantern to cloak himself from the view of the old man’s eye. The murder is also done by concealment as I previously mentioned. The bed kills the old man by suffocating him to death. Suffocation is one of man’s greatest fears. For example, when I was little I used to go inside my blanket and tried to stay there for more than 10 minutes while my brother blocked all the exits, but it was impossible. The fear of suffocation and the lack of air gave me the chills. This clearly gives a spin to the genre of gothic. Finally, the concealment of the corpse is another theme of the mystery explained inside the story. Hiding creates a mysterious atmosphere. This is essential to create a tense feeling for the readers. So we can conclude that the genre Mystery not just creates a theme for the story but it is also essential for the main purpose of gothic literature, horror.

             In conclusion, the things that make “The Tell-Tale Heart” gothic are Horror, Romantic, and Mystery. But what about other aspects like S/F, Fantasy and Victorian? Unfortunately S/F and Fantasies aren’t included in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe might have excluded those aspects as it wasn’t common in his days. However in the case of being a Victorian Era story, because it was written between 1819~1900 “The Tell-Tale Heart” suffices the qualifications. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a classic gothic literature as many arguments and reasons support it. Now I have a much better comprehension in deciding whether the story is gothic or not. Just rely on the factors that form a gothic literature. Horror, Mystery, Romantic, S/F, Fantasy, and finally Victorian.