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teardrop-eclipse · 4 years

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My Twisted Wonderland Ocs Bio

Note: My Two TW OC’s are based on the sun drop flower and moonstone from tangled. ~

✨🌙————☀️✨

Quote: “The moon speaks yet the sun is silence...only hears my voice with no reply.”

———

Full name: Opal Lucine Stone ( オパールルシネ石)

Kanji: 音羽瑠琉志安寿都音

[O] 音- sound, pitch, tone

[Pa] 羽- plumage, feathers

[L] 瑠 - lapis lazuli

[Lu] 琉- lapis lazuli

[Ci] 志- intention

[Ne] 安- peaceful

[S] 寿- longevity

[To] 都-metropolis

[Ne] 音- sound, pitch, tone

———

Meaning of Opal: Gem or jewel

Meaning of Lucine: Moon or light

Nickname: Ms. Stone (address to all her students), Ms. Opal (address to college staff), Opi (address to Cyra)

Age: 27 (physical age)

Birthday: October 18

Zodiac Sign: Libra

Status: Alive

Race: Human

Gender: Female

Height: 5’5

Weight: unknown

Hair color: Opal

Eye color: Grey

Blood Type: O

Occupation: Literature Teacher at night raven college (Masters degree on English Literature)

Personality: Serious, Cold, responsible, respected, strict, smart, heartwarming, elegant, friendly, neat, and sometimes mysterious

Languages: Norwegian & Japanese

Studying languages: French & Spanish

Relatives: Sun (mother), Moon (father), Cyra (younger sister), Nova (???)

Crush: Divus Crewel

Hobbies: Writing poems, spells, and studying other languages

Favorite Food: unknown

Strengths: leadership, challenged, determine, creative, success

Flaws: Sometimes a hermit, worry, sometimes not organized, not sleeping early, cyra’s permission on begging, stubborn, self-distance sometimes, overprotected, frights, tricks, and afraid of mistakes.

Any scars, birthmarks, etc: None

Trivia:

-Most of the nights, opal has a conversation with his father talking about her days at school and Cyra’s usual adventures.

-Every night opal goes to check on Cyra to see everything is alright. She’s overprotected over Cyra.

-She sometimes goes overboard when she caught her students not paying attention to class or not doing their work. She summon these rock spikes when she’s in a very bad mood. You do not wanna piss her off while she’s teaching. Strict mode level survival.

-She’s right handed.

-She will always be interested to learn more about anything and talks about it too. Pretty much a nerd I guess ^.^”

-In magic, she usually control elemental powers like water, earth, and ice. And a slinch of dark magic. Not too much or her inner dark powers takes over. Tried to learn fire but failed.

-After the split as nova, she can no longer hear or communicate her mother. The sun. Only she could hear her father, the moon.

-Can summon rock spikes with or without her chants. No wand required.

-Sense her sisters presents with her moonstone earrings. Glows if Cyra use her dark magic.

-Both Opal and Cyra don’t discuss their past to no one, their hidden powers, Nor as nova.

Quote: “I always ended up learning something new today. I want this exploration to surprise me with a bang! ~”

———–

Full name: Cyra Lily Stone (シラゆり石)

Kanji: 詩蘭利利

[Cy] 詩- Poem

[Ra] 蘭- Orchid

[Li] 利-cleaver, adventurous

[Iy] 利- cleaver, adventurous

[S] 寿- longevity

[To] 都-metropolis

[Ne] 音- sound, pitch, tone

———

Meaning to Cyra: Sun, lord, or throne.

Meaning to lily: Flower

Nickname: Cy (addressed to opal), Ms. Cyra (addressed to teachers and staff), Sunshine (Vil)

Age: 17 (physical age)

Birthday: October 18

Zodiac Sign: Libra

Status: Alive

Race: Human

Gender: Female

Height: 5’4

Weight: unknown

Hair color: Medallion Yellow faded to light blonde

Eye color: Brown

Blood Type: O

Occupation: 2nd Year at Night Raven College

Dorm: Pomefiore

Personality: Curious, creative, adventurous, smart, bright, happy, friendly, cheerful, open minded and shy sometimes

Languages: Norwegian & Japanese

Studying languages: French & Spanish

Relatives: Sun (mother), Moon (father), Opal (Older sister), Nova (???)

Crush: Vil Schoenheit

Hobbies: singing and spells

Favorite Food: unknown

Strengths: Mannered, responsible, kind, freewill, fun, supporter, and challenged

Flaws: Daydream, stubborn, sometimes gets herself in trouble, not asking for help, distraction, doubts, awkward, lies, habits and childish sometimes

Any scars, birthmarks, etc: none

Trivia:

-During daytime when she’s alone, she speaks to her mother the sun. Telling her adventurous days and her friends. Along with opal.

-After the split as nova, she can no longer hear or communicate her father. The moon. Only she could hear her mother, the sun.

-Right handed

-Sometimes Cyra tap in her dark powers, she calls them the reverse chant which it connect to opals powers. However it goes dark, forbidden and dangerous. Simular to nova’s power before the split. She can’t control it thus opal helps her control it. Using her black rock chant. Only use her reverse chant on dangerous situation.

-Extrovert

-Sense her sisters presents with her sun stone necklace.

-In magic, she usually control elemental powers like fire, earth, and a bit of dark. Not too much or her inner dark powers takes over. Tried to learn water and ice but failed.

-Loves anything that has to do with fluffy stuff

-Animal lover

-Hidden power, healing. No wand required.

-Both Cyra and Opal don’t discuss their past to no one, their hidden powers, Nor as nova.

———

Opal and Cyra’s Background: The tear of the sun and moon, falls into earth and creates one human being. They call her “nova”. Nova was curious about everything she sees, touches, everything. She communicates the sun and the moon about what she learned, about things she sees, her feelings, everything!! Every village she goes to, people welcome her with open arms, along with that she learns about the world, people, cultural, magic, everything. However this price were the sun and the moon emerge their powers into one is quite, dangerous. While growing up, her powers gets stronger and not easy to control. One day while helping a few villagers on farming, all of the sudden her powers starts to go haywire and burn the stock. A few homes, injuring people. Nova was devastated and was crying apologetically for all the damage she’s done. Every villager was in rage and kicked her out, she grab her stuff and ran off in fright. Words spread fast and every villager home, are in fear or angered. Calling her witch. “No need a witch in our home, you are cursed.” The bright women lost trust in people, weep for this pain to go away.

Meanwhile the sun and moon felt guilt that her daughter are going some difficult times. Blaming at theirselves for creating a life that they wanna share in a world we’re other life forms could enjoy. “I learned so much about the humans while observing them from the distance. I wanted to be part of their world but I can’t. I am a planet. A moon. And the sun. We gave a piece of us to that world and everyone is afraid of it...” moon said. “The world is not ready for that but I don’t want our daughter to suffer. What if we split the powers into two?” The moon looks at the sun in surprise: “Two? Would that problem be worse for our daughter?” “No, It’s overwhelmed that she has to hold our powers but if she split into two. One will hold the sun and the other the moon.” The moons is flabbergasted by the sun response but has a problem. “If we proceed of doing that, would her memories fade? And one or the other won’t hear us?” While thinking out loud, they didn’t notice their daughter was hearing the conversation, “I’ll do it. I don’t want people to hate me or cause any danger to anyone. If this is the only way I’ll do it. Please mother. Please father. I want this nightmare to end.” In conclusion, the sun and moon agreed and asked nova to chant for the split to start: “

“Listen to my voice. We are the sun and moon. We want the world in peace,

till the end of time..We will balance the chains. With our powers of light and dark. Our fate rely on me,till the end of time.

Till the end of time.”

The chant worked, before splitting she calls her sun half Cyra Lily Stone. And her Moon half Opal Lucine Stone. “Remember our memories, don’t let it fade. Be peace and no harm. Wise but no evil. It will be a struggle but please be together as one....” she splits and two emerges. The moon speaks to her daughters: “Opal, your sister won’t hear me. And so as Cyra speaking to your mother. We don’t want you to suffer no more. Second chance of life we gave. Be wise but no evil.” Opal looks up to her father: “We won’t screw this up, we’ll have a better life and make you and mother proud!!” Cyra looks up and speaks: “What opal said, we’ll control it!!” After the talk opal and Cyra got up and walked away. Put their horrible memories passed them and moved on. Ended up finding a home to stay and re try to fit in. Opal was interested in English literature so she pursuit her career. While Cyra was in home school, Opal was teaching her everything what she’s has to know and importantly controlling each other’s powers. 7 years passed and opal received a masters degree on literature and started to looking for a job soon as possible. While Cyra was wondering around the village looking at stuff her eye catches. Opal met this man named Ashton Vargas outside her hometown while searching for a job, he recommended night raven college since according to him, his headmaster are hiring some staff who are either have a bachelors or a masters degree on any teaching majors he’s looking for. Opal accepted the offer and went to college to talk to the headmaster. She got accepted and had to move in. She told Cyra the news but Cyra wanted to come. Opal Lied to her saying it’s private college and won’t allow outsiders to visit. She left with her belongings but Cyra followed her. Cyra got distracted and when she looked back, her sister is gone. While trying to remain calm, something knocked her off . Leaving her unconscious, once waking up...her life is about to get more interesting and adventurous. As for opal: students to teach and headaches.

Loading Coffin....

Opal & Cyra Outfits~

#twisted wonderland oc #stone sisters #opal lucine stone #cyra lily stone #Will add Chibis Overbolts and Outfits later on #twst #twst oc #Twisted Wonderland OC

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betweengenesisfrogs · 6 years

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Toward a Critical Re-Evaluation of Homestuck, or: A Prayer for Andrew Hussie

(aka Off-the-Cuff Homestuck Thoughts #7)

This might be a manifesto.

Since the ending sequence of Homestuck in April 2017, and even well after the establishment of a canon aftermath for its main characters and the confirmation that there will be a further Epilogue, I've seen a sentiment among Homestuck bloggers and the Homestuck fandom that I find very frustrating, one that persists well into 2018.

The sentiment goes something like this:

"Homestuck is a meaningless work by a flippant, irreverent prankster (Andrew Hussie) who dropped his commitment to the story at the last second, and made fun of his fans for expecting there to be a meaningful ending. Furthermore, he continues to harm and belittle his fandom in the creation of Hiveswap, and only continues his work on Homestuck-related projects to exploit his audience."

Not only is this idea wrong, I find it disingenuous at best, malicious at worst, and actively detrimental to an understanding of Homestuck as a work. While it comes from an understandable frame of mind - the feeling of disappointment many of us felt at the end of Homestuck's pretty short and to-the-point Act 7 - it actively ignores the main reason *why* that ending came across as disappointing at first glance. Namely, it ignores the role serial storytelling - a necessity at that point in Homestuck's existence - played in creating misleading impressions of where the story was going among fans. Furthermore, it completely ignores how well the story arc of Act 6 Homestuck generally works when taken as a whole.

It demonstrates a very shallow understanding of Andrew Hussie as a storyteller, conflating his in-story persona with the actuality of a creator who demonstrates nothing but work ethic and commitment to his creation.

It ignores what actually happened with Hiveswap, which is that despite a frankly horrific set of circumstances that nearly prevented it from being made, Hussie was nonetheless able to gather a small team to create a game studio that delivered on every promise it ever made to Kickstarter backers and created a pretty solid, fun, and novel adventure game, with more installments and a rich evolving mystery on the way.

Finally, this interpretation completely misunderstands the way the idea of narrative is being used in the ending of Homestuck, not as a cudgel to beat off fan desire for thematic completion, but as a tool for delivering a thematically powerful narrative that draws parallels between the specter of Lord English and the way stories themselves are used as tools of oppression.

Homestuck isn't perfect, and neither is Andrew Hussie. But by and large, this popular perception of him is flat-out wrong, an exaggeration of whatever flaws he brought to the creation of Homestuck, and contributes to a misunderstanding of its ending. Indeed, I'd argue it is, in some ways, part of why Homestuck has rarely been acknowledged as a significant work of art. To understand why Homestuck is important, first we need to be able to acknowledge what it achieved.

Here's a daring notion: overall, Homestuck was and is pretty damn good.

Here are some reasons.

1) Being Forced To Tell the Story Serially Over a Slow Drip Messed With the Experience for the Reader

I can hear the bristling now. "I hated the ending," I can hear some of you saying. "It left me cold and unsatisfied, and damn it, that's an objective fact. Who are you to take that away from me?"

Actually, I'm not trying to take that away from you. Like, you're allowed to have been disappointed. I just want to point out that it might be a better ending than you gave it credit for, and explain why it came off the way it did. If you're interested in hearing me out, read on. You should know that initially, I was disappointed, too.

But after rereading Act 6 and the whole narrative leading up to that ending? I changed my mind. Rereading, I found it pretty satisfying, making a great deal of sense, capitalizing on major themes, and delivering a meaningful ending for most, if not all characters

I'll talk more about *what* I think the narrative is doing in a bit, but here's why I think it was misread, by me among many others.

Serial reading fucks with the quality of a story experience. I feel like this is a pretty uncontroversial statement. The problem with serial storytelling is that stories build on themselves, drawing on themes and ideas from earlier on to make a powerful build-up to moments of catharsis. This is the nature of story and character development. However if you're getting a story as little bits and pieces, it is much more difficult for this to happen. You lose track of these threads.

More dangerously, it's very easy to develop a set of expectations around a narrative while it's in pause mode. Little moments - intended to be part of a larger flow of ideas - completely dominate one's thinking for as long as they hold the stage. This is a common thing in fandom, especially webcomic fandoms, who deal with the slowest-drip narratives. Again and again I've seen expectations generated during webcomics' hiatuses lead fans to disappointment with the results, simply because those results have nothing to do with what was expected during one of those moments of downtime. El Goonish Shive, Sluggy Freelance, Gunnerkrigg Court - I've seen it in webcomic fandoms again and again, that the dashing of narrative expectations seemed like a betrayal of the story when read at a drip pace, but made perfect sense when viewed as a whole story.

This is not a problem Hussie was ever unaware of. Here’s an excellent discussion (among many) from one of his early Q&As that takes on the problem in detail:

The longer I do this the more I'm struck by how radical the difference is between the experiences of reading something archivally vs. serially, both for the reader, and the author if he's prone to sampling reactions frequently as I do. For the reader especially, I think the experience of day to day reading is so dramatically different, they might as well be reading a different story altogether.

The main difference is the amount of space between events the reader has, which can be filled with massive amounts of speculation, analysis, predictions, and something I guess you could call "opinion building", which can have both positive and negative effects. On the positive side, these readers become more closely engaged with the material than archival readers can be, zeroing in on details and insights which might be overlooked otherwise. On the negative side, I think that excess mental noise the space between pages allows can potentially be a bit suffocating, and put a strain on the experience the material was intended to deliver.

The archival reader always has the luxury of moving on to the next page, regardless of how he reacts to certain events, and thus can be more impassive about it. That internal cacophony isn't given time to build, and if there are reservations about a string of events, whether due to shocking revelations, or questions over the narrative merit of something, or really any form of dissatisfaction, all he has to do is keep clicking to see how it all fits together, and can make a more complete judgment with hindsight.

He goes on to discuss a specific example of how this played out for the readers:

The recent pages [the start of Horrorstuck] had me particularly conscious of the nature of serial delivery. [Eridan's betrayal] was rolled out over the course of a weekend, first with Feferi, then Kanaya. When Fereri dies, this registers as one extremely dramatic event. Cue the waiting, speculating, worrying and all that. When Kanaya dies a day or so later, it registers as a second dramatic event! Again the scrutiny begins which the space allows. Is this all too much? How do I feel about this narrative turn? Is this setting a trend for a bloodbath? Does that serve any purpose? The reader projects into the future, does a little unwitting fanfiction writing in his head, and may not like what he sees! All this activity becomes the basis for opinion building, which is sort of the emergence of an official position on matters, good or bad, which is only able to flourish in the slow-motion intake of the story. That official position can be a very stubborn thing, especially when it's negative, and seriously textures the way additional developments are regarded. It's really hard to shake a reader off an entrenched position on a matter, even when it was formed with an incomplete picture.

Reading the same events in the archive is quite different. Very little of that inner monologue takes shape. And while the events are still shocking, and the reader may raise his eyebrows a mile high, he then simply lowers them and keeps reading. In fact, because of the reading pace, I would suggest these two deaths actually register as only ONE DRAMATIC EVENT! One guy snaps and kills two characters. In the flow of straight-through reading especially, it is quite startling, tension-building, and can only serve to propel the reader into further pages, at a pace which suspends the experience-compromising (augmenting??) play-by-play.

Hussie would return to this topic again and again, including here and here and here and h8re.

