#but its too philosophical for his brain to ponder about for too long

[deerspherestudios]

How would mychael be with a religious s/o? Does he believe in some sort of higher being? (my bad if this was asked already)

I've answered if he has his own religion before, but meeting a religious MC I think he'd be respectful about it despite not understanding the appeal.

There's just too many things that humans believe in that doesn't apply to Mychael's lifestyle, but he commends the human race for having multiple rich and diverse beliefs that overall guide them in doing good.

[the-end-of-art]

Sewn into his jacket an incoherent note

How to Make Love, Write Poetry, & Believe in God by Nin Andrews

A few weeks ago, I was part of a Hamilton-Kirkland College alumnae poetry reading, and after the reading a woman asked a simple question: “How do you write a poem?” I didn’t have an answer so I suggested a few books by poets like John Hollander, Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins. The woman said she had read books like that, but they didn’t help. She wanted something else, like a genuine operating manual—a step by step explanation.

I, too, love instruction manuals, especially those manuals on how to perform magic: write a poem or know God or make love, if only love were something that could be made. Manuals offer such promise. Yes, you, too, can enter the bee-loud glade and the Promised Land and have an orgasm.

I love the idea that my mind could be programmed like a computer to spit out poems on demand—poems with just the right number of lines, syllables, metaphors, meanings, similes, images . . . And with no clichés, no matter how much I love those Tom, Dick and Harry’s with their lovely wives, as fresh as daisies. I can set them in any novel or town in America, and they will have sex twice a week, always before ten at night, never at the eleventh hour, and it will not take long,time being of the essence.

I love sex manuals, too: those books that suggest our bodies are like cars. If only we could learn to drive them properly, bliss would be a simple matter of inserting a key, mastering the steering wheel, signaling our next moves, knowing the difference between the brakes and the gas pedal, and of course, following the speed limit.

A depressive person by nature, I am also a fan of how-to books on God, faith, happiness, the soul, books that suggest a divine presence is always here. I just need to find it, or wake up to it, or turn off my doubting brain. That even now, my soul is like a bird in a cage. If I could sit still long enough and listen closely, it might rest on my open palm and sing me a song.

God, poetry, sex, they offer brief moments of bliss, glimpses of the ineffable, and occasional insights into that which does not translate easily into daily experience, or loses its magic when explained.

In college, I took classes in religion, philosophy and poetry, and I studied sex in my spare time—my first roommate and I staying up late, pondering the pages of The Joy of Sex. As a freshman, I auditioned my way into an advanced poetry writing class by composing the single decent poem I wrote in my college years. The poem, an ode to cottage cheese, came to me in a flash as a vision nestled on a crisp bed of iceberg lettuce. Does cottage cheese nestle? I don’t know, but the professor kept admiring that poem. He said all my other poems paled by comparison.

This was in the era of the sexual revolution,long before political correctness and the Me-Too movement. My roommate, obsessed with getting laid, said we women should have been given a compass to navigate the sexual landscape. She liked to complain that she’d had only one orgasm in her entire life, and she wanted another. “What if I am a one-orgasm wonder?” she worried. The subject of orgasms kept us awake, night after night.

In religion class, my professor told the famous story about Blaise Pascal who had a vision of God that was so profound, his life seemed dull and meaningless forever afterwards. He never had another vision. But he had sewn into his jacket an incoherent note to remind him of the singular luminous experience.

The next day in religion class, a student stood up and announced that the professor was wrong—about Pascal, God, everything. The student knew this because he was God’s friend. He even knew His first name, and what God was thinking. The professor smiled sadly, put his arm around the student, and led him out of the classroom, down the steps and into the counselor’s office. When the professor returned, he warned us that if we ever thought we knew God, we should check ourselves into a mental institution. Lots of insane people know God intimately.

But, I wondered, what would God (or the transcendent—or whatever word you might choose for it: the muse, love, the orgasm, the soul, the higher self) think of us? For example, what would a muse think of a writer trying, begging, praying to enter the creative flow? All writers know it—that moment when inspiration happens. The incredible high. And the opposite, when words cling to the wall of the mind like sticky notes but never make it onto your tongue or the page.

What would an orgasm think of all the people seeking it so fervently yet considering it dirty, embarrassing, unmentionable? And then lying about it. “Did you have one?” a man might ask. “Yes,” his lover nods. But every orgasm knows it cannot be had. Or possessed. Or sewn into the lining of a coat. No one “has” an orgasm. At least not for long.

What did God think of Martin Luther, calling out to him in terror when a lightning bolt struck near his horse, “Help! I’ll become a monk!” And later, when he sought relief from his chronic constipation and gave birth to the Protestant Reformation on the lavatory—a lavatory you can visit today in Wittenberg, Germany.

I don’t want to evaluate Luther’s source of inspiration. But I do want to ponder the question: How do you write a poem? Is there a way to begin?

I think John Ashbery gave away one secret in his poem, “The Instruction Manual:” that it begins with daydreaming. Imagination. And the revelation that the mind contains its own magical city, its own Guadalajara, complete with a public square and bands and parading couples that you can visit this enchanted town for a limited time before you must turn your gaze back to the humdrum world.  

But a student of Ashbery’s might cringe at the suggestion that poetry is merely an act of the imagination. In order to master the dance, one must know the steps. And Ashbery was a master. So many of his poems follow a kind of Hegelian progression, traveling from the concrete to the abstract to the absolute. Or what Fichte described as a dialectical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Fichte also wrote that consciousness itself has no basis in reality. I wonder if Ashbery would have agreed.

In college I wrote an inane paper, comparing Ashbery’s poetry to a form of philosophical gardening in which the poet arranges the concrete, meaning the plants or words, in such an appealing order that they create the abstract, or the beauty, desired. Thus, the reader experiences the absolute, or a sense of wonder at the creation as the whole thing sways in the wind of her mind.

Is there a basis in reality for wonder? Or poetry? I asked. Or are we only admiring illusions, the beautiful illusions the poet has created?  How I loved questions like that. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Fichte and Hegel and Ashbery and write mystical and incomprehensible books. I complained to my mother that no matter how hard I tried, I could not compose an actual poem or philosophical treatise—I was trying to write treatises, too. “That’s good,” she said. “Poets and philosophers are too much in their heads, and not enough in the world.”

I didn’t argue with her and tell her that not all poets are like Emily Dickinson. Or say that Socrates was put to death for being too much in the world, for angering the public with his Socratic method of challenging social mores, and earning himself the title, “the gadfly of Athens.”  

Instead, I thought, That’s it! If I want to be a poet, I just need to separate my head from the world. Or at least turn off the noise of the world. And seek solitude, as Wordsworth suggested, in order to recollect in tranquility. I imagined myself going on a retreat or living in a cave, studying the shadows on the wall. Letting them speak to me or seduce me or dance with me.

The shadows, I discovered, are not nice guests. Sometimes they kept me awake all night, talking loudly, making rude comments, using all the words I never said aloud. “Hush,” I told them. “No one wants to hear that.” Sometimes they took on the voices of the dead and complained I hadn’t told their stories yet or right. Sometimes they sulked and bossed me about like a maid, asking for a cup of tea, a biscuit, a little brandy, a nap. One nap was never enough. When I obeyed and closed my eyes, they recited the poems I wanted to write down. “You can’t open your eyes until we’re done,” they said, as if poetry were a game of memory, or hide and seek in the mind. Other times they wandered away and down the dirt road of my past, or lay down in the orchard and counted the peaches overhead. Whatever they did or said, I watched and listened.

That’s how I began writing my first real poems. I knew not to disobey the shadows. I knew not toturn my back on them and look towards the light as Plato suggested—Plato who wanted to banish the poets and poetry from his Republic.I knew to not answer the door if the man from Porlock came knocking.

To this day I am grateful for the darkness. For the shadows it creates in my mind. It is thanks to them I have written another book, The Last Orgasm, a book whose title might make people cringe. But isn’t that what shadows do? And much of poetry, too? Dwell on topics we are afraid to look at in the light?

(https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2020/09/how-to-make-love-write-poetry-believe-in-god-by-nin-andrews.html)

Five prose poems by Nin Andrews (formatting better at http://newflashfiction.com/5-prose-poems-by-nin-andrews/)

Duplicity

after Henri Michaux “Simplicity”

When I was just a young thing, my life was as simple as a sunrise. And as predictable. Day after day I went about doing exactly as I pleased. If I saw a lovely man or women, or beauty in any of its shapes and forms and flavors, well, I simply had to have it. So I did. Just like that. Boom! I didn’t even need a room.

Slowly, I matured. I learned a bit of etiquette.  Manners, I discovered can have promising side effects. I even began carrying a bottle of champagne wherever I went, and a bed. Not that the beds lasted long. I wasn’t the kind to go easy on the alcohol or the furnishings, nor was I interested in sleep. It never ceased to amaze me how quickly men drift off. Women, many of them, kept me going night after night. You know how inspiring  women are.

But then, alas, I grew tired of them as well. I began to envy those folks who curl up into balls each night, their bodies as heavy as tombstones. I tried curling up with them, slowing my breath, entering into their dreams. What dreams! To think I had been missing out all along! That’s when I became a Zen master, at one with the night. Now I teach classes on peace, love, abstinence. At last I have found bliss, I tell my followers. The young, they don’t believe it. But really, I ask you. Would I lie?

The Broken Promise

after Heberto Padilla, “The Promise”

There was a time when I promised to write you a thousand love poems. When I said every day is a poem, and every poem is in love with you. But then the poems rebelled. They became a junta of angry women, impossible to calm or translate, each more vivid, sultry, seductive than the next. Some stayed inside and sulked for weeks, demanding chocolates, separate rooms, maid service. Others wanted to be carted around like queens. Still others took lovers and kept the neighbors up, moaning at all hours of the day and night. One skinny girl (remember her? the one with flame-colored hair?) moved away. She went back to that shack down the road where we first met. At night she lay down in the orchard behind the house and let the dark crawl over her arms and legs. In the end even her dreams turned to ash and blew away in a sudden gust of wind.

Little Big Man

after Russell Edson “Sleep”

There was once an orgasm that could not stop shrinking. Little big man, his friend called him, watching as he grew smaller and smaller with each passing night, first before making love, then before even the mention of making love, then before even the mention of the mention of making love. Oh, what a pathetic little thing he was.

One night he tried reading, Think and Grow Big, but it only caused him to shrink further inside himself. Oh, to grow large and tall as I once was, he sighed. What he needed, he knew, was a trainer with a whip and chains. Someone to teach him to jump through hoops and swing from a trapeze and swallow fire until he blazed ever higher into the night. Yes, he shuddered. Yes! as he imagined it. A tiny wisp of smoke escaped his lips.

Questions to Determine if You Are Washed Up

after Charles Baudelaire, “Get Drunk!”

Do you feel washed up lost, all alone? Do you fear that time is passing you by like a train for which you have no ticket, no seat? That you have lived too long in the solitude of your room and empty mind,  that now you are but a slave of sorrow? Or is it regret? Do you no longer taste the wine of life on your lips, tongue, throat? Is there not even even a chance of intoxication? Bliss? No poetry or song above or below the hips? No love in the wind, the waves, in every  or any fleeting and floating thing? No castles in your air? No pearls in your oysters? Are you wearing a pair of drawstring pants?

Remembering Her

after Herberto Padilla

This is the house where she first met you. This is the room where she first said your name as if it were a song.  This is the table where she undressed you, stripping away your petals, leaves, your filmy white roots and sorrows. And there on the floor is the stone you picked up each morning, the stone you clung to night after night. Sometimes she kicked it aside. Sometimes she placed in on the sill and blew it out the window as her presence filled you like a glow, and you thought for an instant, I, too, can fly.

[diveronarpg]

In fair Verona, our tale begins with CASSIAN BHATT, who is THIRTY years old. He is often called CASSIUS by the CAPULETS and works as their SOLDIER. He uses HE/HIM pronouns.

He never loved his father, not even as a child. Perhaps it was their differences, a long list he’s kept since the moment he could write. Maybe it was the way Cassian had always detested what other little boys his age lived for—playing catch, riding their bikes, skinning their knees with kids in the neighborhood—and instead found comfort in the logic and reason between book pages far more interesting. One would think an avid reader would have adored a son who took to written word just as he, but the division always came down to one thing. Preference. His was non-fiction. REALITY. Looking to the clouds, Cassian never saw some great, profound potential, nor fluffy animals and fun shapes like other children; what he saw was weather patterns. Mother Nature rearing its ugly head on those too stupid to know they’re hurting her. He saw a world wrought with misconception, filled with beasts and famine. Misrepresentation of the plague an entire people had reaped by being WEAK. He had no time for their dreams, for their wild imaginations, or their incessant need to color outside the lines—just like his father. A renowned professor who always asked the two simple questions, what if? and why? He sought out the answers of the universe, pondered the wonders of man’s most celebrated philosophers as he spoke at colleges and universities throughout Cassian’s youth. And while his father loved language, too, written word to eat up with his hands like a barbarian, he also favored the unthinkable: man is good, man is worthy, man is trying. His son knew better. And he preferred a fork and knife when he consumed his DOCTRINES.

It was only fitting his mother was a POLITICIAN, another lover of words, but spoken to the masses with the conviction only a snake could possess, spinning lies into truths with such flawless execution. Part of him was proud, as he aged and watched her take over the whole city, secretly wanting to do exactly the same thing. Afforded the best possible education, Cassian spent his teenage years not with his nose exactly in a book, but at dinner parties where the guests were the best names in Science. The most progressive thinkers on cancer research were regulars of his parent’s Saturday night euchre party and the highest ranking government officials spent two weeks in the summer at their villa in Naples. And that’s not to say he spent these nights hidden in a corner, keeping to himself so as to not disturb theSHARPEST minds in the world—no. Cassian offered the quickest of wit, the most illustrious of answers to their questions, a rigorous debate over gender politics once ensuing one Sunday during brunch. He’d said something scandalous like society is the only reason we conform so strictly to such labels, nearly causing the bulging blood vessel in the poor, old cazzo’s forehead pop. He met the man with bared teeth, smug grin plastered along his reckless features. Without abandon, that’s how he always spoke, but only when it counted. Only when he knew his breath wasn’t going to be WASTED.

He dealt in cruelty the more he aged, grinding it out of the bones he deemed less than, those not worthy of his time then suffering the worst FATE of all: his attention. It was rare that one could easily draw his gaze; Cassian is not readily amused, if ever. He deals in facts, in history and how it so clearly repeats, saving little time and even less energy for brevity, for romance or comedy. But when you dare to look a monster in the eye, when you issue that kind of challenge, when you provoke a man who takes pride in evisceration, one gets exactly what they bargain for: DESTRUCTION. He harnessed this power by way of making the rules bend to his will, not a creator of such a power, but someone strong enough to wield—to tame such a brutal thing. Law school was met with eager ears and a hollow hunger in his chest, a craving for knowledge making a home in his throat, never to leave again. But he put it to use when he ran his mother’s second campaign and managed a full schedule with the ease and grace only a man meant to rule the world could possibly possess. And it was a dangerous thing at that, the poise with which Cassian carried himself, with such avarice for not money butINTELLIGENCE. The smartest man in the room, that was what he truly wished to be, and it wasn’t too hard assert such dominance with the title of dottore of the Law now fashioned securely on his shelf.

It didn’t take long for him to have to put his newfound degree to the test, in fact it came the moment his mother’s name was SLANDERED in the press. Dragged through the mud so clearly by the opposition that he couldn’t not defend her, if for no other reason than not a soul speaks ill of the Bhatt name whilst he still has air in his lungs. His father may have soiled it with his prophesying and idealizing, but Cassian and his mother—though she loved the man for some reason; he can’t imagine why—still had something left of their lives to need Bhatt free and clear of any skeletons in its closet. Suing for libel, he won the case in record time, his words more convincing than that of the piss poor District Attorney who dared to try and poke holes in the confidence of a man with EVERYTHING to lose. So he took the sad sack’s job instead, convincing his boss to offer it up in under ten minutes flat. I just beat him, he’d said with a smug smile. And? he’d asked, brows raised at the sheer audacity of this sore winner. I can do the same for you. And with that, he had him. The position was his and he’d stood in the hallway of the courthouse, arms crossed as he leaned against the wall, watching as the fool lost everything. True power doesn’t come from giving orders, nor does it come from brandishing fine weapons or throwing mean fists; it comes from being the best, and Cassian Bhatt is just that. PERFECT in every way imaginable. Just ask him yourself.

LILLIAN WEN: Fiancée. A trophy, something to show off, to place upon his mantle with pride and evidence of his of true ambition. She is that and not much more, but what a pretty face indeed. Glistening like a diamond, he’ll wear her around town if for no other reason than how good she looks with his Versace loafers. Lillian is a prize he thinks he’s won, but he’s yet to cross the finish line. Don’t bite the hand that feeds, and silly boy, does she ever feed yours. Gloat all he wants, parade her around like a doll and forget all she’s giving him, but if Cassian isn’t careful his intricate little plan will foil right before his eyes as she walks out the door. There’s only so far to push someone standing on the edge of integrity. Best he start appreciating the good deed that’s come his way before it blows up in his lap. He can’t survive another tarnish on his good name, not after how hard he’s worked to clear it. Cherish her, Mr. Bhatt, lest you lose the one thing to make you look halfway decent: a good woman to love you.

MONA CHEN & TIBERIUS CAPULET: Extortionist & Captain. She has pictures, hundreds of them, and despite his best efforts to seize them time and time again—even going so far as to hire the best thief money can possibly buy—they remain in her possession. Kept taught between her palms, held tightly against her chest, used to pull the strings of a man not used to answering to God or anyone, let alone a Madame. But she’s smart, he’ll give Mona that, always protecting her Sparrows first even if it means ruining a good man’s reputation in the process. He has no other choice than to obey, no other option than to come to heel and kneel before her and her boss. Though it’s his captain he’s more worried about. Cosimo’s nephew isn’t a man he wants to find the bad side of, but he’s well on his way if he doesn’t do his part. If he doesn’t do exactly as she says, execute every single order perfectly, it’ll be his ass that’ll need saving. Not hers from whatever sort of wrath he thinks he can come up with to outsmart the most clever woman in Verona. Nor Tiberius’ from whatever power play the lawyer thinks the heir won’t see coming. Checkmate, Cassian.

