Blackberry Picking

Seamus Heaney wrote an interesting poem,

“Blackberry Picking
Late August, given heavy rain and sun

for a full weak, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Blubeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.”

                                    -Seamus Heaney
     Through this poem, Heaney seems to be remembering fond memories of blackberry picking with either family or friends but throughout the poem the tone changes a little bit. The poem starts and it seems happy and almost innocent fun. The line the says, " you ate that first one and its flesh was sweet," is full of enthusiasm, almost of that of a child. This was obviously a fond memory that he had with family and friends. Also, in the line that says, "we hoarded the fresh berries in the byre," the children in the poem, whether it be Heaney himself or some of his friends that he is talking about, they are excited about being able to pick all of the berries and they want the berries to keep.
     In the line that says “but when the bath was full”, we see a change of tone. It changes to almost a more experienced tone and almost sad, and regretful. I also know, from looking at other poems throughout his book, that he seems very interested in the theme of innocence to experience. At a time in everyone’s life, they change from being innocent to being experienced in any number of things. This poem just happens to be about blackberry picking. He seems enthusiastic but then towards the end finds out and knows that the blackberries will go bad at some point, even if he does not want to believe it.
   This poem also leads me to believe that Heaney is talking about more than just blackberry picking. And this change in tone helps me to believe that. He could also be talking about the fact that not everything lasts. Good things could, in fact, come to an end. Whether it be like the berries rotting, or something even worse, death of a loved one or something of that nature, these things do come to an end. The last line in the poem, "Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not," may be talking about this. This one small thing, blackberry picking, comes to an end at the end of the week. The children learn that not everything can last forever and they lose some of that childhood innocence that they had and it turns into experience.

Our society to your

Throughout this course, I have found that one theme sticks out when it comes to reading and viewing different cultures, that being that I have to keep an open mind. No two cultures are the same and people judge based on the society that we live in, as sad as that is.  Also, in other classes that we take here, we are taught the same thing. No two people are exactly alike and no two people have the same kinds of experiences in their lives. This just comes as being a part of the society that we live in.

In our everyday culture at Silver Lake, we are used to everyone having what they need, and everyone being close by, such as things like bathrooms, a good support system, like friends, and also their books, and personal items that they may need. In the cultures that we read about throughout the semester, the families don’t always have what they need close at hand, like in the book, July’s People. They were a family that was uprooted abruptly and transplanted into a small tribal village. They did not have what they needed and what they were used to having. These things could be anything from a toilet and a bathroom to having any kind if personal space. They were uprooted from their everyday home, which had all the luxuries and spaces that we, in our society would seem normal, to a small tribal village, with mud houses that were shared by entire families. The Smales, the family in the novel July’s People, had to learn how to live in a completely different society from what they wee used to.

This is something that we are unaccustomed to seeing because we are very used to the society that we live in now. We, as a people, don’t have to worry about having enough food, considering we can just go to the cafeteria and get something or drive somewhere and get something to eat. The Smales had to learn to survive off of what we either given to them by July, or to go get something for themselves. In our society, we don’t have to worry about this.

With keeping an open mind, we are more able to accept and understand what this family is going through. Not every story is as tragic as July’s People though. The books and novels that we have read, cover a huge variety of things from families and their problems, to women controlling others for their own personal gain. Having an open mind helps us to not only accept these characters and their actions, but to accept their society even though it is different than ours.

Critical thinking

            Reading and understanding what is being read are two things that come up everywhere, whether it is in class or in the workplace. Being able to understand what has been given to you is important. Also, being able to take meaning from what that has been given to you. This also includes confidence in understanding.

            Confidence in understanding is a huge thing to try to master. Being able to put a meaning to a bunch of words that has been put before you can be even harder still. Though it seems tough to handle, it is not all out difficult. It just needs to be practiced and used repeatedly so that a person can have the confidence to understand what has been put before them. Being able to take a meaning from a text includes being able to back up what we are think the meaning may be from examples in the text. Doing this was a large part of the class.

