#and the life he's lived where affections and pleasures are fleeting at best and sentiments are detriments at worst

[sotc]

DID---DID MILANA AND HIM JUST BREAK UP. Was it even a breakup when they never quite established what they were anyways to begin with? Heartbreaking for miss Milana.

The tension between them is palpable to say the least now within the party and boy, does Milana feel real stupid. Alistair presented her a rose and all the sentiment that came with it that she turned down because she felt something growing stronger between her and Zevran only for Zevran to turn around and try to downplay what they have and what that token of affection means.

You walked straight into this Milana LOLOL. <3 ALSO....

Bonus points for THIS conversation with Wynne happening right after that scene. Not sure if this was a conversation you could have had earlier but, once again, I super love the timing of this moment in the overall narrative of the romance drama. I imagine Wynne likely caught onto the tension and distance between Zev and Milana afterwards and was trying to comfort/reassure Milana through the uncertainty of this lil breakup. I think Milana really appreciated an outside perspective (at least this time around compared to the last when Wynne was judgmental af lol. ) she isn't CRAZY during these Trying Times and knows something is there between her and Zev.

You'll be OK Milana <3 There is something special between you two and I'm sure, in time, it will work out <3

[simmeredsalmon]

〈whisper of yoriichi’s heart〉

+ a demon sends you back in time and you miraculously meet the elusive yet warm yoriichi... and you fall in love with each other. (violence / angst)

Taisho-era. The feverish gasps elicited from the heat scorching your lungs fill the air brimming with tension, your numb fingers refuse to let go of your sword—even as it quivers. How long has this fight been going on? How long have you endured sprinting around, praying for daybreak?

This demon, Shifumi, has scarcely used his Blood Arts on you; only effecting the surrounding terrain by decaying the vegetation, or rapidly flourishing it. A long spear was his choice of weapon... which he also hasn’t utilized at all. It was perplexing, to have someone trap you within their circle yet not attack you. Shifumi is clearly attempting to wear you down until you cracked. But wouldn’t the sun be rising soon...?

Just as those spate of thoughts gyrated in your mind, Shifumi casts a technique and the crinkled roots under your sandals spring to life and ensnare around your ankles. Your sword immediately shreds them away, but another wave comes at you and effectively keeps you locked in your spot.

“You’re such an idiot girl... You embody your breath-style. You’re slow at escaping me and making deductions... just like the clouds,” Shifumi taunts, the spear glimmering as a crack of sunlight bears itself before you—but he swiftly submerges you in the darkness of trees. “That look in your eyes? Did you finally realize my powers?”

The weapon tucked between his hands, hands teetered with wrinkles yet youth, was a spear in the shape of a clock’s hand. This whole time, he wasn’t controlling plants. He was controlling time, increasing or decreasing their lifespans as he pleases. What a dangerous demon... How many had he killed with those powers?

The tip of Shifumi’s spear tilts your head up by your chin, and a malicious grin appears on his face; his rotted teeth sharp contrast to his plump lips. “Because I’m fond of your special breath-style, I’ll allow you more time to live; or so you’ll think. Just as the clouds have always existed, drifting in and out of time... I’ll send you back to a time where they block the sun. And when you return to your rightful place in time, you’ll feel the pain of a thousand deaths.”

“There has never been a time, or will there be, a time when the sun is not comforting humans!” As trepidation shakes your body, your axons jerk and you push yourself forward in order to impale his spear into your throat and end your life before giving him the pleasure of having his way.

Feeling the immense pain in your neck, your eyes innately shut. However, as you expected to see your deceased family when your eyes opened... you were met with only a familiar sky.

Your body feels functional and healthy, although dried blood coats your throat’s skin—and it feels hard to breathe when you acknowledge that.

When you push yourself up, you scrutinize your surroundings and are unnerved to recognize nothing. The buildings around you are modelled differently from what you know and understand, and even the people ambling by are dressed in old clothing styles.

The people around you haven’t acknowledged your presence in the middle of the road, but you drive any pernicious ideas out of your mind and stand up; addressing the nearest person for advice. You couldn’t afford to squander time by dazing about, you needed to grasp what was happening as quickly as possible.

However, as you tapped a benevolent-looking lady’s shoulder, she didn’t flinch. “Excuse me...?” you said, but she wasn’t even looking in your direction at all. “Please answer me!”

But she didn’t. When her head craned in your direction, her eyes couldn’t see you at all. Their depths only reflected the cat frolicking behind your entity.

