iMedia: The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory

Well...

This is quite the painting. I have grown up with a mixed education of art. Some people have told me that each piece of art has only one interpretation of what it really means, and others have told me that art is what it is, and still others have told me that art is what you want it to be. I personally am a fan of the two latter opinions, and I think that my belief in the freedom of art will be expressed in this blog post.

Salvador Dali provides art viewers with a very open ended piece of art in this painting. I will provide a little background on this painting. First of all, he painted this from 1952-1954, as a rerendering of The Persistance of Memory, which is his most famous work. In The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, it is said that Dali repainted this after the atomic bombs were set off to show the contrast between the setting in The Persistence of Memory and in The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, but there are so many other things that I see. The thing most prominent to me, are the clocks; they look like uncooked pizzas that were tossed and allowed to land on the most uneven of surfaces. But they also look like they're melting. I see that as how time goes by, no matter what you do with it, it melts and runs through your fingers and you can never pick it up, or get it back. To me, the sagging clocks illuistrate how the passing of time is inevitable. Another little interesting thing that I noticed is how the tree that is closer to the viewers is broken up into floating logs. When a tree is cut, you can see its age rings and how old it is. I seriously doubt that Dali was going for that effect but I saw it anyway. Also, going back to the melting clocks and melting time metaphor, the melting clocks are touching everything, showing that everything suffers the flow of time, except for the water in the background. I was thinkning about how we can see the effect time has on trees, on the earth, on people, but how we can't see it in water. If you put a glass of water in front of anyone, they couldn't tell you how old the water inside was or how long it had been there. This illuistrates that there are some things in this world that are timeless. In this painting, what stands out to me is how prominent this idea of the enormity time and it's passing, yet not everything is affected by it.

Here's a link to the painting: http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/Salvador_Dali/The-Disintegration-of-the-Persistence-of-Memory

(Don't worry, I tried to avoid talking about anything in the discription)

Connection: King Lear and The Power of Love

In King Lear, characters like Lear and Edmund made decisions that influence the play. These decisions were driven by love, and I want to connect these decisions to the power love has. Edmund tricks his brother Edgar and betrays his father to Cornwall all so that he can become Earl of Gloucester. His love for power was powerful enough to make him think that turning his back on his own family was okay.

Edmund was also torn between the love of Regan and of Goneril. Their "interests" in him caused him to lose his way and to act in a manner that pleases one or both of them. In turn, their intimate love for him caused them, or at least Goneril, to "lose" her husband. Also, their love for themselves was what drove them to lie to Lear and proclaim their "love" for him; they tried to outdo eachother in order to recieve the better half of England.

Cordelia is another story. Her love for Lear was so real that she would not make a spectacle of it in front of his court. She thought that it was silly to proclaim her love for her father in order to inherit what she deserved. Later in the play, she showed her love for Lear again when she went back to England with the French army in order to search for him.

As for love, it is a noun, a verb, an adjective and most importantly, it is an emotion. It can drive the happiest people to deep depression, and vice versa. It can cause people to kill for the right or wrong reasons and to make decisions blindly. A two person relationship full of love, or lust, can harm so many people. Love can do so many more things, but I only listed those that are directly related to King Lear.

We as readers can see that all of these aspects of love are very prominent in King Lear. Lear's love for himself took him from bliss to complete sadness because he was so self important and so vile to others and those actions caught up to him. He put himself before his daughters and in turn, they plotted against him for their own reasons. Edmund betrayed his brother and turned his father agains his brother, which is just appalling. He also gave up his father to Cornwall, Regan and Goneril so that he could achieve power and respect, but in the end, he died and his actions were all in vain. Regan killed the servant because she was too proud to have someone so low directly oppose her belief of what is right and because she had the same twisted views as her husband. So, we can see exactly how Shakespeare's characters use and abuse love in this play.

Dialectics: Friendship and Loyalty

Many people may look at the title of this blog and say, "Hey, friendship and loyalty are the same thing!" Well there are several things wrong with these people. First of all, hey is for horses, and secondly, friendship and loyalty are quite different, though they relate to each other quite well.

Friendships are human to human relationships with many twists and turns, but loyalty can be as simple as how your dog feels about you. However, in relationships, your friends can or can't be loyal to you and people who are loyal to you can or can't be your friends. Although, what is really important is what the two ideas have in common.

Being loyal largely overlaps with being helpful, as does friendship. Going back to the dog analogy, humans help dogs live by sheltering them and guaranteeing them meals, and humans and dogs provide a companion to each other. Now some oblivious people may state that their pet is their best friend. Not only do they have interpersonal issues, but they also need to understand that friends should regard and treat each other as equals. In a loyal relationship between a person and a pet, the pet is loyal to the person, and the person is loyal to the bet, but in different ways. Pets are loyal to their masters because they feel loved by their masters and the pets can depend on them, and masters are loyal to their pets because they love their pets and they are always there for them. I obviously can't speak for the entire world, but I command my dog, and my dog doesn't command me back; therefore we are not equal; we are not friends. But that does not mean that I don't love my dog, in fact the opposite is true; I love my dog to death and I would do anything for him, which leads me to my next point.

Support and aid are both very central in friendship and loyalty. The armed forces are built on loyalty, and support and aid is a prime job the armed forces provide. While that support and aid is external, the soldiers within the armed forces are trained to support and aid each other, or in other words, function as a unit without necessairily being friends. Friends are also to be there for each other in times of need. Though there is a difference. The armed forces are trained to be loyal to each other, but friends that are loyal to each other are loyal because they want to be.

In a community, especially the global community that becomes more prominent with technological advances, both loyalty and friendship are beneficial and necessary. Being friends assists us humans in the task of bringing each other closer together, and by being loyal to each other, we ensure each others' saftey and well being. In short, both of these valuable traits can lead to many important ideas and other behaviors, including a better world.