#as well as the mental instability that comes from studying mathematics

[fusionpoweredasexual]

Romance clichés, Furries and 19th century American litterarture

In an enemies to lovers plot, obsession often plays an important role. Ususally, this manifests in a characters hate for the future love interest growing so intense it transforms into some sort of twisted infatuation, which through contrivances of the plot can be turned into an actual relationship, healthy or not.

If we accept the pipeline of hate leading through obsession to pseudo-infatuation as an initial stage in an enemies to lovers story, we must then consider whether captain Ahab from litterary classic Moby Dick can be classified as a furry, or an appropriate equivalent for acquatic mammals

[redantsunderneath]

On Analysis, Aside 1 - Duality

“If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.” - Steve Martin

In college, I was a physics major with a minor in math and philosophy, but I really walked away from this stuff when I went to med school/got married (Luthor from the Warriors voice, “I was busy”).  The one part I couldn’t shake from all those all nighters was phenomenology.  I was kind of obsessed with the hard problem a decade before before it was called that and dwelling on Descartes and my hate boner for George Santayana lingered through the salad days. I started thinking about the question as one of the relationship between (I wasn’t really tuned in to the proper language of this) subject and object. This wound up being helpful to me in understanding film, notably “late Lynch” (all David Lynch directed work from the roadhouse/killer reveal scene in the Lonely Hears episode of Twin Peaks on) in which the abjection of the subject in relation to a state of “objecthood” is a reliable motif.  More on this later.

This has some superficial homology to physics, notably the measurement problem in quantum mechanics and whether the thing itself is “actualized” by “observance.” This is not quite right, and physicists will stab me, but it was quite popular in pop physics books of my undergrad time, e.g. the Dancing Wu Li Masters and the Tao of Physics.  This is not solipsism but, rather, elevating consciousness to at least an equal partner in bringing reality (whatever that is) into existence, the other partner being some pretty based equations which define a waveform determining probability.

It wasn’t till Tumblr woke me up to physics again (remember, in the late 80s when I was in physics they didn’t have inflation yet and they taught off of calculus and linear algebra, so I was not only behind the curve I was flat out wrong about many things, and I don’t like being wrong on the internet) that I started to learn about group theory and how to construct the standard model mathematically.  The thing that struck me off the bat is the way all the math is non-commutative.  In all of these constructions, you build things like spinors with building blocks of asymmetrical math - it matters, when two of the basic terms interact ,who is doing what to whom. Yeah, there’s the S word.

The metaphor of symmetry breaking is powerful.  That the nature of the big bang is some perfectly symmetrical situation that begins immediately to break down due to energy decrease/entropy into sub symmetries until we get (waves around) this but that interact to form space, time, matter, etc because they are asymmetrical to each other.  This is powerful in a first 4 chapters of Genesis way: from in the beginning down to Cain and Abel it’s all about divisions into 2 with natures in opposition.  What haunts my mind, though, is the recapitulation of this idea, the idea of broken symmetry, of directed relationships of from/to manifested as an emergent feature at all levels of study.

Bohm’s idea of implicate order, that there is unmanifested order handed down from more fundamental to emergent structures, that can “come out” in the right circumstances, applies to a seemingly foundational asymmetric relationship between dyads that results in a surprisingly durable pattern of duality at all levels, that of the organizing actor and the mercurial acted upon: Boson/fermion, heavens/earth, light/dark, conscious/subconscious, Yin/Yang, subject/object, masculine/feminine (the properties), left/right brain, all the MBTIs, mind/world, order/chaos, etc. This type of configuration will come up a lot in the subsequent posts.  It’s more complicated, sure - the dots in that Yin/Yang symbol indicate an undercurrent in these relationships, an instability in the polarity.  This containing of the opposite is significant for construction of the self and has an almost mythic connotation that we will see in the coming material on Jung.

The verb part of what happens looks a lot like Hegel’s dialectic.  Thesis meets antithesis coming through the rye and produces antithesis.  A subject beholds an object or a relation and constitutes it, iteratively. We will talk about this more when we take off into narrative art specifically (see upcoming structure posts). This could be considered the rudimentary structural grammar of the universe, and specifically of art and story. The basic math determines emergent structures that recapitulate a sense of lopsided relationships that reflect a broken balance, and impetus for unbalanced action (mental or physical) that attempts to restore a whole but instead leaves a remainder.  

There is a gap, a separateness that creates a tension, and an action to relieve this (although ultimate “solution” is not possible because demiurge) and a satisfaction but renewal of the gap.  If there is no gap, there is no tension, and there is no life, no existence, no interest.  But the gap is painful, we want the gap bridged, the tension released.  Well being, happiness, whatever, is this constant encountering and closure of gaps, often an ugly process even when we achieve it. But there must always be another gap.  On some level we know this, and the attempt to organize it under logos is the great motivator in all areas of human striving, though the object of this study is just there in everything we are and do  all the time.

What does this have to do with art and story?  We’ll try to get there.

[innermysteries]

The Greek word for soul was psyche, what we call the soul is the unconscious mind. What is the unconscious mind? It is part of the brain that is not connected to the network of neurons that make up our waking, resting state of consciousness called the default mode network, or the ego. It is interesting, as you will soon see, that Psyche was a female character. Another very intriguing Greek concept was the Daimon, the origin of the word demon. It is the inner genius, the spirit guide within. I offer you an explanation of what they could have meant by this. What follows is an investigation into the neuroscience of the soul and my experiences of self-discovery.