Panic settles itself in the thicket of your nerves, and you desperately search around this town for anyone who could acknowledge your existence. In this endeavour, you discover it’s nearing the end of the...

Sengoku-era. Your despair is acute, bringing you to tears as you stumble your way out of the town. It seems as though you can interact with the world, but they cannot react to you. You’re transparent, in a world bordering reality and dream.

Upon making it towards the stream outside of the town, you peer into the water and are relieved to see your own face staring back at you. You senselessly wash away the blotches of blood on your neck, before heaving a quavering sigh. What should you do? You’re supposedly in the Sengoku-era, where no one can even see or hear you. Feel you. Wouldn’t the only option be... to die?

The sword forged upon your feelings of resolution to destroy demons shimmers on your hip, and you draw it ruefully. “There’s no time for hesitation,” you whisper to yourself, preparing to slit your throat, “I’m going to die once I return home anyway.”

Yet, before you could complete the act, the clamor of metal colliding resounds and you find your sword being ripped from your hands.

Standing before you is a man, the hanafuda earrings he wore swaying with his swift movements. But the calm gentleness in his eyes makes you aware of your heart, how it's still beating. “Don’t hurt yourself. You still want to find a way out, so think before you choose to end your life here.”

The way he says this gifts you solace, even if in that fleeting moment. And that sensation of relief was enough for your mind to process the burden of your body, and you collapsed; although the man caught you on his shoulder before you hit the stream.

... And when you awoke, the scent of fire and fish wafted around you. The sky was dark, and not a cloud tainted the onyx-colored horizon. You peer over at the pale light of the fire, before shifting your gaze towards the man from earlier. “Um...” you breathe out, unsure of what was happening. “You can see me?”

It was all you could think of to say, only you immediately thought about how you should’ve expressed your gratitude firstly afterwards.

Nodding his head, the man clarifies, “I can also touch you.”

When you bring yourself up, the man’s red haori flutters into your lap—and you gasp out, “Th-Thank you very much! Here you should have it back—“

“No, it’s okay. You’re not... wearing proper attire, so you need it more than I do right now,” he tells you, noting your uniform’s short skirt. “I know you’re not supposed to be here. You’re trapped by a demon, aren’t you?”

You then proceed to explain your situation to him, elucidating that you’re from the future and how you came to be before him. Even though you would’ve never opened up this easily, he gave you abundant comfort and you find him trustworthy in spite of not knowing his name. “I’m [full name]... May I ask for your name?”

“It’s Tsugikuni Yoriichi.” And you wondered why Yoriichi was the only human able to perceive you. Maybe it was the purity in his eyes that enabled him to see things others cannot see.

Once he soaked in your plight, Yoriichi agreed to let you accompany him places as you search for a way to return home. To your rightful place in the world.

You felt invincible and powerless all at the same time. Whenever he slayed a demon, you weren’t harmed. Because you weren’t ‘really there’.

The two of you travel evasively across the warring lands, sharing memories and thoughts along the way.

As you learn of Yoriichi’s childhood, you can’t help but say, “If you’ve been cursed at all, it’s only because evil believes you’ll defeat it someday. Why curse a newborn child, who has yet to develop anything?” You also add in, “Also, I think your birthmark is pretty! I-I know I shouldn’t say that, since you’ve been through so much... but I can’t help how I feel.”

Yoriichi is speechless for a moment, mostly for your second remark more than the first. He knows he’s no one special, so the impact was scarce on him. But calling a part of him beautiful so unabashedly shook his heart for a second. “Thank you for saying that, [last name]-chan. If it’s the reason I’m able to help you, then I’m happy for it.”

When he breathes that out, your cheeks suddenly heat up. It’s a tremendous sentiment to be given, and you’re suddenly grateful to still be alive.

Of course you were thankful for Yoriichi before, but now... you feel exuberant strength accumulating within you. It even helps ease your struggles with accepting the fact that you can only give him emotional safety and nothing more.

Yoriichi always tells you that he’s older and doesn’t mind taking care of you—though he would still do his best for you even if he was younger.

In such a short span of time, you had grown extremely close to Yoriichi—and him to you. The nights spent with your head on his lap, his on yours, or mutually draping your haoris (he generously bought you one in your favorite color) over top of you both... they were precious. You cherish them.

Sometimes, when you’re fast asleep, Yoriichi presses his lips against your forehead and sighs against your skin; deeply enraptured with your entity, but too afraid to display such affection when you’re awake.

“Having someone by my side... I never imagined it. Now, I don’t yearn for anything else,” Yoriichi muses to himself, the leaves rustling as the world is still, “I know you’ll depart back to your rightful time someday. And I know... I’ll never be able to love anyone but you.”

