I found Viramontes’ use of imagery in her novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, very effective and beautiful. The reader is able to internalize the idea she’s presenting with vision and reflection, rather than just understanding the words. On page 70, Estrella and Alejo are newly acquainted and are starting to like each other. There’s an awkward silence between them, at which point Estrella doesn’t know how to express herself. Instead of stating it with a common phrase, like ‘she didn’t know how to carry on the conversation’, Viramontes writes, “she didn’t know how to build the house of words she could invite him into”. The image is very fitting since shelter means so much to people with so little materials, and an invitation into her home is much more meaningful and personal than the more generic summary of what was taking place… i.e. she didn’t know what to say. The novel is loaded with engaging imagery. It seems effortless and natural the way she’s able to use the technique effectively, even with topics you may never have thought you wanted imagery applied to. Like when the guard-dog scratches himself with his hind leg, “his purple testicles shaking like coin purses” (pg 114). Disgusting… but awesome imagery!

I was interested in how the name Perfecto was attached to the man Petra and Estrella meet in the store when Petra is rummaging for fresh garlic. It comes up when the man tells the proprietor he finished his repair job, and the proprietor says, “Perfecto!” not in addressing the man, but by indicating his satisfaction with the work (pg 112). He then gets referred to as Perfecto by the narration of the novel. One can assume this identification is through Petra’s perspective, which got me wondering about Perfecto Flores’ role in her life. The word ‘perfect’ is not a traditional name, but an abstract idea, which lends to Perfecto’s portrayal as less of a living person, and more of an interchangeable foil. The Perfecto in the store parallels the original Perfecto by also having a red tool chest. They’re both repair men, or utility men, and utility is what Perfecto represents for the family, and the story.

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As a side-note: In class we looked at some images of Darwin’s hand drawn evolutionary trees, and professor Siperstein said he’d concluded that lemurs were the original relative of humans. That information sounded familiar to me, so I tried to research if that was true. From what I can find, lemurs were the first primate to evolve, which lead to apes, monkeys, and us. It boggles my mind that Darwin was able to deduce, without genetics, that lemurs gave rise to the rest of the primates correctly, since they look more like cats than monkeys. It’s an example of the trust he had in methodical observation and empirical data, and his unwillingness to settle for the easy explanation…

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The transcendentalist movement was being formed by Emerson and people with similar interests in the 1830s, with the majority of ideas being presented at the Transcendental Club. It consisted of a hand-full of members that originally met to talk about their critiques on societal institutions, among many other things (American Transcendental web). Thoreau was born 14 years after Emerson, and was not part of pioneering transcendentalism in these formative meetings, but was greatly inspired by Emerson’s essay Nature as a youth. He went on to refine the movement with a different voice than Emerson, one that’s particularly engaging, at least to me. Thoreau, the contemporary, was less poetic than the master, Emerson, but only by default. Emerson was abstract to an extreme, in order to push the limits of the movement he was a part of… the transparent eye-ball passage speaks for itself. His language was highly stylized, using regular rhetorical statements, like when talking about stars, “Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are!” As well as backward-Yoda-speak, “But every night come out, these envoys of beauty…” Both examples of this stylized language are found within the first paragraph of the first chapter of Nature.

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I’m intrigued by the balance between God often being portrayed as omnipotent and omniscient, yet will also display human-like flaws, emotions, and shortcomings. This leads to an interest in the internal methods in which people reconcile these double standards with the non-faith side of their intellect. In the Pima creation story, The Creator tries to make something, like ants, but it turns out that they don’t accomplish the purpose he put them there for. The same thing happens when he tries to make people, his recipe went wrong and all they want to do is smoke.

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