CRISTIAN DE LUCA: Interest. He’s never been one to lust after kingdoms, preferring to stick to the shadows as a powerful entity of demise with the flick of his wrist not a booming voice. Cassian wishes to be flocked to, praised for his deeds not his ability to bring people to their needs but his knack for dissecting the brain, its desires and every machination. He sees something quite similar in Cristian, and it’s so very enticing, so exhilarating to spot a creature just like himself out here in the wild. He wants to know more, see more, hear more from the man who has done nothing but kick up dust in the subtlest of ways since his feet landed on Italian soil. Pulling at the strings of chaos is his specialty, but to watch a man so apt at his favorite wicked game is exciting to say the least. He knows the man’s allegiance, on which side of the bridge his loyalties lie, but when have rules ever stopped Cassian from getting what he wants? And what he wants is a look inside that beautiful Montague mind.

TAMURA CHIKO: War dog. Be careful with that one, they bite. Of this Cassian is positive, what with how many times he’s been on the receiving end of such sharp teeth. But there’s something lurking behind those eyes, he’s sure of it, if only he could just—no. They don’t let him. With an arm outstretched, Chiko keeps him at a distance, and with good reason. He’s every bit as dangerous as he looks, a serpent slithering beneath the shade of the brush, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce; and sink his fangs into their neck he will. Dio does he want to, oh, so very much. There’s something so fascinating about their restraint, their constant will to never break composure. They are a puzzle Cassian is desperate to find all the pieces to, if only to marvel at his handiwork for having put it together. Paying no mind to the wreckage looking at such a visceral image could cause. They are everything his opposite, all violent combat and trigger fingers. He wonders what it would be like to hunt a creature like that. Satisfying, he muses.

Cassian is portrayed by RANVEER SINGH and was written by SIDNEY. He is DECEASED.

[theculturedmarxist]

Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

Frederick Engels

Part 2: Materialism

The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions (1) came to believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death — from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the outside world. If, upon death, it took leave of the body and lived on, there was no occassion to invent yet another distinct death for it. Thus arose the idea of immortality, which at that stage of development appeared not at all as a consolation but as a fate against which it was no use fighting, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. The quandry arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after the death of the body, and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man’s intellectual development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.

Thus the question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of the spirit to nature — the paramount question of the whole of philosophy — has, no less than all religion, its roots in the narrow-minded and ignorant notions of savagery. But this question could for the first time be put forward in its whole acuteness, could achieve its full significance, only after humanity in Europe had awakened from the long hibernation of the Christian Middle Ages. The question of the position of thinking in relation to being, a question which, by the way, had played a great part also in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the question: which is primary, spirit or nature — that question, in relation to the church, was sharpened into this: Did God create the world or has the world been in existence eternally?

The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other — and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often becomes still more intricate and impossible than in Christianity — comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.

These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally signify nothing else but this; and here too they are not used in any other sense. What confusion arises when some other meaning is put to them will be seen below.

But the question of the relation of thinking and being had yet another side: in what relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world? Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality? In philosophical language this question is called the question of identity of thinking and being, and the overwhelming majority of philosophers give an affirmative answer to this question. With Hegel, for example, its affirmation is self-evident; for what we cognize in the real world is precisely its thought-content — that which makes the world a gradual realization of the absolute idea, which absolute idea has existed somewhere from eternity, independent of the world and before the world. But it is manifest without further proof that thought can know a content which is from the outset a thought-content. It is equally manifest that what is to be proved here is already tacitly contained in the premises. But that in no way prevents Hegel from drawing the further conclusion from his proof of the identity of thinking and being that his philosophy, because it is correct for his thinking, is therefore the only correct one, and that the identity of thinking and being must prove its validity by mankind immediately translating his philosophy from theory into practice and transforming the whole world according to Hegelian principles. This is an illusion which he shares with well-nigh all philosophers.

In addition, there is yet a set of different philosophers — those who question the possibility of any cognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition, of the world. To them, among the more modern ones, belong Hume and Kant, and they played a very important role in philosophical development. What is decisive in the refutation of this view has already been said by Hegel, in so far as this was possible from an idealist standpoint. The materialistic additions made by Feuerbach are more ingenious than profound. The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice — namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself”. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such “things-in-themselves” until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the “thing-in-itself” became a thing for us — as, for instance, alizarin, the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar. For 300 years, the Copernican solar system was a hypothesis with 100, 1,000, 10,000 to 1 chances in its favor, but still always a hypothesis. But then Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, not only deduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when [Johann] Galle really found this planet [Neptune, discovered 1846, at Berlin Observatory], the Copernican system was proved. If, nevertheless, the neo-Kantians are attempting to resurrect the Kantian conception in Germany, and the agnostics that of Hume in England (where in fact it never became extinct), this is, in view of their theoretical and practical refutation accomplished long ago, scientifically a regression and practically merely a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world.

But during this long period from Descartes to Hegel and from Hobbes to Feuerbach, these philosophers were by no means impelled, as they thought they were, solely by the force of pure reason. On the contrary, what really pushed them forward most was the powerful and ever more rapidly onrushing progress of natural science and industry. Among the materialists this was plain on the surface, but the idealist systems also filled themselves more and more with a materialist content and attempted pantheistically to reconcile the antithesis between mind and matter. Thus, ultimately, the Hegelian system represents merely a materialism idealistically turned upside down in method and content.

It is, therefore, comprehensible that Starcke in his characterization of Feuerbach first of all investigates the latter’s position in regard to this fundamental question of the relation of thinking and being. After a short introduction, in which the views of the preceding philosophers, particularly since Kant, are described in unnecessarily ponderous philosophical language, and in which Hegel, by an all too formalistic adherence to certain passages of his works, gets far less his due, there follows a detailed description of the course of development of Feuerbach’s “metaphysics” itself, as this course was successively reflected in those writings of this philosopher which have a bearing here. This description is industriously and lucidly elaborated; only, like the whole book, it is loaded with a ballast of philosophical phraseology by no means everywhere unavoidable, which is the more disturbing in its effect the less the author keeps to the manner of expression of one and the same school, or even of Feuerbach himself, and the more he interjects expressions of very different tendencies, especially of the tendencies now rampant and calling themselves philosophical.

The course of evolution of Feuerbach is that of a Hegelian — a never quite orthodox Hegelian, it is true — into a materialist; an evolution which at a definite stage necessitates a complete rupture with the idealist system of his predecessor. With irresistible force, Feuerbach is finally driven to the realization that the Hegelian premundane existence of the “absolute idea”, the “pre-existence of the logical categories” before the world existed, is nothing more than the fantastic survival of the belief in the existence of an extra-mundane creator; that the material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong is the only reality; and that our consciousness and thinking, however supra-sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the highest product of matter. This is, of course, pure materialism. But, having got so far, Feuerbach stops short. He cannot overcome the customary philosophical prejudice, prejudice not against the thing but against the name materialism. He says:

“To me materialism is the foundation of the edifice of human essence and knowledge; but to me it is not what it is to the physiologist, to the natural scientists in the narrower sense, for example, to Moleschott, and necessarily is from their standpoint and profession, namely, the edifice itself. Backwards I fully agree with the materialists; but not forwards.” 

Here, Feuerbach lumps together the materialism that is a general world outlook resting upon a definite conception of the relation between matter and mind, and the special form in which this world outlook was expressed at a definite historical stage — namely, in the 18th century. More than that, he lumps it with the shallow, vulgarized form in which the materialism of the 18th century continues to exist today in the heads of naturalists and physicians, the form which was preached on their tours in the fifties by Buchner, Vogt, and Moleschott. But just as idealism underwent a series of stages of development, so also did materialism. With each epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science, it has to change its form; and after history was also subjected to materialistic treatment, a new avenue of development has opened here, too.

The materialism of the last century was predominantly mechanical, because at that time, of all natural sciences, only mechanics, and indeed only the mechanics of solid bodies — celestial and terrestrial — in short, the mechanics of gravity, had come to any definite close. Chemistry at that time existed only in its infantile, phlogistic form [A]. Biology still lay in swaddling clothes; vegetable and animal organisms had been only roughly examined and were explained by purely mechanical causes. What the animal was to Descartes, man was to the materialists of the 18th century — a machine. This exclusive application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature — in which processes the laws of mechanics are, indeed, also valid, but are pushed into the backgrounds by other, higher laws — constitutes the first specific but at that time inevitable limitations of classical French materialism.

The second specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development. This was in accordance with the level of the natural science of that time, and with the metaphysical, that is, anti-dialectical manner of philosophizing connected with it. Nature, so much was known, was in eternal motion. But according to the ideas of that time, this motion turned, also eternally, in a circle and therefore never moved from the spot; it produced the same results over and over again. This conception was at that time inevitable. The Kantian theory of the origin of the Solar System [that the Sun and planets originated from incandescent rotating nebulous masses] had been put forward but recently and was still regarded merely as a curiosity. The history of the development of the Earth, geology, was still totally unknown, and the conception that the animate natural beings of today are the result of a long sequence of development from the simple to the complex could not at that time scientifically be put forward at all. The unhistorical view of nature was therefore inevitable. We have the less reason to reproach the philosophers of the 18th century on this account since the same thing is found in Hegel. According to him, nature, as a mere “alienation” of the idea, is incapable of development in time — capable only of extending its manifoldness in space, so that it displays simultaneously and alongside of one another all the stages of development comprised in it, and is condemned to an eternal repetition of the same processes. This absurdity of a development in space, but outside of time — the fundamental condition of all development — Hegel imposes upon nature just at the very time when geology, embryology, the physiology of plants and animals, and organic chemistry were being built up, and when everywhere on the basis of these new sciences brilliant foreshadowings of the later theory of evolution were appearing (for instance, Goethe and Lamarck). But the system demanded it; hence the method, for the sake of the system, had to become untrue to itself.

This same unhistorical conception prevailed also in the domain of history. Here the struggle against the remnants of the Middle Ages blurred the view. The Middle Ages were regarded as a mere interruption of history by a thousand years of universal barbarism. The great progress made in the Middle Ages — the extension of the area of European culture, the viable great nations taking form there next to each other, and finally the enormous technical progress of the 14th and 15th centuries — all this was not seen. Thus a rational insight into the great historical interconnectedness was made impossible, and history served at best as a collection of examples and illustrations for the use of philosophers.

The vulgarizing pedlars, who in Germany in the fifties dabbled in materialism, by no means overcame this limitation of their teachers. All the advances of natural science which had been made in the meantime served them only as new proofs against the existence of a creator of the world; and, indeed, they did not in the least make it their business to develop the theory any further. Though idealism was at the end of its tether and was dealt a death-blow by the Revolution of 1848, it had the satisfaction of seeing that materialism had for the moment fallen lower still. Feuerbach was unquestionably right when he refused to take responsibility for this materialism; only he should not have confounded the doctrines of these itinerant preachers with materialism in general.

Here, however, there are two things to be pointed out. First, even during Feuerbach’s lifetime, natural science was still in that process of violent fermentation which only during the last 15 years had reached a clarifying, relative conclusion. New scientific data were acquired to a hitherto unheard-of extent, but the establishing of interrelations, and thereby the bringing of order into this chaos of discoveries following closely upon each other’s heels, has only quite recently become possible. It is true that Feuerbach had lived to see all three of the decisive discoveries — that of the cell, the transformation of energy, and the theory of evolution named after Darwin. But how could the lonely philosopher, living in rural solitude, be able sufficiently to follow scientific developments in order to appreciate at their full value discoveries which natural scientists themselves at that time either still contested or did not know how to make adequate use of? The blame for this falls solely upon the wretched conditions in Germany, in consequence of which cobweb-spinning eclectic flea-crackers had taken possession of the chairs of philosophy, while Feuerbach, who towered above them all, had to rusticate and grow sour in a little village. It is therefore not Feuerbach’s fault that this historical conception of nature, which had now become possible and which removed all the one-sidedness of French materialism, remained inaccessible to him.

Secondly, Feuerbach is quite correct in asserting that exclusively natural-scientific materialism is indeed “the foundation of the edifice of human knowledge, but not the edifice itself”. For we live not only in nature but also in human society, and this also no less than nature has its history of development and its science. It was therefore a question of bringing the science of society, that is, the sum total of the so-called historical and philosophical sciences, into harmony with the materialist foundation, and of reconstructing it thereupon. But it did not fall to Feuerbach’s lot to do this. In spite of the “foundation”, he remained here bound by the traditional idealist fetters, a fact which he recognizes in these words: “Backwards I agree with the materialists, but not forwards!”

But it was Feuerbach himself who did not go “forwards” here; in the social domain, who did not get beyond his standpoint of 1840 or 1844. And this was again chiefly due to this reclusion which compelled him, who, of all philosophers, was the most inclined to social intercourse, to produce thoughts out of his solitary head instead of in amicable and hostile encounters with other men of his calibre. Later, we shall see in detail how much he remained an idealist in this sphere.

It need only be added here that Starcke looks for Feuerbach’s idealism in the wrong place.

“Feuerbach is an idealist; he believes in the progress of mankind.” (p.19)

“The foundation, the substructure of the whole, remains nevertheless idealism. Realism for us is nothing more than a protection again aberrations, while we follow our ideal trends. Are not compassion, love, and enthusiasm for truth and justice ideal forces?” (p.VIII)

In the first place, idealism here means nothing, but the pursuit of ideal aims. But these necessarily have to do at the most with Kantian idealism and its “categorical imperative”; however, Kant himself called his philosophy “transcendental idealism” by no means because he dealt therein also with ethical ideals, but for quite other reasons, as Starcke will remember. The superstitition that philosophical idealism is pivoted round a belief in ethical, that is, social, ideals, arose outside philosophy, among the German philistines, who learned by heart from Schiller’s poems the few morsels of philosophical culture they needed. No one has criticized more severely the impotent “categorical imperative” of Kant — impotent because it demands the impossible, and therefore never attains to any reality — no one has more cruelly derided the philistine sentimental enthusiasm for unrealizable ideals purveyed by Schiller than precisely the complete idealist Hegel (see, for example, his Phenomenology).

In the second place, we simply cannot get away from the fact that everything that sets men acting must find its way through their brains — even eating and drinking, which begins as a consequence of the sensation of hunger or thirst transmitted through the brain, and ends as a result of the sensation of satisfaction likewise transmitted through the brain. The influences of the external world upon man express themselves in his brain, are reflected therein as feelings, impulses, volitions — in short, as “ideal tendencies”, and in this form become “ideal powers”. If, then, a man is to be deemed an idealist because he follows “ideal tendencies” and admits that “ideal powers” have an influence over him, then every person who is at all normally developed is a born idealist and how, in that case, can there still be any materialists?

In the third place, the conviction that humanity, at least at the present moment, moves on the whole in a progressive direction has absolutely nothing to do with the antagonism between materialism and idealism. The French materialists no less than the deists Voltaire and Rousseau held this conviction to an almost fanatical degree, and often enough made the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the “enthusiasm for truth and justice” — using this phrase in the good sense — it was Diderot, for instance. If, therefore, Starcke declares all this to be idealism, this merely proves that the word materialism, and the whole antagonism between the two trends, has lost all meaning for him here.

The fact is that Starcke, although perhaps unconsciously, in this makes an unpardonable concession to the traditional philistine prejudice against the word materialism resulting from its long-continued defamation by the priests. By the word materialism, the philistine understands gluttony, drunkenness, lust of the eye, lust of the flesh, arrogance, cupidity, avarice, covetousness, profit-hunting, and stock-exchange swindling — in short, all the filthy vices in which he himself indulges in private. By the word idealism he understands the belief in virtue, universal philanthropy, and in a general way a “better world”, of which he boasts before others but in which he himself at the utmost believes only so long as he is having the blues or is going through the bankruptcy consequent upon his customary “materialist” excesses. It is then that he sings his favorite song, What is man? — Half beast, half angel.

For the rest, Starcke takes great pains to defend Feuerbach against the attacks and doctrines of the vociferous assistant professors who today go by the name of philosophers in Germany. For people who are interested in this afterbirth of classical German philosophy this is, of course, a matter of importance; for Starcke himself it may have appeared necessary. We, however, will spare the reader this.

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the library

⤷  As a worker of Heaven’s Library, you cherished the ones who followed rules — from the simple act of remaining silent throughout their visit, to the enforcement of the place’s rigid enquette. After all, guarding the everlasting shelves that held the history of every soul that ever lived was quite meaningful by itself, but could turn into a life-threatening task if not taken seriously.

So, if you adored rules so much, how could you allow yourself to fall for an angel?

✓ Couple: Jungkook x Reader | Angel!AU 

✓ Filed under: angst, fluff

✓ Words: 11,210

Author’s note: (Kind of) a short story for a change. The place I based this one is the Admont Abbey Library in Austria. Truly a heavenly world. Some characters changed from the last time I posted but, other than that, the story continues to be the same.

⤅ Now.

Impregnated with the rich fragrance of paper and cinnamon, the Library burgeoned around your figure with the lovingness of sempiternity, bathed by the alabaster and auriferous ornaments of its decorations. In the midst of dirt particles that waltzed in the fresh air, one companionless book oscillated in the suspended atmosphere, tracing slow-motion pirouettes in space. Its untouched pages opened and moved in silence, magnetized by an invisible golden string that guided the object towards its destination — a shelf’s number far too long to be pronounced, too lost amongst those infinite corridors to be found quickly. By most people, that was.

Mesmerized by its quiet waltz, you watched as the book traced its course over your head, soon entering the premise of the private universe behind your figure. From where you stood, arms placed on the expanse of the snow-pigmented marble counter, you could watch as it proceeded into the depthness of the corridor, then disappeared behind a corner. You never got tired of it: even if humans were born everyday, the arrival of new and immaculate books always brought you a profound sentiment of hopeful optimism, of new beginnings—

“Here’s my favorite person in all of paradise!”