Carl Jung stated that civilized man has become soulless, let us investigate how we could have lost our soul.

The majority of civilized humans are born in a hospital, snatched from their mothers and tortured with needles, circumcision, etc. This is profoundly traumatizing. The way that infants have been treated in the civilized world is so different from the way that our hunter-gatherer, tribal ancestors treated infants for millions of years throughout hominid evolution. Humans in the civilized world come away from childhood seriously traumatized and brain damaged.

Tribal societies breastfeed for three years, this is natural birth spacing. Early weaning is neglect and abuse, it causes weaning conflict, oral fixation, sadomasochism, self-destructive tendencies and the secret death wish. Tribal societies certainly would not leave an infant alone and abandoned in a crib to cry itself to sleep. We are told that infants are to be left alone to cry themselves to sleep until they learn to soothe themselves, but what is actually occurring in the infant mind is a splitting. This is called primitive dissociation and is the root cause of all severe personality disorders such as borderline, antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders. The infant has only one option as a defense mechanism against the nightmare existence within which it finds itself unable to escape from while being neglected by its caregivers, as it is completely helpless and dependent upon them for its nourishment and psychological well-being. That defense involves the severing of the incoming connections from the source of negative emotion, the right hemisphere. This gives birth to the unconscious mind as the default mode network is constructed to protect the infant mind from the pain of its existence. This also occurs when one takes Prozac. The default mode network is a Prozac network.

This is not a great way to start out life, and in a culture of rampant narcissism most of us are victims of narcissistic, parental abuse. People think that you can do whatever you want to babies because they won't remember, this is an utterly cringe-worthy and ignorant approach to parenting and the handling of babies in a hospital setting. A baby's brain is going through an intense period of development during this time that will shape their psychology for the rest of their lives. The corpus callosum undergoes the greatest period of its development during the first twenty-four months after birth.

The reason for the epidemic of opioid addiction has to do with the fact that opioids are naturally released in the brain of all animals, including humans, when a child is nurtured by its mother.

This infant neglect, this narcissistic wound, or what Freud called the primal wound, makes us long eternally, even as an adults, for this nurturing from the mother, and so we crawl into the comforting embrace of an addiction, or try to replace the mother with romantic partners. It is no wonder that the United States has become a welfare state as we look to the Democratic party, the archetype of the mother, to provide social welfare programs to care for its childlike demographic. All baby animals need a sufficient amount of nurturing or they will die. Is it any wonder that what we call civilization is, in reality, a toxic, suicidal, theme park.

This is absolutely no different from the rats of NIHM experiment that was performed in the 1950s. The national institute of mental health created rat utopias in which the rats were given unlimited food and nesting materials. When the rats reached a certain population density they became insane and the colonies collapsed. This was due to the males becoming hyper-territorial and then began guarding the females who were then unable to nurture their young, so the young died.

Infant trauma is not the end of the story, when a child In our society reaches a certain age they are thrown into a heavily left-brain biased educational system In which imagination, one of the most significant mental faculties that distinguish the human from all other primates, is discouraged in favor of language and mathematics. Language and mathematics are also incredible mental faculties that separate us from other primates, but if you think about it, how many languages and branches of mathematics are we spending our youth learning? All fields of study require us to learn a specialized extension of language, whether it be chemistry, physics, political science, anatomy, biology, psychology, etc. These fields of study require us to learn a whole new set of terms and symbols in order to understand and work with the formulas and concepts involved in that field. We are not just learning basic math, we are learning pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, and the list goes on. Students who are imaginative, creative and staring out the window in boredom are stigmatized as having learning disabilities or ADHD and are prescribed drugs to make them fit into the system so that the system does not have to adjust to accommodate, properly nurture and encourage the creative geniuses in our society. The left hemisphere is a conformist, the right hemisphere is an individual. This is most likely why Carl Jung called the process of psychic integration the process of individuation. Creative geniuses and independent thinkers are a threat to a system of conformity and control that is designed to dumb down the population in order to shape them into tax paying, corporate, consumer slaves who perform repetitive, menial tasks In order to scratch out a living, existing on a hamster wheel, never getting ahead and working until they're dead. I do not think it is a coincidence that the retirement age is the average age of mortality among males. We are not supposed to figure this out, we are supposed to be grateful for our jobs and the crumbs that we are thrown from the towering heights occupied by an elite class that parasitically feeds on the laboring masses.

After school we enter into a left-brain biased working world. The brain continues to develop until age twenty-five and we spend most of this time using left-brain functions, almost completely neglecting right-brain functions. Our culture exacerbates and perpetuates this bias.

If you look at the stages of ego development you will notice that at the earliest stage, the impulsive stage, the characteristics are indistinguishable from those of borderline personality disorder. This is the most dissociated and most severe disorder. This is the psychology of a toddler, not having developed the executive function of the prefrontal cortex, It is completely unstable. It throws temper tantrums, having no emotional control or ability to communicate its needs in a more sophisticated way, seeing others In the most primitive way, as either nice to me or mean to me. Antisocial being the next severe, the self-protective and opportunistic child, doing whatever it can get away with, he gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar and blames his sister. The next stage shows the characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder, the conformist, the diplomat. This is adolescent psychology In which the right hemisphere is still largely repressed into the unconscious as a defense against the instability of the underlying borderline personality disorder. The left hemisphere is a narcissist and the default mode network is left hemisphere biased.