The grief is threaded in Yoriichi’s soft voice, yet a tranquil smile is still present on his thin lips. “Maybe I wished for this all along. Wished for you.”

You were a bit slow at times, but Yoriichi never minded having to carry you in his arms; or having you sit on his shoulders when the two of you needed to make great distances. You were also clumsy; couldn’t grill the fish right because you put them too close to the fire at times. But...

You were kind, faithful, and optimistic—you were becoming your old-self, the you who wasn’t overwhelmed with desolation for the future. He wasn’t aware that he was the one who helped you return to your normal self, given you such inspiration and hope.

But Yoriichi is a man of no worth, one who knows he is unable to protect you from your dismal fate.

As he brushes his hand against yours, you unconsciously slip your hand into his... allowing his larger, solicitous hands to encase yours in their heat.

The only one who can grasp your hand... it sounds lonely, like his existence, but it’s much more profound than that. Always behind the clouds is the sun, bright and warm—giving you a push from behind, giving you a perpetual sense of safety. And standing before the sun is the attainable clouds, who give respite and shelter.

“When we die, we’ll be together. We’ll be at the same place. Please, [first name]... don’t lose heart. I’ll never forget you. No matter how much time passes, you’re engraved in me.”

The last thing he whispers is mournful... “Forgive me for being who I am.”

[topmixtrends]

COMEDIAN, ACTOR, AUTHOR, and activist Russell Brand, who needs no introduction, has struggled with addiction throughout his life. Recently we discussed his new book, Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions, in which he shares the hard lessons he has learned over the years.

¤

BRAD EVANS: We all know any book is the outcome of months and sometimes years of procrastination. What really compelled you to write this book at this moment in your life?

RUSSELL BRAND: I felt that anybody who is in recovery has an experience where the initial attempt to tackle addiction — in my case crack and heroin — ends up being utilized in every aspect of your life. Working through and following the same principles can alter all behaviors and all forms of destructive attachments. So what I felt was I’d reached a point in my life where I have gone through so many layers of disillusionment, with sex, fame, Hollywood, and the rest, and the recovery lens through which I live my life offered something.

Don’t get me wrong — disillusionment is a good thing. After all, who wants to be bloody illusioned! Now I by no means do it perfectly. Far from it! But I have seen the techniques that I followed change lives. So I wanted to expound these to offer a counter-weight to the prevailing addictive ideologies of our times, which is a determined and yet unconscious self-centeredness.

When reading the manuscript, I was trying to figure out what type of book it actually was. Ironic, I know, for a so-called post-modernist! I think, in an affirmative way, it’s like an “Anti-Self-Help-Book.” And what I mean is the central message I see jumping off the pages is that it’s precisely the traits of the self-centered, individualistic, fuck-the-world-and-its-loving-sentiments attitudes that get you precisely into the fix in the first place. Hence it’s not about self-help; rather it’s all about a sober and truthful cry for human connection.

I think our culture and our biochemistry can collude to become our worst allies. They can create a kind of chronic individualism. And I feel the natural conclusion of a secular rejection of the mystical leads us to the point that we are just individuals. We are only here for ourselves, surviving alone, and learning how to dominate certain situations so we can fulfill our own impulses and desires.

When I try to find personal fulfillment in my life I still often find myself in a sort of peculiar despair. I start to feel lonely and disconnected. Then I remind myself. Hence why I feel qualified to write about addiction is my life is like a map of addicted lines from money, crack, fame, sex, relationships, and seeking out other people’s approval. And so I see this phenomena appearing again and again in my own life. Maybe the label “addiction” itself is too confining and what we are actually dealing with is the human condition in motion. We live in a culture that uses as its fuel this will to acquire and possess. But the tragedy is such a desire to possess things ends up possessing us.

But this is a constant battle. Every day I wake and I am bewitched and hypnotized by the seductive lure of materialism. And yet I know that when I go and help other people, sometimes in blatant sub–Princess Diana ways or even on a more basic human level by just listening to other people’s problems, that’s when I feel genuinely fulfilled and my life has meaning and significance. There is an indescribable energy there when you begin to help somebody else. It’s a kind of elevated sense of human connection. And you also start to see the real beauty of a person when they help somebody less fortunate. A life of unselfish purpose, empathy, compassion, all those words that are excluded from the political and social ideologies of our times suddenly become accessible through the most basic of human actions and behaviors.

