Author: Justin Castronuovo

What the Miró Shows

Joan Miró was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramist from Catalan, Spain. He was influenced by Sigmund Freud, among others, during the Surrealism Movement, breaking out of an analytical mindset confined to Realism. I understood the title, “Miró, Miró, On The Wall” to describe the surreal reaching for something more yet unknown to most. The accumulation of memories on Claire’s refrigerator of her son Joshua, embarking on the surreal frontiers of computers, and leaving the material world to slide around through his programs lines up with this idea. However, when the sergeant comes to her apartment to give her the news of her son’s passing, she looks to a Miró print on the wall, asking who’s the deadest, alluding to her questioning of the dark possibilities the future holds, and if we should reach for the unknown, knowing how devastating it can be to those still living.

The bereaved mother’s group is more than a mere intersection; the women meet at each other’s homes, with the common trait of having lost a son in the Vietnam War. Our window into these meetings is Claire, and, through her narrative asides, reveals the true feelings she has during the meetings. Claire is constantly reminded of her deceased son Joshua, simply because of his absence, at various moments alone in her apartment, but leading up to, and during, meetings, she is more concerned with the opinions the others have regarding how she compares to them. When she lets on that she lives on Park Ave, she dreads that this will create a wedge between herself and the rest of the group, but at the eventual meeting she hosts, her thoughts are far removed from the gathering, entering a hopeful place reminiscent of her son Joshua. It becomes evident from another aside that, regarding the nonchalant activity of the other women which she describes as selfish, this group is not helping her. Claire doesn’t, at this moment, want to move on or heal, she wants to be reunited with her son. As the meeting progresses, she describes the visit from the sergeant, and has stirrings of a need to heal, finally realizing this is the perfect environment for it.

Primary Characters: Ciaran, Corrigan, Adelita, Tillie, Jazzlyn, Solomon, Claire, the bereaved mothers, Joshua, Lara, Tightrope Walker, Fernando, Dennis, Gareth, Jose, and Sable

Human Intersections/Collisions: approximately 46

 

Let the Great World Spin Ch. 1 and Prologue

Feelings

The first chapter shows how fast a lifetime goes by in the eyes of an outsider. I understand Corrigan’s desire to help others that need whatever he has more than he does, but his prolonged exposure, in his apartment in the Bronx, to the underbelly of the city is doing more harm to him then is worth it for the meager offerings he can dish out to those he has elected himself to serve. His brother attempts to rescue him, but doesn’t understand any reason to endure the smog of lust, greed, and literal living to simply survive however possible, when his own survival thought is screaming at him to leave. The two brothers resemble the two tear drops from the yin yang symbol, one of which is shed in response to an event seemingly unrelated.

 

Geography

The prologue begins with a man taking the attention of passerby in Manhattan by walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers. The chapter begins in the hometown of two brothers in Dublin who live with their mother. After her death, the charitable brother joins an organization he refers to as the order, and is sent on a mission to Naples, then rerouted to New York City, settling in an apartment in the Bronx. The first brother, also the narrator, stays in Dublin, leaving only after a bomb went off near him, and soon after he lands in JFK airport to meet his brother. Corrigan takes him back to his apartment. The apartment is not a home, it is a vessel through which Corrigan tries to, as non-invasively as possible, take on the haze of the world threatening to smother those that work at street corners late at night by providing, but what seems like an afterthought makes all the difference to those treated like the merchandise they sell themselves as. Corrigan takes his brother to the hospital at which his duty is to bring a few of the elderly outside to sunshine and open air. Here the narrator meets the woman his brother is smitten by, also the woman who caused him to drive to Long Island while contemplating his feeling for her, and the conflict potentially arising from the strict rules, including celibacy, in the order he has aligned himself with.

