Thursday, March 3, 2011
Mogey's Story and Lace's Sorrow
Bant looks up to Uncle Mogey. She knows he is at one with the land, and she respects his devotion to knowing and being a steward of this place that he loves so much. He tells his extraordinary story about the buck and what is a truly surrealistic experience that he cannot deny but which is hard to integrate into his belief system and life as he knows it. Lace, on the other hand, just knows that this place is home and finds the move to North Carolina difficult and deadening to her spirit. And then, there's her relationship with Jimmy Make that she is trying to save. What does she mean when she says "But even with romance, without touching, without even much talking, me and Jimmy Make kept getting tied together tighter and tighter, only it no longer had anything to do with that slime green vine. This was rope. Knotted rope, scratchy and binding, and if you didn't feel it always, you sure did if you turned." (p.185)
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Uncle Mogey has a deep connection to the natural setting of West Virginia. He finds a personal serenity from being one with nature that he is unable to grasp from church services. His dreams (or nightmarish visions) of a world where deer are made out of metal, plastic bags, and glass are derived from his fears over the mountaintop removal mining destroying his environment. Lace, too, has a connection to the land despite her dreams of escape. Her relationship to it is based more on the people there instead of the actual natural elements. The beauty of nature only serves as a reminder of the friends and family that shape her life. Her marriage to Jimmy Make begins as another connection to her hometown, as a green vine with the potential to grow, but ends up suffocating her and becoming a rope tying her down and limiting Lace's life choices.
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ReplyDeleteI think that Lace's words mean even without a physical contact, as weird as it sounds, "the forces of nature" keep bringing them closer. I think that it touches on the fact that "opposites attract" and the paths that Lace and Jimmy have taken and are taking can only bump into one another. The rope is described as being "knotted", most likely marking the rough times in their relationships. "Scratchy" from being old, as ropes end to unravel from wear and tear, stress. The rope is a boundary, a leash around Lace. It restricts her and is a constant reminder of what she has been through.
ReplyDeleteI think the metaphor of the vine that keeps Lace bound to Yellow Root is intriguing. In a literal sense, a vine helps plants reach the sun. Metaphorically, Lace's roots or her "vine" (friends and family) like an actual vine support her. However, the vine also has an implication of slowly strangling Lace's happiness and completely smothering her chances of success in life. The idea of the vine also suggests that she is too far "rooted" in the landscape and the culture of the area and cannot leave because of that. Mogey is a likable character because he embodies that connection to the land that Lace so strongly desires to separate from but cannot bring herself to do so.
ReplyDeleteIn Mogey’s chapter, he compares the woods to God and then compares them to himself. In his comparison to God, Mogey describes the woods as giving him that sense of peace and faith that he feels church and the presence of God should give him. He recounts the story of his adventures in the woods with Robby and the buck and depicts that feeling through his body just knowing. It is here that he realizes that, despite the common assumption that God can only be reached in church and through prayer, God is in the woods. God is the woods.
ReplyDeleteMogey comes to this realization and continues to honor the woods. When the mining company starts destroying everything that Mogey believes in, he is devastated. As the woods begin to crumble and decay, so does Mogey’s health. It is as if Mogey and the woods are connected, are the same being, and in a sense it is true. Mogey grew up in these mountains, lived and breathed the air, soaked up the knowledge and power that resided there; they were his life. When he was denied access to the one place he went tromping through everyday, it began to kill him.
Lace’s chapter definitely compliments Mogey’s chapter because both talk about the body knowing. Mogey describes his body knowing where the buck was and how is body felt when he found God’s presence in the woods. Lace also acknowledges this sense that the body knows more than the mind. In the beginning she wants nothing more than to get away from the place she grew up, away from home. Yet, when she finally does leave, when she goes to North Carolina, she can not squash the urge to return home. When she and the family finally do return, returning to nothing, Lace questions why “a body knows” (Pancake 199). She realizes that it is not just her; it is the generations of her family that lived on and grew the land. They are not just her memories that draw her back, but the memories of her family and that lure is stronger than her mere thirty three years.
What is striking about Mogey’s chapter?
ReplyDeleteHow does Lace’s chapter complement or contradict Mogey’s?