These personality disorders show the least amount of neural integration between the right and left hemispheres. Jungian psychology is about integration of the psyche. Carl Jung didn't know anything about the brain or hemispheric lateralization, and yet, somehow, he was profoundly insightful. When he referred to the Anima, the female psyche, he was referring to the right hemisphere which has become unconscious in civilized man. In split brain patients, the right hemisphere will refer to itself as female. The left hemisphere shows many masculine characteristics such as murderous aggression and rationality whereas the right hemisphere is irrational, the source of dreams, compassion, empathy and pro-social emotions.

Every stage of ego development, whether you look at Loevinger's model, Suzanne Cook-Greuter's model, Spiral Dynamics, among others, you will see a gradual integration of the characteristics of the right hemisphere into consciousness. There are ten stages of ego development and I would consider it a spectrum of narcissism, with the tenth stage being that of a taoist master, or enlightenment. Each stage displays a greater amount of self-awareness and humility that come along with meta-cognition, introspection, self-reflection and self-criticism. These are functions of the right hemisphere, as are empathy and imagination.

The reason for our condition, the unenlightened, psychological condition of civilized man, is a disorder of the corpus callosum. This information highway between the two hemispheres of the brain has a lack of communication in one direction. In traumatized infants this condition is called fractional anisotropy. What we don't realize is that what is considered to be a normal, healthy brain among civilized people is actually neurologically damaged.

Brain scans of experienced meditators show a significant increase in the thickness of the corpus callosum, a deactivation of the default mode network and an activation of the insular cortex, the command centers of the brain. The insula, which exists in both hemispheres, sends and receives signals to and from the entire brain. This is how one can achieve enlightenment, or, what I call whole-brain neural integration. This is our natural state of consciousness, the Zen mind. It is the hunter-gatherer state of consciousness. Meditation is a simulation of what a hunter-gatherer does all day long, hunting and fishing with a calm, clear mind yet alert and completely aware of his surroundings. This is mindfulness or what is commonly referred to as being present in the moment. A mind that is not thinking, planning or ruminating on the past and future, or about how others perceive us, a mind without self-consciousness, an undisturbed mind. This is what the Tao Te Ching means by returning to the primal identity. Unfortunately, in order to do this one must leave civilization behind because civilization will never allow you this state of mind with it's endless requirements of left-brain functions, fast-paced modality and stress. Now you see why the enlightened masters are usually forest hermits.

Our civilization, our society, displays every characteristic of the narcissistic, left hemisphere. Narcissism is a defense against a deep feeling of vulnerability and insecurity from childhood neglect and abuse. Unfortunately, the left hemisphere is not the wiser of the two brains. It evolved to make quick and dirty decisions and is certainly not where consciousness should take its residence. It is obsessed with material acquisition because it evolved as the part of the brain that seeks out food. It has an incredibly narrow way of seeing the world, It sees the world as a cognitive map composed of primitive symbols.

The fact is that we have two people inside our heads, when the right hemisphere finally breaks through into consciousness, It can be quite frightening, as Carl Jung described when he stated that the encounter with the Anima may cause petrification and even death.

I personally, experienced panic attacks as my right hemisphere began to break through into consciousness, as I experienced intuition, which is defined as thoughts that originate beyond conscious reasoning.

My encounter with the Anima sent me on a journey of homelessness, vulnerability, nature therapy, meditation and solitude. These things are necessary in order to deactivate the default mode network and activate the command centers of the brain in order to use the entire brain, or as Carl Jung put it, to become whole, to become the Self. This is the individuation process, to disconnect from the herd and become an individual, to develop one's inner world. The right hemisphere does not live in a box, figuratively and literally. It does not want to be confined in an artificial, domesticated prison. Like all animals, humans do not thrive in a cage, and the right hemisphere, when it makes its appearance on the stage of consciousness, makes no bones about this issue. The right hemisphere is open-minded, it evolved to confront the unknown such as predators, mates, unfamiliar territory. It then creates a cognitive map of the unfamiliar to be stored in the left hemisphere, which evolve to concern itself with the familiar. This is why a left-brain biased society is highly neurotic. The definition of neuroticism is fear of the unknown and seeking validation from others. The left hemisphere is also very concerned with where it fits in to the social hierarchy of status and dominance. Openness is one of the big-five personality traits, and it is synonymous with curiosity. In my view, openness, curiosity and facing the unknown are all the same thing. Once you free your mind from its prison then you will be outside the box and you will not want to live in a box. You will want to be in the natural environment where we evolved for millions of years before the sickness of civilization overtook the mind of man.

In order to reconnect with the right hemisphere of the brain, one must process traumatic, repressed memories and emotions, and confront and accept the negative, rejected aspects of one's unconscious personality. This is what Carl Jung described as the confrontation with the Shadow. This is the psychoanalytic process. These blockages must be cleared away, this is what the Tao Te Ching referred to as untying your knots.

A strange phenomenon, realizations, epiphanies, bolts from the blue, will suddenly occur to one who has begun to experience the integration process. Carl Jung stated that this begins after the disillusion of the persona, which I interpret as being an identity crisis, or the collapse of the self-narrative, the self-construct, which is usually composed of distorted beliefs about oneself. When one realizes that these beliefs are invalid, conditioned, brainwashing then this self-construct can come crashing when this happens a person can easily feel that they have absolutely no idea who they are anymore. This is what happened to me when I realized that I had been a scapegoat child of a grandiose narcissist father who had gaslighted me into believing that I wasn't good enough, I had an inferiority complex.