This is in incredibly valuable insight for anyone who creates stories over the long term, especially webcomics. You may or may not agree that Homestuck's finale is well-executed, but I think it's hard to escape the fact that the response to Homestuck's ending, indeed, to most of Act 6, was hugely influenced by these factors. Why? Because the experience of Act 6 and 7 was more affected by hiatuses and the speculation problems they create than any other part of Homestuck.

It's hard to remember these days, but one thing that Homestuck was known for from about 2010-2013 was its absolutely preposterous rate of updates. I'm pretty sure that *was* the initial fuel for the fire that made Homestuck a huge fandom. What other website could you go to see a huge chunk of a story drop on you so regularly? No other webcomic had people using Update Checkers, programs designed to check the RSS feed of Homestuck and tell you within the minute that it had updated so you could check it out before your friends spoiled everything to you. What other webcomic ever needed such a thing? But the first era of Homestuck fandom was predicated on the idea that the comic would update every couple of days, sometimes once a day, sometimes *multiple times in the same day*. No wonder it got so huge so fast. It was an experience unlike almost anything else out there.

Around 2013 this began to change. Homestuck began having large hiatuses, the famous "pauses," and though Hussie indicated the story was working its way towards the finale, it ultimately took until the 2016 anniversary to complete.

Interestingly, it's around 2013 or so that we started seeing frustration with Homestuck break out into a large phenomenon, with many people arguing that the comic had stopped being good, and it's after the largest of these pauses, the Omegapause before the end of Act 6 and Act 7 updates, that we had the famous ending backlash.

The fact that very few people seem to have considered this in their analysis of whether Homestuck is good or not is absolutely staggering to me.

Given these factors, we would expect to see some of the enthusiasm taken out of the Homestuck fandoms during these periods, and strong opinions on where the story should go next, and, lo and behold, that's exactly what we see. The common sentiment is that Homestuck "stopped being fun during Act 6." Well, yeah, it's a lot less fun to have a comic that updates rarely than a comic that updates with loads of content very, very often. That doesn't necessarily mean the content got worse. And yet I see no one asking if this altered our perception of the story.

2) Serial Reading Problems Are Worsened In an Experimental, Twisty Story

This hiatus problem was exacerbated by the nature of Hussie's storytelling. I'd describe his writing style as "affectionate teasing": testing and pushing readers' boundaries, aiming for strong emotional reactions, constantly working to defy and mess with expectations, but ultimately working towards a rich character-based story. Hussie's work whiplashes between humor, horror, worldbuilding, action - it's intense and disconcerting at first, but once you get familiar with it, you see these that all these elements build toward a coherent whole.

I'd argue that this storytelling style is *uniquely* well-suited to long-form reading and endangered by drip-feed reading.

Because when you read piece by piece, you experience whiplash slowly, and that’s not everybody’s kink. Pieces that are meant to work together take on a different tone when read on their own. As discussed above, continuous events seem like separate events when read on their own, and this creates a *false* expectation of where the narrative is going. Furthermore, it's not as much fun to be teased or messed with in slow motion. The expectation that there will be satisfaction and resolution disappears when the current update is all you can think about. This, not a deficit in storytelling, is what created the feeling of "Homestuck’s not fun anymore." But it was the same affectionate, gently teasing storytelling as ever. But this only comes out when the work is re-read.

This is exactly what happened in Act 6 Homestuck. Events seemed like they would go on forever, when in real story terms, they went on for moments. Take the notorious Trickster "arc" (I can't even call it an arc - it’s more of a sequence if anything). Today it's remembered as an unendurable gauntlet of Hussie pushing buttons. The reality of it is, though, if you read through it, it's like Hussie pushing buttons for all of five minutes, like half a chapter from a novel. Literally all it is is: The Gang Gets High on Magic Candy > They Do Stupid Things > Blackout. Mostly it's an excuse for some serious character development *afterward* as the Alphas discuss the bad decisions that led them to this place. It may or not be perfect, but it's definitely a lot more reasonable when you see it's a quick tangent.

Act 6 is full of things like this: events remembered as horrible slogs that are really quite brief in retrospect.

This is brought home when you consider that events in Act 5 – hell, even Acts 3 and 4 – also brought on strong negative responses from the fandom - it's just that they were quickly buried under a story that was quickly moving on to other things. Here are some strong fan outrages from those days I can name off the top of my head:

--This interlude with the trolls is too long, nobody cares about the trolls, Hussie has abandoned the human kids --Nobody cares about troll romance, switch back to the kids --Jade hasn’t been seen onscreen for ages --Vriska’s creation of Bec Noir shows that she is too powerful a character, she will never face comeuppance --John is dead again and Vriska killed him??? --Killing Feferi, Tavros and Kanaya? That’s too many deaths --I thought Feferi was supposed to unite the troll races! You’re telling me that’s not going to happen? --Kanaya is dead??? Fuck that --Scratching the timeline? What, Hussie, you’re going to reset everything and ruin the story? --Equius should have gone out with more dignity, this is a betrayal of his fans --Nepeta shouldn’t have been murdered, this is a betrayal of her fans --Gamzee used to be cute, now he’s a murder machine, this is a betrayal of his fans --We never found out what happened between Gamzee and Karkat? Why won’t the narrative switch back and tell us? --Nobody cares about Doc Scratch --Nobody cares about these stupid Ancestors, switch back to the trolls --Vriska is DEAD? This is a betrayal of her fans

And so on. Reading Hussie’s old Formspring archives is a graduate class in this era of Homestuck fan frustration.

And yet today Act 5 is universally remembered as brilliant, thought of by many as “the time when Homestuck was great.” In my book, while Act 6 does take on different themes than Act 5 (focusing more on the protagonists’ psychology and failures), and thus may not be to everyone’s taste, the biggest difference between the two is that during Act 5, the twists and turns of the story were thought of as part of a unified whole, because the story was barreling along too fast for these complaints to stick around for long.

Given that Hussie has always been aware of the challenges of serial vs archival storytelling, I feel like the relentless output of the first five acts was in part an attempt to mitigate those problems. As if by shoveling content into the mouth of the behemoth, he could propitiate the ravenous fandom horrorterror and thereby stave off the descent of the Infernal Internet Speculation-Expectation Monster that was prophesized to devour all.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t stave it off forever, and lo, in 2013 did the IISEM descend with its glistening tentacle teeth, IA, IA, IA! CHOMP CHOMP.

It astonishes me that in some quarters folks talk about the 2013-2016 pauses as if they were something Hussie wanted, when by all evidence he tried desperately to avoid them up until that point. I don’t need to explain that these hiatuses had to do with restarting the whole process of creating Hiveswap and building a game studio from scratch, right? I don’t need to explain that he got screwed over and these were circumstances outside his control, right? Let’s assume we’re on the same page there. If not, I suggest you look into the matter before assuming these hiatuses had anything to do with creator apathy.

After a certain point, Hussie faced a difficult choice. Unable to keep up the rapid-pace storytelling, he could change the storytelling to make it suit a serial reader, or he could focus on making the story the best it could be for an archive reader.

I think he went for the better option: aiming for the archive reader. If you’re going to argue that he should have put the emphasis on the serial reader: which serial reader are we talking about here? The one who started following in Homestuck in 2010, like me? The one who started after Horrorstuck, and viewed it, but not the end of Act 5, as a complete whole? The one who joined during late Act 6? How the hell would you decide that? Whose experience is the one to privilege?

The only option that really makes sense is to aim for the version of the story that will be around the longest and experienced by the most people: the archive that is the complete story of Homestuck.

Ultimately, I don’t think he could have changed his style of storytelling anyway, and to do so would have been to lose the combination of humor, madness, and surprises that brought us all to Homestuck in the first place. Forced to reckon with a difficult situation, he focused on making his kind of story the best that it could be, and I think Homestuck is better for it.

Given his awareness of the problem as expressed above, I’m sure Hussie knew proceeding over the long term would stoke a lot of resentment in the fandom. But he went ahead and did it anyway, because his goal was not to live up to a certain set of expectations. His goal was to tell what he saw as the best possible version of the story. I have an immense respect for him for that.

3) The Last Pause is the Deepest (or: Omegapause Killed the Character Development Star)

The final hiatus problem I want to point to is that in terms of the narrative arc of Homestuck, the final pause, the Omegapause, came at the most inopportune time for readers to get a sense of the conclusion of that narrative.

Basically, many character arcs in Homestuck were concluded *before* Collide and Act 7. Before the Omegapause. Indeed, Hussie brought many long-running arcs to an end in a very satisfying way during the “conversation” sequence before the final fight, from Dave’s long-needed conversation with Dirk about Bro to Rose’s finally getting to meet and befriend Roxy, to Game Over!Terezi and (Vriska’s) reunion. In narrative terms, Collide was not the climax, even if it might have been perceived to be. The climax was the Retcon sequence preceding the conversations – the desolation of Game Over, our surviving protagonists’ despair, then victory in the form of negotiating with the Denizens, representatives of Skaia, to create a timeline in which victory may take place, both in game terms and emotional terms. The conversation before the final battle showed us an emotional victory – victory in game terms was really just icing on the cake, or an echo of that emotional victory.

The trouble is, having a long pause before the final battle sequences created the false perception that the conversation was merely the prelude to the climax: that, in fact, the climax had not yet taken place. For us serial readers, it was easy to conclude that there was further character development to come.

Well, in some ways there was, and in some ways there wasn’t. Dirk and Dave got to have another big moment in Collide that drove their themes home, while Rose and Roxy had basically already done their thing earlier and just got to fight alongside each other. Meanwhile Vriska and Caliborn’s arcs really culminated in Act 7, and some, like John’s and Ret-Terezi’s, were complicated and continued by the Credits aftermath and probably won’t be brought to a final end until the Epilogue. There’s a degree of variation, which I enjoy. Collide does serve some functions: characters who were at an emotional distance from each other (for instance Jane and Jake), got to fight alongside each other and start building back their friendships. Overall, though, the bulk of emotional entanglements got resolved in that conversation, making the Retcon the load-bearing piece of Homestuck’s climax.

This is why the Omegapause was the most dangerous pause: because it built up an expectation that things would further develop from there with new entanglements and complications, instead of aiming towards a tying-off of plot elements into a conclusion.

I remember what *I thought* the post-Omegapause sequence was going to be: a showdown between the kids and Lord English as he entered the game session through Bec Noir, Spades Slick and Lord Jack. I expected there would be a twist, and I expected one or more of our protagonists would die. I was thrown for a loop when I realized the story had basically been almost over, with no last twist, no “secret final battle” of kids vs LE in sight.

But as I reread the ending of Act 6, I realized: that would have been so much stupider than what actually happened. The fact that the kids don’t directly face LE and Vriska does is one of the most brilliant parts of the ending, and on the reread I rapidly fell in love with the Homestuck’s conclusion. What had thrown me off was the fact that I developed my expectations during a period where it looked like we were further from the end.

But in retrospect, Hussie had been saying all along that we were very close to the conclusion – it was just, at that moment, very easy to get the wrong impression.

Rarely do I see anyone taking anything like this into account.

I do think we could have benefited from more character development after the pause, if for no other reason than to overcome these problems and make the victory feel a little more grounded, and I do feel like certain characters (Jane comes to mind) got more limited and abbreviated endings. But these are minor points for me in the overall arc of Homestuck’s narrative, which in my experience establishes its conclusion very, very well.

4) Homestuck’s Ending Is a Glorious Queer Gnostic Account of Escaping from Narrative Oppression (and Yes, Virginia, it Has Character Arcs)

Okay, so I’ve written a lot about *what* I love about the ending of Homestuck elsewhere, going on for pages and pages, which you can read here and here. For now, let me just attempt (as absurd as it is) a quick summary.

Homestuck in Act 6 parallels many different motifs to drive home the idea that escaping from Lord English’s domain is an escape from a cosmic oppression, and serves as a metaphor for escaping and defying real-life oppressions and hegemonies. These motifs include Gnosticsm, queer identity, pluralism, and a metafictional examination of the controlling role of the narrative that is Homestuck itself.

Gnosticism is an ancient early alternate version of Christianity that posits a false reality created by a false creator, the Demiurge Yaldabaoth, who rules over human beings but whose domain it is the Gnostic’s quest to escape. The Demiurge styles himself a Lord God (often the very same one from Judaism and more mainstream Christianity) and an artist but is in fact incompetent and limited in comparison with the true harmonious reality. That he was able to create such a false world was a cosmic accident caused by angel-like beings known as Aeons, who existed perfect symmetrical pairs until an asymmetry caused Yaldabaoth’s creation. Sophia, the asymmetrical Aeon is our path back to that perfection. Furthermore, the false world is the world of flesh and matter and material things, while the true world is the world of ideas, symbols and archetypes, a place of divine Platonic form. By knowledge (gnosis) we become our true selves and are set free. Gnosticism is anti-authoritarian, anti-patriarchal, and devoted to each human being’s quest to connect to the divine on their own terms.

Gnostic motifs proliferate everywhere in Homestuck, especially Act 6, from such chat handles as GardenGnostic, TimaeusTestified, and TipsyGnostalgic to basically everything about Calliope and Caliborn, including and especially their role in the finale. Act 7 depicts Caliborn as trapped within the realm he is created, destined for power but ultimately doomed to it, destroyed in the perfect moment where Calliope, his counterpart, brings his domain to an end.

Caliborn’s realm is the sequence of time loops and set of worlds that brought Lord English into being, but it’s also the narrative Homestuck that depicts those events and worlds. He complains about the narrative Homestuck, argues with its author, and tries to make his own version, just as a demiurge would. (Secretly, because of his cosmic influence, he’s more of an influence than he realizes. He places limits and boundaries on these worlds in the form of the narratives he perpetuates, and is obsessed with sexist ideas, exploitation, and themes of masculinity, importance and power. That the heroes escape this realm in which he has control is also them escaping these narratives that have been placed upon them.

This is the sense in which Dave says “we don’t have arcs.” As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s not Hussie rejecting the idea of giving his characters meaningful stories (this is largely a false impression generated by the Omegapause weirdness), as shown by the fact that Dave himself has one of the best, strongest arcs in the whole story. What Dave means, and what Dave’s arc is about, is that he had to let go of the false ideas, false narratives placed on him by the world (Lord English’s world, the Demiurge’s world) in which he lived. He did this by understanding the abuse he suffered from Bro (a Caliborn-esque figure) was wrong, and by overcoming his internalized homophobia to realize the value of the relationship he’d found with Karkat.

This is a frequent motif in the final pages of Homestuck. Queerness is represented as a way of escaping the patriarchal, conservative God of the Demiurge, and that these revelations about Dave appear in parallel with the final departure from the domain Caliborn controls is no coincidence. Queer relationships and identities build in the ending of Homestuck into what Hussie tongue-in-cheek called “the gay singularity.” This growth in queerness is represented as growth toward meaning, and further queer figures like the non-binary Davepeta appear as idealistic mentors to teach our heroes to understand their cosmic circumstances.

At the same time, the growth from a material world to a world of ideas is represented as the heroes taking on God Tier identities that embody aspects—ideas that are literally the building blocks of the universe. To know yourself as an aspect is to know who you are, and by knowing who you are, you become an idea that is divine. This all takes place at the same time characters grow towards queerness. To know your own queer identity is also to become divine.

And, at the same time, the characters leave the narrative. Everything that was Caliborn’s – his worlds, his time loops and influence— is left behind by the characters as they move into the realm where they are heroes, leaders, and gods. They pass through a door that resembles the weapon that he used, that is his narrative, the weapon shaped like the symbol of Homestuck, the weapon that *is* the narrative Homestuck. It is a weapon against him because he stays behind, on the other side of the door. Lord English can never leave. He’s in the dark pocket of the black hole forever. Caliborn enters a realm that appears to give him power—but he never comes out. He’s trapped by his own limited idea of who he is and what the world should be.

This is a fantastic, culturally resonant, and very Gnostic ending.

And as to Vriska—I’ve seen many people say that Vriska’s retconned revival gives her too much power and agency, but I actually think it strikes the perfect balance. The story understands what she wants. But it’s not on her side. I have a lot more to say about her (perhaps l8r), but here’s the most important thing: Vriska can’t leave, either. She gets what she wants: the ultimate fulfilment of her identity as The Hero. She gets to Kill the Bad Guy. But at a cost she is incapable of recognizing. Like Caliborn, she never gets to go on to be a fulfilled, happy patron of the new universe. She is always on the inside of the door, stuck inside Homestuck. And the fact that we’re asked to observe her breaking off her relationship with Terezi to go out in a blaze of glory? The fact that we’re asked to compare her to another version of herself who’s let go of her ego, whose bond with Terezi is the most important thing in her life? The fact, that in her eyes, she comes up better, but in ours, she comes up short? How incredible is that?