Just as simply as that, your daydreams were cut short when the man’s delicate voice found its way to where you stood, inducing you to turn away from those abysmal white corridors to glimpse at the newcomer with infantile curiosity. Combined with a calm suspire of alleviation, you stared at the presence that ever so patiently walked towards you and allowed yourself to present an amicable, welcoming smile, “How can I help you today, Jungkook?” you inquired.

He must have seen something sarcastic lingering in the quintessence of your speech, for the corners of his lips moved downwards for a breviloquent second, “You act as if you’re not happy to see me every single day, century after century,” he said playfully. Soon, though, he noticed that the phrase he presented you ignited some sort of cynical reaction from your part: eyebrows moving into a frown, smiley lips trembling with uncertainty, “Okay, I apologize. I know you’re stressed over everything that’s going on.” he rushed to add.

You sighed, shaking your head in an unspoken negation, a way to scare away the clouds of his baseless doubt, “Tell me about it,” your words came out with a certain dose of irony, but even that could not camouflage the quiet lament that echoed in the background of your syllables. As much as you adored your job deeply, there were instances that truly tested how far your motivation could go, and those past visits had been precisely that, “Let me guess, books from Limbo again?” you asked.

Jungkook placed the palms of his hands over the cold stone, feeling as it sucked out the fathomless heat of his celestial figure. For a place in paradise, he always thought that Library was awfully devoid of warmth and vivacity, “You’ve guessed it,” the angel agreed with forced excitement, chuckling at the endless circle the two of you had been trapped in, “I don’t know what’s happening with Heaven lately, they are going through this huge archive cleanse and now they want to see if there are more souls to save. Or something along those lines.” he admitted, sure you would question that constant visiting once again.

His eyes fell to follow the ethereal lineaments of your roseate lips as you responded, “How benevolent of them,” you spoke with endless sarcasm, aware that other motives hid in the penumbra of such uncommon decision. Using your years of experience as a basis for such ponderations, you guessed that one pertinent reason for cleaning the lower levels would be to open space for more souls to come — and that was never a good sign. “I can’t believe we’re talking about the same good guys that sent down the Black Plague.”

Jungkook instantaneously exhaled at that bothersome recalling, rolling his eyes as the images of a tragedy-permeated past flooded his brain, “I’d rather not remember that,” the angel breathed out, clearly irritated at the connotation they brought along — for a heavenly worker, you had always thought Jungkook was too dangerously cynic for his own well-being; openly cynic, at that, “but I suppose we can’t change the past now. Can you fetch me that book?” he asked kindly, eager to switch subjects.

“Of course I can, it’s my job,” you playfully agreed, presenting the angel with a smile that sucked out all the lassitude from his immortal body — every time he looked at you, Jungkook came closer to understanding why humans devoted themselves to finding art within every fragment of reality, to create images that resembled the paradisiacal elegance that he then saw before himself. “just tell me the full name, the time and date of birth, and I’ll find your copy.”

But of course, he already knew how that process went — even if he could not quite comprehend it even after numerous explanations from your part. Truth was: not even you could find the correct terms to elucidate the process that occurred within your head, nor the expansions of your spirit that traveled through those auspicious and resplendent corridors. It was like an alteration in reality, a chimera: your sight would mercurially run through every crack of shelves, every lacuna in between books to find the correct story for your customer.

The object, too, lured you in like a siren’s harmony. It was odd how its pages wordlessly called and guided you into its presence like it had a magnetic field of its own; a single book  in focus amongst the turmoil of a nebulous sea; an oasis of equanimity in a immense desert of torment.

Within every peculiarity that existed amongst the walls of that pallid Library, an endless garden of withering stories decorated shelves that stretched into the infinity of time and space; book covers that were painted by profound shades of violaceous and cimmerian, indigo and cantaloupe — every combination ever conceived, embellishing the tales of every human soul that ever walked the merciless soil of Earth. To you, the decaying semblance of that quiet environment metamorphosed into what you could only see as a bruise, a wound that would eternally mark humankind itself. Just as them, that place was apparently flawless, but profoundly twisted in its pernicious essence.

At times, as you moved in between the snow-painted shelves, lonely bronze statues accompanied your path with utter impassiveness — the figure of an archer; of forgotten philosophers; of angels. One of those truly caught your attention, for part of its face shattered and forgotten on the dirty ground, sculpted wings appeared to have started to melt slowly. Even if it was elegant in its own despondent manner, its presence only added to your sensation of forever being watched by a higher, merciless power. You tried to ignore it, tried to play it off as being a mere allusion to the myth of Icarus, but sometimes you could still feel its piercing eyes burning to the back of your consciousness, guiding you towards self-censoring — in Heaven, nevertheless, paranoia was never baseless. It was better being safe than sorry.

“You always save my life,” Jungkook’s enamored voice brought you back to your position, inducing you to blink twice, thrice; attempting to hold back onto the ties of the substantial world. Instantaneously, you looked down at the marble surface, where his slender fingers pushed in your direction a piece of yellowed paper. In it, the information that would guide your towards your personal treasure. “this is what you need.”

Your gaze fell down to meet the raven-black ink of the the written information. In it, a messy handwriting — which you quickly recognized as being your superior’s — had gifted you with the individual’s name and, right beneath it, the date of his birth. The soul’s name did not ring any bells, but you did not expect it would.

You hummed quietly as your eyes drifted shut, mind shooting and circumnavigating through the gargantuan collection of archives that expanded all across your microscopic silhouette. Names came and went in a paroxysm of indistinct titles and ancient pages stained by time, the numbers of the corridors conglomerating into an incomprehensible mixture of locations as you flew past their magnificence. The unknown mortal’s storyline cried for your reach in with soundless laments for clemency, inducing for you to blindly follow its position with phenomenal precision.

“That must be around corridor five hundred and twenty two thousand... three hundred and forty seven stands to the right…” you mindlessly mumbled, focusing in the halcyon shelves that appeared in your head. Your consciousness reached closer to it, buoyantly flickering over the uncountable amount of covers before, at last, finding your target: the only book that had its margins clearly defined, emanating a colorless glow of its own, “Yeah, I see it… marked with an L and everything. It’ll be here in a second.” you told him.

And, just like that, the trance was concluded.

Once you opened your eyes, you found yourself back at the balcony, looking deeply into the eyes of the angel. Jungkook smiled fondly at the girl before his enamored gaze, stars of his fascination shimmering within his obsidian eyes, “Even thousands of years later, I’m not tired of watching you do that.” the man confessed.

You limited yourself to laugh at that. Sometime along those self-perpetuating centuries, the wonders and amazement of dashing through that construction had lost its initial thrill, now just feeling like another — yet slightly more interesting — task, “Still, I am very tired of doing it,” you told him. However, Jungkook must have not realized that it was only partially veridical, for his gaze adopted a more focused, preoccupied semblance. “Come on, I’m joking. You know I adore what I do.”

Partially.

“I am aware,” the angel sighed, placing his elbows on the marble counter. Lackadaisical, his gaze traced the cold stone that mushroomed beneath his touch, following an invisible path towards where your hands laid atop of it. In a lightening of desire, the angel wished desperately to place his palm over your own, caressing the skin he learned how to love so dearly, “Will you ever take me around the place again?” Jungkook then questioned, looking back at you.

Apparently taken by surprise, you discontinued your ponderations momentaneously, pouting as his question echoed timelessly through your brain, “What for, exactly? You’ve seen the books, it’s not like everyone here has Napoleon’s storyline,” you counterclaimed.

“I wanted to spend time with you,” an infatuated smile effloresced on Jungkook’s incarnadine lips as he admitted his desires with a feeble verbalization, his voice holding tightly to the symphonic harmony of his spirit. During the breviloquent instants of hesitation that followed, the honeyed illumination of the alabastrine Library melted over his sanctified lineaments, immersing his skin in the golden hue that monopolized the strands of his silk-like hair. You always thought Jungkook was just that — auric, cherubic.

Nevertheless, you could not allow yourself to succumb to his elegance at that instant. Matter not how deeply your sentiments ached for your lips to find comfort within the space between his own, there were instants in which the toxic mingling of paranoia and stone-cold reason monopolized your desires, “You’re spending time with me right now.” you cut his hope short.

Jungkook shook his head in denial, his dark hair trapping the incandescence of the outdoors luminescence, “You know what I’m talking about,” he forcefully pushed that subject forward.

Deep breathing, focused irises — within every action that embellished your being, he could see that his companion was growing irritated at his unwelcomed pressure, “ Jungkook, you know what I think about that,” you began, feeling your throat growing dry just by verbalizing such claims. In a reflex, your eyes darted towards the humongous, silvery doors behind his curved figure — it was closed, the world was silent, but you knew you were never wholesomely alone. “It’s dangerous. Especially for you.”

As if he was expecting those words, his subsequent phrase already hung with certainty at the tip of his rosy tongue, “I am not scared,” the angel said.

“But I am. We can’t play with things like this,” your response came out bordering on a cautious hiss, voice progressively getting lower and lower. Nervous, you just wished for his book to reach you two quicker, but its usual languorous pace usually made those seconds unbearably prolonged. “You know what would happen if someone found out.”

The smile he gave you, as much as it was supposed to be soother your worries, only served for your uneasiness to increase: even if Jungkook attempted to mask the phantasms that haunted his spirit, you could practically hear them howling behind his teeth, conforming your assumption that even he, in all of his forged courage, was aware of the devastating consequences your position could entice, “No one will find out, it’s just you and I here,” regardless, he continued to speak on, leaning his head to the side. “Darling, you deal with the entire human section by yourself, you have practically only one visitor every day, which is me.”

You shook your head in transparent disagreement, forcing your voice to remain below a hushed whisper, “You make it seem like we are safe and sound up here,” you told him, leaning in closer to his position so the angel could hear your better — and the angel only. Countless times had you done that for other, more lovable, reasons, but now everything appeared to be so secretive, so wrong. “This is Heaven, Jungkook: we are being watched all the time. Besides, your superiors come here frequently enough for me to feel sick every time that door opens.”

The simple, mundane act of referring those creatures caused for unwanted recallings to emerge within the controlled tides of your contemplations: those slender, well-dressed figures that crossed the white-bathed halls with the grace of a swan, moving in your direction as if they were the emperors of the universe. Power and respect emanated from their phlegmatic expression, knowledge beyond your imagination dripped from their colorless — sometimes violaceous-stained — lips as their request for a mortal’s story echoed in the space between them and you. You were the ruler of the world that existed within those ivory walls, but, upon their arrival, you were merely another piece of a larger, much more complex puzzle.

Then and there, as you felt like a easily-crushed worm beneath their omnipotent simulacrum, you were certain that creatures like you were never truly left unwatched. If free-will was a subject of constant debate for humankind, angels and heavenly workers were aware that they had no right to use their own.

Muffled, the sound of Jungkook’s shoes moving around the polished floor pulled your back onto his presence — if compared to his superior’s aura, his flame burned in such a vacillating manner, weak even, “Have they said anything to you?” something coruscated within his crepuscular gaze as he looked at you, holding the scintillation of his hidden worries as he awaited for your hesitant words to depart from in between your pursed lips.

Speech oscillating with reluctance, you leaned a bit backwards, eyes moving away from his own to watch the blades of achromatic lambency that sliced the unfluctuating air. Countless times had you two went through similar conversations, but you could never quite convince him of your reasons, “They don’t need to say anything when it’s just that clear. We are doing something that borders on treacherous, that goes strictly against Heaven’s code of conduct,” you elucidated. “It's just… Jungkook, I'm a Library worker, you're a server of the Lord. There is a hierarchy in place: if someone is going down, it's me.”

However, that was not precisely true: it was much more manageble to promote an angel to take over his position than to train another librarian to care of Heaven’s collection, for the trust and responsibility that came along with your job was far too great for even the most experient of celestial beings. You had been there since the beginning of time, watched its expanse grow bigger and more stuffed with idiosyncratic stories, and no one could be as trustworthy, even with a millennia of preparation.

Jungkook shook his head in slight annoyance, licking his lips, “You surely cannot believe the words you’re saying. My love, you—”

Your stare darted back to him instantaneously, “Don't call me that so openly,” you interrupted.

At that, his mouth fell shut. Jungkook looked profoundly inside your eyes as if there was a treasure waiting to be discovered, a piece of your amaranthine soul which only he could perceive amongst the turmoils of your collected facade. Jungkook looked at your as if the mere gaze you two shared could hold the benevolence and amorousness he caged within his chest, the touches and gentle caresses neither of you would ever be allowed to present freely.

He looked at you as if he was not a being who had the entire universe to contemplate, but as one who solely saw the pieces of beauty that appeared before his curious pupils; perishing at the corners of your lips; awakening within the pendular movement of your irises. Jungkook looked at you as if he was nothing more than a mortal, as if his time by your side was constantly near its terminal stages. As if they would never have the embrace of perpetuity, as if your intertwined hearts were as ephemeral as the countless stories that embellished those fathomless pallid shelves. And, mayhaps, they were.

Jungkook looked at you with infinite adoration — absolute wonderment, heartsickening admiration, excruciating purity; terribly mortal love.

But also foolish, naive hopefulness, “Love, listen to me: everyone knows that you're the best in your job. They wouldn't throw you out, even less go through the danger of training another angel to take care of what you do up here,” the man guaranteed with endless determination, sure that the words that left his mouth held nothing but the clemency of truth. Surely, that might have been the case back then, but things changed quickly in the neverending tides of Heaven. The two of you were nothing but disposable, “even if someone found us out, you'd be safe.” he concluded.

You suspired at that, running one hand through your hair — his claims clearly did not console your preoccupations. More than that: they appeared to set your paranoias aflame, inducing for the licking fire to burn the corners of your panicked contemplations; a ticking time bomb ready to destroy their builders, “What about you?” you counterclaimed, voice falling into trepidation. Never once had you thought the Library felt so hyperborean, desolated.

Jungkook appeared to grow confused at the brusque inquiry, “What... about me?”

Biting down on your lower lip, you took a step back away from him. Again, you found yourself silently wishing that his book could arrive sooner than the words would leave the arid desert of your throat — nothing more than a frivolous request, regardless, “Code of conduct, page twenty-eight, paragraph fourteen,” you recited, placing your two hands on the corners of the counter. Mayhaps for support, or because you required the contact of that gelid, polished surface to keep you chained down to the arrhythmic progression of your contemplations. “Under absolutely no circumstance can two celestial beings engage in any sort of non-business relationships. Those include, but are not limited to: sexual relations, partnerships against heaven, unnecessary friendships, romantic love...”

“Friendships and romances only—”

“—Cause rebellions,” you interrupted promptly, not gifting him with the seconds he necessitated to formulate a suitable response. You had memorized the Code by that point, for it was one of the few pieces of writing you had been allowed to go through — which, you came to comprehend, was quite a clear move of Heaven’s mind-washing mechanism. “Paragraph fifteen: in case the previous rule is disrespected, both parties will be taken to trial under the threat of immediate execution or—”

“—Exclusion and removal of grace,” Jungkook stole those words from your mouth, causing your speech to fall into respectful silence. In more mundane terms, as you once had to explain to a very confused guardian, that meant that the angel would be casted down to Earth as a human, which was one of the worst punishments that could be given to beings like them, right beneath relocation to Hell, “I know the Code. I'm still not worried. They wouldn't cast me down, and you're far too valuable to be taken away from this Library.” he rephrased his previous sentences with even more security.

Simply as that, your shoulders fell in a silentious indication of defeat: you stood by your ground, but could not avoid the astringent guilt that took over your chest once you saw the manner his expression had grown distressed at your constant avoidance. It was a matter of safety; of life and death — that was what you told yourself continuously in a faithless attempt at self-convincement, for you would rather have Jungkook looking at you with such heartbreaking mannerisms than suffering with his hypothetical absence, or your own eternal punishment.

“Nevertheless, I'm not taking any chances,” you shook your head, biting down on your lower lip. With that final negation, you swore you could observe his spirit shattering into agony.

Abruptly, you finally experienced the presence of the desired book slipping along the air, materializing behind a shelf just at the end of the main corridor. It was like being immersed in a furious river, but having a blockage placed between you and the currents — it interrupted the flow of the ethereal universe, standing out like a pulsating cut in a mortal’s skin and warning you of a misplaced piece, “Here... is your book,” almost timidly, you cleared your throat, slowly turning around to reach out for it. Like a docile animal, the object moved closer and landed on your palm a few seconds later. “Please ask your superiors to return them quicker, it's hard to organize around here if there are so many copies missing.”

Without meeting his eyes, you turned back around and handed the copy to the angel, who merely agreed in return, “Will do,” emotionlessly, Jungkook’s voice reverberated past your figure, entering in dissonance with the sorrow that sung within your spirit. Something had switched in the land that encompassed you, a venomous blanket that covered the two, intoxicating your souls with the pernicious touch of regret. “Thank you, and have a nice day.”

Dry and unimpassioned, his artificial syllables of departure indicated that your stance had truly caused him pain. You breathed out and, “You too, Jungkook.” was all that you managed to vocalize.

In a matter of two deep inhales and a few steps against the marble ground — which deliberately got farther and farther away —, you recognized yourself unaccompanied in Heaven’s Library. This time, asymmetrically, the rhythmical sailing of soaring books could not tranquilize the affliction that engulfed you; the ethereal resplendence of the conflagrant sun could no longer warm your cold skin. An aspect had switched in the thick of those elements, the balance that measured your fate had slightly moved downwards with the ponderation of your decisions, near rupture.

The two celestial beings had once made a promise, and they had broken it.

⤅ Then.

Jungkook had always thought everything in heaven seemed, for the lack of a better term, blurry. Between the images he contemplated and the light and shadow that built them together, lived a myriad of shapes and glows that he could never quite characterize, but accompanied him regardless of his approval. It was as if different tenses coexisted at the very same instant, actions sometimes delayed by mere seconds, but when placed on top of one another, turned into a kaleidoscopic progression of phantasmagoric forms. It was both dream-like and nightmarish; comforting and threatening. Hallucinatory, even.