Mogey's chapter stands out as one of the first chapters not narrated by Lace or one one of her children (Bant, Dane, and Corey in particular). Like Bant and Lace's respective chapters, Mogey's chapter is told in the first person, which allows Mogey to recount a vivid flashback as well as to speak about the present. Mogey's flashback involves a hunt he went on as a boy, during which his older cousin shot a magnificent buck that he and Mogey were later unable to recover. While pausing for a moment during the search for the deer's body, Mogey recalls that he felt, for one of the only times in his life, "total sureness" and peace. Throughout his adult life, however, Mogey is haunted by dreams of the deer, dead or dying, and he feels a terrible pity for the animal. Mogey's recollections reveal his deep respect and empathy for nature. He struggles to reconcile this genuine spiritual connection he feels to the natural world with his Christian faith, though ultimately he comes to the conclusion that "what [the] land tells [him]... is not paganism or idolatry or sacrilege or sin" (Pancake 179).
Of course, Mogey's strong bond to nature means that the destructive practice of mountaintop-removal mining devastates him - physically and emotionally - almost as much as it does the land he loves so dearly. His symptoms manifest themselves as both crippling headaches and darker, more disturbing dreams about the buck from his childhood. In Mogey's nightmares, he sees snarling deer with sharp teeth or a deer with "a plastic bag for a belly" (178). Mogey's dreams about unnatural, monstrous deer represent the fear and worry he feels about the unnatural havoc the mountaintop-removal mining companies are wreaking on his home and the surrounding environment.
Lace's chapter, which follows, complements Mogey's chapter in many ways. It, too, focuses largely in memory, and traces Lace's increasingly unsettled reaction to the destruction happening all around her.
Lace recalls how she and Jimmy Make moved their family to Raleigh, North Carolina for two years, and how miserable she was being so far from her home, and from nature - both literally and figuratively. During this time, she recounts: "me and Jimmy Make kept getting tied together tighter and tighter, only it no longer had anything to do with that slime green vine. This was rope. Knotted rope, scratchy and binding, and if you didn't feel it always, you sure did if you turned" (185). Lace seeks comfort in Jimmy Make, as he is symbolic of the life she had back in West Virginia, and she feels a faint spark of their previous romance. Soon, though, she recognizes that their fates are inescapably intertwined, and grows to resent the ties that bind them together like a harsh, restrictive "knotted rope" rather than a live "green vine." Knowing that she cannot raise her four children without the support of her husband, Lace feels trapped by Jimmy Make and by her situation in North Carolina.
When at last the "rope" loosens and the family is able to return to Yellowroot (due to the death of Lace's mother), she senses relief, hope, and a revival of her complex and passionate feelings for the land (which, interestingly, contrast her bitter lack of feeling towards Jimmy Make). Lace realizes that what she feels for the land must be "drawing down out of blood and from memories that belonged to more than [her]" (199). This deep-rooted, binding instinct that draws Lace to care so much about the land she lives on - and to abhor that land's destruction - is the most obvious trait that she shares with her uncle Mogey and the quality that makes their chapters complementary to one another.
I am the leader for the blog for the 3/4-7 homework.
ReplyDeleteThe HW question is: How does Avery tell his story? What effect does it have on you as a reader. How would you compare Dane and Corey? What do they add to this family? Story?
Avery tells his story in a length hunk of the book, reflecting on his memory of the Buffalo Creek incident. I actually enjoyed how Avery told his story, especially the part where is he recording it for his teacher. Through his words you really get the sense that this was a huge blow to him, and as we said in class, after you go through a tragedy, you are never the same person. Avery and Corey add individual voices to this novel, and especially in Avery's case, there is a vibrant impact that sticks with you because the way he describes what went on around him leaves you with powerful images as if you were living it.
Mogey’s chapter focuses on his exceedingly deep connection with Yellowroot and all that its land entails. His encounter with the buck, the spiritual feelings he gains while wandering the woods, and the nightmares he has as the mining and construction progress, perfectly exemplifies his mental and emotional tie to the woods. I think it is peculiar that as Mogey is growing up, his spiritual connection to the woods, which acts as his belief system, both strengthens and weakens and as he grows older. He begins to realize the extent of the damage that the mining is doing to the land – “what we’re doing to this land is not only murder. It is suicide” – and he is still stoic in his belief of the mountain’s importance, yet his headaches and nightmares begin to weaken his positivity, hence his musings that seem to allude to the End of the World pamphlet that Dane finds at Mrs. Taylor’s house – “It’s like a clock running down…I feel the universe dead quiet in its halt.”