Neither the Hero or the Villain, trapped in their own ideas, trapped by their own ideas, can ever be free.

It’s a pretty good ending, is what I’m saying.

5) Against Apathetic Lazy Troll Hussie

So, back to that perception of Hussie I discussed earlier. The idea that he’s a flippant, irreverent prankster who never cared about bringing his story to a good conclusion.

By now it should be clear why I don’t really buy that line of thinking. The sheer effort put into Homestuck after the pauses began, the level of thematic complexity Homestuck was going for at the end—these belie the idea that he was apathetic or lazy or wanted to piss off his fans. What seems obvious to me was that he was committed. He devoted himself to driving towards an end he was personally satisfied with, whatever anyone else thought of it, and chose to accept the consequences of having to tell it over the long term.

I could see how it might be easy to get the impression that Hussie’s a very frivolous, thoughtless guy, when his in-story self is a ridiculous, flighty orange goofball. But come on. That’s mistaking the persona he uses for comedy with his actual self as a writer. Reading any interview, Q&A session, or discussion with him reveals how much thought he put into every moment of Homestuck, and above all, that he was committed to putting an incredible amount of effort into it from the very beginning.

He was also committed to challenging himself and bettering his work, whether that meant trying new experiments (flash games, new animation styles, splitting panels and dialogue, messing with formatting, letting the villains take over the website, etc., etc., etc…) or rethinking his work to take account of a larger, more diverse perspective, as we saw with the developing queerness and introspection of characters like Dave.

Yet he knew that not all experiments would be received well. He chose to accept that, to not wallow in the familiar but to take on new things regardless of in-the-moment reader reactions. As he put it:

I guess I just believe in sticking to your guns as a creator. It doesn't mean you completely ignore what people have to say or fail to take it under advisement, but pandering and caving into critics for fear of diminished appreciation is the wrong way to go. Staying the course with your vision doesn't mean you'll do everything right, but if included in that vision is serious, concerted exploration, you can only benefit as an artist. Adversaries to this cause should be regarded as villains.

There are two ways to do the "obstinate douche bag" thing as an artist.

One is in vehement defense of stagnation. Some artists I've encountered do this, and it's completely indefensible. It's as low as you can get, creatively speaking.

The other is in vehement defense of exploration. This is just the opposite. This is a posture everyone should strive for, and these artists are the ones people should be most inclined to offer their attention and support.

That's just how I feel about it, and I come from a zero-BS standpoint on it all. This isn't a job for me, and I'll never modify my approach to protect a bottom line. If it was just a job, I guarantee I wouldn't spend every waking hour doing it. It's kind of a strange personal mission I'm on, which I happen to make money from, and that's cool. People are welcome to come along for the ride.

There’s a deep, deep irony to me in the fact that some talk about Act 6 Homestuck like it was a stagnant period in Homestuck’s development, when in fact, it was one of its most creative and experimental periods. This is true both of its structural and visual experiments, where messing with form finally revealed itself to be central to Homestuck’s major themes, and of its storytelling experiments. It’s understandable that diving into the kids’ psychological problems was a shift, and not everyone was down with it, but the very fact it was a shift shows that Hussie was trying new things. It would have been easy for him to stay in a comfortable place doing the same things he did in Act 4 and 5, but instead, he began to ask different questions and take the story someplace new. And honestly? Act 6 took a long time to pay its full dividends, but I loved where we ended up in the end.

(What kept us from enjoying it in the moment? The pauses. Once again the pauses.)

But for me, the thing that most puts the lie to the idea of Lazy Hussie is the sheer fact of Act 6’s existence itself.

Consider how easy it would have been to drop Homestuck completely when things got rough in the middle years. Consider how many webcomic authors would have done just that. I can name many webcomic hiatuses where the webcomic never came back.

But Homestuck did. Not only did it return, it returned spectacularly, scorchingly, with the shocking and dynamic Game Over, with Caliborn’s claymations, with two spectacular, full-length animations, one of them lovingly-hand drawn. It returned with metafictional shenanigans and glorious queer Gnostic themes. Hussie kept going, and kept experimenting all along the way.

This is the furthest thing in the world from laziness.

And the same is true for Hiveswap. It astonishes me how much I’ve heard Hiveswap talked about as a debacle or a betrayal of its fans. Despite having horrible problems dropped on him, the sort that would ruin any other Kickstarter, Hussie spent the next few years working to make sure he met the promises he’d made to his fans. He did.

My dudes, Hiveswap is real. It exists. It delivers on every promise that was made about what it might be: it’s a fun, pretty, point-and-click adventure game telling a new story in the world of Homestuck. It’s creative and clever and updates an old style of gameplay by letting you put things on things to your heart’s content. It’s certainly more accessible than Homestuck, and not yet as structurally complex, but given future installments, there’s plenty of time for it to grow into something rich and thorny. And rather than see this idea go under, from basically nowhere Hussie worked to bring together a small, diverse team of queer artists and creators to make this thing happen.

Again, not exactly laziness.

That’s why it angers me when I see people calling Hiveswap (somehow?) a betrayal of Homestuck fans, or advocating pirating Hiveswap or demanding their money back because it doesn’t live up to some weird set of expectations they placed on it. Maybe during the periods of drought and ambiguous release dates, both for Homestuck and Hiveswap, it made a little sense to be skeptical of Hussie making promises, but now?

It’s basically spitting in the face of a creator who kept working in the most difficult circumstances, and the small, insanely hard-working team who made it possible, over something that they’ve handed to you exactly as you specified right on your doorstep in a gift-wrapped box.

I’m not saying you can’t critique Hussie or his storytelling. He’s definitely a weird dude with a lot of quirks (Which is perhaps the only kind of dude who could have made something as quirky as Homestuck.) I think it’s fair to say he hasn’t always communicated well with the fandom. But the reaction to him these days is totally, ludicrously, out of proportion, beyond anything that would be a useful critique.

A related question is whether Andrew Hussie is burnt out on Homestuck.

Well, maybe?

It’s certainly true that since 2013ish he’s stepped away somewhat from communicating directly with his fans. But 2013 is also the time when Homestuck fandom was at its most massive, its most full of infighting and meaningless arguments, and its most overwhelming to keep up with. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to hear more of his insights, but it’s pretty understandable that he wanted to step back a bit under the circumstances. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s burnt out. I mean, he seems to be living his best life, posing glamorously with his fidget spinners and Minion t-shirts. Not exactly hiding in a cave. Rock on, dude.

If he is burnt out on Homestuck, though, that makes what he’s done with Homestuck and Hiveswap all the more impressive. That he brought them this far, and wants to see them keep going and keep doing well, when he could have let them drop unceremoniously a long time ago. If he’s delegating some of the work to others, all the better. I can think of nothing better for an artist who’s burnt out and ready to move on than to find people he can trust to keep the things he started going into the future, and that, I think is exactly what we have in What Pumpkin, Viz, and Homestuck’s artistic team.

But even to assume that he’s burnt out is to presume a lot about his mental state from some very scant data. By many other indications, he wants to keep engaging with Homestuck. There’s an Epilogue to come—a capstone for those last few ambiguities surrounding the timeline, John and Terezi. And he’s getting the Homestuck books re-published with new commentary through Viz—so maybe that’s where he wants to have his conversations with his audience. And he’s still the creative director of Hiveswap itself. It’s very possible he’s not burned out—if anything, wants to keep building the world he created in Homestuck and seeing where he can take it next.

Ultimately, I think people’s ideas about Andrew Hussie say a lot more about their lingering feelings about the ending of Homestuck—a backlash brought on by the pauses he had to work with—than anything about Hussie himself.

6) The Conversation Around Homestuck

Homestuck is a goddamn triumph.

There are certainly critiques I could make of it. But they pale in light of what Homestuck is: is one of the most rich, genre-bending, experimental, character-driven, hilarious, innovative, metafictional, transcendent, optimistic works on the Internet—to say nothing of how it dwarfs much of the rest of literature.

Ultimately, I think Hussie was right: as an archive, as the story it is from beginning to end, Homestuck stands. It’s a rich, meaningful work with a meaningful finale, and it’s right there to be read by anyone who wants to read it. In that sense, Homestuck was and Homestuck is. It doesn’t really need me to defend it. Nor does Andrew Hussie.

So why did I write all this? Why did I write everything I’ve written here on this blog?

Well, mostly for Homestuck’s readers. For fans like myself.

Because I still see people who came away from Homestuck feeling totally burned and abandoned by its creator, when that was anything but the truth. Because I still see people who feel like they can’t escape an awful negativity about this comic, about the ending of something they passionately loved. I want them to see that it doesn’t have to feel that way.

And because I want Homestuck criticism to be better. Because I see prominent bloggers, some of whom I really respect, taking so little of this stuff into account. I want to see people talk about Homestuck’s place in literature, in internet culture, without discounting how circumstances shaped how it was perceived. I want to get away from a lazy cynicism—that cynicism everywhere online—about whether stories can be meaningful at all. A cynicism that Homestuck is the very antithesis of through its themes of transcendence and hope.

I think for some people, Homestuck is that weird old obsession they cringe at. The ghost of teenage fandoms past. Which is fine. It’s reasonable to want to move on. But it frustrates me when I see the same cynical, cringing attitude affecting how people feel—or feel like they’re allowed to feel without social stigma—about the work Homestuck itself. I’m not interested in cringe culture.

I frankly don’t have time for it when Homestuck’s as good as it is.

Don’t get me wrong, I want Homestuck to be criticized, too. I want to hear what its flaws are. I think that’s also an important part of the conversation. But don’t tell me it’s a pointless, apathetic work, that it’s just the product of laziness. Because we know better than that by now. Because we need a better conversation than that. Don’t tell me that Homestuck doesn’t have Gnostic themes. Tell me how it uses them, and how it could use them better. Don’t tell me Homestuck’s meaningless. Tell me how it strives to be meaningful—because it does, in every aspect of its storytelling—and tell me where it succeeds, and where it fails.

That’s the kind of conversation I want to have about Homestuck.

You may not agree with the things I’ve pointed to here—you may think that Homestuck’s ending is much more flawed than I do. But that’s totally fair. All I want to say is this:

If you were holding off from letting yourself enjoy Homestuck, or if you once enjoyed it and wish you could enjoy it again, or if the experience of the ending left you feeling disappointed and frustrated and burned out…

Give it another read, especially Act 6 and 7.

You might be surprised how much you like what you find.

#homestuck #homestuck ending #homestuck analysis #homestuck criticism #andrew hussie #off-the-cuff homestuck thoughts extravaganza 2017 #now in 2018 #in defense of homestuck #homestuck fandom #understanding homestuck #ending themes #understanding the ending #serial vs archival reading #homestuck is good actually #against lazy cynicsm #towards a better conversation #keep rising

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The Weekend Warrior Home Edition 8/14/20 – SPUTNIK, THE SILENCING, FREELAND, SPREE, THE BAY OF SILENCE

Another week, another batch of movies to get through in hopes there’s one or two worth writing about… and then writing about all of them anyway. (Sigh). I hope there are people reading this, at least. If so, go to the bottom of this column and drop me a line!

Before I get to this week’s movies, I want to give a special congratulatory shout-out to the wonderful Melanie Addington, because this is the final week of the 17th annual Oxford Film Festival. I have to say as someone who regularly covers a couple other bigger festivals, she’s done such an amazing job pivoting to the virtual world, to the point where what usually is a five-day very localized festival turned into a nationwide digital festival that’s been stretched out for 16 weeks! Those bigger festivals like SXSW and Tribeca could take a lesson from Oxford, because what usually are two highly-anticipated festivals every year became a whole lot of nothing thanks to COVID. It’s like they gave up, rolled over and just died. Oxford, meanwhile, has done Zoom QnAs with a lot of the filmmakers and casts from its films to help maintain the community feeling that makes the festival such a great destination for those in-the-know. (I haven’t even gotten into the amazing drive-in screenings or the year-round On Demand program they’ve been having over the past couple months.)

Anyway, OFF ends this week with the world-premiere of a movie that was supposed to open at SXSW, Mario Furlani and Kate McLean’s debut feature FREELAND, starring Krisha Fairchild from Trey Shults’ movie, Krisha. Freeland is a similarly strong indie r drama, this one starring Ms. Fairchild as Davi, a black market marijuana farmer in Humboldt County, Norther California, who sees her way of life changing when she’s forced to go legal after California legalizes marijuana. Instead, these changes might run her out of business. It’s a beautifully-shot (Furlani is also the cinematographer) character drama that spotlights Fairchild giving another memorable performance, surrounded by an equally excellent cast that includes Lily Gladstone from Certain Women. I hope a good distributor like IFC or Magnolia will scoop this up for release, as I think it’s an interesting look into the pot business from a unique perspective. I also think it could do VERY well at the Indie Spirits. You can watch Freeland for a couple more days (at least) with a QnA with cast and crew on Thursday night right here.

Also, check out the Eventive site for the final week line-up which includes a TON of shorts. (Be mindful, that some of the content, specifically The Offline Playlist, will only be watchable if you’re in Mississippi.)

Also starting this week on Thursday is the 5th Annual Dallas-based Women Texas Film Festival (aka WTxFF), also going virtual this year, which I don’t really know that much about, but it’s run by my friend, Justina Walford, and she generally knows her shit when it comes to movies. Its mission pledge is right there in the title, but all the movies in the festival have a woman in at least one creative role. You can check out the full list of movies playing here, although they are geoblocked to Texas unfortunately. The festival’s series of panels and QnAs, though, can be watched anywhere in the United States, and those should be good.

Let’s get to the regular releases….

This week’s “Featured Flick” is Russian filmmaker Egor Abramenko’s SPUTNIK (IFC Midnight), a sci-fi thriller taking place in 1983 after an incident the Russian spaceship Orbit-4 that leaves one of the cosmonauts in detention after the death of his commander. Oksana Akinshina (who was in The Bourne Supremacy) plays Tatyana Klimova, a psychologist sent to study the surviving cosmonaut, Konstantin Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov), and she learns that he brought back something with him from space.

I was a little worried about this movie, only because the opening reminded me so much of my experience watching the original Russian film Solaris so many years ago. Its quizzical opening in space leads to Akinshina’s character being introduced in a way that’s so slow and talkie that I worried about what I should expect from the movie as a whole. Thankfully, about 20 minutes in, we meet the creature that’s seemingly come down from space inside the cosmonaut, and it immediately changes the very nature of the film.

I don’t want to spoil too much about why the movie gets so interesting, because it’s not non-stop creature kills, although the movie does get quite exciting every time this creature emerges, particularly when it’s being fed various Russian convicts. Even so, the film always remains fairly cerebral about the creature’s origins and its relationship to the cosmonaut, who abandoned a child before his fateful space accident. Adding to the grey area about whether Tatyana should ally herself with Konstantin is her supervising officer, played by Fedor Bondarchuk, who clearly wants to use the creature as a weapon, knowing that both Konstantin and his “other” only trusts Tatyana, so they all need her.

Needless to say, the creature design is absolutely fantastic, and the comparisons this movie is going to get to Alien are quite apt, because the creature is on par with the xenomorph. I only wish I could see it better since it only comes out in the dark, and watching a movie that plays with light like this one does is just not conducive to watching on a laptop. (In fact, if you’re in a position to see Sputnik in a theater, even a drive-in, and you’re not averse to subtitles, I’d recommend going that route.)

Sputnik might fool you at first into expecting something in the vein of the original Solaris. In fact, it’s more in line with The Invisible Man, a creature feature that explores one man’s inner demons through the lens of science fiction. This probably would have been a better Venom movie than the one we actually got.

Jamie Lannister himself, Nicolaj Costar-Waldau stars in THE SILENCING (Saban Films) the English language debut of Belgian filmmaker Robin Pront (The Ardennes), a dark action-thriller set in the rural area of Echo Falls where a serial killer is hunting and killing young women and girls.

Robin Pront’s The Silencing is usually the type of movie I’d enjoy, if only I haven’t seen the exact same movie so many times before. I wasn’t sure whether it’s Costar-Waldau’s alcoholic hunter Rayburn Swanson, whose daughter disappeared years earlier, or it was cause of Annabelle Wallis, the town’s sheriff, Alice Gustafson, whose troubled brother Brooks (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) is caught up enough in the towns drug issues to act as the movie’s second-act red herring. Throw in the Native American aspect of the movie, and you’re right back at Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River, which was just a much better version of this movie all around.

Adding to the lack of originality is the fact that there are now so many television shows about serial killers, which is a shame since Pront’s previous film showed so much promise but also suffered from similar issues. Costar-Waldau gives a credible performance, maybe slightly better than Wallis, but we’ve seen this movie so many times before that even trying to throw in a twist or two goes awry since no one ever commits. The major plot twist about halfway in has an opportunity to change everything but instead, it’s negated mere minutes later.