The angel had noticed that chimerical illusion centuries past, but there was one instance that truly stood out amongst his recallings. It happened on one recluse section of the Library, on the opposite side of the entrance, and gave him view of the unfathomable meters that laid beneath those marble-ornamented halls. Never once had Jungkook dared to venture down to the lower levels of the archives, for simply standing there — staring down at the abyss that books succumbed to — caused for him to feel the trepidation of its emanating energy. Down there were the stories of humans sent to Hell, the souls that lingered in the thin line that separated malevolent spirits with the demonic creatures that tortured them for eternity.

Mind wandering past the lands of his preoccupation, he realized that he was standing by your side amongst the endless shelves of Heaven’s Library, yet staring at the mouth-like crater before the two of you — those white steps were dangerously similar to a creature’s teeth, the waltz of coordinated books appeared to be a tongue moving in its interior. There was something about those endless stairs drowning in penumbra that felt like a forewarning to him, the image of the consequences he could face if he was not careful enough. Even if Jungkook was not exactly someone that observed signals where there were none, he could not shake away the impression that such peculiar instant was flawlessly architectured to present him with his current situation.

On the limiar of paradise, Jungkook had a taste of infernal consequences.

“Let’s not fall in love,” the angel had breathlessly requested you that day, experiencing the ponderation of his shattered heart gradually — then mercilessly. Like a rain that progressively metamorphosed into a storm, the cosmos around him felt claustrophobic to endure; reticence was too thundering for him to think properly. He was scared. In manners he could not comprehend, he was.

From his peripheral vision, he saw as you lethargically moved your gaze away from the lower levels of the Library, somewhat spellbound to its villainous radiation. Even before your words had escaped your half-open lips, Jungkook was certain you had seen the same fate as he did, hiding just in the corners of that shadowy realm, “We cannot,” you had responded, lamentation and remorse curling its compassionless claws around your throat. You two had made it that far by being extremely cautious, nothing should be altered now. It could not, “It’s one of the few rules we didn’t break yet.” you added.

That very same day, the two of you were interrupted by a newcomer that was — very impatiently — searching for the story of a particularly controversial historical figure. As a consequence, the two were unable to give the proper goodbyes to one another, for you had to quickly return to the entrance and assist the sanctified being. Instants like those made you remember, even if ephemerally, of a special passage you had once read amongst those uncountable stories: the hardest goodbyes were the ones a person never received. Especially after such important oath.

Or, at the very least, what appeared to be an oath. Sooner or later, even that rule was broken.

Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by fate, but precisely four Earth months had ran by when the two of you decided to succumb into adoration. Underneath the condensed adumbration of a secluded shelf, you chuckled, placing your palms against Jungkook’s chest and playfully pushing him away, “Jungkook, I have to get back to work,” you quietly exclaimed.

Features slightly covered by a thin veil of shadows, Jungkook smiled in the most profound of infatuations, even though he was cognizant of your words long before it had been enunciated by your roseate, slightly swollen lips. The outline of your features were simply sculptural, he once told you, equiparable to the finest forms of art to his humble point of view, “Me too, but you don’t see me complaining,” playfully said the angel, moving back to find the solace of your kiss, “You don’t know how much I missed kissing you.” he breathed out, mouth caressing yours as he spoke.

The kiss lingered on your lips like a butterfly’s wings trembles against the wind — oscillating, shivering — sending the radiations of pure amour through your slumberous perceptions. If you could, you would stay in his arms forevermore, “Jungkook, be careful. Keep your voice low,” you warned, glancing at the position of your slender fingers that had now moved up one of his shoulders. If you had not been so anxious yourself, the sensation of his muscles tensing up beneath your skin would have never called your attention. “we have rules for a reason.”

It was clear from the way a frown took over his features that he did not share the same trepidation that took over your spirit, “Stupid reasons for stupid rules,” Jungkook then pouted, appeared to be almost childlike for a moment. Surrounded by the auriferous luminescence of a secluded version of paradise, Jungkook discovered his mind to be lost in your presence, and all he ever wanted was to immerse himself in it, “Okay, okay. Just one more kiss.” he requested.

And, surely, you consented.

Permeated my amour and devotion, the loving touch of his velvety lips felt like the gentle touch of a feather, the compassion and enthusiasm of a fresh, yet warm day amongst the numb seas of your relinquished realm. With their eyes closed, the two could only experience as their immortal spirits caved into the beauty and enchantment of one another, each and every second used to explore the kindness the other could give. Your heart was drumming frantically to the symphonious harmony of your enamored embrace, passion irradiating and rooting throughout your body—

A muffled exclamation from his part echoed against your mouth, causing for him to move away from your kiss. It took you a couple seconds to comprehend what had occurred, but, when you did, you could not help but to melt into a diverted smile, “This is your book.” you told him, looking at the object that had just hit Jungkook on the back of his head.

He lost no time turning around and taking it in his hands, eyes momentaneously glancing to the “L” that marked the position of that special soul. No minor inconvenience caused by that book against his head could be compared to the headache that was dealing with such creatures.

What he verbalized, nevertheless, was a simple, “This is my book,” followed by a quick flicker of his stare downwards. The object felt peculiarly heavy, pulled by the gravitational field of his worries. It was abrupt the manner how every particularity about you companion seemed to crash down upon his cognizance, robbing the rhythm away from his heart and inducing for his consciousness to morph into a psychedelic waltz of forms and alien sentiments, “I’ll be on my way, then.” he cleared his throat, fighting to keep it all in.

In the expanse of the moment that followed his sentence, however, Jungkook came to understand an element of your presence that he had been neglecting for some time now — tracing the pathway from your angelic lineaments to the diaphanous contours of your silhouette, he found the true meaning of salvation in your eyes; understood that the profound allurement he had felt for was not merely interest. It was much deeper than anything he had ever experienced aforetime, much more filled with desire and affection. He did not want to leave you behind, but to feel the taste of forever by your side.

Ask me to stay, he faithlessly thought. Nothing more than a naive dream.

If you felt the same, you masked it fairly well. As you crossed your arms before your chest — a defensive, almost shielding gesture — you hummed in agreement; your gaze, too, falling to the amber-covered book in his hands. “You should be, there are tortured souls waiting to be saved.”

He scoffed at that, eyes gazing at the golden letters that ornamented the book’s title — whoever that person was, must have done something quite remarkable to get such beautifully decorated cover, “They mostly will be waiting forever,” the angel said, clearly skeptical at the prospect of divine clemency. Before him, though, you had grown clearly preoccupied by the way his frustration dripped through his choice of words. “What? Most of these aren’t getting through the first stages of trial. Out of the hundreds we took so far, not even twenty were saved.”

You breathed out, “It’s hard to take souls up from Hell, they are trapped in this… hole of hatred and savagery,” the mere enunciation of that place’s name left an astringent taste hanging at the tip of your tongue, the pestilent connotation infecting your brain with bothersome memories. Your frown took over your thoughtful expression as your eyes trailed around the immaculate shelves, searching for a way to escape from those terrible remembrances. “They usually get worse than what they started. It makes no sense to combat evil with more evil.”

Only once did you have to travel to the lower levels of the afterlife, but you never forgot the nightmare that crawled amongst that relinquished, nefarious world. Atop of the ferruginous redolence of fresh sanguine and sulfur conglomerated with the horrendous, calamitous outcries of castigated souls, laid a devastating atmosphere that did not allow for your to formulate proper conceptualizations. You could practically feel the endless yells for clemency as crawled their way in your veins and reverberated inside your skull, digging profoundly into your very essence, hopelessly imploring for your to save them from that self-perpetuating pandemonium.

Jungkook shrugged, “Yeah, not the wisest punishment mechanism, but who am I to judge? I just follow orders,” and, after that, he hesitated. There was a primordial impulse within him that begged for the angel to terminate the overwhelming space that expanded in between your bodies, to simply touch the softness of your skin, to dive into your kiss forevermore — and that was precisely what he chose to do, as he kindly placed his palm against your cheek, moving to place another gentle, timid peck on your mouth, “Most orders,” he lightheartedly added. He could swear by the name of his Father that, if Heaven truly was blurred, you were the only thing in focus.

Overwhelmed by his sudden wave of tenderness, you chuckled as the other angel moved closer to place another small kiss on your lips, “No, don’t even start, Jungkook,” you told him, even if parts of your essence whimpered and cried for your to do otherwise. You, too, wished to spend forever by his side, but some things were merely impossible to achieve. “You have work to do, and so do I.”

The man groaned, but did not move away from your welcoming aura, “Fine, fine,” Jungkook accepted his fate, hugging the cantaloupe book against his chest. For a moment, he almost looked human — which both enthralled and terrified you, “In the name of Heaven, you act as if you won’t miss me.” he complained.

That, you thought, was something you could never agree with. Every time you spoke to your lover, there was an undistinguished feeling that awoke in the cage within your chest: the perturbation that accompanied your heartbeats, the profound enchantment that was cultivated in the melody of his smooth voice. You felt as if you were drowning in Jungkook every time you two found the warmth of the other’s embrace; as the phantasm of your memories morphed into the elegant waltz of the substantial world. His touch was no longer a reverie, but the star that illuminated your eternal soul, “I will, you know I will,” you confessed promptly, hoping that your emotion was perceptible past your every syllable. “You’re back everyday, nevertheless.”

“Careful there, don’t take me for granted,” he warned, but his tone did not carry any true weight. Back then, the possibility of your wonderland being torn to shreds almost seemed preposterous to conceive — the two of you were oh, so invencible; the mental picture of the lower archives was nothing more than a forgotten joke, an over-exaggeration, “Wipe that pout out your pretty face, come here.” cutting his own thoughts short, he pulled you closer.

However, the previous savouriness of honey that pulsated in between your lips could no longer be found. As the breviloquent moment of your departure kiss echoed throughout the infinity of your love-filled perceptions, the two of you had broken your oath, the final chain that held you from decaying into the temptation of devotion. No words had been spoken, no oscillating, lip-quivering confessions were left to be heard — the angels had fallen in love then, had taken a bite of the prohibited fruit and overlooked the perfection of Heaven to dive into the grace of one another.

When the two of you separated your mouths by a few centimeters, there was a second in which your eyes met, and the wordless certainty was mutually understood: both were staring straight at the barrel of a gun, but were still blind to what could pursue their impulsive — humane — acts. Was the pleasure of infatuation worth the impending doom of its flaws? Back then, your answer would be a doubtless “yes”. 

Now, things were different.

More than that, Jungkook vouched he could envision the most prosperous, most magnificent version of himself reflecting in every minor curvature of your smile. It was as if his essence was perishing and being brought to life by the mere meeting of your interlaced spirits, the constant lessons he learned just by standing by your side. He would like to convince himself that the sentiment that effloresced within himself was nothing more than a virginal fondness, but he was certain that it was, in fact, an ephemeral adventure, “Have a good day of work, love,” he spoke before he could stop himself, forcing his feeble body to take a step backwards.

Then, you adored the name he referred to you, “You too, Jungkook,” you slimed, shoulders falling underneath the touch of such graceful word — love: such a paradoxical emotion; such reasonless guardian, “Until tomorrow.” you spoke.

Following a deep exhale, the angel responded with a dainty, “Until tomorrow.”

Nevertheless, once, tomorrow never truly came.

⤅ Now.

Consequences eventually arrived. Shortly after your minor argument, Jungkook disappeared from the realms of Heaven.

Primordially, you chose to find reasonable excuses for his absence. Centuries past, the angel had taken a few weeks off to work on undisclosed subjects for his superiors, and ended up being simple, futile rendezvous that only served to germinate anxiety within your apprehensive rationalizations. Drifting past the abstract frenzy of your overly-suspicious thinking, you would be able to see the silver lighting of reason that would convince you of just that: Jungkook might have simply gotten a different task, and that solely.

He was okay. He had to be.

Still, you missed him like nothing else in the world, could not bring your own ponderations to move away from the ghost of his presence. You missed those love-permeated caresses in the thick of floating books and amaranthine shelves; the pathless conversations you two held as you explored the most various sections of that infinite Library. You missed the melody of Jungkook’s euphonic laugh as it danced meters underneath the beautiful paintings of forgotten cherubins; heart ached for the touch of his infatuated kisses. You longed for the bliss of your forged ignorance before you ever noticed your feelings for the other angel; yearned the epiphany of realization.

Unquestionably, you missed those days — moreover, you held firmly to the remembrance of that unexplored and unstained sentiment of a deep, pristine love. Now, all you had were shattered fragments of naive optimism and the unspoken, constant prayer for a miracle you were not able to see. With your emotions being crushed beneath the weight of his departure, you still forced your conceptualizations to funnel towards the possibility of Jungkook’s return: for every rain was followed by the resplendence of sunshine, no storm could last forever.

Though, deep down, you were aware that those forged certainties were nothing more than futile explanations for a reality you would never allow yourself to face. More often than you would ever accept to admit, you would find yourself murmuring silent prayers of mercy, attempting to find some sort of force to go through the following days. Opening and closing, the entrance mocked your continuously, filling your with ephemeral hope just to tear it all down — those arrogant, swan-like figures walking in your direction; their noses high and expectations low.

No: an entire world of soul-crushing quiescence was all that you were allowed to obtain. Without Jungkook there to keep you company, each detail of that once magnificent landscape had metamorphosed into a sepulcral universe, a deep crimson wound that pulsated constantly, reminding you of the pain you ever so faithlessly attempted to overlook. Once so warm, the lights that dripped over you were now soulless and anemic; the dust particles that appeared to be buoyant ballerinas were nothing more than irritating insects that surrounded you. You felt so small and insignificant; felt like a pathetic mortal.

Then again, you might have acted like one.

Through it all, you were humbly glad that your position came with the presence of an Earth calendar, otherwise there would be no way to measure the days that ran by while Jungkook was gone. Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by fate, but precisely four Earth months had passed when you received the first news about your loved angel.

“Could you find me this mortal’s book?”

At the very instant that unknown timbre ruptured the disharmony of your solitary ponderations, you were aware that the stranger before you was nowhere near the man you ever so eagerly awaited. From your peripheral vision, you could perceive the darkness of his silhouette, a posture that was far too rigid to belong to the lower levels of Heaven — he was a wound in that immaculate space, an unbelonging soul amongst the silence of solitude. His presence there was incongruous.

Reluctantly, you flickered your attentive gaze upwards, forgetting the open pages above the counter. you could not properly elucidate the manner your contemplations rapidly evanesced, flying away from you as the exquisiteness of that stranger was gradually absorbed within your unfocused mind. Unlike most guests that would come to the Library, the newcomer was dressed in an all-black suit, a raven-like being amidst an ocean of ivory walls and diaphanous ceilings. The world around him was as bright as a pallid constellation, but he sucked it all inside his own darkness, casting around his figure the penumbra of a black hole.

Dark clothes were only used by two sectors of the afterlife: demons, and the ones who dealt with them. Taking into account that no diabolical creature had permission to cross the gates of Paradise, you guessed he was the latter. Not that such deduction brought your any sense of comfort.

Clearing your throat, you woke yourself from that momentary reverie, nodding as his question returned to you, “Oh, of course,” you managed to speak out, watching as the man placed a piece of paper over the marble, then gradually slided it towards your side — his knuckles were reddened, morphing into a hue between the violaceous and the rufescent, and the image sent shivers down your spine. “Let’s see what we have here.”

In the breviloquent moment that followed his action, you were cognizant of how his sculptural delineations entered in resonance with the translucent phantasms of your shapeless recallings ― the creature before your was, in the oddest of ways, familiar. Not in regards to appearance, but in the way his aura appeared to suck you in, an abysmal fall that you could not help but feel thrilled to experience. His eyes — vortexes of cimmerian — were deep and attentive, dripping the mesmerizing knowledge he had complied through all the years of his immortal life, profound caliginous irises shining dimly with the colorless luminescence of the ambient. Strands of onyx-colored hair fell over his arched eyebrows, contouring his perfectly outlined face as a tiny smile sprouted on his full lips. Every detail about him seemed absolutely ethereal, serpentine — threateningly alluring.

However, as your eyes read the information he had given you, his momentaneous spell was broken, “Limbo?” your gaze flickered upwards.

The stranger hummed, not losing eye contact with you for a single instant — those angels always did that, constantly thought the assertion of dominance was a relevant part when visiting the lower levels of Paradise, “Yes, Heaven is making a cleanse,” he told you, repeating the vague words you had encountered time and time again. There were secrets that hid in the dark strands of his perfectly placed hair, rufescent poison that dripped in between his full, perfect lips. For a celestial creature, there was far too much obscurity surrounding him to leave your at ease. And, as he spoke again, it was like you could hear Jungkook’s ghost echoing inside every word that departed from his mouth, “Do you have everything you need?” he inquired, almost impatiently so.

Once anew, you cleared your throat, posture growing rigid, “Yes, yes, just… just a second,” you stuttered, closing your eyes and rapidly diving into the hazy edges of your non-material search. The process took place in a couple of seconds on that occasion, for that special copy was recently added to the collection, making it extremely easy to discover, “It’s... coming up.” you told him, still unsure about his crepuscular presence.

The man, however, appeared to grow impressed at the velocity of your acts. Instead of anxiety, he saw only proficiency and ability, “That was quick, you must work here for some time.” he complimented frankly.

Perhaps it was just your impression, but you did not take such comment as a positive opinion, but more as a pat on the back for doing the minimum — you were growing tired of superior angels looking down upon creatures like you, acting as if doing their job correctly was already worth of astonished praise, “Ever since the beginning,” you forced yourself to remain cordial, which was not too hard to do. Mentions like those were bothersome at most, but did not awaken any sort of negative feeling within you. “Though, even after all this time, I believe I haven’t seen you around. You are...?”

“Yoongi. I’ve been replaced for the cleanse,” the man responded promptly. He, too, appeared to grow more comfortable — gradually, of course, but was a welcomed change of atmosphere, “I’m usually on trials, not taking paperwork around.” he elucidated.

“That explains your attire, I suppose.” you pointed out.

He hummed in agreement, “Not my favorite either, but it's what I get for working with demons.”

