arvapor-blog

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Some thoughts on gender in pen names

Hello all!

It’s been a long time since my last post, and I apologize. But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Most people who know me see me as a woman, a female. But in many times in my life, I have wanted to be a man. Sometimes I look like a man because of the way I dress and do my hair and the fact that my voice is deeper than most women (though both my mother’s and sister’s voices are deeper).…

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The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Albert Camus (via henretta84)

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[The human social world is] a decadent and hypocritical world in which natural impulse, stigmatized and denied, can only express itself in illness.

Elizabeth Dalton

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The Paradox of Change and Stagnation

The Paradox of Change and Stagnation

I have been thinking about change and why human beings are afraid of it. I suppose we must be afraid of the unknown, as if it could never turn out well, or as if it would turn out well for a moment before slipping away. It seems to me that we are afraid of both good change and bad change because we often cannot tell whether this change willbe a good one. So we often prefer things to stay the…

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Strengthening Faith By Strengthening Doubt

Strengthening Faith By Strengthening Doubt

Two Sundays ago, on September 7th, one of the members of my bishopric asked me if I would do a talk on faith. I accepted, though that week would have been busier than other weeks. So I began thinking about what I myself thought about faith. I wanted to write a talk that would be unique and in line with the church and my own conception of faith. So then I wrote the talk and, after many revisions,…

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In the classical period, indigence, laziness, vice, and madness mingled in an equal guilt within unreason; madmen were caught in the greater confinement of poverty and unemployment, but all had been promoted, in the proximity of transgression, to the essence of a Fall. Now madness belonged to social failure, which appeared without distinction as its cause, model, and limit. Half a century later, mental disease would become degeneracy. Henceforth, the essential madness, and the really dangerous one, was that which rose from the lower depths of society.

Michel Foucault

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Madness is Reason...

Madness is Reason…

This might be a contradictory sentence, but I have never heard of a more perfect notion of madness than what we find in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. In the fourth chapter, “Passion and Delirium,” Foucault argues that there is a kind of reason in madness. If a man is actually made of glass, and glass is easily shattered, of course he is going to have to be careful when he touches anything,…

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A Demon in the Mind

A Demon in the Mind

What if you met someone with whom you became fast friends? You like him, and he likes you. You have great conversations with each other. You learn a lot from each other. And thus, you trust him as a best friend. But what if he turns out to be the devil? Or worse, what if he turns out to be a figment of your imagination? But yet he feels so real to you! You cannot accept that he is not real…until…

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We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

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We can know love by knowing hate (and vice versa)...

We can know love by knowing hate (and vice versa)…

Does love exist? I look around and all I see is hate, darkness, despair. Yet if those things exist, then surely love does as well. After all, how can the realization of hate exist if there had not been the realization of love at one point? How can I know what hate is if I had not known love? But then again, perhaps I know neither thing, if I cannot know love without knowing hate first, if I…

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"Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives."

(via Pinterest) 

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Whatever the sources of our impulses to brutality, they can be exploited and exacerbated by social contexts that provide them approbation.

William F. Schulz

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The Rising Spirit

I’m sorry for not updating on here more often. But I have big news tonight: I just finished my first draft for the first novel of my series, the series I’m going to be using for my senior thesis. The working title was “Becoming God” but has now changed to “The Rising Spirit.” The major premise used to be that God is a writer, but has now changed to the related questions: When do we accept what…

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The body becomes absolutely present BECAUSE it is being annihilated, because the annihilation of it is so painful that the pain forces the person to abandon all other mental content, all other objects of his attention and sensory ability. Torture demonstrates that physical pain possesses the power to annihilate a person's world, self and voice.

Arne Johan Vetlesen, A Philosophy of Pain, p. 21

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The presence of pain means the loss of a world, the familiar world of mental content, of initiative and meaning; he absence of pain means the presence of a world.

Arne Johan Vetlesen, A Philosophy of Pain, p. 20

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For the torturers, the sheer and simple fact of human agony is made invisible, and the moral fact of inflicting that agony is made neutral by the feigned urgency and significance of the question. For the prisoner, the sheer, simple, overwhelming fact of his agony will make neutral and invisible the significance of any question as well as the significance of the world to which the question refers.

Elaine Scarry

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In war, the persons whose bodies are used in the confirmation process have given their consent over this most radical use of the human body while in torture no such consent is exercised.

Elaine Scarry