Slow and grim, The Silencing suffers from being an overused genre that’s been done so much better before. It’s already been playing on DirecTV but will be in select theaters, On Demand and Digital this Friday.

Next up is the thriller THE BAY OF SILENCE (Vertical Entertainment), starring Claes Bang from The Square as Will, whose girlfriend and baby momma Rosalind (Olga Kurylenko) vanishes with their twin daughters and baby son, and her father Milton (Brian Cox) seems to know more than he’s telling. The film is written and produced by British actor Caroline Goodall (who has a small role in this one), adapted from Lisa St. Aubin de Teran's 1986 novel and directed by Dutch filmmaker Paula van der Oest, who has made some decent films like Black Butterflies and the Oscar-nominated Zus & Zo.

We meet Will and Ros as they’re having a romantic moment in the titular bay in Luguria, Italy, and after a few odd occurrences, Ros vanishes with her twin girls and the baby boy they had together. It doesn’t take long for Will to find her, but she seems to have gone insane, and Will needs to find out what happened.

Honestly, it’s not worth getting too deep into this movie’s plot, not so much due to spoilers, but more because there are just so many WTF moments that happen out of the blue, and then the next moment they’re forgotten. For whatever reason, the movie just doesn’t allow any of the tension or mystery to build, and even the most horrificly grim plot turn is handled so matter-of-factly.

There’s no question that van der Oest is a fine filmmaker, something you can tell from the general look of the movie, but the pacing and tons is generally all over the place as nothing happens and then a LOT happens. Bang’s decent performance is countered by a lot of overacting from Kulryenko, and while Cox plays a much bigger role in the story than you might expect, his scenes do very little to elevate the film’s plodding tone.

The Bay of Silence is a highly uneven and bland thriller that tries to offer a twist a minute with very of them ever really connecting, instead feeling grim and tedious and like a lot of wasted potential. Oddly, it feels more original than The Silencing above but just doesn’t come together even as well.

Where do I even begin with Eugene Kotlyarenko’s SPREE (RLJE Films) except that it stars Stranger Thing’s Joe Keery as Kurt Kunkle “of Kunkle’s World,” a social media vlog where he tries to get viewer’s attention and likes. He finally decides to go on a killing spree (get it?) while picking up passengers in his car ride service Spree (see?), until he encounters a stand-up comic (Sasheer Zamata) who fights back.

Listen, I understand fine why a movie like Spree might get made, since it’s meant to be relevant to the youngsters, who are much like Kurt, totally obsessed with their own social media and getting attention. The idea of some kid becoming a serial killer just to draw more attention to himself is not exactly incredible. I found Kurt so annoying that I didn’t think I would ever be able to have any empathy for him, and I was right.

We basically watch Kurt driving around and killing various people, most of them pretty horrible, granted, but Keery comes off more like a bargain-basement Christian Bale in American Psycho. Zamata is generally the best part of the movie, which is why the last third starts to get past some of the movie’s earlier problems to become more about an actual influencer showing Kurt how it’s done. (Zamata’s “SNL” castmate Kyle Mooney can’t really do much to make their scenes together funnier, since it’s just another sleazeball hitting on her.)

David Arquette also has a few funny scenes as Kurt’s father, but what’s probably gonna throw a lot of people off and make or break the movie is that so much of it is made to look like it was filmed on a smartphone, complete with running commentary from the viewers that you’re supposed to read, and presumably enjoy? Me, I just found it annoying.

Spree is gonna be one of those love-it-or-hate-it movies depending on which side of the age gap you’re on. To me, it just seemed way too obvious and not something I could possibly recommend to anyone over 19.

Okay… Documentary time!

I really wanted to like Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ BOYS STATE (A24/Apple TV+), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and received Special Jury Prize at SXSW Film Festival, but it’s a pollical doc that deals with a subject that just didn’t interest me very much. It follows a thousand teen boys from Texas who come together to form a government from the ground up, and that’s the problem right there. The fact this is all about guys. I just couldn’t get interested enough to watch the whole thing since it seemed obvious how it would turn out. Boys State was supposed to open in select cities last month but instead, it will be on Apple TV+ Friday after getting a few drive-in preview screenings, cause that’s just the way things are going these days.

Willa Kammerer’s Starting at Zero: Reimagining Education in America (Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation/Abramorama), which will open in Virtual Cinema Friday after a Virtual Premiere tonight. It seems very timely, as it deals with investing in high-quality early child education. Just as timely is Muta’Ali Muhammad’s Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn (HBO Documentary Films), which premieres on HBO tonight, looking at the events around the 1989 murder of teenager Yusuf Hawkins by a group of white men in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Erik Nelson’s doc Apocalypse ’45 (Discovery/Abramorama), which will be in theaters this Friday and on Discovery over Labor Day weekend, is about the end of World War II, using never-before-seen footage with narration by 24 men who were there for it.

Quiver Distribution has two movies out this Friday, both which could probably be seen as young adult movies – not really a genre I like very much, so your mileage may vary?

ENDLESS from director Scott Speer (Midnight Sun) is a romantic drama starring Alexandra Shipp (X-Men: Apocalypse) as graphic novelist Riley, whose boyfriend, Nick Hamilton’s Chris gets stranded in limbo after he’s killed in a car crash. Taking the blame for his death on herself, Riley struggles to find ways to reconnect with Chris in the afterlife.

I wasn’t sure if this movie would be for me, since I’m not a very big fan of young adult movies generally. So many of them have hard-to-believe high-concept premises involving two lovelorn teens – Midnight Sun being a good example. Unlike so many of these movies, Endless isn’t based on a popular book, and I was a little worried about Speer’s skills as a director and whether he could avoid turning this into a very obvious teen version of Ghost. There’s a little bit of that but on a whole, the movie isn’t a complete waste of time. For instance, Shipp is decent in this sort of dramatic role, probably better than Hamilton, and it avoids getting too weepy thanks to DeRon Horton’s animated Jordan, who befriends Chris in limbo and quickly becomes the movie’s frequent saving grace.

Otherwise, the movie feels like any other soppy teen romantic drama, being very predicable with way too much overacting, particularly from Fammke Janssen as Chris’ Mom. Even though the relationship between Shipp and Hamilton works fine, unless you’re on board with the whole concept of the latter spending the entire film as a spirit, you’re going to have a hard time fully enjoying the movie.

In Bobby Roth’s PEARL, Larsen Thompson plays the title character, a 15-year-old piano prodigy whose mother Helen (Sarah Carter from The Flash) is murdered by her stepfather (Nestor Carbonell). She’s sent to live with Jack Wolf (Anthony LaPaglia), an unemployed film director, who used to be one of her mother’s ex-lovers, who also might be Pearl’s father. I know! Let’s spend an entire movie going back and forth trying to figure it out, okay?

I don’t have a ton to say about this movie, but if for some reason, you want to watch it just cause you’re a fan of Carter from The Flash, you should know that she appears in the movie via a series of black and white flashbacks to show her relationship with Jack, but those might be the best part of a very bad movie.

Thompson just isn’t a very solid actor to carry this, and Roth must have pulled a lot of favors to get this movie made ‘cause it wasn’t financed based on the script. Her relationship with LaPaglia just seems kinda creepy. Things just gets worse and worse, especially when Pearl goes to school and the other girls act like they’re in prison. There’s also Barbara Williams as Pearl’s alcoholic grandmother – the fun just never begins, does it?

At its worst, Pearl comes across like a Lifetime movie – not the first time I’ve used this statement this year and probably not the last. It’s just very dull and not a very good movie; LaPaglia is way too good an actor who deserves better than this.

Also on VOD this week is Kevin Tran’s Dark End of the Street (Gravitas Ventures), an indie horror movie involving a community in the suburbs plagued by someone who is killing the residents’ pets. This wasn’t a terrible movie but I had a hard time getting past the general premise about killing pets, so it was hard to get into what Tran tried to do in terms of putting a twist on a tried-and-true horror genre. Maybe I’ll give this another try after finishing this column.

Also, Ben Galland’s action-comedy Gripped: Climbing the Killer Pillar (1091) follows Rose (Megan Kesley), a L.A. gym climber who falls for rugged outdoorsman Bret (Kaiwi Lyman) as they embark on a trip to climb the “Killer Pillar” in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, only to get caught on a cliff edge.

The Metrograph’s Live Screening Series is continuing with a great line-up over the rest of August with the Satoshi Kon Retrospective continuing with Millennium Actress playing until midnight tonight, plus Masaaki Yuasa & Koji Morimoto’s popular 2004 film Mind Game starting Wednesday night at 8pm. Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001) will screen on Friday at 8pm, and then Monday, Jenna Bliss’ animated The People’s Detox (2018) will join the screening library. To become a digital member, it’s only $5 a month or $50 for a year, which is a great deal for the amount of movies you see.

Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema will stream Paulo Rocha’s 1963 film Change of Life starting Friday while Film Forum will stream Weiner Holzemer’s doc Martin Margiella: In His Own Words about the fashion designer, as well as Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day which is a 1959 documentary about the fashion photographer filming the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Hoagy Carmichael, Mahalia Jackson, Thelonious Monk and many more.

Apparently, Netflix has a new movie out on Friday called Project Power, starring Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but I received ABSOLUTELY NADA about it from Netflix, so this is all you get. Watch out, Netflix, there are a lot of streaming options out there now!

Speaking of drive-ins (which I was WAY up there), on Wednesday, you can catch the latest in Amazon Studios “A Night at the Drive In” series. “Movies to Make You Open Your Eyes,” which will screen Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Jordan Peele’s Get Out.

Next week, more movies not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #Movies #Reviews #OxfordFilmFestival #Sputnik #Spree #vodun #TheSilencing #TheBayOfSilence #BoysState #Pearl #Endless

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ofsort · 7 years

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Peter Wessel Zapffe - The Last Messiah

The first English version of a classic essay by Peter Wessel Zapffe, originally published in Janus #9, 1933. Translated from the Norwegian by Gisle R. Tangenes. I One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself.

He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.

Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.

That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.

Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.

Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more, it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life’s embrace.

So there he stands with his visions, betrayed by the universe, in wonder and fear. The beast knew fear as well, in thunderstorms and on the lion’s claw. But man became fearful of life itself – indeed, of his very being. Life – that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life. Even as the child sets out on the river of life, the roars from the waterfall of death rise highly above the vale, ever closer, and tearing, tearing at its joy. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unravelled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happen arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle. He sees himself emerge in his mother’s womb, he holds up his hand in the air and it has five branches; whence this devilish number five, and what has it to do with my soul? He is no longer obvious to himself – he touches his body in utter horror; this is you and so far do you extend and no farther. He carries a meal within him, yesterday it was a beast that could itself dash around, now I suck it up and make it part of me, and where do I begin and end? All things chain together in causes and effects, and everything he wants to grasp dissolves before the testing thought. Soon he sees mechanics even in the so-far whole and dear, in the smile of his beloved – there are other smiles as well, a torn boot with toes. Eventually, the features of things are features only of himself. Nothing exists without himself, every line points back at him, the world is but a ghostly echo of his voice – he leaps up loudly screaming and wants to disgorge himself onto the earth along with his impure meal, he feels the looming of madness and wants to find death before losing even such ability.

But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologicocosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.

From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic.

Such a ‘feeling of cosmic panic’ is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual’s attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.

The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.

In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground. III

Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living – because cognition gives them more than they can carry?

Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

If the giant deer, at suitable intervals, had broken off the outer spears of its antlers, it might have kept going for some while longer. Yet in fever and constant pain, indeed, in betrayal of its central idea, the core of its peculiarity, for it was vocated by creation’s hand to be the horn bearer of wild animals. What it gained in continuance, it would lose in significance, in grandness of life, in other words a continuance without hope, a march not up to affirmation, but forth across its ever recreated ruins, a self-destructive race against the sacred will of blood.

The identity of purpose and perishment is, for giant deer and man alike, the tragic paradox of life. In devoted Bejahung, the last Cervis Giganticus bore the badge of its lineage to its end. The human being saves itself and carries on. It performs, to extend a settled phrase, a more or less self-conscious repression of its damaging surplus of consciousness. This process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living.

Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the ‘healthy’ and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, ‘fear of life,’ refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of antibiological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced – correctly – as a betrayal of ego’s highest potential.

The whole of living that we see before our eyes today is from inmost to outmost enmeshed in repressional mechanisms, social and individual; they can be traced right into the tritest formulas of everyday life. Though they take a vast and multifarious variety of forms, it seems legitimate to at least identify four major kinds, naturally occuring in every possible combination: isolation, anchoring, distraction and sublimation.

By isolation I here mean a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling. (Engström: “One should not think, it is just confusing.”) A perfect and almost brutalising variant is found among certain physicians, who for self-protection will only see the technical aspect of their profession. It can also decay to pure hooliganism, as among petty thugs and medical students, where any sensitivity to the tragic side of life is eradicated by violent means (football played with cadaver heads, and so on.)

The mechanism of anchoring also serves from early childhood; parents, home, the street become matters of course to the child and give it a sense of assurance. This sphere of experience is the first, and perhaps the happiest, protection against the cosmos that we ever get to know in life, a fact that doubtless also explains the much debated ‘infantile bonding;’ the question of whether that is sexually tainted too is unimportant here. When the child later discovers that those fixed points are as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘ephemeral’ as any others, it has a crisis of confusion and anxiety and promptly looks around for another anchoring. “In Autumn, I will attend middle school.” If the substitution somehow fails, then the crisis may take a fatal course, or else what I will call an anchoring spasm occurs: One clings to the dead values, concealing as well as possible from oneself and others the fact that they are unworkable, that one is spiritually insolvent. The result is lasting insecurity, ‘feelings of inferiority,’ over-compensation, restlessness. Insofar as this state falls into certain categories, it is made subject to psychoanalytic treatment, which aims to complete the transition to new anchorings.

Anchoring might be characterised as a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness. Though typically unconscious, it may also be fully conscious (one ‘adopts a goal’.) Publicly useful anchorings are met with sympathy, he who ‘sacrifices himself totally’ for his anchoring (the firm, the cause) is idolised. He has established a mighty bulwark against the dissolution of life, and others are by suggestion gaining from his strength. In a brutalised form, as deliberate action, it is found among ‘decadent’ playboys (“one should get married in time, and then the constraints will come of themselves.”) Thus one establishes a necessity in one’s life, exposing oneself to an obvious evil from one’s point of view, but a soothing of the nerves, a high-walled container for a sensibility to life that has been growing increasingly crude. Ibsen presents, in Hjalmar Ekdal and Molvik, two flowering cases (‘living lies’); there is no difference between their anchoring and that of the pillars of society except for the practico-economic unproductiveness of the former.

Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas. The average person makes do with the collective firmaments, the personality is building for himself, the person of character has finished his construction, more or less grounded on the inherited, collective main firmaments (God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future). The closer to main firmaments a certain carrying element is, the more perilous it is to touch. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of penal codes and threats of prosecution (inquisition, censorship, the Conservative approach to life).

The carrying capacity of each segment either depends on its fictitious nature having not been seen through yet, or else on its being recognised as necessary anyway. Hence the religious education in schools, which even atheists support because they know no other way to bring children into social ways of response.

Whenever people realise the fictitiousness or redundancy of the segments, they will strive to replace them with new ones (‘the limited duration of Truths’) – and whence flows all the spiritual and cultural strife which, along with economic competition, forms the dynamic content of world history.

The craving for material goods (power) is not so much due to the direct pleasures of wealth, as none can be seated on more than one chair or eat himself more than sated. Rather, the value of a fortune to life consists in the rich opportunities for anchoring and distraction offered to the owner.

Both for collective and individual anchorings it holds that when a segment breaks, there is a crisis that is graver the closer that segment to main firmaments. Within the inner circles, sheltered by the outer ramparts, such crises are daily and fairly painfree occurrences (‘disappointments’); even a playing with anchoring values is here seen (wittiness, jargon, alcohol). But during such play one may accidentally rip a hole right to the bottom, and the scene is instantly transformed from euphoric to macabre. The dread of being stares us in the eye, and in a deadly gush we perceive how the minds are dangling in threads of their own spinning, and that a hell is lurking underneath.

The very foundational firmaments are rarely replaced without great social spasms and a risk of complete dissolution (reformation, revolution). During such times, individuals are increasingly left to their own devices for anchoring, and the number of failures tends to rise. Depressions, excesses, and suicides result (German officers after the war, Chinese students after the revolution).

Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feeling and thought. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature’s deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom.

We love the anchorings for saving us, but also hate them for limiting our sense of freedom. Whenever we feel strong enough, we thus take pleasure in going together to bury an expired value in style. Material objects take on a symbolic import here (the Radical approach to life).

When a human being has eliminated those of his anchorings that are visible to himself, only the unconscious ones staying put, then he will call himself a liberated personality.