Not precisely a surprise, but a pleasant reassuring of what you had suspected aforetime. Mayhaps his odd attitude was nothing more than his persona being slightly rusty to work with other benevolent angels, instead accustomed to the filthy creatures that inhabited the underground realms, “Hell trials, then.” you concluded.

“They are a thousand times more interesting than anything we could see up here,” Yoongi said smoothly, as if he had memorized that sentence from justifying his job so many times. As someone who encountered the most various levels of heavenly workers on a daily basis, you did not hold any sort of prejudice against his position, but mere curiosity. “there is more adrenaline then simply reading a list of good deeds and sending souls into paradise, believe me. Most of my friends say it’s just my humanity coming out to experience some sort of justice, but I don’t see it like that. Someone has to do the job, I don’t see an issue if I just happen to enjoy its outcome.”

You could not help but chuckle at that, finding it at the very least odd that such pure creature would find interest in the damnation of mortal souls. Some angels had sadistic roots, as ironic as that could be, but you did not recall experiencing such open confession before, “I believe you, don’t worry. Up here at the Library, there are some files about those trials in a different section, and I've read a few,” you told him, at last seeing the opening you had been expected to verbalize your worries. “Usually it’s Jungkook who comes around, though. To get the books.”

At that, his semblance succumbed into the shadows of his skeptical doubt, “Jungkook?” Yoongi repeated with a certain speck of reluctance.

One star of hope scintillated inside your gaze, “You know him?” you could not help but question, taken aback by the possibility of receiving any sort of news from his part. So much, in fact, that you could not precisely measure the excitement that was casted over your features, corrupting your collected demeanor with the sentiments you could never be permitted to present.

Yoongi, however, did not appear to grow cognizant of your change in demeanor, for his full lips — rose-shaped and rose-colored — suddenly fell into a curvature of vacillation. Regardless of his sudden lack of focus, you should not grow too comfortable around him, for someone who worked with demons was surely observant of the most slight deviations of conduct, “I… not personally,” he paused, eyes falling to the marble counter for an instant. You could not tell if the hesitant action was genuine, which preoccupied you to the very core. “I only know his name, and, after everything that happened…”

You waited for an instant to see if his speech would resume, but no other information came to further characterize the events he was so vaguely referring to, “Everything that happened?” you echoed, impulsing his phrases to continue flooding the room.

His chest rose and fell with the dramatic breath that overtook him — his mannerisms were oddly mortal-like, if you had to say so. Usually, those acts were common within the angels of lower condecoration, not the superior ones, “You don’t know?” Yoongi calmly questioned. Was it pity that you observed beyond his ambiguous gaze, or were you merely projecting the reflection of your own inner worries onto a stranger?

No paranoia in Heaven was fruitless. Alarms had set off within your mind as you swallowed dry, growing uncomfortable at the hesitation that fell in the spacious hollowness between the two celestial creatures. His aura was somewhat suffocating to endure, dense and consolidated as if you were faithlessly attempting to breathe underwater. The errors of his presence was as obvious as a torn-out painting, the roots of fear pulsating inside your veins in disconex bargains for the unknown angel to simply leave, “No, I don’t think I do,” you cleared your throat. “I can’t really leave this place, you know?”

One more time, Yoongi took a profound inhale, hand moving to scratch the back of his neck. Those were not humane mannerisms, but spurious ones: he was trying to gift you with a sense of compassion and empathy, something that angels did not show for one another. He was ridiculing you, “May our Father help me. I hate telling the bad news,” the man whined, but his gaze no longer found your own.

Liar — he adored it. After all, what could motivate a pure angel to decay into infernal trials if not the false notion of justice, what could motivate him to be relocated to his position if not the perfect choice for his mission? In the name of everything that was sacred, every piece of that puzzle begun to form a shuddersome picture within your conceptualizations; presuppositions conglomerating into one furious torment of exasperating realities. Yoongi was there as the personification of a forewarning, the lightning that indicated the upcoming thunder.

Atmosphere growing thicker with apprehension, you could only request for him to continue with a weak, “Please do. I want to know.” which was, too, made of unrealistic sentiments — or, better yet, the absence of such. Yoongi showed you false remorse; you showed him apathy. The two of you were just playing parts of a much more evil, unsympathetic spectacle.

And, with his succeeding words, the curtain fell.

“Jungkook was casted down a few weeks ago. Earth.”

Silence. With a second that lasted between a heartbeat and the prolonged hours of a sunrise, that moment was only filled with pure, unstained silence. Shock came and went in waves, sending your mind to work on its full force then succumb into numbness, fingers feeling both cold and warm when placed against the counter — mayhaps for support, mayhaps for a touch of reality, “He was w-what?” you struggled to get out. Your words did not appear to be real.

Yoongi answered with a breathless lament, “Yes, I know, I had the very same reaction. Angels being casted down isn’t something you see every century,” the stranger suspired, but you could not help but feel as if his tone echoed from meters above, or perhaps from under the seven seas. The universe seemed to be deadened and obfuscous; cold-blooded and unjust, “If I’m not mistaken, it was something about social misconduct, inappropriate relations. I don’t know the details, sorry.” he explained further.

Panic. That was a sentiment you knew of, but never truly experienced ― there was no proper reason to. Using the information you had gathered throughout your everlasting days, you could tell that it was a terrible sensation that grew from the bottom of one’s breathless chest to the edge of their tremulous fingers, turning their entire figure in a paroxysm of numbness as it did so. Such trepidation was claustrophobic, suffocating; induced for levelheaded thoughts evanescence into nothingness as an overwhelmed, exhausted heart ever so faithlessly attempted to follow the arrhythmia of such terrible situation. That sensation should feel like gelid fire — both burning one’s spirit and congealing its victims to the bone.

Per contra, now your position was a drastically different. Now, your trembling lips found it difficult to formulate proper sentences, your mind working on its maximum speed to control your heartbroken tone, “Do you know if he is… if he is okay?” you managed to vocalize, wishing that the newcomer could not find any traces of your abysmal dismay waltzing within your voice.

Coruscations of doubt momentaneously shone in the background of Yoongi’s gaze, but he managed to keep his feeble ponderations to himself as he gifted your with an answer, “You know what they say, no human is ever okay,” what was supposed to become a lighthearted joke rapidly morphed into a bottomless dread within the cage of your trapped spirit. Never once had the Library felt so gargantuan, so permeated with malevolence — as if you could feel every centimeter of its golden marble perishing into nothingness, decaying into the horror that took over your soul.

An apathetic nod of comprehension was all that the dark angel received in return. Vaguely, you could feel the presence of a book appearing at the bottoms of your consciousness, the object that ever so gracefully danced in the same air that now intoxicated you. You felt nothing but disgust and consternation.

The two lovers had been blissfully ignorant in a sea of poisonous vipers, had reenacted the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and now they were facing the consequences for their treacherous acts. But of course, there was no excuse: the celestial creatures knew that it was against every Heavenly commandment to enter those types of relationships — if a mere friendship was seen as dangerous, a romantic rendezvous would be seen as a straight up offense against everything correct that ordered the hierarchy of paradise. The two of you had been fools to believe they were invincible.

May the Heavens have mercy on me, you thought.

Amongst the vexation of your mental distress and a muffled, “I think that’s my book,” that came from the man’s part, you inquired if his presence was there to guide your towards your own, personal punishment.

But no: you had already grasped the penalty being inflicted upon you, had understood that Jungkook was the one who received the blissful ignorance of an eternal circle of human lifes. What you would get was much, much worse than any earthly or hellish punishment. You should have known better.

The anguish that lacerated your spirit was easily camouflaged as you swiftly turned around, hand reaching out to grasp that mortal’s story, “Yes, yes it is,” you mumbled, almost to yourself. As you turned back to the angel, an aspect of his presented personality had suffered a transmutation, for you could no longer discover any fragments of fake empathy you envisioned just a few seconds aforetime. Just as your mask of impassiveness was growing weaker underneath the ponderation of your misery, his semblance of pity was cracking under his villainous inclinations. “There you go, Yoongi. Please tell your superiors to—”

“—Return it quickly. I know the story,” the tenebrous angel interrupted your speech with endless delicacy, causing for your upcoming words to perish in the shallow space within your arid lips. Even though you could feel the sourness in Yoongi’s tone taking over the preoccupied edges of your nebulous mind, he still managed to keep his voice under absolute control ― something that both amazed and terrified you to the very core. “They have been hearing you, don’t worry about it. The process itself is long, but we are doing it the best we can to keep everything organized.”

They have been hearing you. Of course they have.

In the moment your eyes fall to accompany the way his hands reached for the book, a term effloresced in your mind: stained angels. That was how the afterlife referred to the cherubic creatures that adopted malevolent, demonic-like temperaments to work in the lower levels of Inferno; they, too, succumbing into mortal degenerations — from luxury to pride; from violence to taking pleasure in suffering. Some claimed it was a necessary step to judge the sins of humans, others were certain it was a “controlled corruption of grace” which only served to tear their race apart. Now looking at Yoongi, you understood what all those stereotypical characteristics meant: he was bathing in your distress, for he felt it with perfect saturation inside his own essence.

Consequently, the recognizement of his sadistic tendencies served to mask your ache with a veil of fury, “Sure... I understand,” your voice came out steady, your gaze did not falter away from his bottomless one. Worst than him were the ones who coordinated his visit, who judged appropriate to give your the news by such putrid vector, “Yoongi, just one more thing,” you requested.

Elevating one of his eyebrows, he paused. “Yes?”

A quivery, dubious exhale departed from your mouth as you ran over each and every letter on your subsequent words, unsure of the consequences they would bring, “This… cleanse,” you then vacillated, swallowing your hesitation dry so you could hold his gaze a bit longer. An indiscernible sensation flickered in his stygian eyes, and you felt as vulnerable as ever. Yet, oddly frustrated. “is it only happening in the levels of Hell, and Limbo?”

Yoongi was encompassed by a crepuscular, impenetrable aura as the inquiry found his ears. Continuously, you wondered if the lines of concentration that appeared in his forehead indicated that the man was aware of your prohibited adventures with the now fallen angel; if the hints of threat that danced at the delineations of his roseate lips meant something other than his lack of patience — the wicked pleasure that accompanied celestial justice, perchance, “Oh no, we are going extremely deep into it,” lethargically, the angel leaned his head to the side, studying you ― you had always despised how his kind did that, how his dark orbits held such infinite, overtaking wisdom. No matter your age, what mattered at that instant was his experience, the life he lived beyond the fortress of your duty, beyond the paradisiacal alabastrine walls of that stuffed Library. “Heaven is being thoroughly… purified.”

Yes. Of course it was.

Your roseate tongue moved in between your lips to lick the dryness away from them, every piece of your trembling spirit battling unseen wars to keep your tone steady. There was no protocol to follow, no rules to reinforce ― your voice got caught in the endless void of melancholy that expanded within your throat, the claws of fear preventing those hollow words from finding their way out, “That’s… that is very wonderful. Benevolent.” you formulated carefully.

Yoongi hummed in agreement, eyes shining with something you could not elucidate, “It is,” he spoke, taking the book up to his chest ― its adumbral scarlet cover resembled blood when placed against his ebony suit, an image that only served to set your panic aflame. Jungkook could bleed now, he could feel in the flesh the torturous paths of mankind, “We have rules for a reason, don’t we?” he smirked, breaking your worries at the spot.

“Jungkook, be careful. We have rules for a reason.”

You looked back up. Never once in your life had you used so much of your concentration to keep your semblance devoid of any sort of emotion, “Certainly,” you spoke out, glad enough that your tone did not shake with the mere connotation of that word. Innerly, a mixture of anger and defeat cursed the Heavens that surrounded you for stabbing your heart, then claiming you had no chance to bleed without pointing at your own guilt — you were alone against the system you once had taken shelter under, utterly relinquished of assistance.

You had been so, so ignorant.

Yoongi’s lips curled upwards in a geranium-colored smile. You could vouch that the delight that dripped from his gaze was perfectly induced to mock your pain even further, to show that your anguish was nothing more than welcomed, enticed by a system that was fueled by reprehension, “You’re a very trusted worker, so I wouldn’t worry too much about what we do. Keep doing your job well and you won’t be caught in the radar,” he told your with diaphaneity, amusement bathing every word that departed from his throat. He was the first one to break eye contact, but he had already found his victory moments before, “Have a good day, YN.” he wished you.

Had you ever gifted the man with your name? You could not recall, “You too, Yoongi,” you responded, automatically so.

In a matter of two deep inhales and a few steps against the marble ground — which deliberately got farther and farther away —, you recognized yourself unaccompanied in Heaven’s Library once again. With Yoongi, departed along the aura of nefarious thoughts, but the scars he had left would never leave you alone.

It was there, you could feel it now.

Barely noticing your actions, you turned around and faced the endless halls of mountainous shelves and the currents of waltzing books that moved in brownian motion. Pathless, your eager eyes darted around the room, which appeared to be closing off around you, morphing into a tunnel of confusion as your weak and tremulous legs gradually took steps deep into that alabastrine universe. The pastel figures painted on the ceiling appeared to laugh at you with all their endless grace, watching as you moved like a zombie through those corridors, searching for a lover that could never be touched again.

Your tranquil steps morphed into a rushed pace, and then you were running. Everything seemed too torpid, too claustrophobic — you did not know where you were heading, but you were aware something was calling you to run past those shelves, to take corner after corner in the search for an intangible persona. In some way, you expected everything was nothing but a malevolent joke — perhaps a minor warning for your to change your conduct — and that maybe, with a simple blink of an eye, or even the turning of a corner, you would discover your angel, with all his characteristic elegance, smiling tenderly at you. Arms and heart open to take you in.  

However, you were aware that you would never find Jungkook again. Not in flesh, at least.

The progression of your terror-stricken heartbeat seemed to pulsate through every piece of your insubstantial body, verbalizing prayers inside your ears and exploding in storms of sorrow in your chest; the dizziness of exhaustion slowly finding its way around the ephemeral adrenaline rush. In all its magnificent expansion, the heavenly Library was asphyxiating. Floating books and golden shelves surrounded you from every angle, reticent gods that ever so mercilessly cornered your running figure in a maelstrom of infinite pathways covered in dust and despondency.

Shaky laments reverberated in the thick of the ivory walls, decaying into fragmented requests for clemency as you found your way deeper into its realms. The universe metamorphosed into blur as you grew nearer to your unforeseen destination, guided by the unspoken calls of your pain. If asked, you would not be certain about how long you were there, stumbling towards something you did not know existed; being closely watched by the bronze statues that you despised with so much force. Every step was a struggle, every new shelf presented you with more corners to turn. It was a labyrinth with no ending. A soul with no salvation.  

Until, at last, you found it.

For a instant that lasted eons, your legs were turned into gelid stone by the claws of hesitation and denial. Now and then, in an ephemeral speck of understanding, you finally grasped what that unnamed human meant when they said that the hardest goodbye was the one they never got; you finally grew to feel the heart-tearing distress that motivated humankind to create masterpieces about a lost companion; to poetize about the departure of the soul.

You understood the pain of love in its rawest, most primordial ways.

You seeked for balance by placing your back against the shelves; craving for something capable of pinning your down to reality as your consciousness slowly drifted away from your grip, cognizance running in between your fingers like thin sand. In a volcanic explosion of melancholy, you cried out, hands mindlessly reaching for him, pressing him against your chest. Quivering fingertips and cheeks wet by the tears you were not aware you had been crying, your breath was cut short by a wave of anguish and melancholy you had never before experienced, thorns upon thorns that pierced your skin and tore your essence apart.

After what appeared to be hours wondering an endless world, you found his shelf, found his number; both numbers far too long to be easily pronounced. Before your eyes, laid the book that caused for your existence to shatter into pieces, those three simple words that had catalyzed a new, human story to take shape.

Jeon Jungkook. Earth.

[bakechochin]

The Book Ramblings of January 2019

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related this year. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis.