So why do you think then that we often act and behave against our better judgments? I am thinking here of our attraction to relationships and people we know to be detrimental and indeed toxic to our physical and emotional well-being.

Possibly a misplaced sense of romanticism. What I mean by this is the individualistic notion that you can find fulfillment by being with some aspirational figure that comes from the desire to be with some deity or earthly goddess. I’ll find salvation if I find the true one, like your own personal Jesus. This idea I think is highly prevalent. And yet even more toxic I think is the commodification and objectification of all relationships. To view somebody like an object that can serve you, make you feel better, and improve your social status. Now I have to admit that in my case this happened all too easily. I have to work to not approach relationships in this indulgent way. But these are just tendencies. And that’s what a recovery program means to me. It is to learn to acknowledge and deal with these tendencies on a daily basis.

It’s also important to recognize it’s not the difference between having a program and no program. We are socially and culturally programmed to behave in certain ways, not least the program of vapid consumerism. And so if you don’t undo that program, decode yourself from the “I’ll never be good enough unless I get my hand on that object” like somebody who is leaving an all too consuming cult, then that’s the program which will come to shape your existence.

We have to learn to untangle the strands that bind us to materialism. We know the material world is an illusion that is transmitted into our consciousness through the senses. This is why personal crisis is important here. It gives us the opportunity to reevaluate our lives and ask difficult questions.

There is invariably a deep philosophical underpinning to this project. And that is the attempt to connect with something, which in the most inexplicable but no less real ways gives meaning to this all too fleeting life. Am I right in saying this is truly a search for the substantive over the superficial? Or to put it another way, maybe it’s an embrace of something irreducibly spiritual, which only comes from certain courage to tell the truth about your existence?

What is substantial about the spiritual to me is its efficacy. I know it works. When I do these things I feel better in ways I can’t explain but know are real. It doesn’t require any science to tell me this. When I am kind, loving, and when I surrender I know that I am becoming a better me. These things can’t be measured. Nor can they be mechanized or monetized. They are in fact affective. They have a truth, which is different and difficult to legislate or iterate. This again is the deception of secular materialism. It teaches you to become suspicious of those feelings you know to be true. And then it sells us solutions to our problems that come from living under the false ideals of consumerism. This is how addictions take hold. They don’t appear as problems but solutions in our attempts at seeking some form of human connection. And this is why I think we are all somewhere on the addictive scale.

I know that I could lapse at any moment. I don’t know what’s around the corner. What unforeseen event might push me back into the depths of loneliness and despair? This is why I haven’t written this book from a position of authority. It’s written from a position of an experience I am still living. And it’s when I actually think that I’ll take full control of this situation that the ego starts to reappear, armed with its desire, pleasure, and fear to send me down the wrong path. So the reason why the spiritual is important is that it is the only thing that can transcend the material and passive consumerism.

You talk in the book of the need to confide in others about your troubles. I would like to read out this particular segment, not only because it brought tears to my eyes, but also because I think it really addresses what’s at stake here:

Suddenly my fraught and freighted childhood became reasonable
 and soothed. “My mum was doing her best, so was my dad.” Yes, people made mistakes but that’s what humans do and I am under
no obligation to hoard these errors and allow them to clutter my perception of the present. Yes, it is wrong that I was abused as a child but there is no reason for me to relive it, consciously or unconsciously, in the way I conduct my adult relationships. My perceptions of reality, even my own memories, are not objective or absolute, they are a biased account and they can be altered.

The moves here from the deeply personal and tragic to the transformative are powerful. And it no doubt takes a great deal of courage to put this onto paper. How do you hope these words can help in the healing of others who carry such difficult memories?

As Jarvis Cocker once put it, “without people we are nothing.” Recovery and spirituality are collective and communal activities. They cannot be achieved by being stuck into a pod and shot into outer space. Primarily it is about how you relate to yourself and how you relate to others as people. Just to clarify, the abuse you referred to in the passage happened outside of my family and the issue, I feel, is that it’s possible to alter our perception of the past, and in doing so we also alter our perception of the present. But you can’t just say this to yourself stuck in some room. It has to be related.

Lets now connect this more specifically to your earlier work on the War on Drugs. Historically, the drugs issue has often been neatly separated into war/law versus development/health paradigms. Now while the critique of the former is most welcome, too often the latter can reduce this to questions of individual pathology or deviance. It is simply the individual who screws up! How might we learn to better connect the social to the individual in this context?