A very popular mode of protection is distraction. One limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions. This is typical even in childhood; without distraction, the child is also insufferable to itself. “Mom, what am I to do.” A little English girl visiting her Norwegian aunts came inside from her room, saying: “What happens now?” The nurses attain virtuosity: Look, a doggie! Watch, they are painting the palace! The phenomenon is too familiar to require any further demonstration. Distraction is, for example, the ‘high society’s’ tactic for living. It can be likened to a flying machine – made of heavy material, but embodying a principle that keeps it airborne whenever applying. It must always be in motion, as air only carries it fleetingly. The pilot may grow drowsy and comfortable out of habit, but the crisis is acute as soon as the engine flunks.

The tactic is often fully conscious. Despair may dwell right underneath and break through in gushes, in a sudden sobbing. When all distractive options are expended, spleen sets in, ranging from mild indifference to fatal depression. Women, in general less cognition-prone and hence more secure in their living than men, preferably use distraction.

A considerable evil of imprisonment is the denial of most distractive options. And as terms for deliverance by other means are poor as well, the prisoner will tend to stay in the close vicinity of despair. The acts he then commits to deflect the final stage have a warrant in the principle of vitality itself. In such a moment he is experiencing his soul within the universe, and has no other motive than the utter inendurability of that condition.

Pure examples of life-panic are presumably rare, as the protective mechanisms are refined and automatic and to some extent unremitting. But even the adjacent terrain bears the mark of death, life is here barely sustainable and by great efforts. Death always appears as an escape, one ignores the possibilities of the hereafter, and as the way death is experienced is partly dependent on feeling and perspective, it might be quite an acceptable solution. If one in statu mortis could manage a pose (a poem, a gesture, to ‘die standing up’), i.e. a final anchoring, or a final distraction (Aases’ death), then such a fate is not the worst one at all. The press, for once serving the concealment mechanism, never fails to find reasons that cause no alarm – “it is believed that the latest fall in the price of wheat...”

When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of ‘saving’ the suicidal is based on a hairraising misapprehension of the nature of existence.

Only a limited part of humanity can make do with mere ‘changes’, whether in work, social life, or entertainment. The cultured person demands connections, lines, a progression in the changes. Nothing finite satisfies at length, one is ever proceeding, gathering knowledge, making a career. The phenomenon is known as ‘yearning’ or ‘transcendental tendency.’ Whenever a goal is reached, the yearning moves on; hence its object is not the goal, but the very attainment of it – the gradient, not the absolute height, of the curve representing one’s life. The promotion from private to corporal may give a more valuable experience than the one from colonel to general. Any grounds of ‘progressive optimism’ are removed by this major psychological law.

The human yearning is not merely marked by a ‘striving toward’, but equally by an ‘escape from.’ And if we use the word in a religious sense, only the latter description fits. For here, none has yet been clear about what he is longing for, but one has always a heartfelt awareness of what one is longing away from, namely the earthly vale of tears, one’s own inendurable condition. If awareness of this predicament is the deepest stratum of the soul, as argued above, then it is also understandable why the religious yearning is felt and experienced as fundamental. By contrast, the hope that it forms a divine criterion, which harbours a promise of its own fulfilment, is placed in a truly melancholy light by these considerations.

The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.

Unless the worst sting of suffering is blunted by other means, or denied control of the mind, such utilisation is unlikely, however. (Image: The mountaineer does not enjoy his view of the abyss while choking with vertigo; only when this feeling is more or less overcome does he enjoy it – anchored.) To write a tragedy, one must to some extent free oneself from – betray – the very feeling of tragedy and regard it from an outer, e.g. aesthetic, point of view. Here is, by the way, an opportunity for the wildest round-dancing through ever higher ironic levels, into a most embarrassing circulus vitiosus. Here one can chase one’s ego across numerous habitats, enjoying the capacity of the various layers of consciousness to dispel one another.

The present essay is a typical attempt at sublimation. The author does not suffer, he is filling pages and is going to be published in a journal.

The ‘martyrdom’ of lonely ladies also shows a kind of sublimation – they gain in significance thereby.

Nevertheless, sublimation appears to be the rarest of the protective means mentioned here.

Is it possible for ‘primitive natures’ to renounce these cramps and cavorts and live in harmony with themselves in the serene bliss of labour and love? Insofar as they may be considered human at all, I think the answer must be no. The strongest claim to be made about the so-called peoples of nature is that they are somewhat closer to the wonderful biological ideal than we unnatural people. And when even we have so far been able to save a majority through every storm, we have been assisted by the sides of our nature that are just modestly or moderately developed. This positive basis (as protection alone cannot create life, only hinder its faltering) must be sought in the naturally adapted deployment of the energy in the body and the biologically helpful parts of the soul1, subject to such hardships as are precisely due to sensory limitations, bodily frailty, and the need to do work for life and love.

And just in this finite land of bliss within the fronts do the progressing civilisation, technology and standardisation have such a debasing influence. For as an ever growing fraction of the cognitive faculties retire from the game against the environment, there is a rising spiritual unemployment. The value of a technical advance to the whole undertaking of life must be judged by its contribution to the human opportunity for spiritual occupation. Though boundaries are blurry, perhaps the first tools for cutting might be mentioned as a case of a positive invention.

Other technical inventions enrich only the life of the inventor himself; they represent a gross and ruthless theft from humankind’s common reserve of experiences and should invoke the harshest punishment if made public against the veto of censorship. One such crime among numerous others is the use of flying machines to explore uncharted land. In a single vandalistic glob, one thus destroys lush opportunities for experience that could benefit many if each, by effort, obtained his fair share.2

The current phase of life’s chronic fever is particularly tainted by this circumstance. The absence of naturally (biologically) based spiritual activity shows up, for example, in the pervasive recourse to distraction (entertainment, sport, radio – ‘the rhythm of the times’). Terms for anchoring are not as favourable – all the inherited, collective systems of anchorings are punctured by criticism, and anxiety, disgust, confusion, despair leak in through the rifts (‘corpses in the cargo.’) Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt (as Communism has also a spiritual reflection) by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively, violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition. The idea, in either case, is uncannily logical. But again, it cannot yield a final solution. Though a deliberate degeneration to a more viable nadir may certainly save the species in the short run, it will by its nature be unable to find peace in such resignation, or indeed find any peace at all.

If we continue these considerations to the bitter end, then the conclusion is not in doubt. As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change. As its numbers mount and the spiritual atmosphere thickens, the techniques of protection must assume an increasingly brutal character.

And humans will persist in dreaming of salvation and affirmation and a new Messiah. Yet when many saviours have been nailed to trees and stoned on the city squares, then the last Messiah shall come.

Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:

“– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.

– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?

– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.

– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”

And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.

He is the last Messiah. As son from father, he stems from the archer by the waterhole.

Peter Wessel Zapffe, 1933

Notes:

1 A distinction for clarity. 2 I emphasize that this is not about fantastic reform proposals, but rather a psychological view of principle

#zappfe #the last messiah #philosophy #norwegian philosophy #essay #peter wessel zapffe

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isayeed-blog · 5 years

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The Irrational

Hatred has been created in laboratories by social psychologists, again and again. In fact, as an English teacher, I have generated hatred in my classes: when I separate the class into two groups, and have them play a competitive linguistic game, the loyalty to the ingroup, and the animosity to the other group, are remarkable.

One of the pioneers in this line of research was Muzafer Sherif, a Turkish social psychologist who had emigrated to America. He reasoned, strangely enough, that, America being a democracy, Americans would tend to be conformists because their democracy emphasised mutually shared agreements. In the early 1950s, he devised an ingenious experiment at Robber’s Cave, Oklahoma, to test his hunch. He took twenty-two schoolboys, none of whom knew each other, to a summer camp and divided them randomly into two groups. He had screened the boys for pathological traits to rule out any dispositional effects, ensuring that only the situation prevailed, rather than the inner workings of the individuals.

Each group was then separated from the other for a week, during which time they developed their own leaders, identity and culture. Sherif then threw the two groups into a series of competitive activities and games. “Hostility quickly emerged between the two groups, to the point where they could not engage in non-competitive activities without insulting and even fighting one another”, reports political psychologist David Houghton. Mere, arbitrary classification of the boys into two groups sufficed to create hostility, a situational effect. Political parties, divided by personality, ideology, history and values must generate far greater hatred. In Sherif’s experiment, nothing was at stake; in national politics, issues like language, religion, money create a life-and-death struggle. Democracy makes us situational enemies, to echo Jason Brennan’s felicitous expression.

British social psychologist Henri Tajfel has found that hostility towards outgroups and favouritism towards one’s own can occur in the absence of any interaction between them and in the absence of any ‘reasonable’ or ‘rational’ differences between the groups. The ‘situation’, and not the ‘disposition’, makes the difference. In this respect, we are all Homo psychologicus, the irrational animal, not Homo economicus, the calculating creature.

Tajfel divided individuals randomly into two groups based on such frivolous criterion as their opinion of indistinguishable abstract artists they had never heard of: those favouring ‘the Paul Klee style’ and those favouring ‘the Kandinsky style’. To his surprise, the individuals displayed extra-rational loyalty to the ingroup and hostility to the outgroup. When sharing financial resources, they chose to penalize the outgroup rather than receive more money themselves.

Political psychologist Geoffrey Cohen did a number of scientific studies to determine how political partisanship – or what is sometimes unflatteringly called ‘tribalism’ – affects judgment about policy issues. The experiments presented participants with two contrasting alternatives – stringent or generous – of a social welfare policy. Judging each policy on its merits, participants chose the policy consistent with their ideological views. However, when the policies were attributed to either the Republican or the Democratic Party, liberals preferred the Democratic-labeled policy regardless of whether it was generous or stringent, and conservatives favoured the Republican-labeled policy regardless of the details.

This brings us to another dimension of the irrational: conformity.

In 1955, Sherif’s findings were challenged by social psychologist Solomon Asch. Asch believed that Americans could act autonomously even when the group challenged their view. To test this, he devised an experiment in which he showed subjects four perpendicular lines, A, B, C and X, where C and X were the same length, and the others shorter or longer. Asch speculated that even if the group gave the wrong answer – A = X, or B = X – the individual would not subscribe to a transparent falsehood.

The subject made few mistakes (less than 1 percent of the time). But there were seven other members of the group (who were Asch’s confederates posing as subjects). They were instructed to give incorrect answers unanimously on specific ‘critical’ trials.

Of the 123 participants in Asch’s study, the individual yielded to the group 70 percent of the time on some of those critical trials. Thirty percent of the subjects conformed on the majority of trials, and only a quarter of them maintained their independence throughout the testing.

We conform out of two needs: informational needs (other people will have knowledge that may be useful), and normative needs (other people will accept us more if we agree with them, the need to belong). The first is rational, unlike the second. The reason is not far to seek: prior to civilization we lived in small, close bands to which we clung for security, suspicious of other groups; that is to say, for most of our prehistory until very recently over the last ten millennia, a wink. Demagogues succeed through sheer atavistic appeal.

Technology, unavailable in Asch’s time, now allows us to peer into the mind – literally. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) scans reveal which parts of the brain are active – ‘light up’ – during the experiment. When we yield to the group’s erroneous judgment, conformity shows up in the brain scan as changes in selected regions of the brain’s cortex dedicated to vision and spatial awareness (specifically, activity increases in the right intraparietal sulcus). However, if you make independent judgements that go against the group, our brain would light up in the areas associated with emotional salience (the right amygdala and the right caudate nuclear regions). This shows that resistance to the group creates an emotional burden for those who maintain their independence. That is to say, autonomy comes at a psychic cost.

“We like to think that seeing is believing,” observes neuroscientist Gregory Berns, “but the study’s finding shows that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe.”

For a literary rendition of the psychic cost of independence, the reader is directed to the masterly short story by D H Lawrence, England, My England. It is the story of a fiercely independent young man, too independent to earn a living. He depends mostly on his father-in-law, and neither of them mind; he loves his wife, children and nature. They have a happy life, until his daughter has an accident. This experience proves devastatingly disorientating. He relinquishes his autonomy, and goes to war, fighting the Germans, a cause he doesn’t believe in, and dies.

#muzafer sherif #Henry Tajfel #solomon asch #d h lawrence #tribalism #political psychology

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 5 years

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IF YOU TAKE a few hours to read through one of Inger Christensen’s book-length masterpieces, there will come a point when you too feel as though you are standing inside a poem, even if you happen to be sitting. Maybe you feel this way because the poem in your hand has persuaded you that it is somehow both a precise and infinitely suggestive microcosm of existence, and a palimpsest of how it all hangs together, and this has left you uneasy. A little exalted, maybe, a little dissolved. Whatever it is, the feeling stays with you long after you close the book, even after you cannot remember a single line. Lines, for instance, like these from the opening of alphabet:

1 apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist

2 bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries; bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

3 cicadas exist; chicory, chromium, citrus trees; cicadas exist; cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

4 doves exist, dreamers, and dolls; killers exist, and doves, and doves; haze, dioxin, and days; days exist, days and death; and poems exist; poems, days, death

At some point in alphabet’s long, self-complicating litany it may occur to you that the poet is conveying a stunningly complex and philosophically worked-through picture of the world seen through its fragments. When the poem ends with the 14th letter, the reader is left with a sense that it nevertheless continues beyond the page, like the Fibonacci sequence on which it is structured, ad infinitum. That it is like the world because it is of the world. And if a reader has reached this conclusion it can only be because she has begun to see not just poems differently, but also the world. What sets Christensen above other poets, moralists, mystics, and scientists who aim to reeducate our vision in such a way is that she rarely instructs by telling how to see, but instead gets readers to experience an alternate way of seeing through the reading of her verse.

Christensen’s major works — it, alphabet, Letter in April — bring their readers to know many things, or one very large and complex thing, even if it is so big and complex that the only way any of us may ever hope to know it as a whole is in the sense of acquaintance, intimacy, and acknowledgment. This is how the world speaks to the visionary, though it takes a poet of great talent and intuition to share this sort of experience with an audience. Thankfully we now have The Condition of Secrecy, the first collection of Inger Christensen’s essays to appear in English, so that we may benefit from the author’s own attempts to come to grips with this experience, with the many ethical and aesthetic implications of her poetic vision, and so much else.

The collection begins with a nostalgic paean to organized labor and collective well-being that is also the memoir of a child’s first summer vacations, and it ends with the book’s only poem. In between, we find Inger Christensen expanding on the perennial preoccupations of her life’s work: the enormity and complexity of the natural world and its systems; the world-systems of human language, climate, agriculture, chemistry, and poetry, just to name a few; leftist politics; mathematics; and ars poetica. As in the poems, the result is an overriding sense that they are all connected, somehow, and that some connections worth seeking nevertheless remain beyond the boundaries of language.

Take that first essay, “Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity in the Summer Cottage.” Christensen recalls the time in childhood when the word summer first became meaningful for her. This also happened to be the time when the Nazis were in Denmark, yet the occupation remains an element of the grown-up world: a sharpness around the edges of vacation and routine maintenance. Early on, Christensen presents us with the “string of glimpses, images, moments of awareness when summer became apparent and instilled itself in us.” The images that follow are a harmony of precision and evocation, and achieve a deft, almost musical balance between nostalgia, melancholy, and “a random, passing humanness, overcome by love and made mute.” Yellow slugs “moving like slow flames” on coke slag behind a gas works, boys and girls scraping the cracked dry earth with shards of porcelain, wide meadow, silent sea. And here is how Christensen ends that section, before moving on to the role that trade unions played in the evolution of her sensibility:

They’re three banal experiences, nothing out of the ordinary; many people must have seen and done the same things, but for me they stand out. They were for many years almost supernatural, are still nearly indescribable, and I know by now that I have to let them stay beyond words, because they’re about a child’s — a human being’s — in this case, my own — first aesthetic experiences. Even back when they first happened, these three images were already what I can now call them: three images — open, endless beauty; pointless energy; and the security of not being alone.

The next thing you know, she is describing a child’s impression of solidarity among the tradesmen who volunteered around the cottage, which was owned by the tailor’s union and opened to its members in turn. Another set of images, now of collective, collectivized effort, striking for Christensen precisely because of their naturalness in a world where they were under mortal threat: “[W]orking together, pruning trees, making steps out of railroad ties, picking apples, painting garden furniture, spreading gravel…”

Since this is the first essay in the collection, it would be reasonable to suppose that reminiscence has carried the poet first to one set of images from her childhood, now to another. But as you read on, you begin to understand that those images of happiness have already involved you in Christensen’s interwoven vision of the world both as it is and as it should be. Subsequent essays, ostensibly about poetry, language, art, and nature, reveal a vision of the natural world that is inseparable from a broadly leftist politics, a poet’s metaphysical commitments, and a challenging, deeply considered theory of language. From one essay to the next, it all begins to hang together in luminous prose (conveyed in graceful, intimate English by her longtime translator Susanna Nied) confirming what was already evident in the poems: that Christensen was one of the eminent visionaries of the 20th century.