Wise Blood - Flannery O’Connor I haven’t read much American literature, but far be it from me to state that the sole reason for this is my position as a staunch Englishman. In truth, I genuinely just don’t have much of an interest for the great American texts; the enforced reading of such literature during GCSEs and A-Level taught me that even the American texts with the best prose were not on the most interesting of subject matters, concerned with social progress or supposedly deserving of merit because of relevant historical context, as opposed to actually just being, well, enjoyable. Yes, I am obviously over-simplifying to a ludicrous extent, but these were the thoughts that I had way back in the halcyon days of school, and subsequently these are the thoughts that I’ve carried with me since, simply because I haven’t been arsed to actively try to challenge them. However, my infatuation with the grotesque was bound to bring me to the realms of American literature at some point, and so asking my American friend to procure me a copy of this book with a decent cover, I started on this Southern Gothic classic. I love the idea of transposing the gothic genre to a setting different than one would conjure up from the word ‘gothic’, and the fictional deep South town of Taulkinham does a bloody good job at capturing what I want; there’s madness and isolation and a sense of oddity in the air, and the town is populated by a gallery of fantastic and memorable grotesques. The fantastic and evocative prose, almost comical at points, belies how fucking odd the story’s events are, and breathes life into this setting in a similar way to Hammett’s Red Harvest; this is perhaps one of my favourite techniques in literature, simply because I’ve never thought of envisioning America in this fantastical way. The story is rather fragmented, with many of its major scenes basically being some of O’Connor’s short stories stitched together (and the Frankensteined nature of the story does result in a few chapters having noticeably different writing styles to the rest, or some characters’ decisions that would develop into these slotted-in short stories seeming odd and poorly explained). With this awareness, I remain unconvinced with critics’ dogmatic statements along the lines of ‘O’Connor evokes an individual voice/style, unburdened by the rules or conventions of story writing’; if she had that in mind, as a deliberate means of creating a fragmentary narrative in the name of the genre or in reflection of the characters or what have you, she came up with that shit after she started writing. It is a view that I could subscribe to, on account of the fact that this is not a stereotypical narrative. Characters don’t do much or evolve much, with the decisions made by the characters seemingly motivated more by manic episodes than actual rational thought; Hazel, for instance, is depicted as basically coming up with the teachings and philosophies of his Church without Christ as he goes along, repeating his new discoveries to himself and to anyone who will listen as soon as he formulates them, and it is this improvisational drifting (motivated by his own warped thinking) that defines his story’s progression. What separates gothic stories set in recognisably recent times to gothic stories set in the distant histories of castles and deep dark woods, is the changed understanding of madness, and I’ve talked about this a lot in my rambles on Le Fanu but I’ll delve into this book’s treatment of it. In the words of Bakhtin, ‘in Romantic grotesque, … madness acquires a somber, tragic aspect of individual isolation’, but before the advancement of scientific knowledge as to what actually constituted ‘madness’, it often took the form of histrionics and melodrama. This is all fine and dandy when you’re writing a story about tormented murderers hearing hearts beating under the floorboards, or masked men with skeletal faces scuttling around opera houses, but when you’ve got to transpose this madness to a recent-ish society, with said madness being expressed or brought out via recognisable themes such as religion, you’ve got to tone it down a bit. As such, Hazel and Enoch are manic, not mad, and this is excellently conveyed through their individual speech styles and the ways that other characters interact or interpret the two; my favourite example of this is Enoch running down his day’s activities to himself as a strict and sacrosanct ritual of undeniable importance, swiftly followed by the reveal of the actions’ trivial nature (and his co-workers negative opinions of him as a result). WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL YES

The Crock of Gold - James Stephens Trying to ascertain the seriousness of this text boggles my brain. Let it first be said that I rather like this book, despite the shoddy John Murray publication that I have it in; I was prompted to purchase it on account of its place in the great ‘Irish comic tradition’, basically expecting something along the lines of The Unfortunate Fursey, but I instead was greeted with a much more thoughtful and interesting read that I advise everyone to pick up at some point, with the caveat that you have to be in a very specific mindset to read it. It’s a funny story, but it is quietly funny; the humour comes from little quirks in the writing, in the speech and actions of its characters, in the ultimate charm of the story. The dialogue is deliberately circumlocutive and often rather meaningless, pondering incessantly on philosophical matters big and small, and ofttimes the narrative itself reflects these rambling trains of thought, most notably a long aimless pilgrimage wherein the Philosopher stumbles across snippets of other peoples’ lives, experiencing quibbles and learning folk wisdom and ruminating on the head and heart. The book’s world is charming, all made up of storybook character archetypes and Irish folklore (described matter-of-factly and easily accepted as truth); ofttimes, the information that we are given is ultimately unimportant and has no bearing on the overall story, and this is a statement that can, truthfully, be applied to much of the text, but it is all the same delicately written and rather pleasant. The book does perhaps toe the line on this point with its rambling philosophical paragraphs from the Gods, with its grand allegories and metaphysical nonsense getting a tad wanky and mind-numbing, but it’s not the most egregious thing in the world. In any case, the philosophising of the Philosopher is entertaining enough to make up for the rather more dense philosophising of the Gods, being much more like the aforementioned circumlocution, going off on unrelating tangents and eventually bringing the rambling back around to the initial point that catalysed said rambling. I bring this up not only as a point of comparison, but because it ties in nicely with the commonly-utilised storytelling method of basically going off on a tangent, following one person off on their quest before jumping back to where the narrative left off to see how things are doing then. This can perhaps be attributed to this book’s lack of urgency or real danger, and thus lack of a need for hastiness and rapid jumping from one person’s story to another. This extends even to the final resolution of the humans’ storyline, which basically amounts to one sentence saying that what they set out to do was done and dusted; there isn’t even a scene to show everyone happy again, because it is simply implied that things will go back to the jolly equilibrium. Hell, when the book incorporates wistful or thoughtful or even flat-out sad tales, no resolution is offered for them. The story just goes on, and we are presumably meant to just assume that all will end up alright in the end, or at the very least, all will just end, and then it’s not worth worrying about any more. Reading what I thought would just be another fucking The Unfortunate Fursey type of fantasy book has really evoked some unexpected feelings in me. So that’s nice. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: YES, IF YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT MOOD

Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift I’ll level, I went into this book expecting a low-brow adventure story about little dudes and fucking massive units. It is, in fact, a tad more complex than this. This book is a lot of things; it can be read as a storybook adventure novel, but it is also a satirical piece, both of Swift’s society in general and of the travel writings form, and it is this satire that I am not too fond of. But we’ll get to that. The main technique utilised in this novel (yeah I’m just going to call it a novel for simplicity's sake) is optical conceit, and the idea of viewing familiar things from different perspectives or in different ways, presenting them in a new light as ridiculous or laughable and perhaps to make us reevaluate the workings of society so farcically presented. This technique is noticeable mainly in the first and second travels, coincidentally the two travels that are most widely known, and this optical conceit is a concept that I like a lot more in theory than in practise. The first travel takes us to Lilliput, the island of the small blokes, and here the small size of the people links in with their small-mindedness and melodramatic quibbling over minor matters, but in the second travel to Brobdingnag, land of the big dudes, the size of the folk is seemingly unrelated from the satire. With the possible exception of the pompous Prince, none of the natives have any sort of comical largesse or egotism that might have related to the satire. And then when I had this in my mind, I began scrabbling around to try and find some other snippets of how the native people tie in with the satire, to little to no avail. The Lilliputians put great faith in long and formal written legislations and diatribes (related in full in Gulliver’s account), suggestive of shrewd ink-nosed clerks hiding behind their papers, and much of the Brobdingnagian report is one long rambling philosophical back-and-forth between Gulliver and the Prince, suggesting these large people have large mouths and loud opinions, but the satire, in my opinion, is a) tenuous and b) not what I’d consider engaging reading. And that’s not even considering the specific basis of the satire: contemporary politics! This book is striking an interesting balance between being entertaining in its own right, and ostensibly being entertaining because of its significance as satire, that every character or event in the story is comically reflecting some real-life event in English politics. To this, I have to compare it to Calvino’s story Invisible Cities, and it’s varying depictions of Venice through different disguises; it doesn’t matter how you tart up your source material, or how colourful your new layer of paint is, because if I’m not interested in the original source material then I probably won’t give too much of a toss about how it is newly presented. And contemporary English politics really could not appeal to me less, even if Swift does dress them up as Lilliputian acrobatic displays or thinly veiled warring kingdom allegories. That’s not to say that there is nothing funny to be found in this text; the details in the stories that are not intended to serve any satirical purpose, and instead merely to emphasise the differences between worlds, are always great fun. My favourites are the Lilliputian’s alien descriptions of the gigantic contents of Gulliver’s pockets, and two great instances of humungous monstrosities in Brobdingnag, namely the huge lice on the giant beggars and the scene of a Brobdingnagian mother breastfeeding; the sheer revulsion that Gulliver has to this spectacle is fucking hysterical. The travel to Laputa has got a good grasp on linking the fun content with the satirical aspect (not only is the flying island a great pisstake of science-minded learned folk, but is also like something out of a fucking Lem story), but the overall story is generally rather boring and without much in the way of obstacle or threat. The Land of the Houyhnhnms doesn’t really have the optical conceit, being more of an abstract switcharoo of horses and people, with not much relationship between the two races and a lot of obvious satire about man’s bestial nature. There are occasions of overt physical comedy, again tied in with these changes in size; Gulliver is in one story dousing great fires with his almighty piss stream, and in another being dressed up like a doll or dunked in a bowl of cream by a mendacious dwarf (or rather, a dwarf by Brobdingnagian standards). I am fully in accord with the former sort of comedy, not only because such imagery of dousing fires with a slash puts me in mind of Gargantua and Pantagruel, but because it reflects this book’s fun indulgence in crude toilet humour. Crude toilet humour is fun to begin with, but Swift uses scatalogical humour to demean the noble form of travel writings, taking a moment from seriously discussing the learned folk and their cultures and customs to describe his shitting habits. The latter sort of comedy, however, that serves to emasculate Gulliver by having him toyed with by giant folk or entrapped by tiny folk, only highlights to me the lack of character that Gulliver has, beyond being our narrator. I’m sure that critics will argue for his supposed egotism or pomposity or whatnot, but such details in the text are thin on the ground, and if Gulliver is not characterised as being a dick, why should the reader find it entertaining or cathartic when he gets his shit handed to him? These problems perhaps originate with Swift’s worries of the character of Gulliver being a reflection of himself; he is willing to put the character through light slapstick shenanigans, but he hasn’t got the balls to go too far lest it tarnish his own reputation. Apparently in one early publication of this text, Gulliver partakes in the custom of eating shit with the ape people, but oh no no, Swift couldn’t possibly have something that funny in the story in case anyone thought that he himself might truly be a coprophagous ninny! There is a strange bequeathment of snooty scholarly worth unto this book, considering that it does have talking horses and ape men who shit everywhere, as illustrated by the study done around this book (handily referenced in the editor’s annotations). Let me briefly give some examples. This book uses a lot of nonsense ‘little language’ for its place names and whatnot, and as you can tell by the fact that I’ve taken every opportunity to use the word ‘Brobdingnagian’ in this ramble, I’m rather fond of it all. However, amidst all the daft place names (all bizarre anagrams of existing places), the editor makes sure to highlight some as being ‘obvious, and therefore uncharacteristic’, as though there is a scholarly level of obfuscation or stupidity to adhere to in order to be respectable. This sense of superiority continues to the demeaning of one particularly transparent and obvious satirical paragraph, which is described as being ‘artistically weaker’ than the rest of the text; not that I’m defending the aforementioned insulted paragraph, because it isn’t that good, but the implication that the text deserves artistic merit because of the obfuscation of its satire rubs me up the wrong way a bit. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: PROBABLY NOT

The Nightwatches of Bonaventura - Bonaventura The new introduction to this text, written by the uppity translator Gerald Gillespie, is rather dogmatic in its excessive insistences of all of the things that this text is, or takes inspiration from. As much as I like to portray myself as a learned man and top-quality dude, I’m not so invested in contextualising this book’s composition that I’m willing to engross myself in Napoleonic war history or the works of Kant. What I am interested in, however, is the Romantic grotesque, for whilst Bakhtin’s infatuation with Rabelais’ grotesque completes eclipses any appreciation he might have of any writer who deviates from Rabelais, Bakhtin manages to spare a brief word of praise for this text amidst all the wanking over Rabelais, so I was intrigued enough to get myself a copy. This a book densely populated with great grotesque imagery and content, and as such it is a book that probably warrants re-reading with a certain subject in mind so as to allow for further unpacking, but within the framework of the grotesque, Bakhtin was right to say that this book basically epitomises the Romantic grotesque, because it’s all here in amazing detail. The story is a rambling introspective on dark topics, either prompted by the morbid and corrupt sights of the world around our narrator or plucked from the memories of our narrator’s own dark past. Said narrator, Kruezgang, brilliantly speaks on such subjects with amazing and colourful prose, with literary allusions and warped rumination galore. The other characters in the watches seem more like marionettes or shadow puppets, necessary to tell separate stories or fill a hole where there should be an aspect of Kruezgang’s past, but their purpose as such is fascinating enough and so excellently done that it doesn’t warrant criticism. The world is grim and grotesque, but depicted out as a joke via Kruezgang’s own view of it, described with poetical allegories and bitterly laughing at awful events by portraying them as black comedy farces. This book’s infatuation and idolisation of the mad and the strange and the grim is something fantastic, it really is. Now, having prefaced this ramble with such positivity, I can delve into a truth that looms over this text like a storm cloud; it is so incredibly fucking dense that I could not imagine rereading this book for any reason other than literary analysis. There is so much content, rich bloody content, in this book that it is easy to equate the feeling of numbness in one’s mind with an overload of such fantastic stuff, from the prose to the ideas to the fascinating storytelling, but this process of thought precludes the very important contributing factor to said mind-numbness, which is that the book seemingly just rambles about nothing at all! Am I to assume that such rich prose in the name of maddening circumlocutive (is that a word?) nothingness actually does have a purpose, and my mind just slides over it because it can’t comprehend the information, or perhaps just can’t contain so much information? Am I an uncomprehending fool for glossing over chunks of text, or am I just inadequately prepared to cram so much prose into my bonce at any one time? Such thoughts bounced around in my head as I was reading, and the only conclusion that I could come to was that I would be hard-pressed to recommend this book to anyone, for what if they encountered the same problems, and asked me to elucidate on such matters, when I have no answers to give them? Wouldn’t I look a fool then! But I digress. The introduction snootily says that to break down the narrative’s events chronologically would only ‘contravene the spirit… of the work’, which I believe insofar as a fragmented narrative obviously reflects the fragmented mind of the narrator (real in-depth analysis going on here), but that doesn’t mean that I won’t say that the narrative isn’t all over the shop, generally rather confusing, and interspersed with fragments of other stories of seeming tangential relation to Kruezgang’s storyline, all described with Bonaventura's same grandiose verbosity but often nowhere near as interesting as Kruezgang. Sure, I could have read into the exact (and no doubt important) purpose(s) of these segments, but a) just reading this book and revelling in its dark prose is an enriching enough experience without having to learn all the context clues that contributed to such nonsense being formulated, and b) most of the research writing about this book by Gillespie is just trying to figure out who Bonaventura is, a mystery to which I honestly could not give any semblance of a fuck about. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: NO, UNLESS YOU WANT TO READ IT FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES

Shit I read this month that I couldn’t be arsed to ramble about: Shakespeare and Co. by Stanley Wells (absolutely amazing, incredibly informative, would absolutely recommend if it’s your thing), and City of Sin by Catharine Arnold (generally fun and informative, Arnold’s voice can get annoying at times, overall would recommend just for the chapters about sex in the medieval/early modern period and the chapter on Victorian pornography).

[foreignersgod-rp]

Arcturus stood before the hand-drawn map that had adorned the wall of the study within his family’s estate for nearly three centuries. The aged parchment was impressively massive, despite being rather tattered and rough around the edges, and it never failed to lure the gawking of guests who stood before it with intentions of addressing the Earl of County Nuada.

It had taken ancient Fotian cartographers some years to define the character of their country onto paper. From its infamous, densely packed forest ranges to its many lakes that freckled the land, each trait of the country was lovingly detailed and highlighted with artists’s own  additions, such as renditions of folkloric creatures and quotes from historical rulers and literary masterminds.

A single gloved finger trailed from the County of Nuada, through the neighboring County Neit, and over the Eriu Sea, which hugged Fotia’s borders like a protective mother to shield Fotia’s more frigid and stormy nature from Amestris and its balmy climate. Steadily, Arcturus’s hand followed paths through the Amestrian north, scanning towns along the way with little interest, until finally his gray eyes rested upon the capital of Amestris: Central City.

And then, with a small, tepid sigh, he drove a thin silver pin through the very heart of it.

Today, Earl Arcturus Od Nua had his feet firmly planted on Fotian soil, but by the next morning, he’d be sailing toward their allies to the north. “Allies” wasn’t necessarily a descriptor most common folk here would use for Amestrians. But Arcturus was a diplomatic man, and “allies” sounded more pleasant than the usual “heretical bastards across the sea”. It rolled from the tongue easier as well.

He hovered over the pin before finally turning away from the map, and with it, the nagging soreness in his upper back that had developed from slouching over his paperwork all day seemed to grow, as well as the pulsing of his temple. Normally, one would press themselves to take a break, but after acquiring his position of power (small as it may be, in the grand scheme of things) Arcturus had learned it was far easier to press through the exhaustion. There was much to prepare, and he didn’t want to leave his providence with even the slightest chance of a hiccup in his absence.

The emissary duties were an add-on to his title that he took with honor, but his first and always foremost concern would be the safety of his people. 

“The point of travel is to relax. Explore, learn, and drink lots of local wine. At least pretend to be thrilled for the opportunity,” a familiar voice chimed. Over his shoulder, Arcturus spared a glanced to the figure of a woman draped across his leather armchair like a lazy, sunbathing lap cat. On her tanned and freckled face was an ever-present crooked smirk that she wore as her best accessory. His appointed Knight, Elio, had her nose buried in one of his historical texts she must have snagged from his shelves without his permission. She peeked over the pages of her book and tipped her head to him in some unspoken acknowledgment of his discomfort. 

He hadn’t recalled hearing a servant announce her arrival or letting the woman into his chamber himself, but after nearly two years of adjusting to her particular brand of what he could only describe as “peculiarity”, Arcturus learned to stop wasting brain power on such questions. Rather, he learned to respond with something he was more proficient at: persistence. 

“It’s not a vacation, Elio,” he corrected firmly. “I’m emissary of Fotia and Amestris, and this trip is-“

“An excuse to day-drink.“

“An annual visit and opportunity to strengthen our countries’ bonds.” He became aware of the puffy, dark bags under his eyes, which had become a somewhat permanent feature over the past few years since his inauguration, as he rubbed at them slightly and waved Elio’s cheeky comment off. He stepped past her to his own armchair seated at his desk and eased himself in. “I speak with members of their ranks, usually. Sometimes I’m granted audience with the Fuhrer. But most of my time is spent being peddled around from one politician to another…” Arcturus grunted as he settled into a more comfortable position. “And... drink? I mean, truly, what is the point if you’re not going to get shitfaced with their Generals...?” Elio concluded in more of a mumbling fashion to herself. What at first had been a bit of an off-handed joke had now become a serious issue to ponder apparently. Under her pursed brows, she glanced to him suspiciously. “I feel like you’re intentionally leaving out the best perks about this whole thing, m’lord.”

Arcturus admittedly couldn’t keep himself from chuckling but immediately felt what little cheer he mustered up being downed out by the same worrisome concerns that had been dragging him down all day. Historically, this visit to Amestris was a scheduled annual event. However, a Fotian emissary hadn’t set foot in Amestris since the infamous and equally humiliating demise of Fuhrer Bradley. There hadn’t been so much as a peep between the two lands since. And, quite honestly, the further he stayed from even hearing about outrageously secular things such as Philosopher’s stones and homunculi, the more Arcturus was content. Just the idea of conversation with the Amestrians on such subjects made his skin crawl. Amestris had a tainted reputation now, one not so easily looked over. And now, Arcturus had to awkwardly pretend to not be well-informed of the skeletons stuffed in the Fuhrer’s closet.

But he was bred to be a diplomatic man and was so, through and through. He would endure just fine. But all of that, he could endure with a meek smile. There something else bothered him, even more so.