These flashes of insight indicate that intuition has begun to come online. This is a function of the right hemisphere, this is how it communicates. There is so much information that the right hemisphere wants to communicate but was unable to. I will never forget how it made my hands shake, It felt as though information was being downloaded to my mind from the universe. Carl Jung referred to this as the flooding of unconscious contents into the conscious mind, and warned about it overwhelming the conscious mind. He called it ego inflation. A person feels as if they are a god or the universe itself. This inflation will pass.

The right hemisphere is also musical and will communicate with songs. If a song suddenly appears in your mind, think about the lyrics and what they could mean in the context of whatever situation you are in, a decision you are trying to make or a conflict you are attempting to resolve. Most of the time these songs are light-hearted, sarcastic and humorous. Implicit meaning, IE; metaphor, sarcasm, irony, and humor are functions of the right hemisphere, wow the left hemisphere can only interpret things explicitly. An example of explicit interpretation is the way fundamentalist Christians interpret the Bible literally and not as a metaphorical mythology. When this function of the right hemisphere begins to come online you will suddenly realize the hidden meaning of all kinds of movies and stories. This is one of my favorite functions of the right hemisphere and was an incredible time for me when this began to occur.

It is very strange to have a conversation going on in your mind instead of an internal monologue, but the hardest part is awakening to the horrors of reality. This is taking the red pill, Awakening from the dream world of left brain optimism. This is a period of great darkness that one must endure as one begins to realize the truth of the human condition and the massive problems with society. As one's eyes become open to how suicidal we all are, how reckless and unenlightened civilized man has become. Civilized people live in a state of somnambulism, they are sleepwalkers, they live in a dream world of left hemisphere biased optimism and grandiosity while they unconsciously work to destroy themselves, destroy their environment and enslave, imprison and domesticate themselves. In fact the situation is quite grim and there is little cause for optimism. We have destroyed our ecosystem and are now facing our extinction.

There is no good news for the human race that comes with enlightenment. Awakening means facing reality. This is the great burden that one must carry. This is where stoic philosophy comes into play, Nietzsche's pessimism of strength. This is the Freudian transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle that would normally occur in the adolescent mind during the rite of passage into adulthood in a tribal setting. This element is missing from the modern, civilized world, and so we remain psychologically childlike, regressed, in a state of arrested development. We have attempted to eliminate suffering from our existence but suffering is necessary for psychological development and, ultimately, we create much more suffering by trying to eliminating it.

This psychological process of accepting the call to adventure, leaving ones comfort zone, venturing into the unknown, into the dark underworld of one's unconscious mind, facing the demons there, overcoming resistances and recovering the treasure hard to attain is what the myths are about, the myth of the hero's journey.

[darachsciath]

CHARACTER STATISTICS

TAGGED BY :  @edhelaran TAGGING : uhh the Hannibals following me bc I’m curious, and everyone else who wants to do this.

—  PHYSICAL STATS;

RUNNING SPEED   —   8 / 10.

RUNNING ENDURANCE   —   9 / 10.

LIFTING STRENGTH   —   7 / 10.

CARRYING ENDURANCE   —   7 / 10. | 10 / 10 light things

JUMPING ABILITY   —   5 / 10.

THROWING STRENGTH   —   8 / 10.

STEALTH ABILITY   —   6 / 10.

PAIN TOLERANCE   —   7 / 10.

SWIMMING SPEED   —   0 / 10. 

SWIMMING ENDURANCE   —   0 / 10.

STRETCHING ABILITY   —   7 / 10.

DANCING ABILITY   —   4 / 10.

CLIMBING ABILITY   —   8 / 10.

TOUCH SENSITIVITY  ( PLATONIC )   —   9 / 10.

TOUCH SENSITIVITY  ( INTIMATE )   —   10 / 10.

GENERAL REFLEXES   —   8 / 10.

OVERALL PHYSICAL CONDITION   —    9 / 10.  || 6/10 post-BOTFA SIDE NOTE:  Compared to most Dwarves, Thorin can be considered slightly above average. He’s not too burly for a Dwarf, nor too light (though he is not the perfect standard either, in terms of what Dwarves find attractive, but this is food for some other time...). Though taller than most Dwarves, Thorin’s length puts him at a disadvantage on jumping and running, though he runs at an above average speed for a Dwarf. It is uncommon among Dwarves to be able to swim, and Thorin is no exception. He holds a certain fear for (deep) waters as much as he dislikes the absence of solid ground underneath his feet.  Stretching, dancing, stealth: Thorin, like many Dwarves, can come across as a little clumsy (if not stiff). A Dwarf’s physical build is different than that of Men or Elves, or even Hobbits, who are shaped more in proportion than Dwarves who are known for their short and stout appearance. Touch sensitivity: High scores on both, as Thorin is often one to spend very long periods of time without being touched or touching someone else, so when he does engage in such acts, he often experiences them quite intensely (even the most innocent touches).

—  MENTAL STATS;

ADVANCED MATHEMATICS   —   ? / 10.

SIMPLE MATHEMATICS   —   9 / 10.

SPATIAL AWARENESS   —   4 / 10.

CHEMISTRY UNDERSTANDING   —   6 / 10.

BIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING   —   7 / 10.

NATURE SCIENCES UNDERSTANDING   —   8 / 10. 

CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE   —   9 / 10.

ARTISTIC ABILITY   —   8 / 10.