(The universe with nature with the social system with humans with me with my feelings, my work, my language, and more — all these and their mutual interrelationships are incorporated into my concept of the world, which is in constant flux, but on which I base everything anyway, as if it were what we call a philosophy of life — one that’s a process, where seeing can’t be separated from a life that both sees and can be seen, and that, when it expresses what it sees, demonstrates its innate inexpressibility.) (“The Miracle Play of Reality”)

Christensen’s deep commitment to naturalism makes classing her among European literature’s modernists or postmodernists (or both) such an uncomfortable exercise in taxonomy. Hers is an idiosyncratic, philosophical sort of naturalism, no doubt, and one of the joys of these essays is the insight they give English readers into how she understood her poetics, like her ethics and theory of language, as emerging from a vision of the overwhelming interrelatedness of being. “[L]anguage and the world express themselves with the help of each other,” she writes in the characteristically titled essay “Silk, the Universe, Language, and the Heart.” And just as language isn’t strictly representational on her view, neither is her mode of naturalism. For example, the mathematical complexity of her poems doesn’t aim to reproduce forms found in nature, but rather is itself one of those forms. Even these essays, as she understands them, are in the first instance more like ferns than they are about anything, though they are also that.

If Christensen’s work doesn’t look to us like straightforward naturalism, she suggests, it reflects only the poverty of our conception of the natural world. (So calling her a “formalist,” as Eliot Weinberger does, would surely be correct as far as it goes, though it’s a bit like calling Gregor Mendel a gardener.) And that we don’t typically consider it realistic or naturalistic that a picture of the world as it is contains a vision of the world as it should be, reflects the poverty of our moral vision, which for Christensen is also our physical vision and the ability to see each nested within the other like a duck-rabbit.

It is exciting and refreshing to see a poet meditate on the experience of the sublime majesty of nature, whether in the prevalence of Fibonacci numbers or the sheer chance that she was born a human and not a mackerel, and not conclude with the Romantic elevation of the individual as seer or the poet as one with “the best words” and “a very good brain,” but with exactly the opposite: a radical leveling that comes from the experience of unity. For Christensen, it is zero steps from here to an ethics and political theory.

Christensen finds this sort of unity in the experience of reading, of course: the poet’s and the reader’s minds are “intermingled in the poem, as if the poem were our minds’ common ground.” But she finds it also between readers and anemones, anemones and slag, slag and the slow flames of slugs. Christensen thinks that this transitiveness of things is a product of language, but only because language is itself an expression of life, like weather, vines, and human nature. (This is the “condition of secrecy” of the book’s title, or something like it.) And this means that the difference between inner and outer, mind and world, self and other, is false, ideological, and contrary to honest relations and human flourishing. All words, like all wounds, are ordinary, and therefore held in common.

Yet from this vision Christensen draws conclusions that are neither cynical nor quietist, but radical. Christensen writes of Michelangelo as “a ripple on the surface of art” in hopes of getting us to see that such an understanding shouldn’t be embarrassing either for Michelangelo or for a conception of art as the independent force of nature she believes it to be. Whatever elides the distinction between an individual and the world, as art can do for both artists and readers, ought to be cause for exaltation even as it dissolves the boundaries by which the individual recognizes herself. Here we are getting back to the vertigo we feel when reading Christensen’s long poems, but which now begins to shape itself into the ethical and political aspects of her vision — in particular her rejection of the centrality, even the metaphysical reality, of the individual.

Christensen extends her blurring logic to everything conceived in language, not least the individual herself. The summer cottage “belonged to us only because it belonged to others” — so too summer, so too language and thought, so too self, so too all life human and nonhuman alike. So, she concludes:

[T]here’s also no reason to cultivate individual experience, individual psychology. It’s a fiction, because it suggests that there’s a kind of freedom beyond the purely physical freedom that we own only in our interplay with the world and with each other. For that reason I consider it more important to posit an incorrect explanation of the world than to present an explanation of an individual self that may be correct. (“Interplay”)

Christensen understands that her challenge may not appeal to many of her readers. But another of her aims is to posit an explanation of the world that is at the same time an intimation of how we might respond, and thrive, in response to that challenge. “Through this writing, I’ve been trying to get to the heart of my relationship with my readers. […] I want them to see what they don’t see. […] I want them to do what they don’t do. What we want to do anyway, if we ever could become helpless enough to do it.” (“To Talk, To See, To Do”) This isn’t to invoke a Kantian morality of universality and duty, a Rawlsian bedrock of risk-aversion, or even the radical absurdity of the existentialists, but to suggest a wholly new starting place by rejecting the mirage of individual personhood and, lest she be confused with the totalizing collectivist programs of the 20th century, also by rejecting the division between humans and the wide rest of being.

But who will lay the first stone in the foundation of helplessness? Though she did not live to see today’s battles over literary practices, with their jeremiads over the use of pronouns other than the first-person singular, she knew that poets had a role to play, if only because of their intimacy with loneliness, isolation, and expression:

[Gunnar Ekelöf] said that he was afraid, and he told us that at last he was no longer afraid of being afraid, because he had figured out that he wasn’t anyone special and had accepted it — “in reality, you are no one” — and he found a kind of comfort in that. The important thing is that he had the courage to keep telling it to others, to say it again and again: I’m afraid. I’m no one. Isn’t that the way it is for you, too? … How else can we put aside the lust for power in all of us? (“To Talk, to See, to Do”)

Readers hungry for an alternative form of literary politics will be stimulated by Christensen’s democratic alchemy of ars poetica and ethics, especially in contrast to dominant practices of subordinating one to the other. And there is much in this volume to spur the thinking of left-leaning writers and readers uncomfortable with the ways that appropriation discourse sometimes seems eager to erect a regime of coercive property relations in the realm of culture — precisely where human freedom may best discover itself and develop into ethical consciousness — yet who are equally unwilling to start declaring zones of human life off limits to politics. Those in search of a different sense of “belonging” than the proprietary one that seems to dominate in this weird country will be pleased to find that Christensen offers an alternate vision of uncommon philosophical depth and poetic richness of how speaking animals might understand their place in the disordered order of things, and how that might change how we decide to live and act together.

Although Christensen’s essays are immensely rewarding along these lines, I will leave the rest to the reader’s discovery, since I don’t want to give the impression that The Condition of Secrecy is a political polemic. The essays here are also about poetry, the self, fate, geometry, dreams, shame, painting, prepositions, history, anonymity, truth, geometry, agriculture, generative grammar, metaphysics, Giordano Bruno, the necessity of art, Lu Chi, the baroque, the atom bomb, trees, diaspora, a trans-species mercy “somewhere between wonder and forgiveness,” silk, the universe, and, well, so on. Among this wealth of astonishments, what most amazes is how it hangs together in Christensen’s unified vision, even if all the connections aren’t exactly displayed or laid bare by argument. She quotes two lines by Lu Chi: “In a single meter of silk, the infinite universe exists; language is a Great Flood from a small corner of the heart.” As Lu Chi left it up to his readers to discover the logic connecting the two halves of that sentence — to stare into the weird sense of that semicolon, as it were, particular but also identical to all the others — so Christensen guides the reader but ultimately leaves it up to her to make sense, and to get a firsthand sense of sense’s limits.

At the limits of language, Christensen finds herself constrained in her ability to convey her interconnected vision to the reader. She explains, in her way: if we find a person attractive, it is not because of any particular feature or set of features, but the “internal interplay among” them, which of course is invisible. It is invisible because it is a mental construction of aesthetic experience. But just because it is invisible and constructed doesn’t mean that it’s not real or natural. To give her readers a view of the world’s grand invisible connectedness, a writer needs to give an intimation of it by the form of her words, but also leave space for the reader to look past them. And since Christensen’s interrelatedness is probably ineffable to boot, knowledge of what it is like is going to end up being more like an experience, or a feeling, than a set of propositions. Over and again, Christensen draws the reader into her world, and then beyond it.

It. That’s It. That started it. It is. Goes on. Moves. Beyond. Becomes. Becomes it and it and it. Goes further than that. Becomes something else. Becomes more. Combines something else with more to keep becoming something else and more. Goes further than that. Becomes something besides something else and more. Something. Something New. Newer Still. […] Already much more difference between life and life than between death and life. (“Prologos” from it)

Inger Christensen is very often called an “experimental poet,” but since no one ever explains what they mean by that phrase, I assume it is meant to refer to the complicated formal structures of her later works. Nothing she wrote is especially difficult, which is often what is implied by “experimental.” Yet one after another these essays remind us that experiments by themselves reveal nothing, but instead provide a method for confirming or rejecting a hypothesis, a wild intuition, a vision or dream. So maybe what critics mean is that she uses the form to work out the vision, to see what will result. But who ever knew how a poem was going to turn out before they wrote it? It is true that Christensen’s starting place is a wild vision, though she is at pains here to remind us that the form is likewise part of the vision, and not the sort of thing that can stand outside it as a test or a working out.

And what about the possibility of failure that ought to be essential to any experimentation? To be sure, the possibility is always there in Christensen’s poems, but if the experiment fails, the vision fails, and so too fails the poet, all the way down to her most basic convictions and understanding of the world. Failure would say little about the experiment itself and less about the world, but everything about the poet. It would mean that she was wrong about the way the world is, what is valuable in it, and by extension that she was wrong about the way she chose to live her life. If the vision turns out to be mistaken, it would be not only an artistic catastrophe, but a personal, ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical one as well — more like kidney failure than a debunked hypothesis. This is why Christensen’s approach to her verse, at least, might be better characterized by the visionary’s stance of commitment than by the neutral attitude of experimentation, where the experimenter may hope to walk away unscathed when the experiment falls apart.

If it can be said that Christensen was an experimental writer, I think the description best fits the drifting, darting, spiraling movements of her mind in this volume. The 18 works collected here are in Montaigne’s tradition, explorations written with such elegance, humility, and inquisitiveness that it is impossible not to wish to write like her, which after reading The Condition of Secrecy you know can only mean to be like her. And there is a vision of unity here so seductive that we might not be able to shake it, even if we don’t find ourselves convinced or committed in the end. Maybe we will at least come to understand how helpless we are. Then we might even find the courage to say to ourselves and to others, again and again: I’m afraid. I’m no one. Isn’t that the way it is for you, too?

Lowry Pressly is a writer of essays, fiction, and cultural criticism. He is a PhD candidate at Harvard University.

The post Astonishments for Our Time appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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newssplashy · 6 years

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Finance: One of the best airlines in the world is one you've probably never heard of — here's what it's like to fly Air Astana

Though Air Astana is only 16 years old, it has won a ton of awards. For the last six years, consumer aviation website Skytrax has given it a 4-star rating and named it the best airline in India/Central Asia. Here's what it's like to fly Air Astana.

Air Astana is the flag carrier of Kazakhstan, operating in 60+ destinations primarily in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Russia.

Though the airline is only 16 years old, it has won a ton of awards. For the last six years, consumer aviation website Skytrax has given it a 4-star rating and named it the best airline in India/Central Asia.

I decided to fly Air Astana Economy-class cabin on a flight, from Seoul, South Korea to Almaty, Kazakhstan and Almaty to Moscow, Russia, to see what the experience was like.

Chances are, unless you're an airline junkie, you've probably never heard of Air Astana.

Only launched in 2002, Kazakhstan's flag carrier is relatively unknown to most Americans and Europeans, unless they happen to have taken a trip to Russia. But that may soon change.

In just 16 years, Air Astana has built a reputation for friendly staff, new, well-kept planes, and great service. For the last six years, consumer aviation website Skytrax has given it a 4-star rating and named it the best airline in India/Central Asia. In 2014, Business Insider named it the 12th best airline in the world.

The Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation said in 2012 that Air Astana had "performed better in its first decade than just about any other start-up carrier."

Add in the fact that the list of best airlines these days is dominated by flag carriers like Qatar Airways, Singapore Airlines, Emirates Airlines, and Etihad Airways, and I was very excited to give Air Astana a try.

I got my chance recently when booking a long-haul trip from Seoul to Moscow for the World Cup. I am pleased to say that Air Astana did not disappoint.

Read on to see what I thought of my flight on Air Astana, departing from Almaty International Airport to Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport, operated on a 767-300ER.

For a recent flight from Seoul to Russia, I decided to book Air Astana, the national carrier of Kazakhstan. I was little bit nervous because the flight required a connection in Almaty, the former capital of the country. The first flight went off without a hitch and I landed at Almaty International Airport. It was a bit dinky.

To get on my second flight from Almaty to Moscow, I had to go through the transit desk in Almaty. Everyone on my flight was transferring to Moscow, as we were all heading to the World Cup. Because Almaty requires passengers to pass through security at the transit desk, I had to wait in line for an hour during my layover.

My flight was on time. After checking our passports at a small gate inside the airport, we boarded a bus that drove us to the plane on the tarmac. There's something about boarding a plane from the airstair rather than the gate that makes me feel like a celebrity.

The boarding process went pretty smoothly. Business Class looked to be very nice with 21-inch wide seats and 37 inches of pitch. They also looked to have a ton of legroom. Maybe one day I'll get to find out.

If you want to reserve seats in the first, second, or emergency exit rows in Economy Class, you'll have to pay extra through the company's MYSEAT service. I wasn't buying, thank you very much.

By the time I got to my seat, most people were already seated with their bags stowed in the overhead compartment. Nearly half of Air Astana's fleet is made up of Airbus A320 and A321 planes. But for long-haul flights, like my trip from Seoul and to Moscow, they use 767-300ER planes.

The downside of boarding after everyone was seated is that there was little space for my bags. It was made worse because a number of the compartments were filled with these Air Astana bags of blankets. The fluffy, luxurious blankets came in handy on the long flight, so I won't complain too much.

The 4-hour, 40-minute flight started with the flight attendants coming around with hot towels. This should be standard on all flights. It starts the day off right.

Then they come around offering Kazakhstani candies. I took a few.

Leg room was solid, if unspectacular. Economy seats on the 767-300ER have 18.1 inches of width. I can imagine if you are tall — I am only 5-foot-7 — this could be a problem. The 30 to 32 inches of pitch isn't much, either. But the seats felt well-kept and not pilly.

That pitch measurement is assuming you can put your seat back at all. For some reason, it was incredibly difficult to push in the button to recline my seat. I had to use two hands.

One of the best parts of the flight was the amenities package. Even though my flight was only around 5 hours, Air Astana didn't skimp. It made me feel like I was in Business Class.

The package included slippers, ear plugs, a dental kit, pen, hand cream, and an eye mask. The mask had two sides: a red side that said “Do Not Disturb” and a green side that said "Wake Me Up For Meal." Very clever.

After taking a lot of flights recently with subpar entertainment systems, or no entertainment system at all, Air Astana's was a revelation. It was an Android-based tablet loaded with movies, TV shows, and games. I ended up playing the popular mobile game 2048 for quite a while.

It's crazy that some carriers haven’t upgraded their seat-back entertainment system to tablets. It's so much better. I also binge-watched a season of Fargo during the flight. The quality was top-notch.

The in-flight magazine was one of the better ones I've read, offering a ton of useful tips about visiting Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Everything was written in Russian, Kazakh, and English.

The view outside the window was pretty incredible on both the flight from Seoul to Almaty and Almaty to Russia. This is from the first flight, as we passed over the desert in Inner Mongolia.

The service on Air Astana was incredible, at least from the perspective of someone who is used to flying American carriers. Flight attendants were moving up and down the aisles constantly with drinks, snacks, and meal service. First, we got these cheese crackers.

Next up was a box of Kazakhstani sweets and chocolates. There were too many in there to eat, even for someone with a sweet tooth. I'm still carrying around a few in my backpack.

Next up was meal time. On my first flight, I opted for the chicken. It wasn't the best chicken I've ever had, but it was high quality for an economy-class flight. There was a light brown sauce over it and the meat was juicy. The best part was the chopped beet salad that came with it. After two weeks in Korea with few veggies, the salad was much needed.

On my second flight, I opted for a beef stroganoff pasta. It may not look pretty, but it was very tasty. Who doesn’t like cream sauce on pasta?

I’m not sure what I was flying over when I saw this, but this blue-green lake was unbelievable looking. AirAstana primarily operates in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Russia. The landscape was stunning the whole time we were flying.

After a couple more hours of watching Fargo, we landed in Moscow. Overall, my experience with Air Astana economy was spectacular. The plane was new and well kept, the flight attendants were attentive and nice, the entertainment system was top-notch, and the airline didn't skimp on food or goodies.