“[an] elegiac glimpse of hope.” – USA Today

Feelings

The first chapter shows how fast a lifetime goes by in the eyes of an outsider. I understand Corrigan’s desire to help others that need whatever he has more than he does, but his prolonged exposure, in his apartment in the Bronx, to the underbelly of the city is doing more harm to him then is worth it for the meager offerings he can dish out to those he has elected himself to serve. His brother attempts to rescue him, but doesn’t understand any reason to endure the smog of lust, greed, and literal living to simply survive however possible, when his own survival thought is screaming at him to leave. The two brothers resemble the two tear drops from the yin yang symbol, one of which is shed in response to an event seemingly unrelated.

Geography

The prologue begins with a man taking the attention of passerby in Manhattan by walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers. The chapter begins in the hometown of two brothers in Dublin who live with their mother. After her death, the charitable brother joins an organization he refers to as the order, and is sent on a mission to Naples, then rerouted to New York City, settling in an apartment in the Bronx. The first brother, also the narrator, stays in Dublin, leaving only after a bomb went off near him, and soon after he lands in JFK airport to meet his brother. Corrigan takes him back to his apartment. The apartment is not a home, it is a vessel through which Corrigan tries to, as non-invasively as possible, take on the haze of the world threatening to smother those that work at street corners late at night by providing, but what seems like an afterthought makes all the difference to those treated like the merchandise they sell themselves as. Corrigan takes his brother to the hospital at which his duty is to bring a few of the elderly outside to sunshine and open air. Here the narrator meets the woman his brother is smitten by, also the woman who caused him to drive to Long Island while contemplating his feeling for her, and the conflict potentially arising from the strict rules, including celibacy, in the order he has aligned himself with.

Mediate

 

When one mediates a situation or chain of events, they are overseeing the route to a desired outcome, or inserting themselves into a confrontation such that both sides may be resolved peacefully in agreement. In my elementary school, there was a branch of student government called peer mediators in which designated students were vested with the power to resolve playground squabbles. At first glance, I had understood the word in this definition, but the sentence does not mediate this definition. Keats with an agenda or not, which may not be negative, is pushing his belief of beauty and truth being synonymous and equivalent. The author, Stanley Diamond, however, refutes this statement, believing beauty and truth to be two separate identities that in some cases may overlap, but are not entirely interchangeable; as something can be truly beautiful or beautifully true, the words are used as a mere description of perception. Diamond believes this to be the only use of the words, while Keats recognizes and is ultimately trying to perpetuate an understanding of the far-reaching, true meaning of truth, and its relation to beauty; as when something is a truth, or the truest form, it invokes a type of true beauty not found in the aesthetic opinionated description, for when something is true it is beautiful in its willingness not to deceive, and to nurture the dissemination of its truth as a mediator of its pursuit. Diamond calls the equation of truth to beauty an assimilation. In Diamond’s opinion, any equation is a mediation of this assimilation. This opinion then mediates his agenda of discounting Keats’ “agenda,” so in execution Diamond is guilty of the same mediation he accuses Keats of.

Mediate

 

When one mediates a situation or chain of events, they are overseeing the route to a desired outcome or inserting themselves into a confrontation such that both sides may be resolved peacefully in agreement. In my elementary school, there was a branch of student government called peer mediators in which designated students were vested with the power to resolve playground squabbles. At first glance, I had understood the word in this definition, but the sentence does not mediate this definition. Keats with an agenda or not, which may not be negative, is pushing his belief of beauty and truth being synonymous and equivalent. The author, Stanley Diamond, however, refutes this statement, believing beauty and truth to be two separate identities that in some cases may overlap, but are not entirely interchangeable; As something can be truly beautiful or beautifully true, the words are used as a mere description of perception. Diamond believes this to be the only use of the words, while Keats recognizes and is ultimately trying to perpetuate an understanding of the far reaching true meaning of truth and its relation to beauty; As when something is a truth, or the truest form, it invokes a type of true beauty not found in the aesthetic opinionated description, for when something is true it is beautiful in its willingness not to deceive and to nurture the dissemination of its truth as a mediator of its pursuit. Diamond calls the equation of truth to beauty an assimilation. In Diamond’s opinion, any equation is a mediation of this assimilation. This opinion then mediates his agenda of discounting Keats’ “agenda,” so in execution Diamond is guilty of the same mediation he accuses Keats of.