MUSICAL PROWESS   —   9 / 10.

MIMICKING ABILITY  ( AUDITORY )   —   7 / 10.

ODD PROBLEM-SOLVING —   4 / 10.  

COMPREHENSION  ( SPOKEN WORD )   —   9 / 10. 

COMPREHENSION  ( WRITTEN WORD )   —   10 / 10. 

COMEDIC ABILITY   —   1 / 10.  

COMEDIC TIMING   —   1 / 10.

OVERALL MENTAL PROWESS   —   8 / 10.  SIDE NOTE:  While gifted with the wealth of being born into a royal family, Thorin has never really been one to excel at his studies or teachings (this is also the case in his modern verses). Often, his knowledge is at an average level, though he does score high on things that involve creativity. He has a heart for music, playing the harp since he was little (piano in his modern verses), and has always been quite fond of reading as well. Sometimes he sings, but barely ever in the presence of others. He’s very self-conscious, and considers his arts to be very intimate. While he excels at the arts, he has never been very good at drawing. If he wishes to create something, he often creates it from an image he has in his mind and further adjusts it until it looks well enough. Thorin is too serious to be a proper (or a good) comedian. He doesn’t know many jokes, nor does he like a lot of jokes. He doesn’t have a feeling for finding the right time to make a light-hearted comment or a silly joke either. Thorin much rather prefers to be silent, which often leads people to believe he’s a party pooper.

—  EMOTIONAL STATS;

INTERPERSONAL INSTINCT   —   8 / 10. 

INTRAPERSONAL INSTINCT   —   7 / 10.

EXTROVERSION   —   2 / 10.

MORAL COMPASS   —   5 / 10. // it’s kind of a russian roulette lbr

EMPATHY   —   7 / 10. 

EXTRASENSORY ABILITY   —   1 / 10.

EMOTIONAL ENDURANCE   —   9 / 10.

COPING ABILITY   —    9 / 10.  

TENDENCY TOWARDS ABUSIVE BEHAVIOUR   —   3 / 10.

TENDENCY TOWARDS VICTIM BEHAVIOUR   —   1 / 10.

LEVEL OF DENIAL   —    2 / 10.  

PROTECTOR COMPLEX   —   9 / 10.

DAMSEL COMPLEX   —   0 / 10.

EMOTIONAL INTIMACY  ( WITH PARTNER )   —   8 / 10.

EMOTIONAL INTIMACY  ( WITH FRIENDS )   —   6 / 10.

EMOTIONAL COMPREHENSION   —    8 / 10.

TENDENCY TOWARDS PANIC   —    2 / 10.  

GENERAL EMOTIONAL STABILITY   —    6 / 10. SIDE NOTE:  While raised as a prince and the heir to a throne, Thorin often feels like he’s not as good at communicating with others as he wished. With his own kin, it’s less of a struggle than with those of a different kind. But as Dwarves rarely meddle with other peoples, he doesn’t really find any worries or troubles with this slight struggle in communication either. In the end, it’s often only the Elves who make it most difficult for Thorin, who sometimes also struggles with himself. While he may appear as confident, he is also incredibly self-conscious and often spends more time doubting himself than one could possibly imagine. As introverted as he can be, Thorin spends a remarkable amount of time by himself (even when among others) Dragonsickness throws a lot of dirt at putting numbers on (most of) these stats, because it often tumbles things around completely. Thorin may lose his ability to (want to) communicate with others, he will feel so little empathy where usually he feels plenty for his kin or his emotional endurance an stability can plummet to a point where he could just weep or get angry over trivial things. Where he usually knows how to cope with his emotions or struggles, the Dragonsickness might just sweep the ground from under his feet and have him drown. Or it might create such frustration and greed within his mind, he becomes a cruel little goblin pushing his people into neglect or even slavery instead of the proud and caring Dwarven King he’s ought to be. Lastly, it also causes Thorin to grow much more prone to panic, and general emotional instability.  Emotional intimacy: Thorin often has a high need for intimacy of the intellectual and emotional kind much rather than the physical kind, but he will always remain introverted which continues to make it difficult for him to be completely transparent with his partner. With his friends, he is as emotionally intimate as is necessary. He might vent or share an opinion or a thought, but you’ll hardly ever find him weeping on one’s shoulder, seeking comfort or admitting how he truly feels. Though, when Thorin loves (or hates), he loves (or hates) genuinely...

[larryland]

by Gail M. Burns

David Auburn’s Proof burst on the national consciousness nearly twenty years ago – winning Tonys and a Pulitzer and being made into a big budget, star-studded film – so the initial flurry of professional and amateur productions across the country has run its course and the play is ripe for revisiting in the #metoo era.

A simple play about complex subjects, Proof centers on 25-year-old Catherine (Talley Gale) who has just lost her widowed father, Robert (Richard Howe), a brilliant mathematician at the University of Chicago, after years of mental illness during which she was his sole caregiver. Her only sibling, older sister Claire (Halley Cianfarini), has opted for a high-powered career in Manhattan, but of course Claire is headed home for the funeral. Also in the mix is Hal (Ethan Botwick), a young professor of Mathematics at the University who was mentored by Catherine and Claire’s father, and who is going through the late professor’s effects to see if any important and undiscovered research survives him.

Claire and Hal begin a relationship, and she gives him a notebook containing an astonishing mathematical proof that she claims she wrote. But Claire doesn’t even hold an undergraduate degree, her studies having been interrupted by her father’s illness and her decision to care for him, and she also seems to have inherited some of his mental instability. Can she prove that the proof is her work and not a last burst of brilliance from her father?