After flying Air Astana economy on two flights, I can say confidently that the airline knows how to treat passengers in economy. While I'm sure Business Class is great, I wasn't in it, so I won't speak to that. But it's clear that Air Astana wants to make a good impression on its economy passengers, which I cannot say for US carriers like United or American, in my experience.

At the end of the day, it comes down to the little things that were clearly thought out. The blankets provided by Air Astana, which were available on both flights that I took, were big, fluffy, and warm — not the thin, paper blankets of other airlines. The number of times a flight attendant came by to offer drinks, a snack, coffee, or tea made me feel like a valued customer on the flight, not just a number.

It helps a lot that Air Astana is a new airline. Nearly their entire fleet is planes that are around 10 years old or less. I was on a 767-300ER, but the majority of their fleet is Airbus A320 and A321. That makes a big difference when you are choosing your carrier. You have a much higher chance that you'll be on a fresh, well-kept plane with Air Astana, rather than one that's been through 20 or 30 years of flights.

The food was solid. It wasn't the best airline food I've ever had — that still goes to Japan Airlines — but the portions were generous and there were lots of snacks to go around. I particularly enjoyed the Kazakhstani sweets, which gave me a tiny window into the culture.

With all of that in mind, it should be obvious that I would fly Air Astana again. The only downside was transferring through the Almaty Airport, which was small, old, and had an excruciatingly long transfer process. But given how good the flight was, spending a couple hours in an airport that wouldn't be out of place in rural Montana isn't a huge price to pay. And if there are Air Astana routes that don't pass through Almaty, even better.

Give Air Astana a try if you have a chance. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/06/finance-one-of-best-airlines-in-world_25.html

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wbouldingblog-blog · 6 years

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Hello, dear readers. This is strange. We’re not on the move. We’ve been in the same place for 6 days, so there’s not been a natural break in proceedings to update you AND we’ve got another 2 days before we finally make it to New Zealand. Most importantly, we’ve crossed the equator and are now having to do handstands all the time here in the southern hemisphere and wear special harnesses to stop us falling off this side of the flat earth. Here’s how we made it.

After an uneventful night in a windowless hotel room in Ho Chi Minh (apart from a second cheesy foodgasm experience in Pizza 4Ps – we couldn’t get enough of it), we were checking out and, of course, it was at this moment, 2 hours before our flight to Singapore left, that the credit card machine stopped working. Luckily, as is often the case in HCMC, there was a guy with a scooter available to take Henny to another branch of the same hotel to pay there, where the machine was actually working. Henny was returned on the same scooter, and we hopped in a fresh-faced (couldn’t have been more than 22) Uber driver’s car and wove through the traffic to the international terminal of the airport.

Once inside, we played a game of ‘Where’s The Check-in Desk?’, followed by a lightning round of ‘Which Queue Is The Fastest?’, where the plot twist was that they were all glacially slow. Once at the desk, we were offered emergency seats (fistbump – legroom!) and made our way to immigration, where the authorities made sure to line everyone up to have their passports checked by smartly-dressed sloths. We eventually made it through and got through security (where more attention was paid to the football on the TV than to the x-ray machine) and found a little café, where we grabbed a baguette (I wanted more pho but there wasn’t enough time ☹), and sat down at our gate just as they started boarding. Once we’d finished our food and climbed on board (the extra legroom was aaaaaaaaamazing), we settled into our travelling routine of dozing, reading and listening to music. Before we knew it, we were at the gloriously modern arrivals terminal of Singapore Changi airport.

The difference was immediate and superb. The information desk spoke an English better than most of south London. The airport was spacious, with great big relaxation gardens featuring Koi carp-filled ponds and chirruping cicadas, an entire entertainment deck (as if we were on a cruise ship) with consoles, ‘jam room’, and cinema, and more shops in one place than I’ve seen in a terminal building. The catch? The price. Our first set of coffees outside of cheap Asia was in the 15 euros range (I did, admittedly, have a sausage roll too, but that was the cheapest of the three items). We’d gone from being able to live like royalty (if we’d wanted to) to being able to just sit quietly and sip at our coffees, trying to maximise the enjoyment.

We were going to be here for 12 hours. We wandered around looking at things we will never be able to afford, booked ourselves on the free city tour for the evening and even crossed into a different terminal to see if there were any major differences (none apart from the air conditioning being three degrees lower). We wandered some more, marvelled at the gardens, went to the loo (still not able to beat my shopping centre experience) then looked at phones, as mine was about to give up. I found a good few models, but they’re all still a bit too expensive at the moment, particularly as I’m not sure what my job situation will be in the next few weeks. We went and attempted to play on some games on the entertainment deck, but the computer was slower than I’d thought. After some button-mashing on street fighter II (Henny must have been cheating – I lost convincingly both times) and Henny being devoured by the ghosts on Mrs Pacman, we headed over for our tour, which took us to two major sites in Singapore. First was the Merlion, a new fountain which represents the wealth of the city pouring out of the lion’s mouth. The word ‘Singa’, we found out, means ‘lion’ and ‘Pura’ means ‘city’ (a prince saw a lion on a hunting trip here, so the tale goes), so the lion symbol represents the city itself, the fishy tail its marine economy. Second stop were the Gardens by the Bay. These newly-created, eco-aware gardens are fantastic for getting lost in (as a French couple displayed by being 15 minutes late to the pick-up point) and for getting good sunset pictures of the Marina Bay Sands hotel. After two hours of walking and seeing new sights, we headed hungrily back to the airport, skipped through security and went to a food hall, where I had some Thai green curry and Henny had some Korean barbecue.

Once we were gastronomically satisfied, we headed to the cinema, where we caught the action-packed finale of Fast and Furious 8, and I got an email about another translation, which was to be submitted in 2 days (or whatever it was after taking into account the time difference – this has really messed up my perception of time). I went to charge the laptops and begin work on it while Henny watched the beginning of Boss Baby (the only film in the cinema’s repertoire that I’d wanted to see, but hey ho). The hour before we needed to get to our gate disappeared into a flurry of typing and it was soon time to say goodbye to Changi and hop on a plane which would take me over the equator for the first time.

Our seats were, sadly, not in the emergency escape aisle this time, and we were surrounded by people who seemed to want to cough up their insides every five minutes, or sniff at 20-second intervals without using a tissue. This continued through most of the flight and is what I blame for my currently-annoying throaty cough. We slept through most of the flight though (it only lasted 7 hours) and were suddenly on our way down to land in Melbourne. We got off the plane, ran to the immigration barriers and, after a brief moment of panic when the automatic gate didn’t recognise me, I engaged in some sport-based banter with the immigration official and was let through unmolested. We had to wait for a bit for our bags, but eventually got them, Henny purchased her new-country sim card and we hopped on the express bus to take us to the city.

We trundled along the freeway (the Aussies seem to have taken the American word for this one) and, at some point along the journey, we turned a bend to see the towering heights of the Melbourne skyline spread out ahead of us. It was fantastic – a moment for a Hans Zimmer score, maybe from the Gladiator soundtrack.

We hopped off the larger bus at southern cross station and onto a smaller bus (more like the local ones we get in England – Surrey peeps, think the 465 to Kingston) to take us the United Backpackers hostel, where we’d be spending the next couple of nights. Through the small yellow entrance which you’d just walk past if you weren’t looking for it, the hostel was clean and bright and everything you could wish for from a place that wasn’t a hotel. Henny claimed a top bunk and I took a bottom bunk (on the other side of the room; most beds were already taken in our dorm) then, after a refreshing let’s-not-smell-like-plane-any-more shower, we headed out for Henny to show me briefly what there was to see in our little corner of Melbourne, including a glimpse of federation square and Coles, the supermarket chain. I initially baulked at the prices, but soon did the maths for the exchange rate and worked out that it was just like inner-city London prices; high, but manageable as long as you were careful.

Henny had been liaising with her former au-pair mum and the girls, and so arranged to go and meet them at their hotel (they live in Canberra but had come to stay in Melbourne for the weekend) while I finished off a particularly urgent translation and made some friends at the hostel at the same time. After I’d finished my translation, I headed off to meet the ladies at their hotel. The girls are diabetic and have a beautifully cute and patient dog called Molly who is also a registered assistance dog; she can smell when their blood sugar levels are dangerous and will alert Adrienne (mum) or their carer at school so that they can take action. After lots of stroking the dog and hearing about their adventures so far, we headed out for dinner, little Molly Polly trotting along alertly beside us.

Everyone wanted sushi, so we walked the 15-or-so minutes it took to get to a particularly well-rated one in a shopping centre near the central shopping area of the city. We’d finally found somewhere to get to the sushi conveyor belt which would sit all 5 of us (Molly could stay on the floor), when a man, who looked as if he’d taken inspiration from Ken (of Barbie fame) for his plastic-moulded hairdo, flatly, yet with an apology or two, refused us service, citing the fact that our dog couldn’t be in the restaurant. Despite Adrienne’s best efforts, showing him the assistance dog card and explaining the need for him, the man (like his hairdo) was not for moving.

Flinging a threat of legal action in the court of human rights over our shoulders along with some Paddington-esque Hard Stares, we left the centre and headed to the David Jones (think an Australian John Lewis) food court for some reduced-price (it was the end of their trading hours) sushi and fried chicken, which was lovely. The girls had a minor spat over a sip of milkshake (apparently the other’s spit would still be in the straw and original owner needed a replacement), which escalated and gave Adrienne a chance to highlight the differences between antipodean and middle-class British parenting approaches – there was no messing around with her. Direct and to the point, with a hint of frustration in her tone and vocabulary, she told the girls that there would be no replacement and that was that. Our sushi eaten and milkshake-wars in a state of ceasefire, we headed out to the street and parted ways, arranging pickup times for the morning after next when we were to head to the zoo for the day!

Before heading to the Zoo though, we had much to see of the Melbourne CBD, so the next morning, we went on a walking tour, learning about the history of Melbourne, the meaning of various sites and their importance in the development of the city, as well as some of the more notable citizens, including a particularly nefarious Robin Hood-inspired Irishman by the name of Ned Kelly. He and his gang were bank robbers and did the common people a service by combining their raids with the destruction of personal loan documents, which, unsurprisingly, made them rather popular. We saw the laneways where countless street artists had applied their skilled hands to jazz up the between-streets, and ended up with a beer in the pub. Here, Henny took her leave to go and see an old friend from her previous time in Melbourne, and I went on a lovely long walk around some other parts of Melbourne with some of the guys from the walking tour. When we’d had enough (the sun was baking), we headed back to our hostel and had a game of pool over a beer, which I lost (the pool that is, not the beer).

Once I’d got over the loss, I chilled in the aptly-named ‘chilling room’ until my evening’s entertainment arrived. Steph got to the hostel around 7 and we had a drink at the bar, whilst realising that it had been 7 years since we had last seen each other – she had been a supervisor at the farm a long time ago. She now works for Victoria Zoos and had managed to wrangle us free tickets for Melbourne Zoo for the next day. The free stuff didn’t stop there; she’d also won a competition at a Chinese dumpling place and had free dumplings for a year! The dumplings were excellent and I added some crisp pork belly to the order too, which was fabulous – melt-in-your-mouth tender and crunchy where you wanted it to crunch. Afterwards, we headed to what has become one of my favourite places in the world. A bar called Bartronica – a heady mix of retro-gaming awesomeness, pinball and beer. We played and lost heavily at Mario Kart (I was so good back in the day!), then I started kicking some serious gaming butt at smash bros., where Link sword-spun his way to secure me victory countless times. I had a go at Family Guy pinball, the Who song running through my head the whole time (… a pinball wizard’s got such a supple wriiiist… but not from holding a pint of beer), but couldn’t quite engage my inner Tommy to dominate the leaderboard.

We returned briefly but unsuccessfully to the Super Smash Bros., but I couldn’t emulate my previous success against much stronger competition (sorry Steph!) and so we headed our separate ways, promising to meet up again before Henny and I jetted off to Kiwiland.

The next day was full of excitement – we packed up our things, moved out of the hostel and headed downstairs to be picked up by Adrienne again and taken to the zoo. It was a baking hot day, so I wore my England rugby cap (carefully chosen to do maximum damage to local sensitivities after last year’s tour) and a pint of sun cream to keep out the ozone-free rays.

The girls (and Molly) raced around the zoo, the girls flitting like freed butterflies from one exhibit to the next, Molly following suit, a little perplexed by the richness and variety of scents coming her way. Molly was only allowed in certain areas, marked in pink on the map, so Adrienne took care of her at those times. We saw lions, tigers, sea snakes, African wild dogs, pelicans, monkeys (but no gorillas – they were hiding from us, we decided), iguanas, macaws, meerkats and penguins. We also saw a lot of Australian wildlife, which the girls weren’t as interested in as I was, having seen it all before; kangaroos, wombats, emus, kookaburras and a platypus were all fascinating to me but old hat to them.

The girls did, however, manage to spend some time (and a decent amount of their poor mum’s cash) in the gift shop, much like I’d done at the tender age of 10. Adrienne then drove us to our new home with Chris and Leesh, at their flat in the trendy suburb of Collingwood near Fitzroy, Melbourne’s answer to Neukölln or Shoreditch. They are renting a comfortable, modern 2-bed + open-plan kitchen/diner/living room flat in the former Yorkshire brewery, which has been redeveloped into a large housing complex complete with rooftop garden (with a BBQ, naturally) and gym. We said hello, dumped our stuff in our lovely little room, and headed back outside to meet Adrienne, who took us to Lygon street, a famous foodie street. It is a street, it is full of food, but 90% of it is Italian ristorantes, whose borderline aggressive front-of-house teams all seem to emulate Vietnamese street sellers (“You come eat here, I have very happy customers, I give you good deal, best price best price”). Not quite in the mood for pizza, we opted for a very tasty fish and chip place and tried all the deep-fried delicacies they had to offer. Things almost kicked off with Molly again, but the waitress was nice and understanding and Molly could remain under the table.

By the time we’d polished off the last of the nice thick chips, it was time for the girls to hit the hay and for us to go and meet Chris and Leesha at one of their friend’s gigs, where he would be playing funk/soul/r’n’b beats from 11. The bar was called Boney and the décor took us the 16,000ish kilometres back to Berlin. Arty things hung from walls, lighting was minimal and red and the patrons were suitably (under)dressed or just in the black-jeans-and-beard hipster garb necessary in this sort of place. We grabbed a drink with our hosts, headed upstairs to see his friend play to a room packed to the rafters with smoke from a smoke machine and not much else – we were the only four who had come to see him so far. Gradually though, other acquaintances dribbled in and the music got louder with each new audience member, so much so that we couldn’t really get acquainted with the newcomers, and decided to dive back downstairs. C&L joined us later, then left for their next gig. We called it a night (‘This is a night!’) then went back to our new room (possibly stopping for a McD’s 10-piece chicket nugget box) and slept until it was socially acceptable to wake up.

The next day dawned, but in our quiet, dark, cool cave of a room we didn’t notice until it was almost too late. We were supposed to meet the girls at 10.30 at the Victoria Markets (yay more shopping), which would take nearly half an hour to get to. Luckily, the girls and Adrienne had already headed to a different set of markets before, so we made our leisurely way down to the markets and had a breakfast of bacon and egg bap for me (plenty of ketchup, thanks) and a beetroot and feta salad for Henny. Just as we were polishing off the last morsels, we felt a familiar fluffy presence next to us and found that the girls had found us. Off we went on a zig-zag path past all the stalls with their various trinkets and tourist tat. I found a new adapter for my chargers as well as 2 decks of cards for 5 dollars (bargain). The girls found a few things that they liked, including a fake diamond-encrusted name tag for Molly and a set of earmuffs for themselves, in preparation for the harsh winter ahead.

We had to do some shopping for our promised (my fabled) roast dinner, so we almost tearfully parted ways with the girls for the time being and made our way around to find some decent veg and wine. We then toddled back to C&C’s and, after a while chilling out on the roof (Henny had to finish off her Hoi An post) and a couple of visits from a territorial pug, we prepared for the night’s entertainment: an outdoor cinema extravaganza with a picnic and Get Out. We took a nice ride in a taxify (similar to Uber but better for the drivers and customers apparently), and got to the botanical gardens, where we walked down a dusky path to a great big blow-up screen, in front of which a crowd of people were lying on the grass. We set up camp, tucked into our picnic and opened bottle after bottle then a box of wine, while the events of Get Out (a very, very good Black Mirror-like film) played out in front of us. But that wasn’t the only thing I was watching. As the sun had set, hundreds of crow-sized fruit bats had started winging their way to their twilight dinner above us. I sat, captivated by the slow, graceful movements of the huge bats. Luckily, I managed to pay enough attention to both and, once my wine-addled, bat-distracted, Get Out-head-blown state was brought to a close, we got in another taxify and roared home, where someone (Chris? Was it you?) decided to watch Whiplash (a film about a drummer – awesome) on their projector, just to keep the cinema feel going. It was fantastic – so much was relatable in the film, though maybe I had yet to experience the stresses of being a professional drummer like that. Tapping my legs in time to the music still bouncing around my head, we went to sleep and ended our second night in Collingwood.

