// I Need Some Help!!!!!!

Okay, I have this composition I need to do and I'm a little stuck for ideas. Help would be nice! Here is our handout...


Fifth Business
Composition Ideas


Fifth Business presents a world in which faith and metaphor are as important as knowledge and fact.

The novel seems to contend that the modern world has largely abandoned faith and metaphor as ways of making sense of ourselves and our world. We no longer believe in miracles. We no longer believe in saints. We no longer seek metaphors to describe our relationship with the world and with other people.

Of the Mexican peasants who have come to petition the Virgin Mary at the basilica at Guadalupe, Ramsay says:

They were untouched by modern education, but their government was striving with and main to procure this inestimable benefit for them; anticlericalism and American bustle would soon free them from belief in miracles and holy likeness. But where, I ask myself will mercy and divine compassion come from then? Or are such things unnecessary to people who are well fed and know the wonders concealed inside an atom? (p.199)

But does anyone really “know the wonders concealed inside an atom?”

Ramsay suggests that science itself may be based on faith. At least he uses the languages of religion when Dr. McCausland “catechizes” Dunny after Willie’s death. Science seems to have the dogma of institutionalized religion without the sense of wonder. To “know” a “wonder” is to cease to wonder. Ur faith in science, ironically, quashes faith in magic.

Yet if faith in science has replaced our faith in religion, perhaps then too old icons and old metaphors have been replaced with new ones.

An icon is something that represents a belief, as the Virgin Mary does. What icons have we in our society today?

What ideal does a Barbie doll represent? A BMW? A university diploma? What faith does it imply? Who is Madonna? (Hey, Why’d she choose that name?) Why the public interest in the Scott Peterson trial? Or some other articles of faith: What’s an atom? How do you know they exist? What’s Einstein’s Theory of Relativity? How about Darwin’s theory of Evolution by Natural Selection? Non-Euclidian Geometry? Warp speed? Can you name a scientific truth?

Do you know anyone who believes in UFO’s? Psychics? Ghosts? Ouija boards? Past lives?

What does marriage mean? What’s a family? What’s a right?

How do you know?

Is Star Trek a mythic idea of the future? An ideal view of the present? Is Married, With Children a mythic view of anything? What does it say about us?

If we have machines to do all our work for us, will we have jobs? Will we have livelihoods? Will we have meaning?

Is technology good? Is it meaningful to ascribe moral qualities to technology?

Your Composition

Show how an accepted fact or assumption is untrue, or how it means something other than what it is conventionally thought to mean.

Or

Show how something obviously not literaly true reveals or represents some truth.

Form

DO NOT write an expository five paragraph essay.
Do not write an expository five paragraph essay.
Do not… get the point???

Try something else original, interesting, chancy, out on a limb.

Narrative (story or anecdote)
Descriptive (illustration and images)
And/or Persuasion (grab your readers – figuratively speaking of course.)

Remember to be humble. Laugh at yourself. Laugh at your ignorance, and at everyone else’s. Perhaps not mine.
Well, maybe even mine.

Most of all make this something that means something to you. Whatever that may be.



.....Yeah, confused me! What I’m thinking about writing about is how people look at the cross now as just jewelry, not actually something that was used to kill Jesus. Another thing I want to talk about is Christmas, and how we have destroyed and buried the real meaning of it. I’ll probably talk about the differences of the big boom and God actually creating the earth himself.

But I need some ideas! I’m a little lost! Please help me out!