At Oldcastle Eric Peterson has directed a gentle, low-key but deeply engrossing production. Because there is less high drama, the characters come across as more realistic. Gale, who is on stage nearly non-stop, presents Catherine as exhausted and grief stricken – after all these years of dealing with her father’s non-lethal mental illness it is a sudden cardiac event that carries him off – but not mentally unbalanced. There is a seismic shift for a caregiver when they suddenly wake up one morning and no one needs them anymore. Catherine is not only unmoored emotionally, but because was a caregiver during the years most people spend finding themselves and establishing a career, she also has no sense of herself separate from her father – except for her proof, which she worked on in the wee hours of the night, the only time when her father didn’t demand her full attention.

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Gale literally twists herself into pretzels trying to simultaneously hug herself and render herself as small as is humanly possible. But when she and Hal connect and she gives him her most valuable possession, the thing that establishes her as someone other than her father’s daughter, we see the relative freedom and joy in her movements.

Botwick’s Hal is equally physically restricted. Like Catherine, he has lived in Robert’s professional shadow, – before he was 25 Robert had already made two discoveries that changed the course of modern mathematics. Both worry that the adage that a mathematician’s best years are over by the time he or she is 25 – in other words at about the age they receive their doctorate and embark on their academic career – is true. Have Catherine and Hal’s best years already passed? Hal sees himself as a mediocre mathematician and being able to discover and publish a posthumous proof of Robert’s could make his career. The likelihood of the proof Catherine gives him being hers and not her father’s seem slim…

Cianfarini’s Claire is all yuppie bonhomie. Freshly ground gourmet coffee, jojoba crème rinse, and an engagement to her equally upwardly mobile boyfriend form the center of her world. Accepting early that she has inherited only a small portion of her father’s mathematical skills, she has settled into a career as a currency analyst. She acknowledges that Catherine has inherited far more from their father – but worries whether that is a good thing.

Howe’s performance as Robert was a bit of a disappointment. I described Peterson’s production as low key, but in Howe’s case we get little sense of Robert’s illness, his brilliance, or his neediness. Whether there is a physiological connection or not, mental illness and great genius often coincide. This and the deep connection between Robert and Catherine – and we see Robert only in Catherine’s memories and imagination – are lacking.

On my previous encounters with this play I didn’t see the focus on the relationship between Catherine and Hal as central to the plot, but now it takes on a different complexion. At previous production I can remember thinking Hal was quite the villain, but director Eric Peterson makes it clear here that Catherine and Hal are genuinely attracted to each other, and that neither is using the other for ulterior motives. In fact, I don’t think I have ever seen a more engaging love scene than the one Gale and Botwick enacted at the end of Act I.

The other bit of gender politics in the play is the issue, which is still the case, that the majority of mathematicians are male. That a woman, and a young, uncredentialed woman at that, could best the “guys” at their game raises all sorts of toxic masculine reactions, which are played only subtly here.

When you enter the theatre you are greeted by Wm. John Aupperlee’s set depicting the back deck of the house Robert and Catherine share, adorned with Cory Wheat’s projection. I say adorned because as soon as the initial projection – an astonishing black and white trompe-l’œil image of the rear of the house – is switched for more subtle sunlight-through-the-leaves patterns, as it must be or the actors would be performing with blotchy projections all over them, the “house” resolves into nothing but a matte black wall with a door in it. The house projection returns during scene changes, but every time it vanishes again you feel a sense of loss.

It took me until well into Act II to understand that that one door – through which people seemed to access both the interior of the house and the outside world – was meant to be the back door of the house and that there was an unseen front door as well. In other words when people “left the house” they were going in through the back door and then out through the front door. In my mind exits to the outside world should have been made off of the deck, stage left, and indeed occasionally they were. When the critic has to spend a long while pondering a door there is something wrong with the set and/or the direction.

Ursula McCarty’s costumes subtly conveyed character and socio-economic rank while offering freedom of movement. The matter of the vanishing house aside, Wheat’s projections were fine, as was David V. Groupé’s lighting. Wheat is also credited with the sound design, which consisted mostly of an increasingly loud and insistent recording of The Sound of Silence played during scene changes. I usually like that song…

My technical quibbles aside, this a strong and moving production of a thought-provoking play. If you saw a production a decade or so ago, I encourage you to revisit it. And take along a teenage or twenty-something woman while you are at it. There is good fodder for debate and discussion on the ride home.

Proof by David Auburn, directed by Eric Peterson, runs August 31-September 9, 2018, at the Oldcastle Theatre Company, 331 Main Street in Bennington, Vt. Set design by Wm. John Aupperlee; costume design by Ursula McCarty; lighting design by David V. Groupé; sound and projections by Cory Wheat; stage management by Gary Allan Poe. CAST: Richard Howe as Robert, Talley Gale as Catherine, Halley Cianfarini as Claire, and Ethan Botwick as Hal.

For ticket reservations or additional information contact Oldcastle Theatre at www.oldcastletheatre.org or 802-447-0564.

  REVIEW: “Proof” at Oldcastle Theatre Company by Gail M. Burns David Auburn’s Proof burst on the national consciousness nearly twenty years ago – winning Tonys and a Pulitzer and being made into a big budget, star-studded film - so the initial flurry of professional and amateur productions across the country has run its course and the play is ripe for revisiting in the #metoo era.