ReplyDeleteIn Lace’s chapter, she states that, "but even with romance, without touching, without even much talking, me and Jimmy Make kept getting tied together tighter and tighter, only it no longer had anything to do with that slime green vine. This was rope. Knotted rope, scratchy and binding, and if you didn't feel it always, you sure did if you turned." The constant hardships that Lace faces, her fathers death, the further restrictions on the land, and the distance growing between herself and Jimmy Make, do are not emotionally, mentally or physically separating the two, but their togetherness is no longer being bonded by that “slime green vine,” which gives off a feeling of nature and wholesomeness, hence the “knotted scratchy and binding” rope is what connects the two together because they both are going through these hardships – together. Although Jimmy Make is keen on doing what ever he can in order to provide for his family, the mining is eating away at his soul, just as it has Lace’s father, mother, and herself as well. Moving to North Carolina adds further insult to injury, in that it makes that knotted scratchy rope more apparent due to Lace’s feelings of complete insignificance and isolation from the only world she feels is her home.
The in depth spiritual connections that both Lace and Mogey feel are what keep the former coming back and the latter ever present on the mountain. The resources the woods provide, the aura that it gives off, and the community itself are so utterly unique that both characters are just in feeling a special need to always be near the unfortunately deteriorating presence of Yellowroot – regardless of it negatively affecting the two characters both mentally and emotionally.
THIS IS ARABELLA
ReplyDeleteJimmy Make and Lace are first of all forever intertwined because he is the father of her child (and later more children). Whether Lace likes it or not, the couple does not have to put any work, mental, emotional, or physical, into becoming more knotted together. This bind she feels to him is not a good thing, they are pulled together by their opposing views. They both believe strongly that they are doing the right thing (staying or leaving) and want to prove to the other that they are right. They are tied to their opposing views about the land. They also feel tied down in their relationship, neither of them being able to do what they want and be happy. Lace is not happy staying because Jimmy continually judges and hates her for it. She will be ultimately happier once he has left at the end. She can feel free and unburdened, unbound by the knot she felt choked by. Jimmy Make is not happy leaving at first because he does not want to leave the kids or Lace. But as their unhappiness grows and they grow even further apart, he has to make the choice to figuratively cut the ropes that tie them together, and go out into the world, doing what he wants to and believes in.
Pages 168-199-
ReplyDeleteThe chaotic dreams and how Mogey seems to died with that land are striking about his chapter. Mogey over and over again describes his dreams about the buck. He watches it struggle every time. Then as the land around him dies and is destroyed the crazier his dreams get. It is like his sanity is going with the mountains. Also the way Mogey is attached to the land and how he feels for it is striking. He hurts with the land. Mogey’s health goes down hill as the mountaintops are removed and as the land is killed. His headaches become so overwhelming that he has trouble functioning. Lace’s chapter complements Mogey’s chapter. When she moves away the land and the culture associated with it is taken away. She sinks into a depression and cannot live a happy life away from the mountains. Mogey and Lace cannot live a happy life without the mountains. The both care for the land around them and are unable to function without it in their lives. Both these characters start to fail without the land of West Virginia in their lives.
When Lace compares her relationship to Jimmy Make, the slime green vine is the lust that once bound them together. Once they had children together, lost interest in each other, and gained a heap of responsibilities, the vine twisted into a corse rope that binds the two of them together. Through all of this they are now dependent on each other, whether they like it or not. West Virginia is another rope that has bound Lace, but this rope connects her with a mountain that she truly loves and sees as her home. When she moves to North Carolina, she is miserable and the rope tugs her back home. Uncle Mogey has this connection to the land of West Virginia without the need of a rope. He is devote to the land and has no need to be tied to the land, for he does not want to run. Lace wants to tug free from the rope and the land, but the more she tugs, the more it pulls.
ReplyDeleteLace and Jimmy Make are an example of people who love each other in a “binding” way. Just as a child and a parent are “obligated” and “destined” to love each other, Lace and Jimmy Make are bound together by their children. When Lace and Jimmy Make first met, they were truly in love. Not to long after that, however, Lace realized she was pregnant and her “love” for Jimmy Make became forced rather then something she really wanted. This deviation from true love to love out of the need for family acceptance is what changes Laces description of her relationship with Jimmy Make. At first, Lace refers to Jimmy Make and herself as bound by a green vine because a vine is alive and always changing, much like their relationship. After their second child and inevitable marriage, however, this vine turns to rope to symbolize them being bound together whether they like it or not.
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