The criminalization of drugs is a useful social tool in the management of populations. And I agree with your critique of the health model as a determinate means for reducing what is a social issue to some individual pathology. Addiction can affect anybody, but it is certainly exacerbated by economic deprivation. But there are different forms of deprivation too, like emotional deprivation, so it’s not like the poor simply have full ownership of this. Though it would be nice for them to have exclusive control of something! What I mean is that its effects are felt more there in terms of the experience, the treatments, whether you are criminalized or not, and often whether it takes your life.

A while back I went on a police raid in west London. This was a very revelatory experience for me. They battered the door in of this “crack house” — which in itself is an interesting description for a deprived home — and what dwelled within was not monsters. It was like booting down the door of a leukemia ward. It was full of thin, emaciated, and broken people who were slumped and pale in chairs, denied sunlight of every variety — literal and spiritual.

These were people who were just holding their lives together. And what I realized here was that it’s precisely those programs, which take you from the individual narcissism and nihilism to forms of social care and compassion that are most needed here. If we have an inclusive, empathetic society then by definition you don’t abandon people to the fate of forces beyond their control. We need to help people so that they are not defined by problems, which are often social problems. If we have systems that emphasize the corollary and connection between us then we will build a better society that is more inclusive.

I want to push you a bit on this term “recovery,” which is used for the title. The way you seem to use and deploy the term here is different from more simplistic understandings, which might refer to the rediscovering of some essential self that’s been somehow trapped or frozen in time and just needs to be re-discovered. And yet this book seems to also be a critique of such perfectible lifestyles. Or that to recover means to also accept that sometimes it’s actually okay not to be okay in life, and that all of us struggle with our identities.

This again is something I have only found in spiritual conversations. You accept fallibility as part of the human condition. And you don’t punish yourself because of it. Humanity needs to relinquish the idea of perfectibility. Now a natural biochemical entity like the human does have a code. It will grow a certain way, if in our case unimpeded by social, political, cultural forces. But we know those forces exist. So when I use the term recovery I am talking more about an intended path, which doesn’t condemn us to live addicted lives and to succumb to the logics of passivity and its false material prophets. We must be reborn from a world that sees us only as a statistic.

To conclude, I’d like to end on the issue you begin with at the very start of the book — namely the big impending “D” or death question. As you point out in the introduction, we don’t like to talk about the reality of death individually, and it certainly is not something we like to talk about publicly. And yet since Plato onward, it has been thought that to philosophize is to learn how to die. 

I don’t think however this goes far enough, or at least it needs to be taken a stage further. As they say, “Religion is for people who fear hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there.” With this in mind, your book leaves me asking: How can we examine our life, to learn to appreciate its finitude and the impending death we all face by actually crossing over and looking at life from the perspective of death? Or, as you say, to ask serious questions about our life, our present, and our hopes from the future, while already knee-deep in the mud of our tragic and yet still wondrous condition?

This requires actually some rather simplistic shifts in acceptance and gratitude. To begin, on an all too human level, I relinquish the idea that I am not homeless, lying in a gutter and smacked up on crack because I am now somehow a superior being literally looking down. It’s more because of some random set of coordinates and unforeseen events, which have deposited me into a comfortable life, and I’m really lucky and gracious. So I don’t have a punitive attitude toward those people who by chance find themselves in desperate states.

I always find it a real honor that when I am among addicts they will often just take me for who I am. They know my past and my fallibilities. And it’s in these moments that I also realize we are all ultimately connected. We are all experiencing this thing called life together as part of a shared consciousness, for better and worse. And when I realize this I know I am not on my own anymore. I am no longer afraid. I don’t have these obligations to prop up some avatar of myself, some deification that people might love or give me approval in order for me to ameliorate some inner sense of worthlessness and isolation.

When the self feels like it’s worthless or nothing I feel we are searching for a deeper truth. How can we not be disconnected or divided, separate from everything? Clearly the retreat into individualism is more than self-defeating here. Because if we separate we are condemning ourselves to nothingness! This is not about the annihilation of the self as in the subjugation in a violent or destructive way. But the recognition that there is no need for fear because we are already one, and these things are not just philosophical tropes or empty mantras, they are things you can live by recognizing that your own suffering is an opportunity and call to break out from the imposed paradigm that reduces worthiness simply to what objects you accumulate. And this is what it means I think to find out the truth about ourselves.

¤

Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer, who specializes on the problem of violence. He is the founder/director of the Histories of Violence project, which has a global user base covering 143 countries.

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Artwork: Chantal Meza, Get Away II, Oil on Canvas 55×78 (2014).

The post Recovering from an Addicted Life: A Conversation with Russell Brand appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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