[marcosassone]

Distillery District Magazine

Marco Sassone, Blue Track, 2016, oil on canvas, 48 x 58 inches.

Call him Cavaliere. In 1982, he was knighted by the Italian president Sandro Pertini into "the Order to the Merit of the Italian Republic." As a boy of nine years of age living in Tuscany, Marco Sassone befriended a street person and invited him into his home. His surprised family took the visitor in, fed and clothed him before sending the man back on his way. This event galvanized the young man's outlook for a lifetime.

Rarely seen in Europe, and associated with catastrophes, the homeless individuals encountered by Sassone upon his move to San Francisco in 1981 again struck a resonant cord. Near a railroad track at San Francisco's Ferry Building, he ran after a homeless man to befriend him and take his picture. He got the picture, but never saw the man, called Willie, again. In preparing for the San Francisco series, he lived during the daytime among homeless individuals for four years, returning each evening to his studio to live normally. Forty ­three years after his first encounter with a homeless person, Sassone mounted an exhibition in San Francisco titled "Home on the Streets" at the Museo ItaloAmericano. In his honor, San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan declared March 30, 1994 as Marco Sassone Day.

Tragedy, anomie, and cataclysm inform Sassone's work. On November 4, 1966, 24-year old Sassone witnessed the great flood of Florence and was forever imprinted by the sight of personal belongings floating atop twenty-two feet of mud and water from the Arno river down the main streets of the city. The catastrophe created 5,000 homeless families. A month later, he went to Crete where he painted on the streets. These were formative and impressionable times for the young man, marked by displacement and issues of daily survival.

Now living in Toronto, Canada, where he moved from San Francisco, California, in 2005, the artist is fueled by singular passions. He has always been a nomad, wandering from one location on to another before comfort and complacency could set in, the proverbial rolling stone that gathers no moss. He moved to California in 1967 at the age of 25, to Long Beach, then to Laguna Beach where he made a name for himself in the Festival of the Atis for several years. ln 1981, after frequent cross­country trips to New York, he settled in San Francisco, describing this time period as one of great unrest and instability. Even today in Toronto, the current end point in a succession of self-exiles, he admits to disequilibrium, and makes annual pilgrimages to the Amalfi coast and Venice in Italy. The termfldneur comes from the French verb that means "to stroll." Sassone is such an individual, one who experiences the city by walking through it. The modern Western city transforms certain individuals, giving them a new relationship to time and space while altering concepts of freedom and being.

Linear perspective is a mathematical system for creating the illusion of space and distance on a flat surface that originated in Florence, Italy in the early 1400s. In this view, an artist must first imagine the picture plane as an "open window" through which to see the painted world. Sassone paints these urban landscapes-mindscapes from a street perspective, characterized by lines converging into a vanishing point that powerfully, visually pulls the viewer into the work. The vanishing point, also seen as a vortex, is a metaphor for a place in which one disappears. A similar concept is found in physics with the "event horizon" a border in spacetime beyond which things can no longer affect the observer, and essentially disappear into a black hole.

Within one psychoanalytic theory, a primal is a reliving of earlier significant events, and for this artist, the most influential include his befriending a homeless person in 1951 and the great flood of Florence in 1966. Sassone's paintings of the homeless are manifestations of his primal experiences. His realistic expressionist paintings are born of a caring heart wounded by personal displacement and brushes with homelessness, but in his paintings one also finds sanctuary, solace, and deliverance. 

Although a work is composed over several days, he states, "Every painting is a moment" that captures mental focus and activity. His painting styles includes divisionismo, with its interrupted brush strokes, and the style of the Macchiaioli from the Italian word macchie meaning "spots", a reference to the sparkling quality to the work that is a consequence of its quick execution. The Macchiaioli, predecessors of the French impressionists, were a group of Florentine painters, many previous revolut􀀳onaries, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Austrian master Oskar Kokoschka and his lyrical colorful impastoed expressionism, channeled through Kokoschka's Tuscan student Silvio Loffredo, with whom Sassone studied in 1963 when Loffredo was a professor at the Accademia in Florence, also critically influence Sassone's approach. Describing his paintings as "living things," he has syncretized his own distinctive style, with palpable emotions on canvases bearing innervated brushstrokes, resulting in a movement of the surface frequently combined with a jolting one point perspective. The paintings are a way for Sassone to plumb his psyche, mining seminal memories that he transduces onto canvas and paper in his personal telegraphic style, creating sanctuary for both himself and for his subject.

In Venezia 79 (2003) Sassone revisits a familiar composition of framing a Venetian canal, and holds a mirror, its reflective surface tarnished and altered by the gradual loss of its silvered backing, up to the sinking Queen of the Adriatic. In this painting, Venice, with its buildings and water similarly gestured and hued, is figuratively and literally dissolving into the sea. Within a tunnel vision-like perspective, the less well-defined and unfocused periphery contrasts with the sharper central image, a trapezoidal column of light that draws the viewer to its vanishing point. Visually searching for it behind the palisade of buildings induces a spellbound mysterious longing and melancholic state. The palette is predominantly Dorian gray, subdued and moody, compared to some of the brightly churning yellows and reds in other Venetian watercolor and oil paintings by the artist. Although the sky threatens darkly above, part of it appears as a brighter dappled iteration of itself in the water, invoking the artist's concept of reflections as distorted versions of reality. Sassone's brushstrokes stoke the surface of the painting, de materializing its imagery to penultimate abstractions of color and light.

