In terms of modern, Promethean punishments, nothing seems worse than being forced to read the fantasies of a sad, dumpy looking Mormon housewife who really just wants to have a threesome with a werewolf and vampire. I do not know if the werewolves are supposed to be soccer players and the vampires football players, or vice versa, or maybe one of them stands in for the lacrosse players (do they have lacrosse in Mormonville?) but it is pretty obvious that each group represents some sort of sports team.
The other aspect of the Promethean punishment (in this case having crows peck your brain out every night instead of your liver) is being forced inside the mind of a teenage girl, or being forced inside the mind of a dumpy looking Mormon housewife fantasizing about herself as a teenage girl having a threesome with a shorn werewolf/captain of the soccer team and vampire/point guard of the basketball team. I teach teenagers all day, every day, and though their dasein is surprisingly difficult to comprehend, any rational adults would not for all the bodily punishments in the world have their mind forced back into teenage ontology.
One of the things I do find most interesting as a teacher is the desire for the demos to possess Nietzschean qualities like personality, charisma, and creativity the desire my students have to be a Kierkegaardean individual as opposed to a particular. The ideas (not theirs, of course) are deeply flawed, we all do not have personality in the Nietzschean sense, or charisma, and most of us certainly are not individuals as Kierkegaard saw it, but also profoundly amusing to see in action (Note: I am well aware how horridly obnoxious adding the suffix 'ean' to the last names of different philosophers and apologize for the pretention; that I have found a way to avoid saying 'Kafka-esque' is a miracle of sorts). Our regime functions as a sort of Hegelean wet-dream where everyone not only has the respect he thought was essential to our being, but thinks themselves an autonomous individual, wholly liberated from material, ethical, and metaphysical burdens, able to manifest and create their being on a daily basis. Personally, I think that is simply a lot of work, and gladly leave it to the ubermench and glow worms like Churchill, but having taught both spectacular and frightening pedestrian students, this idea about individuality is the glue that binds them together. With the spectacular, it really does create something, particular humans capable of becoming an individual, and all the freedom from the material, tradition, and custom have certainly created more of these individuals, even if they have less individuality than the individuals of earlier regimes, but in the pedestrian types, the woefully pedestrian types, it leads to extended conversations like this:
Me (in a conference with a student about how she can improve her writing): "Jessica, the biggest deficiency (she didn't know what this word meant) in your essay is you did not have enough textual evidence of analysis, if you had more of both, you would have done better."
Slug (slug is a much more fitting name for Jessica because she seems to be closer to a slug than a person. It seems to take effort for her to blink her eyes, and breathe (through her mouth, of course) and she walks as if she is Atlas with the weight of the world on her shoulders, or just the weight of her head, which must be filled with rocks for reasons you will see): "What's that?" (in a nasally, absent-minded tone where the words come without thinking, not that thinking would have brought forth any other words)
Me: "What's what Slug, I don't understand your question."
Slug: "What you just said."
Me: "Well, I just said that you did not do as well on the essay because you are missing both textual evidence, and, more importantly, analysis."
Slug: "What's analysis?"
Me: "What do you mean what's analysis? I mean like (I use the word like a good deal with my students. They seem to understand similes much better than anything else) analytical statements where you made deductions (take a guess asto whether she knows what a deduction is) about the text based on textual evidence."
Slug: "I don't understand."
Me: "You don't understand what Slug, what a deduction is or what textual evidence is?"
Slug: "Yea."
Me: "Yes to the first, or yes to the second."
Slug: I don't know, both."
Me: "Ok, well, here (handing her the book we were reading). Find me a piece of evidence from the text."
Slug: "Like where (again, the deep comprehension of simile manifests itself)?"
Me: "Anywhere, flip to any page and find some textual evidence."
Slug: "Ok, here." (flipping to a random as I told her to, but holding the book open and towards me, like a gift of some kind)
Me: "Ok, good, now read it and find something concrete in it that is textual evidence." (I don't know if she knew what I meant when I said concrete, like she could have thought I meant concrete as in the construction material, but she seemed to be able to grasp my meaning from either context clues in the sentence, or from the fact that she was holding a book, and not something hard and can scrape your knees on should you fall on it, which she must have done quite a bit learning to walk)
Slug: "Ok, here, it says the weather was bad."
Me: "Ok, good slug, now that is textual evidence. Analysis would be talking about why the weather is bad, or, even better, what the significance of the bad weather is."
Slug: "Ok."
Me (at this point, I feel I have won my Pyrrhic victory, which is an apt description because this little dialogue does not really capture the extended, dramatic pauses in between everything Slug says (one would think she is contemplating the celestial bodies they are so long), and decide to end the conference): "So you need more of that in your next essay, then you will do better."
This conversation is in no way misrepresentative of Slug, and really represents her grappling with something of relative difficult for her; it was certainly more difficult than the conversation I had with her were she asked me how to 'do' vocabulary, like how to complete a sentence with a missing word, or find a synonym for a word, or how to write a sentence with a vocabulary word in it. Heidegger thinks all humans having (or are) being, so she must too, but I could not in any way tell you what this girl's being is. Our orthodoxy about individuality and personality seems to have done this girl no help, and I get the feeling that a little noblesse oblige and condescension would help her more than telling her she's an individual, capable of selecting her own values and 'lifestyle', though until we outsource the re-stocking jobs at CVS, I feel comfortable there is a place for her in this modern world of creative beings.
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