            Being able to back up our opinions from the text makes us much more knowledgeable about what we are saying in the first place. Taking examples from the text makes us look deeper and more critically at the text and learn something from the text. This takes a lot of practice and hard work at first but does get easier as time goes on. This is also something that we can use either out in the workplace or even in other classes. We can use this to our advantage in other classes because we will know the different ways of getting to the deeper meaning about a text.

Onions as a history lesson?

            Naomi Shihab Nye wrote a great poem about, believe it or not, an onion. Tis onion is incorporated into the story as if it were really something else. This is the poem:

“When I think how far the onion has traveled

just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise

All small forgotten miracles,

crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,

pearly layers in smooth agreement,

the way the knife enters the onion

and onion falls apart on the chopping block,

a history revealed.

And I would never scold the onion

for causing tears.

It is rights that tears fall

for something so small and forgotten.

How at meal, we sit to eat,

commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma

but never on the translucence of onion,

now limp, now divided,

or its traditionally honorable career:

For the sake of others,

disappear.”

             -Naomi Shihab Nye

This onion that Nye talks about is figurative, could stand for any number of things. Before the poem there is a small fact about the history of the onion, being that it is originally said to have come from India and was brought along on trips to other parts of the world from there. This figurative onion could represent any number of things. But I think it could be referring to history itself.

The words that stick out to me in the poem would be “a history revealed”. This history could be the onion’s history but it could also be the world’s history. Like an onion, history has layers, or otherwise known as different eras. Throughout these eras, there have been wars, tears, loss and victories. These layers make up what we have and know today. Like an onion, these layers can be pulled apart or left as a whole, just like history can be focused on one area or another. The only difference is how it is done.

Though these types of things happened they are often forgotten about. No one thinks to talk about history at the dinner table, just like no one thinks about talking about onions that were used in the meal. We have come a long way as a civilization just as the onion has gone a long way in traveling across the world and being all over the world.

An Affair or Something More??

Masks, by Fumiko Enchi, is about how women behave in a patriarchal society. Mieko is an old woman who had Akio and Harumé. Akio, who married Yasuko, died in a skiing accident and now Yasuko is in love with Ibuki, but planning on marrying Mikamé. Though this sounds very backward, Mieko has a huge role in everyone’s love lives. Yasuko feels that Mieko is really controlling her, even though Mieko is not Yasuko’s biological mother. Towards the end of the book, we find out Mieko’s plot, to get Harumé pregnant so that she will be able to have Akio’s bloodline continued in another generation because Harumé and Akio were twins and weren’t their father’s kids. Mieko had had an affair with another man while she was married and had the children of another man.

            Yasuko, who has an affair with Ibuki nearer the end of the novel, has a role in what Mieko was plotting. Yasuko would switch places with Harumé, while Ibuki was sleeping. This way, the two woman managed to get Harumé pregnant. What stuck out to me the most would be that how did Ibuki not know that he was not with Yasuko. Mikamé, while talking with Ibuki about the ordeal, said that the woman slipped something into his drink so that he was not aware of what he was doing. Though he may have been drunk, he still would have known that he was not with the one that he thought he was with. And this happened more than one time as well.

            Yasuko tries to brush it off by telling him that he sounded like a poem “from the Tales of Ise: ‘Did you come, I wonder, or was it I who went? I scarcely know – was it dream or reality, did I sleep or wake?” (111-112) The fact that this happened more than one time makes a person think. Though the two women wanted to continue on Akio’s bloodline and the Toganō bloodline, they were willing to risk Harumé’s safety and health in order to get what they wanted. And Ibuki seemed oblivious to what they were doing or trying to do to both Harumé and himself.

            These women, though they seemed harmless, where trying to further themselves, hurting not only Harume but Ibuki and his small family too. They did not think of what the consequences would be when they did this and at the end of this book, Mieko seems as if frozen in one place because of all that she has lost in her lifetime. She lost her son and also, now, her daughter because of what happened with Harume and Ibuki. A lot of the things that happen throughout the book happen because of Mieko and her greed and ability to have things turn out exactly the way that she wants them to.