In Tracks (2008), with Kiefer-like elements and somber hues, the curving tracks and switches draw the viewer to unseen converging foci. A beam of steel that literally railroads one's vision to the vanishing point visually splits the canvas. On one side of the tracks is a single stand of desolate, nearly leafless trees, the presence of a pathetic nature. The right side describes a curve to the base of the skyscrapers with flanking structures, evidence of man. The city skyline implies the busy metropolis as it towers above the wasteland feel and coloration of the expansive foreground, totally bereft of any human presence. Invisible and implied, the lost, unclaimed, and dispossessed wander along and cross these train tracks in their seemingly aimless peregrinations. Self-described as "homeless before birth," the currently Toronto-based artist is forever imprinted as ajldneur, artist, humanist, knight, and street person. Unmoored in the contested region between longing and belonging, Marco Sassone creates from his core with passion, conscience, and dignity.

Kóan Jeff Baysa

Kóan Jeff Baysa is a curator, writer, art collector, integrative medicine physician, and Whitney Independent Study Curatorial alumnus. He has curated shows for the London Biennale and the LA International Biennial. He is the Director and Curator of International Projects for MOCA Beijing,.

Marco Sassone, Tracks 2, 2007, oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches.

Distillery District Magazine Editor, Keith Veira had the pleasure of sitting down with MARCO SASSONE, leading up to his November 9th exhibit, 'VIATICUS' at Berenson Fine Art, Toronto.

Keith Veira: Mr. Sassone, thank you for meeting with us. Aft􀀁er being knighted in 1982, any thoughts how it might have influenced your perspective, regarding hierarchical social structures and how does it manifest in your body of work.

Marco Sassone: This is an interesting question. Definitely in Italy social structures are still present -­ though, not as evident as in the past where classes of nobility were ranked by their respective title. In 1982 I had been in America already 15 years and for the most part well amalgamated to liberty and social equality. I vividly remember one splendid morning in February 1982 when I received this astonishing news from the Italian Consul in Los Angeles: I had been honoured with a knighthood in the Order of the Merit of the Italian Republic. I was stunned. If this honour had any influence at all in my work, I could never tell. What actually has been present in my work throughout my career is that certain sense of colour and sensibility particularly tied to the European school of painting and my growing up in Florence. 

KV: When you're painting in divisionismo style, how does it occur, by subject, visionary inspirations, what is the creative process? 

MS: Divisionismo has been an element of my work since the early days. I recall I was truly fascinated by the broken strokes that partially revealed the background colour, a technique that was spontaneously incorporated into my way of painting and is still currently part of the process, independently of subject or inspiration. 

KV: With all your accomplishments, as a gifted and honoured artist, do you have any regrets? Please share your thoughts with us. 

MS: Often an artist's brain is not well equipped to deal with the business world, and for sure I had my share of disappointments in this department. However, when we are talking about the work itself -- in my studio -- I know I have tried to remain in touch with myself during the act of painting. The temptations are enormous in this crazy profession, but beauty emerges only when you are truthful to your core as an artist. Therefore I can say, without a doubt, that I do not have any regrets. 

KV: After many decades, of creativity, you art continues to astound and inspire us: tell us about your November 9th upcoming exhibit, 'VIATICUS' by partially li��ing the veil. 

MS: I came up with the title Viaticus as I was working on a particular canvas. Painting has always informed my life and this time I must tell you I thought I hit the jackpot just by thinking of this word. It was exactly what I wanted -- something beyond the meaning of journey, something that represented my existence as well. Viaticus is a Latin term for all that regards the road, it identifies the moving, the travelling, the experiences: journey as necessity, a journey to discover new cultures, a journey of hope, of revelations; in many ways a journey to discover ourselves. As examples in literature we may recall Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid as well as Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," in modern times. Furthermore, as I wondered about this word, I thought of my own travels through time. All of these ideas were present in my thoughts as I began painting -- small watercolours as studies for large canvasses. I am still presently working on the paintings for the show. I invite you all to completely lift the veil at my opening in November.

KV: Lastly, there's significant evidence that your art was forged in the United States and is currently under investigation by the FBI and the RCMP. Can you provide a few comments and any potential ramifications for the international art market? 

MS: Initially, it was under investigation by the RCMP and then the FBI. It continued in the form of a civil lawsuit filed by my attorneys in Las Vegas, and is presently with the Supreme Court of Nevada. I have been instructed by my attorney not to talk about the lawsuit itself, but I can express comments on how it impacted my career following my personal discovery of the forged artwork. In 2014 when I first saw my signature (which was not mine) on an artwork, it felt like I was violated in the most disgusting way. I could not believe it. Painting had guided me through my own path of discovery, but this time I was forced to embarked on a different voyage of discovery, I needed to know who was copying my artwork, who was forging my name, and I realized I was committed to this task with an intensity equal to my painting. Unfortunately any fake art creates a disturbance in the art market. Collectors requests for a work's authentication are an immediate reaction to the news and that's precisely what we are dealing with at the studio. We must let the legal process take its course in order to put a stop to the forgeries. 

KV: • Thank you Marco.

Marco Sassone, Venezia 79, 2003, oil on canvas, 72 x 48 inches.

Marco Sassone, Doll Land, 1992, oil on canvas, 40 x 62 inches.

This article is a reprint from Distillery District Magazine, Toronto, October 2017, Digital Edition, Vol. 17. The original article can be found here.