This is also where I’ll leave you guys for the time being; there’s plenty more to come! For now though, I’ll just try and keep my eyes open – I’ve just taken some cough medicine and it’s one of those ones with ‘do not operate heavy machinery after use’ or something like that. Do laptops count as heavy machinery?

Yours drowsily,

Boulders

Superb Singapore + marvellous Melbourne (part the first) Hello, dear readers. This is strange. We’re not on the move. We’ve been in the same place for 6 days, so there’s not been a natural break in proceedings to update you AND we’ve got another 2 days before we finally make it to New Zealand.

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tarapai-blog · 6 years

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sur-realize the reality

“Only he who has a different visual opening can see the world in another way.” Bruno Munari

I remember the first time I saw a school of black fish above my head, swimming towards me slowly. I was seven years old and believed I was in a fish tank–until the car horn blasted in my ear. The fishes turned into raindrops and I found myself completely wet, standing in front of my school. My father pressed the horn again, “Why are you standing in the rain? Come! Let’s go home.” I gathered myself and returned to a reality where everything was drab and solid, where I felt loneliness and silence. I was waiting alone in the late evening.

What I experienced was a type of dream, a vision, arising from my unconscious self. But this dream was different from a typical nighttime dream over which we have no control. It was a powerful fantasy over which we can take ownership. A daydream is a subjective and personal mental space where things can be anything we wish them to be. It can inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different than the actual world. Dreams and fantasy to me are the purest forms of play. As a child, I frequently focused my attention toward them to relieve myself from exposure to disturbing contexts and stress. As Lynda Barry, an American cartoonist and author observed: “We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.”

Dreams are direct projections of the subconscious. They create inherent visions and actions beyond reason, translating inner characteristics and existence into dynamic forms and shapes. Sometimes, these visions can be illogical and last only a few minutes, but they always come from a deep internality. In 1960, D.W. Winnicott, an English psychiatrist, introduced the concepts of the “True Self” and “False Self.” He described a state of being one’s True Self as being in an unforced and spontaneous state. In this state, dreams convey our real self through fleeting imagery. These forms don't occupy a physical space but exist inside us. To reach this alternative space we need to reconstruct our perception. “Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself.”

Most of the time we live within the realm of consciousness—in what we call reality. In this stage, we have a sense of clear straight perception and understanding. Certain aspects of reality, however, can force us into a state of feeling controlled or feeling boxed into conventional and external norms. Winnicott described this state as the False Self. These external forces get us out of our comfort zone, with fear, anxiety, and stress preventing us from stepping outside these boundaries to find the answers to the questions we may have, and stifling our curiosity. Winnicott also explains that the state of being overcontrolled could prevent the potential for experiencing "aliveness" and feeling only emptiness. In this state we feel pain, disappointment and a sense of impossibility. Fortunately, we also possess intellect, enabling us to find ways to get through these undesirable events—dreaming is one such avenue.

To express our True Self, in reality, we start by situating ourselves in the realm of the surreal world. Dreams and surreality are theoretically overlapping phenomena, both are internal, fluid, and ambiguous. The only difference is in their “duration.” A dream is temporary, but surreality can be permanent (Suzanne Césaire, 1941). It is clear that a lens of imagination is required to enter this state. In a heart-touching scene from the 2006 movie The Pursuit of Happyness, Chris Gardner (Will Smith) and his three-year-old son get ejected from a motel after they are unable to pay for his stay. They have nowhere to go, but the father tries to hold things together by making up a fantasy about dinosaurs for his son. The two end up sleeping in the restroom of a metro station that Gardner has convinced his son is a cave. This magical scenario illustrates what Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher of psychic productivity and imagination calls "the calm beaches in the midst of nightmares." The father uses fantasy to mitigate his own fear and to prevent transmitting it to his son. The next day, his son innocently mentions he would be willing to stay in the cave again (instead of a motel) seeming not to realize the grim reality that surrounded them. In this state, Gardner creates a surreal world in which his son can place his trust.

“Surreality is a perfect nonsense that goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all.” – Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Living in surreality can influence how we perceive the real world. We may have an illogical perception or see irrational images. Salvador Dalí, a prominent artist and surrealist of the 20th century, has proved how rich the world can be by embracing pure and boundless creativity. “Surrealism is destructive,” he said, “but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” In Dalí’s work, he shows us visual representations of his dreams and hallucinations through exquisite paintings, suspending reality and discovering a new universe. His True Self is communicated and he makes his mental spaces permanently visible. Within his paintings, there are levels of strong emotion that embed true narratives about himself. For instance, his painting The Great Mastubator (1929) is not just a fantastical painting, but a representation of Dalí’s severely conflicted attitudes towards sexual intercourse. In his youth, his father left out a book with explicit photos of people suffering from advanced, untreated venereal diseases to educate him about the dangers of sex. The photo horrified, yet fascinated him. He continued to associate sex with putrefaction and decay into his adulthood. In adopting this approach, he recontextualized the reality about sexual disease into an engrossing vision.

Recontextualizing reality is to consider reality from different perspectives. These perspectives come mostly from one’s internal latencies such as the subconsciousness and sometimes from deep memories. When Ettore Sottsass, an Italian designer and the founder of Memphis Group, was a small boy, he loved to design cemeteries: “the tombs looked to me like small architectures, very much my size.” His sketches of cemeteries were outwardly patterned and colorful, removing the implication of death from the landscape. Later, his playful visions turned towards furniture and architecture. In this work, he invented unusual and hyper-functional objects based on his moods that he considered to be a major ingredient in his work–more so than any logical function. Sottsass fully lived in the realm of surreality until his last breath.

Considering these examples, what is interesting about dreams and surreality is that we can use them as a filter to reimagine and to irrationally change the assumptions of the immediate world. It allows us to see alternative contexts. As Lubomir Dolezel writes in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, “Our actual world is surrounded by an infinity of other possible worlds.” Once we transport ourselves to somewhere else, from a real-time situation, we enter the sphere of surreality. In doing this, we must be concerned that entering this state can be either positive or negative. Horrific hallucinations can occur when we are awake. They are caused by one’s personal traumatic experiences–a stifling sense of insecurity or a response to a natural disaster. They are reactions to situations from which we want to escape rather than situate. When this happens, severe experience or memories overpower the subconscious producing zone of discomfort in reality. In this state, our memories and fears reinforce the False Self. We must be aware of never letting them become a wall between ourselves and our dreams.

Dreams are not just fantastical perceptual visions, they can be realized through the form of action. In early 2017, there was a sense of emerging political chaos as many people were upset at the result of the U.S. presidential election. To some, it was a traumatic experience, having a person who had taken positions and made statements that were regarded as offensive to women. This trauma significantly impacted many women’s subconsciouses. The sense of dread became a wall seemingly built to enclose them and increase their insecurities and fears. However, for many this new reality awakened their aspirations. This resulted in the Women March in January 2017 in Washington DC where dreamers rallied for change and opposition to the new regime. The protest was a manifestation of the expression of True Self in action. Dreams were represented through protest signs using strong symbol of womanhood, the uterus, to comically represent the power of women. Wearing costumes, and bearing protest signs, men and women of all races joined together, and visually colored the city using fantasy and humor in response to the actual, severity of the situation. This surreal phenomenon re-established trust among the American people and released the tension from the protesters’ insecurities, encouraging belief that an idealistic change in the country was possible.

“Surrealism is psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” – André Breton

Dreams and surreality guide us to see better alternatives. In his 1516 work, "Utopia," Sir Thomas More introduced the concept of utopia and the opposite concept, dystopia. These ideas were presented as unrealizable fictions in the form of socio-political satire. Utopia is presented as an imaginary place that possesses perfect qualities for its citizens, and a complete absence of political problems. More presented utopia as place of eternal peace and happiness—a place that was obviously unrealizable. In their book, Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby describe a vision of Utopia that is far more interesting as a concept used as a stimulus to keep idealism alive, not as something to try to make real–a reminder of the possibility of alternatives, as something to aim for rather than build.

In adopting this attitude, we may see a great potential to put our trust in dreams and surreality as they have the capacity to recontextualize the undesirable parts of the actual world. There are many artists who are fascinated with visualizing a mental space through fantastical drawings. This approach invites us to view these visions as inspirational daydreams rather than as serious proposals. Paul Noble is a British Artist whose work is full of rigorous detail, so much so that it might best be viewed through a microscope. In his large scale work, Nobson Newtown (1998), he visualizes a vast phantasmagorical universe rendered in graphite pencil using a technique known as oblique projection. In his work, he presents a parody of various architectures; shopping malls, tourist spots, hospitals, factories, etc. but behind this humorous immersive drawing, is a caution—the drawings contain a total absence of human representation. Noble claims that “the truth is that wherever man goes, destruction and sadness aren’t too far behind.”

These examples address serious issues, through the lens of fantastical activity and imagery. They demonstrate how one’s personal creativity can address inaccessible and undesirable problems, and become clear significant manifestos regarding concerns in society. In this state, the appealing quality of fantasy can attract us more than a quality of realism. We can observe that the power of imagination or enter a state of being our True Self, which carries our internal exuberance and control forward and perhaps help us to conquer severe situations. As the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland observed: “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” As Vincente Minnelli, an American Stage Director, famous for directing classic MGM musicals such as Meet Me in St. Louis, Gigi, and An American in Paris, said: “Surrealism is a way of life–” not just a cultural movement in the art history.

Living in reality, we follow the world. But living in surreality, the world follows us. We all know the world is what it is, it can’t physically be something else, but as Albert Einstein once said: “Logic will get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere.” Perhaps, somewhere we never expect. If we want the world to exist in the way of our choosing, it is important to see the potentials of everything in our life. Once we give ourselves over to the realm of possibility, we are one step ahead of realism. Norman Bel Geddes, an American theatrical and industrial designer, mixed technologies with dreams, fantasy, and the irrational. In his work, he went beyond seeking functional solutions to problems, but used design to form dreams. In 1939 New York World’s fair, he designed an environment of large-scale models featuring a national network of expressways. It was viewed very much as an America of the near future: a realizable dream. Addressing a less optimistic reality, Herman Kahn, whose radical phrase was “thinking the unthinkable,” reconceptualized the practicalities of nuclear war by thinking through the aftermath in a rational way: how could America rebuild itself after an Armageddon? This speculative fantasy alerted people to the possibility of a nuclear war from the realm of the unimaginable to something much closer to everyday life.

Surreality is not the realm of the insane–whatever appears in our mind is eventually fantastic. In 1966, Yoko Ono, debuted her installation “Ceiling Painting” at London’s Indica Gallery where she and John Lennon first met. As with her instruction paintings, the “Ceiling Painting” was not a painting at all but an installation. It included a ladder with a magnifying glass suspended from the ceiling. In its original incarnation, the audience was to climb the ladder to see a word written in minuscule letters on a white canvas suspended from the ceiling above. The word was “YES.” Resolutely positive and elegantly simple, its humorous, intelligent twist gently transformed the audience into participants. The ladder and its accouterments are only the beginning of the artwork; its completion is in the “audience’s mind,” rolling over the meaning of that small yet powerful message; a word with an infinite definition. As John Lennon experienced this installation, the positivity of the word “Yes” incredibly conveyed Ono’s attitude and personality. Lennon was full of wonder and excitement to know her and ultimately made her his wife. In this work, Ono coupled a path to mental space with the action of climbing a ladder, metaphorically recreating the experience of a dream. If the word had been “No,” the power of negativity would have virtually eliminated all possible visions.

To perceive the value of dreams and surreality, we must understand the intimacy between our internal and external realities. In doing so, we can understand that the imagery that often occurs in our mind is never illogical. The irrational isn’t always impossible. It is important to listen to our True Self and let it speak in a way. In this world, with many unpredictable situations, we should appreciate that some people prefer to occupy the realm of surreality. By their examples, we will know that we have to do this for ourselves as well. Such an attitude can only enrich and broaden our minds. As Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst and follower of Sigmund Freud, once said “Our perception will become clear only when we can look into our soul.”

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victorstocks00-blog · 7 years

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Abcarticledirectory.com.

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This direct exposure indicates that our hair must be brushed for its own health much more than in ancient opportunities. In this particular publication filled in 1906, Jim as well as Della Dillingham Young are actually a few crazy, but which may hardly afford their apartment or condo. Historical Moments likewise organizes a few roleplay subjects, and also attending to social as well as relaxation subjects. It was actually during middle ages times that the principle from consuming with each other while assembled at dining-room tables emerged. The thinkers that are going to assist our team with these unpleasant but never prophetic times will definitely be those who teach us the best ways to determine unpleasant realities during dilemmas and the best ways to act with both vigilance and shrewd. Having said that a great deal of historians have actually confirmed that the trick signs of astrology are actually relatively more mature going back to the early opportunities from individual creating. Stonecutters, slaves and public officials were actually paid off in a kind of beer called 'kash' - which is actually where the word 'money' originated. This inner reality of lifestyle, as well as the knowledge of the best ways to touching that transcendental field of pure creative knowledge deeper within yourself and also utilize that, has been recognized as well as kept through reclusive Himalayan Vedic Masters given that the absolute most old of times. Context: That is why Contru Rampache, the aged lama, has actually arrived right here to the old community of Horse. Redford (Akhenaten, LJ 11/1/84) presents a study of the political, social, as well as theological partnerships one of the peoples from Egypt, Assyria, and also the Levant during the 3000 years coming from the Paleolithic period to the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. What identifies this study is the per spective of an Egyptologist who ap proaches the target of old Egypt and also Israel without the usual assumptions and also emphases found in the research studies originating from biblical studies academics. There is a quite higher option that contemporary product science will come to be a lot even more provided that it shall gain the ability to once more find likelihoods of very ancient times today and also listen to very old time noises as well as phrases today. Hand writing equipments performed date historical times, the Egyptians and also later on the Romans strengthened the writing method after they offered the plume marker. Losey is actually presently studying yet another Siberian Arctic dog burial ground with more ONE HUNDRED old pooches. Individuals of historical Egypt were actually mainly pescarian, implying they would certainly usually eat fish. These talented skills who can easily decode the posture and decode from the inter-planetary body systems to the old individuals's lifestyle were actually considered as predictors, witches, sorcerers, warlocks, witches, druids, therapists, shamans, conjurers, magicians or tools. The modern-day tradition from providing a meaning to every blossom is thought to have actually been actually brought to Europe after the French as well as the English skilled it in Chicken. I am actually immersing on my own in finding out about ancient Druid life for history information. Around the exact same opportunity (c. 1800 BC), Egyptian revered writings, like The Book from the Dead, make it clear that successful movement to the immortality relied on a lifetime record from compassionate actions in the direction of the suffering. My study collection for this job has increased to over 60 essential manuals, and also this manual made its technique near the best. Despite today's digital communication our team still make use of a lot of paper, whether that's for sending characters and also invoices, advertising, brochures, or calling cards as well as details books, so that's important our company locate a paper provider which may provide our company along with high quality newspaper at budget friendly costs. In Peru, as in historical Egypt, that was actually the custom-made to mummify the dead and to lay to rest with the moms the clothing, food items, house tools, tools, as well as various other objects as well as write-ups used by the living. Like Argus from the early opportunities, Our team leave this modern-day Greece, Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum, To shear the Golden Fleece. Historical Classical disguises look remarkable no matter where shown - be it indoors or outdoors. Immediately the majority of them are underpriced however as soon as the word goes out that silver will make a rally, the situaltion is visiting modify. The ancient Egyptians positioned wreaths and florals at the doorway to tombs from loved ones, much like the method which our company embellish burial ground tombs. If you have any concerns relating to the place and how to use yellow pages uk residential (Highly recommended Webpage), you can contact us at our website. Apply this technique at least 4 - 5 times everyday as this are going to be actually very advantageous for you to cope with the nearsightedness concern. The old Roman intellectual Pliny was actually so relocated by emerald green's lush colour he composed, nothing at all is actually a lot more intense in comparison to the greenish of emerald and also sight is freshened as well as rejuvenated by staring after this stone Following his advise, Roman empress Nero used emerald sunglasses to see the gladiators. In this manner, you may learn more concerning the meaning and also story behind the several tribe tattoo designs and figure out the tattoos of a specific society that rate of interest you even more. The Classical in early opportunities utilized attractive containers to lug their perfume, as well as gemstones were made use of due to the Classical people to hold and bring their colognes.

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How do I hate thee?