Sunday, November 27, 2016
I feel as though bewilderment is a state of confusion or uncertainty that causes us as people to question reality. Although bewilderment does cause us to question our realities, it is necessary for people to have a sense of certainty in this world. We need certainty in our lives to keep ourselves sane and to allow us to know something is absolutely true. For example, we know for certain that we need we need oxygen to live and breath. Without this certainty, our imagination or rather our bewilderment takes over and we come up without various excuses and wild theories about why we can still breath or we even question what it is to breath. Certainty provides this buffer for us to keep ourselves from losing a grasp on reality. Bewilderment is also necessary for the human mind to have. In the essay "Bewilderment" by Fanny Howe, one of the things she talks about the concept of God and the bewilderment and disbelief that surrounds the bible. People question if God is real or not, and those that do believe Him to be real are filled with a bewilderment of sorts, that people say questions logic and fact. But the point here is that it is the bewilderment that surrounds God brought so many people to God in the first place because that very same bewilderment provided people with a sense of hope and understanding showing just how important and influential one's bewilderment can be.
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My working definition of the word “Bewilderment” can be defined as an uncertain, unclear and puzzling behavior done by people. Fanny Howe author of Bewilderment quotes that the meaning is that “It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden(6).” In this statement, Howe is saying that bewilderment is a behavior that an individual can chose to be incognito and not able to be found which is an unclear and uncertain action. Another quote, “…there is a dimension of plot, but greater consciousness of randomness and uncertainty as the basic stock in which it is brewed(7).” In this quotation by Fanny, she is stating the same as in the first quote. Certainty and uncertainty (“Bewilderment”) are both necessary in everyday life survival. People need certainty in cases like knowing what they need to do everyday to get something accomplished to be successful. In both quotes Howe says that uncertainty comes along in everyones daily life and its true. The uncertainty in life is what makes it something to live for, it keeps you constantly thinking and on your toes. In the end we need both bewilderment and certainty to be able to function everyday.
ReplyDeleteI’ve always thought that the word “bewilderment” meant to be in awe of something, but to be in so much awe that you get lost or confused. Then, my definition was backed up by Edward Abbey and his story “The Serpents of Paradise”. My favorite example is when he is awestruck by two gopher snakes in a sort of mating ritual dance to the point that he freezes for a few seconds when the two reptiles notice his presence. He snaps out of his moment of paralysis soon after, but he still experiences bewilderment in the sense of being frozen in awe. However, after reading “Bewilderment” by Fanny Howe, I’m not so sure my definition is correct. Howe brings in religion and poetics and many other things that I am not versed in into the definition of bewilderment. This leads me to think that maybe “bewilderment” is purely confusion. Despite this, I prefer my original definition.
ReplyDeleteI think certainty is necessary in our lives in order to give us something solid to hold on to. For instance, death is a certainty. It may be scary to some, but I think it just gives us more reason to be happy and, simply put, live life. As for bewilderment, if I use my definition, I think it is necessary because without some sort of awe in life, it can be pretty boring. If we do not at least attempt to bring in a sense of bewilderment, we just coast through life (kind of like David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” speech).
When I think of the word “bewilderment” I always would feel a sense of questionable or a state of shock that I wouldn’t be able to focus or process properly. More like when we are caught up in the moment. This mostly relates to Edward Abbey story in “The Serpents of Paradise” where he examples is when he was struck by two gopher snakes in a sort of mating ritual dance to the point that he freezes for a few seconds when the two reptiles notice his presence. He was paralysis for a moment when he finally came back to his sense from the state of shock he encountered. That moment defines how he experiences the sense of “bewilderment” just by that encounter he had with the snakes. However, in Fanny Howe essay of “Bewilderment”, it gives a different perspective than what Edward Abbey predicted. Howe describes it in a religious and poetical way that raises some questionable doubts of how he defines “bewilderment” in his point of view. As for word, “bewilderment” in general, in my perspective of what I think of “bewilderment” it raises certain questionable doubts when we do encounter certain things that would cause us to be in shock. If we do not at least acknowledge the sense of bewilderment or ever encounter it we wouldn’t experience what is going on throughout our lives.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your definition of bewilderment, Nicholas, in that it causes us to question reality, but I’d like to extend that idea further. While bewilderment is structurally just an enhanced version of confusion, it is also the state of mind and inherently state of reality related to chaos. Fanny Howe states, “The mystery of thought can only be solved by thought itself – which is what?”. This simple statement followed by rhetorical question transitions bewilderment into chaos. Defining bewilderment as a confused segment of thought creates a parallel between consciousness and our lack of knowledge of it, therefore because the idea of being alive and having thought is abstrusely esoteric, our consciousness is now in a continuous state of bewilderment and the reality we live in is just chaotic, because we see it like that and because we have no idea of the root of our perspective. Bewilderment is our natural state of being, and not feeling confused or uncertain is because we conceal it for purposes of survival and conforming into our society. In other words, our reality is so mysterious and unknowable because we don’t understand the perspective or means of which we are conscious. It just happens. And consequently, we live in a world of chaos, which we are thrown into and given false platitudes and infinite unknowns, and most of the time we are expected to not question them and just fill them with bleak ideas for functional purpose. Conclusively, the negative connotation associated with bewilderment isn’t appropriate because a state of confusion is inherently much more natural than the opposite, and questioning our reality usually leads to us understanding it better.
ReplyDeleteBewilderment is not being able to comprehend what is happening or what has just happened, and being confused as to why or how it happened. In the essay, Bewilderment, author Fanny Howe states “In their story they were unable to handle the complexities of the world or the shock or making a difference” (5). Howe is explaining here how characters in her stories or poems are in wonder of the things in the world that might surround them sometimes. Earlier she had mentioned how the author and reader could come up with their own way of describing what the situation is, “These characters remained as uncertain in the end as they were in the beginning, though both author and reader could place them with within a pattern of causalities” (5). Therefore, bewilderment is necessary to life, just by reading any book or short essay we lead to asking ourselves questions in which we sometimes find the answers to and we develop ideas so that we can share with others. Certainty is also necessary in our lives because it gives us that sense of relief when we are certain of something and we know we are safe. For example, in “Serpents of Paradise” Edward Abbey talks about how he thought to himself if there are Faded Midget snakes near his trailer in Utah there must be diamondbacks so he is lucky to find a gopher snake which happens to be the diamondbacks enemy. He shares with us that once the yellow-brown snake was with him he was no longer in fear of a diamondback going around his home. He was certain that it would not come back therefore he felt safe.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your idea and definition of bewilderment, but I would also like to add that bewilderment also brings a sense of mystification-- something that is perplexing to the mind, which is a word that stuck out to me in Fanny Howe's piece, "Bewilderment". I believe that bewilderment is necessary in our lives because there is not always a concrete answer to everything in our lives. By being bewildered may lead someone to try to the find the answer to something. I like how Howe brought up the idea of dreams by writing, “The dreamer is aware that only everything else but this tiny dream exists and in this way the dream itself is free to act without restraint”. In a way, Howe makes it very clear that dreams offer cause us to be bewildered because there are so many things that happen in dreams that cause us to question why they happened and they often leave us confused. Along with bewilderment being necessary in our lives, I also believe that certainty is also necessary in our lives; having certainty allows humans to have a sense of sanity—like you mentioned in your post. I like how you brought up the example of oxygen and how through the use of certainty we know that we need it in order to live. If there was no level of certainty in our lives there would be a lot of mayhem and we would be very lost individuals in our society.
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