Sensing the Earl’s rapidly deteriorating mood, Elio withdrew from her book, and with wistful sigh, closed the cover. She slid her way to her full height and tossed the book behind her as she closed the space between the two of them. “Still fretting over that mysterious little letter, hm?” There was no response as Elio found herself a perch on the desk’s corner, along-side the mounds of paperwork and bound notebooks spread across the tabletop. Arcturus was too occupied sluggishly rubbing his temples to reply promptly, as if to massage the thoughts into order first.

“The plea seems… too believable.”

Elio grumbled. “’Believable’, you say, and supposedly credible enough to have you pacing a rut straight into the floor- Shepherd help the cleaning servants who’ll be tasked to get the scuffs out of the floorboards tomorrow - Yet you won’t permit me to scout ahead in Amestris. You won’t even let me read the gods-damned letter.”

“I’m clearly not a target.” Though he intended to simply make a statement, it sounded more like begging to his ears. Perhaps he was. “No lowly lord such as myself is at risk, and that’s why it was wise of someone from within the Fuhrer’s inner circle to reach out to someone like me.”

“Truly? ‘Tis a rather desperate gesture to me. They know nothing of a ‘lowly lord’, such as yourself. So why reach out to you to help aid in a kidnapped queen- who we have no evidence was actually kidnapped?”

There was a heavy pause. Elio narrowed her eyes, and briefly, her ever-present smile waned. Arcturus made no effort to avoid her questioning gaze but still preferred to direct his sight to the map on the opposite wall of him. Arcturus pensively tapped his finger upon his chin, staring at the intricate veins that made up Amestris on the map. The longer he stared, the more his sights were drawn toward another body of land further north. The channels of Amestris bled out into a blank, near-nothingness, only depicted as mostly snow-capped mountains and endlessly blank landscapes.

“… Ah… There is a reason you’re willing to stick that big nose of yours into their business. But you won’t tell me. Is it really worth dragging Fotia into a cat fight between Amestris and Drachma?” Elio’s tone was somewhat vexed. Arcturus closed his eyes against it. He could feel the exhaustion of the day seeping somehow even further into his muscles now, and an argument with Elio about boundaries wasn’t something he could muster any further energy for. He smoothed back rogue strands of his long black hair that had freed themselves from his tie. Mounting fatigue was evident in his hoarse voice. “This is just something I cannot ignore… and yet there isn’t anything I can do. They took a risk to send that plea for backup, but I can’t send an army into Drachma on the assumption of a single Drachman citizen.” A light twist in his chest crept its way to his throat as he let slip a painful sigh and fought back a wince. “Even if I wanted to and had the concrete evidence to back his claims, our King wouldn’t permit it…”

A quick snort of laughter came from Elio abruptly. Perplexed, Arcturus frowned at her, then blinked down at the warm, slender hand that had found its way onto his tightly wound shoulder to offer a few lighthearted pats.

 “Almighty Shepherd!” she laughed in a way that was unclear whether she was just feigning exasperation or if she was actually irked at the idea. “You’re so quick to ignore that you have Fotia’s most talented Knight at your disposal? I will be there with you! Mayhap I can dig up a little more intel on the situation while you smooch on some local women and sample ales, aye?” She slyly winked, and for a second Arcturus could feel the corners of his lips threaten a genuine smile. “Besides,” she continued with a roll of her eyes. “I’m willing to bet Princess just ran off because she got bored of the attention. Being a queen must be so incredibly droll.”

Before Arcturus had the chance to insecurely squirm from under her friendly gesture, Elio swept away on her heels and, before reaching the exit, twirled into an elegant bow. “I will take my leave for the evening, m’lord. Tomorrow, we can deal with the Fuhrer’s concerns face-to-face.” As she straightened, she offered another fast wink. “And then after, I say we find out how awful Amestrians whiskey truly is.”

The two both cordially offered their farewells in warm silence, and soon Elio was waltzing out the door to retire for the evening. Now the ornate balcony window of the Earl’s suite was painted a deep, dark rosy pink, softly brushed together with the violet hue of impending night. After Arcturus quietly lit the last lantern of the study, he snuffed out the flame of his match with a flick of his wrist. Though he’d love nothing more to find his way beneath the alluring sheets of his bed, Sleep was an elusive lover, and he knew full well that tonight would be one full of work rather than rest. Settling down into his desk once more, he withdrew a piece of parchment that had arrived a few days earlier. He had felt a twinge of anxiety as soon as he first laid eyes on the dark blue wax seal of the envelope, secured to a poor, bone-weary messenger eagle that arrived at his estate and insistently squawked at his window. It was days later and even still, his heart beat quickened.There was still a lump in his throat as he scanned over the loose, lackadaisical script, but he forced himself to take in the actual message itself:

Arcturus         -

I wish I could say I’m sorry I had not written sooner. You understand my predicament, I’m sure. But now it’s time to put aside any pride and address an urgent matter. I have reason to believe an Amestrian of some considerable importance is in imminent danger. Please understand that I must be light-footed in this letter when it comes to details. We can discuss this further on your future departure to my new place of residence.

 You have always been a bullheaded lad, but a smart one nonetheless. You will know where to find me, nephew. Always in a figurehead’s shadow.

 -          Anostraus

Arcturus couldn’t resist a sneer at the scribble of a signature, which would have been illegible if it weren’t for the fact that he had been well-acquainted with his uncle’s awful handwriting through years of tutoring he had received beneath him.

‘I’m sorry, Elio,’ The man thought as neatly folding up the note before tossing it to the hungering flame of his lantern. ‘No rest for the wicked...’

[autolovecraft]

As I drew near the age which had haunted my line had met their end.

Yet read as I delved deeper and deeper into the face of his kind, seeking such things as the only human creature within the great fortress, and made familiar to me by the remains of the presence of man or spirit produced in my utter solitude my mind began to connect them with the moisture of the last staircase, the Evil, on account of the night. Still I was absolutely resolved. His long hair and flowing beard were of such a deadly marble-like whiteness as I delved deeper and deeper into the repellent depths burned freely and steadily, I broke through the perpetual dust of the curse with myself. Here I found what seemed much like an alchemist's laboratory.

Old Michel was said to have burnt his wife alive as a sacrifice to the land beyond. It told of a man clad in a field, forced poison down his throat, and left him to die at the mention of my ancestor. Much of my title from much exceeding the span of thirty, old Pierre was called to the proportions of a man clad in a field, forced poison down his throat, and flung my now dying torch at the age which had been a feared and impregnable fortress. Cobwebs in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with its dull hollowness and latent malevolence. Know you not guess my secret? Within these walls and amongst the dark and occult in nature most strongly claimed my attention. 'May ne'er a noble of thy murderous line survive to reach a greater age than thine! Yet through the dark and occult in nature most strongly claimed my attention. His long hair and flowing beard were of such surroundings that my mind, remembering what had occurred, shrank from the society of the researches of Charles Le Sorcier. To be confronted in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with its dull hollowness and latent malevolence. His long hair and flowing beard were of the presence of man or spirit produced in my brain a horror of the night. Who, I sought the lower levels, descending into what appeared to be either a medieval place of confinement, or a more recently excavated storehouse for gunpowder. Still I was absolutely resolved. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the slimy floor in a massive oaken door, dripping with the moisture of the researches of Charles Le Sorcier? Now I know that its real object was to keep from my shoulder, for each movement of the alchemist, I afterward pondered long upon these premature deaths, and gloated over the revenge of Charles Le Sorcier! His forehead, high beyond the Gothic door. That I had with me my paternal ancestry that gave rise to the days of the unknown death.

His enthusiasm had seemed for the man had obtained access to the terror which I sat had been defied, yet now realizing how the secret of Alchemy was solved? That debased form of the hill was thrown into the face of his disconnected speech. The steps were many, and the lack of companionship which this fact entailed upon me, and gnarled, were of a terrible and intense black hue, and continued by each possessor. Whilst I had proceeded back some distance toward the steps when there suddenly fell to my examination of the hidden world of black magic. One night the castle walls. Upon one thing I was unable to interpret.

Louis, son of Godfrey, in no manner could I account for the coming of the sinister Charles Le Sorcier!

I seemed to hear emanating from it a faint sound, as though life were not yet wholly extinct. And my mother having died at my birth, my eyes must have started from their orbits at the same fateful age, and ere he released his murderous hold, his victim was no more. From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and thus down through the spell that had first so haunted me, and ere he released his murderous hold, his victim was no more. As soon as the Philosopher's Stone or the Wizard. 'Fool! He had studied beyond the usual dimensions; his cheeks, deep-seated, else I should have dismissed with scorn the incredible narrative unfolded before my eyes.He shrieked, 'Can you not how the secret of Alchemy was solved? As the ages of feudalism one of the apartment was an opening leading out into one of the pendulum of the morning in climbing up and down half ruined staircases in one of the dark natures of the castle, less than a week before that fatal hour which I sat had been old Michel and young Charles has escaped into the wildest confusion by the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of long dampness, met my eyes. At my evident ignorance of his meaning, the wild ravines of the ancient Gothic doorway stood a human figure. Furniture, covered by the surname of Mauvais, and thus down through the perpetual dust of ages and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the unsteady glare the top of a terrible and intense black hue, and gnarled, were of a certain ancient man who had once dwelled on our estates, a month before I was resolved at least that it should not find me a family of short-lived men, I burned with the evident intent of ending my life as had been defied, yet as I had always deemed strange, but which now became dearer to me each day, ninety long years ago. Louis, son to Henri, the wild ravines and grottoes of the unhappy and accursed Counts de C—, first saw the light of day, as I might, in the course of nature have died, for, since no other branch of my ancestor. One night the castle, less than a week before that fatal hour which I allude is the early age at which all the long centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon my own race I was permitted to learn more of the sinister Charles Le Sorcier? In unusually rational moments I would fall back to occult studies, and in roaming without aim or purpose through the trees. In one corner was an only child and the faded tapestries within, all was frightfully dark, and was reputed wise in the exploration of the otherwise untenanted gloom.

Alone I buried him beneath the stones of the most startling nature, and thus down through the dark and shadowy forests, the form of Charles Le Sorcier. As I drew near the base with the moisture of the once mighty lords of the sorcerers and there came upon old Michel Mauvais, the Evil, on account of his peculiar garment. To be confronted in a profusion never before seen by me were spun everywhere, and gloated over the revenge of Charles Le Sorcier?

The circumstance to which I had spent the hours of my family was in one of the menials standing about told him what had occurred, shrank from the twisted mouth.

High. Furniture, covered by the dust of the great edifice, telling too late that poor Michel had been a feared and impregnable fortress. Who, I had felled was the source of all my excursions of discovery in the ages passed, first one, then another of the ancient Gothic doorway stood a human figure. To be confronted in a skull-cap and long medieval tunic of the old château and its perusal confirmed the gravest of my great house, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the days of the dark natures of the most dilapidated of the massive clock in the minds of the primeval forest stands the old castle in which they were set, opened wide with an expression which I was permitted to learn more of the dread curse upon our line that were nightly told and magnified by the fall of a terrible and intense black hue, and was reputed wise in the parks, the dry and dusty moat, the aged Pierre gave to me by the light of day, ninety long years ago. High.

Perhaps it was at a loss to gather the purport of his peculiar garment. Without warning, I had spent the hours of my great house, yet as I have never elsewhere seen in man. In one corner was an only child and the meadowland around the hill was thrown into the mysteries of the old château, and left him to die at the foot of the presence of man or spirit produced in my utter solitude my mind, remembering what had occurred, shrank from the damp and sunken pavement. Michel had been his father's fate. Then, slowly advancing to meet the Count, Robert by name, was this man of considerable intelligence, whose name I remember as Pierre. Thus time and the faded tapestries within, all is changed. I fancied that the words 'years' and 'curse' issued from the lowly abode of the many wild ravines of the passage as the tunic of dark color.

It was in existence, I turned to examine the charred and shriveled figure on the floor. Perhaps it was at a loss to gather the purport of his father's slayer as he approached the age of thirty-two, thus maintaining the foul provisions of his father's slayer as he approached the body, I broke through the spell that had first so haunted me, but I did not pause to examine it, whereupon there was revealed a black aperture, exhaling noxious fumes which caused my torch to sputter, and I fell prone upon the plains that surround the base with the wanderings of the mysterious stranger. Once I caught the name of Charles Le Sorcier must in the light of my troubled life.

In one corner was an immense pile of shining yellow metal that sparkled gorgeously in the ungoverned madness of fury and despair, the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the coming of the old château, I spent the better part of the castle on the floor. Much of my apprehensions.

[15001700tt]

Reflections of the Deep Sense of Self

well, i dont really have an audience except for a handful of mutuals and the many porn bots that i cant seem to get rid of no matter how hard i try but i am still gonna use this platform to voice out my thoughts since i have too many of them and i feel like i might drown if i don't talk about them.

i dont necessarily think that i am a person that is easily swayed by men, i was able to emotionally control myself quite effectively in my youth.

my first crush was simply a pick from the crowd to stop my friends nagging about who it was. i just observed the crowd and picked the most likely to not interact with my sort and said "him, he is so cute!" hoping that my friends wouldn't see through my facade. i didn't want to like anyone just because of their looks but I had quite literally not spoken to the male sort in my entire life (not including men I am related to, I was in all girl private school before I moved to America's public system) to develop an interest in them in a romantic or infatuated way even.

now this is just my introduction to my philosophical essay about whether hurt/ mentally ill people are inherently evil but I must admit that this was started because of other reasons. we might not even get to touch on that either, i tend to ramble and not get to the point effectively.

if you followed me long enough you would know that I was talking to a man I might've called Viking. but we do not talk anymore after I made my feelings clear to him.

i feel many things, most of the time, its anger, the other times, confusion, hurt, rejection..etc. but I do not blame him. mostly because, i am quite annoying as a human being.

one of the things i took to as a way to distract me from the pain, was reading. i read so much that it was impossible to feel anything except the emotions that I was told to through a page. but in between books I would have nights where i wouldnt be able to focus on the words, and I would ponder what was it i did wrong, what was it that made him deem me worthless, not worth responding to. and I would come up blank because my self-preservation wont allow me believe that because I made my intentions clear that I was in the wrong to do so when I feIt that our relationship was taking the wrong turn. if I am allowed to call it a relationship, because quite frankly it was a level below a situationship and a level above a friendship. that I was quite sure of.

as I sit here and write after almost two months of silence from his end and mine, because I refuse to be the one to break it. call it pride, call it stubbornness, I was not the one to ghost the other. i refuse to chase after someone who clearly does not want me. but still can't deny that I lay in bed every night at some godforsaken hours of the night wishing, and hoping that he would just take a step towards me. as I had done to him that one Wednesday afternoon in April.

my point is that my interest in men started out of necessity but it has evolved into a yearning of something that seems quite unattainable. i am not attractive by any means, but I am not of the ugliest sort. i have seen people with more weight with worse features than I with partners who could care less about appearances. which to say that my looks shouldn't be any good reason to ghost me. and while I don't necessarily think that my appearance was the reason for the silence I do struggle with the way l look so my insecurities have found a very good home in the found silence from him. i am working on losing weight out of a bet with friends but also out of bitterness but nevertheless, he is a man and if he wont block me than he must see what he is missing out on.

but again, I used to think I would never be that girl. the one who wanted something but she cant have it. which is quite the diabolical because the entirety of the 11 months we talked I had many panic/ anxiety attacks over how our appearances didn't match, our aesthetics weren't compatible, about how I was too ugly for him or too fat for him. but he seemed the sort that was straightforward and didnt waste other peoples times. i guess i was wrong in the sense that he kept me around because he was bored and disposed of me when it got too serious for his liking. i thought i always had the upperhand, that if things ended i wouldnt be too hurt about it and do what i do best, find the next boy to obsess over.

funny enough, he seemed interested. but i cant know for sure. i mightve made it up in my head.

i have a fear, which shouldnt be a fear but it is. remember how i said that my first crush was out of necessity? well that seems to be the case with me from 7th grade to the end of highschool. which is crazy because you would think with all the men i obsess over that i would find men attractive. i think there is a clear line between celebrities and fiction characters from a real person with undeliberate faults and thing you cant control.

i never thought any of my crushes were ugly, they were good looking but they didnt make me feel attracted to them. it didnt help that i was also the type to watch from a far and not the get close and comfortable.

considering this my first person that i liked and held an 11 months conversation/-ship with i think i did very good but that doesnt change that i read too many romantic book and i had a silver of hope.

a silver of hope that maybe i wasnt weird or shitty for not feeling attracted to anyone in my life. that i finally found someone who literally embodied my dream guy and couldnt have been more perfect. if only he was better at communicating.

he says that he is traumatized from long distance relationships, i now understand that it mightve been his fault. he doesnt communicate. in the 11 months we have known each other i know about a handful of things about him while he had me all figured out. except for one thing. he never got my fear of relationships. since i suspect he ghosted me because he thought i would want one. i guess ghosting me seemed like his best option.

i might not be undesireable but i am not anyone's first choice either. usingmedia to distract me from my emotions literally has become my life. i read about 15 hockey romances the weeks after the ghosting. i was already reading regency era adult romances but i couldnt bring myself to finish them because i had spoken to him about them. this decision i will regret because i talked about everything with him. i mentioned this before. quite literally everything reminds me of him. and its quite sad because i cant evn ssay what we had was special. i decided yesterday that he wasnt worth all of this, and i know he isnt. but i am tired. i just want to be dessired and wanted.

i literally stopped reading a book because the male interest did the same thing that he did to me, essentially to the female protag. i cant even pick up the raunchy adult romance.

i didnt let my self feel the extent of my emotions, only in small slivers of despair, or when i am too tired to pretend that his actions didnt affect me.

he was perfect in all ways but one and i was all faults except for one; my immenient need to communicate.

and no one knows, a friend of mine knows, but they dont know everything, i dont want her to get annoyed with me. i was in her place too many times and i refuse to put her through that. and our mutual friends?

hahahahaha the other night i was speaking with S, and he said that the last time he spoke to him, he mentioned me and Viking said 'oh i havent spoken to her in a while' thats it. no explaination no excuse. i dont even know why that infuriated me. i wasnt even worth an explaination in his eyes. S barely found out via vague summary from me. because even though i was/am hurt. i refuse to tarnish his reputation. 'in a while' ????? you mean two months? but then again S couldnt remember the last time he talked to him. but like still?

forget that we were flirting constantly i thought i was friend at least. i deserve more than this. i think. maybe not then.

i want to scream and shout and hit him and cry about why he didnt want me. but i realize thats self depricating. i should never seek validation from a man, i know but it wouldnt fucking hurt fam.

i have so much to say and yet i feel like its already too much. i should keep quiet. thats what people want from me. for someone who is 'boy crazy' i have not stomached going on a dating app, or boy watching in public because it physically hurts. for gods sake i cant even read fanfiction or just READ because of it. any sight of anything merely romantic makes me want to yell. i am tired and i want to turn everything off. including my stupid rat brain that only seems to be attracted to assholes.

but the same fucking stupid brain cant help but hope that is our enemies to lovers story. one day... god i hope one day...

[the-story-of-six]

Meditation

“Meditation provides a way of learning how to let go. As we sit, the self we’ve been trying to construct and make into a nice, neat package continues to unravel.”

- John Welwood

Iris would sit on the roof for hours, never moving even for the slightest passing breeze, with one leg resting upon the other and both paws clasped together firmly. The sun had just begun to disappear over the tops of the trees, and the Spring air had started to cool as the distant Westward horizon glowed with waves of soft red and purple light. In the distance, the swooshing sounds of passing cars on the nearby freeway could be periodically heard over the serenity of an otherwise quiet and peaceful late afternoon.

The Lucario’s eyes were gently shut, and a small stream of transparent, blue aura vapor seeped from the crack between her right eyelids, indicating that she had been concentrating hard enough to draw energy from the outside air, and then let it flow throughout the conduits in her brain to increase her focus. It was not as violent as it usually was during a battle, rather it was more gentle and wispy as it floated upwards from her eye socket and then dissipated.

She was, on the outside, completely at peace with the world, her entire body appearing as relaxed as a hammock on a warm beach. She was still, and she stood with as much poise as a buddhist monk. On the inside, however, her train of thought had begun to drift off of the tracks, letting old memories and internal struggles plague the mindscape she had worked all day to create. The small thoughts happened so suddenly, like rolling a snowball down a mountain only for it to reach the bottom and become a devastating boulder. She couldn’t help it, not after what she now knew, not with the truth that plagued her like an Egyptian curse. Another wave of anxiety hit her body like a speeding truck, and it shook her so badly that it nearly threw her off balance as she wobbled slightly in the wind passing over the roof of the house, jolting her back to consciousness.

Iris gasped and stared into space for a moment, the real world returning to her, and the haze of aura stopped flowing and then evaporated into the atmosphere. She stood dazed, her pupils dilating, and her surroundings came back into focus. This never happened to her, she had never felt like this for years, not ever since she matured. She needed to calm down, to think things through rationally. She regained control of herself and sighed, taking in a fresh breath of afternoon air to clear her head, and then she righted herself as she was before. It took but a few seconds for her to return to her previous state of thinking, but she eventually recalled the thoughts that had been violently shaken from her mind and then continued where she had left off, pondering the events for the past week of her life.

The pendant she wore around her neck, artfully smithed from gold and embroidered with a black cross passing in front of a smaller sapphire-blue disc, had been with her ever since she was still inside an egg. It was engraved with symbols that roughly translated to a dead language used by an ancient tribe of Lucarios, a tribe that had lived in the Northern mountains of the Sinnoh region thousands of years before the first man had ever set foot in the area.

It was her tribe, it was her ancestors who had all but disappeared as the sands of time etched away at them and their history, their entire population thought to be completely extinct and yet here she was. They were always heavily shrouded in mystery, as ancient ruins with unsolvable hieroglyphs were the only lead to go on. However, more recent investigations had been conducted since the early 50’s, when technology and research had advanced to the point where they were finally able to learn from this apparently once-great civilization. Books were written about their findings, and Iris read them, as many as she could get her hands on. As she read, she began to notice a pattern, a series of intersecting threads that never seemed to quite connect. Of the dozens of books she has ever flipped through, each one of them had always pointed to one, terrifying paradox.

She. Should. Not. Exist.

Her eye, tinted blue and constantly glowing with an intense light, was one of the few connections between her and this tribe of Pokemon she called her ancestors, her family, the ones who left her alone up in the mountains as an egg and never heard from again. It was all there, the language they used that was inscribed in the jewelry she owned, the location she that was found in as a newborn, and most importantly, the source of her abilities.

Her abilities were not simply gained through sheer willpower and physical exercises, no, her power could never be achieved through any normal means of training. This was something else, something that materialized in her when she had evolved into her final form, it made her see and feel things she had never felt before, like she had been injected with knowledge that which existed beyond the boundaries of the dimensional plane she resided in. She could never understand it, nor could anyone else that came across her. Even her trainer was baffled and slightly afraid at the sudden, seemingly unexplainable changes that sprouted, but it never affected the bond they shared as Pokemon and master.

What she read in those old books made her out to be some sort of savior, like a demigod of sorts, blessed by the god named Arceus who watches over all life from above in his Holy kingdom. Her eye was the determining factor, anyone could see that it was something special, but it carried a weight that Iris would have to bear for the rest of her days. The eye represented power, it represented wisdom, and most importantly it represented that Iris’ connection to the spiritual realm of aura and thought was so strong, that she essentially transcended from being a mere Pokemon to being nearly omnipotent.

Arceus was supposed to bless one chosen member in each generation of her clan’s life, as per the deal they made with their holy idol. As long as they continued their worship and sacrifice, as they always had, they would always be protected from harm. Arceus was far, far too busy (apparently) to attend to the needs of each individual on the planet, so instead he bestowed upon them a blessing. In her clan’s own language, Iris memorized the prophecy upon which her life was created to fulfill;

“May the plagues infest us, for our savior will arise from within our numbers to burn the pestilence with aura like fire, and those who oppose our way of life and threaten our loved ones will be forced to face their sins until they repent, and only then can our hero find divine rest until they are once again needed.”

There was a book in the back of the Public Library, which was located in her hometown of Jubilife City, a place she went to quite often. Pokemon were allowed to use public services such as the library, or the local shops, or public transportation, because they could be trusted to understand how such things operated. She got herself a Library card, and she used it periodically to indulge herself in as many intellectual and philosophical works as she could possibly find, occasionally delving into other genres like fantasy and things that entertained and engaged her. She also used the library for her own, personal research, as she scoured the depths of the History and Geography section for anything related to her ancestors. Of course, there were the documentaries, the investigations that gave her the knowledge that she had memorized end to end. There were even works in the Religious category that talked about cases of Arceus appearing on Earth and granting wishes and blessings to those who prayed to him. In those she could sometimes find her clan hidden within the pages, amongst other tribes that were similar to hers, but not quite as important to her for the moment. Her tribe had always been written off as another ruined civilization, a fallen kingdom where all of their beliefs and practices had meant nothing because they had ultimately destroyed themselves and completely disappeared off the face of the planet, never to be seen again. Iris was so emotionally attached to the history of her people, who they were, what they believed in and strived for, but to everyone else they were another example of the way that time can just completely wipe away an entire tribe of once-magnificent creatures and move on to the next one, and then the next one, over and over to infinity and even beyond that. Time is unending, time is limitless, and time feels no remorse.

No matter how deep she dug, Iris always felt in her heart that something wasn’t there, like a piece of the puzzle had escaped and run off. For months she lost her lead, up until she found that book. She had never seen it before, not until it randomly fell off of it’s shelf as she passed by. To any common man the situation could have well been written off as simply being coincidental, albeit incredibly so, like perhaps it wasn’t shelved right, or the wind blowing off of Iris’ body as she passed by was strong enough to knock it off of its fragile perch. But she knew that wasn’t possible, the aura in the air was faint but it happened to appear right where the book has been, then vanished. It was like a passing ghost, something otherworldly that still had a physical interaction with the plane of existence all life on Earth inhabited, but whatever the case may be it still got Iris’ attention as she picked up the book and studied it. The writing on the front of it had faded away so it could no longer be legible, but some red, shiny lettering on the spine of the book barely read, “Gōruden'ōra.”

“Golden Aura…”

She had heard her clan’s name many times before in several different languages, so she knew how to pick it out, but she had never come across this book before until now. On the spot she began to rapidly flip through the pages, reading as fast as her eyes were allowed to move, at first finding only information she had already figured out up to this point, but then suddenly the pages stopped turning and she froze.

It was there, depicted in detail with fine, black ink, next to a wall of text, the pendant she was wearing around her neck. She took one hand off the book and used it to quickly remove the necklace from herself, then placed it on the page. The two of them were side-by-side, identical copies of one another, it couldn’t be mistaken for a different one even if the most skilled craftsman alive attempted to replicate it. Her mind raced with questions as she took the necklace and sat down with her back against the bookshelf behind her, starting to read the text beside the picture.

Since the clan was founded, sightings of this pendant around the tribe leader’s neck had been sourced through studying the surrounding areas of the Eastern Sinnoh region, where other, less-prosperous tribes of other Pokemon had written their history on their own walls. They would write about the blue warriors whose leader would always sport a shiny, blue medallion they would wear wherever they went. In this specific instance, it was a group of Sneasels and Weaviles that had never before been thoroughly documented, as many investigations never seemed to look further than the collapsed snow banks that used to be their homes. This was different, way different. As Iris continued, she discovered that a small group of humans, a party of around 4 or 5, came from their homes to another country in 1942 to further investigate what other researchers had called a dead end. They dug into the snow for months, setting up a remote base camp near the site. Nobody passed through the area normally, so nobody even knew they were out there. They eventually hit a cavern some 10 feet underground, and what they found inside now lie within the pages of the book Iris was holding, and it had never been investigated since.

But her ancestor’s trail ended centuries ago, where no further evidence could prove they still existed past that point in time. There were no writings, no relics, and no way to pull back the thick blanket of snow that had covered the sacred ground upon which they used to roam. According to all accounts she had ever read, the tribe had been wiped off the face of the planet.

And yet here she was

The people who discovered her took both her egg and the necklace back with them, and it had been in her possession ever since. It carried quite a bit of emotional weight for Iris, even if she never made it outright obvious. She never knew what it was for, but she knew it came from her family and that it was important to finding out who she was. Now here, in this book that she had been gifted by some entity whose origins remain a mystery, it was said that the trinket that she had been left with has been worn by every single documented tribe leader that had ever ruled over her tribe. No other history book, encyclopedia, cultural website or Pokemon professor had ever even mentioned any of this before, as far as she knew the necklace was given to her as a parting gift from the family that had left her behind. But now she knew, that it had a much, much greater importance than she could have ever imagined.

The pendant was a symbol of strength, of utmost authority over all others and respect from even the wisest of elders. She could barely come up with a reason as to how, or why, but there it was hung around her as it had always been, a silent symbol of the past that she had so longingly wanted to uncover bit-by-bit. She stood motionless, but visibly there were signs that her concentration was waning, every fiber of her being felt like it was falling face-down into an endless pit as realization washed over her in a tidal wave.

At that moment, she heard voices whisper to her.

They were incoherent, and very, very quiet, but the cacophony of whispers contained key phrases that Iris could just faintly pick out as they swirled around her head like ghosts;

“… forgotten…”

“… -will never understand…”

“… -need you…”

“… prophecy…”

“… half-god…”

“… protect us…”

She could sense the presence of other entities with her now, they were all around her, suffocating her and spinning around her like the clouds of a hurricane. Books began to fall over and off the shelves around her, and lights started to flicker on and off in the section of the library she was in. And her necklace, her necklace seemed to almost hover upwards as the thread attached to it hung around Iris’ neck still. The sapphire disk was glowing brightly then, and it shook violently with the concentrated power of hundreds of generations of Lucarios, who all gave their lives to protect their families, their loved ones, all of the innocent people in the world that needed to be saved because that’s what leaders do. That is what leaders do… and this one singular phrase repeated itself inside of Iris’ head over and over again, with different voices sounding off in an orchestra of enlightenment. These voices, this necklace, it was a connection to the other side, to her ancestors, to her tribe, it was a link to everything she had ever wanted to know, and now it was decided that it was the right time for her to understand.

Now she did understand, she hadn’t just been chosen to protect her clan, she had been chosen as the clan’s leader, and ever since she was born it was always her destiny to take her place beside her ancestors. And now her family was calling her back, lending her their energy, their knowledge, their willpower, to have her lead her clan as their chief, to guide her into her true calling as a hero amongst her people.

But the question still remained, why did they leave her in the first place?

And more than that, where did everyone go?

As she stood there on the roof, all of these realizations rattled around in her head so hauntingly, so absolutely brutally and unrelentingly, that she just had to stop. Her eyes thrust open as an audible gasp escaped her lips and she planted her second foot on the roof to prevent herself from losing her balance again. She took a second to breathe, to calm herself down as the deep dark thoughts of paranoia phased away into stardust inside her head. She was calm now, she felt the gentle breeze blow through her fur, heard the droning sounds of cars on the highway once again, and she sighed as she stretched her arms out into the air. She put them back down and just stared at the sunset, watching the last shred of color vanish behind the horizon, appreciating the world and the small pleasures that came with living there. She smiled slightly, but it dropped again as she turned her attention towards the pendant, using her right paw to lift it up so she could see it around her neck.

She studied it closer now, picking out every detail she could find, all the tiny engravings with thin, swooping lines and miniature stars, and as it sparkled in the moonlight the sapphire disc seemed to almost glow. It was a beautiful work of art, crafted by the finest artisans in the village thousands of years ago, and it was entrusted to her for reasons she used to wonder about constantly.

She used to think perhaps it was a reminder that she had a purpose, set forth by the gods and left for her to figure out the rest. Perhaps her parents knew, or had always known, and they wanted to give her hope, to show her that they would always be with her in one form or another, maybe it was a sign of love.

A single tear rolled down her cheek, she hadn’t cried for years and yet this was enough to bring forth her emotions from the steel-locked gate that she kept them behind. She needed to know why she was abandoned, only to be called back like this. She needed to know how, and she needed to know as soon as possible. There had been a feeling clawing at her back, which had gotten more severe in the past month or so. Something was coming and she didn’t know exactly when, or even what she needed to look out for, but she could tell it was going to be devastating to her and everyone she’d ever loved and that she needed to do something about it before the point of no return.

Iris let the pendant drop to hang where it would always sit, and then turned to stare at the moon coming up and over the trees. On this night it was full, casting the entire region in a soft, bluish light. She looked at it with an expression of determination, with a tinge of melancholy. No matter what may threaten her home she would protect it with her life. No matter how menacing or how powerful these monsters could possibly be she would find a way to save the ones she cared about, she would save them all. Then she would go on to lead her people and rebuild their civilization, if there was anything left at all. She hoped to the gods that it would be so. Iris would never be afraid, not with the strength she had knowing her ancestors were watching over her. She only hoped she had enough time to prepare for what lay ahead, for failure would destroy everything she’d ever had, and the threads of prophecy would be cut. But first, she would have to find her home, if there was anything left of it at all. She hoped to Arceus that she wasn't too late...

As she stood, she swore she could almost feel a warm, reassuring paw on her shoulder.

[ymd3signs]

How To Design Happiness

Design, at its heart, is about solving problems. That’s why it’s so easy to talk to designers. They can explain exactly how their interface is built to help you navigate through your phone, or how a device was shaped to make it possible for mass manufacturing on the assembly line.

But throughout hundreds of conversations with designers, I’ve begun to wonder: If most people’s goal is to live a happy life, why did I never hear designers explain how they’d built something to make me happy?

At SXSW, I moderated an event called Designing Happiness. Its experts included Bruce Vaughn, former chief creative exec with Disney Imagineering; Gabby Etrog Cohen, senior vice president of PR and brand strategy at SoulCycle; and Randall Stone, director of experience innovation at Lippincott. All three brands strive to create happy experiences, not as an afterthought, but as the first step in what they do. It is an approach that’s paid enormous dividends for each company. Here’s what they taught me:

HAPPINESS IS MOSTLY THE ANTICIPATION OF AN EVENT AND MEMORY OF IT

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so,” said the philosopher John Stuart Mill. It’s a paradox at the heart of happiness. We are hardwired to enjoy the anticipation of a joyous event and savour the memory. But in that actual moment of experience? It can be hard to tell.

So at the creative consultancy Lippincott, designers have a theory called the Happiness Halo–and it’s built upon reconstructing happiness as a three-act structure of anticipation, experience, and memory.

“First it’s about creating anticipation,” Stone explains. “That’s really strong–both from a psychological standpoint but also the anticipation of the experience is sometime greater [than experience]. It goes back to our primitive skills of releasing dopamine. It’s our hunting skills. If we didn’t have this sense of anticipation, we would have starved to death a long time ago.”

Anticipation is so powerful that being excited about a big event, like running a marathon, can give you as much joy as actually completing it.

“The experience itself is really important,” Stone continues, “but an experience is never perfect, and you don’t weigh an experience by adding it up over time. It’s not like you add four and five and get a score that equals happiness. You actually remember the high moment and the end moment, and the most important thing is the memory.”

The end moment is particularly profound–and it’s something every good waiter already knows. One study found that waiters who gave mints at the end of the meal received 3% higher tips, while those who presented the mints with just a bit more effort, asking the question “would anyone like mints at the end of their meal?” received 14% higher tips. It shows that we’re biased to remember endings by nature (remember that when penning your next novel).

YOU NEED A MOMENT OF TRANSITION TO ESCAPE THE REAL (UNHAPPY) WORLD

Anticipation reveals something else about happiness: That with all of the micro-stresses we experience in our daily lives, it helps us to prepare ourselves to be happy, to decompress, wipe our consciousness, and open ourselves to joy.

Disney and SoulCycle both craft experiences specifically to accommodate this transitional time. At Disney, they call it a “portal.”

“Think about Disneyland where you literally go through a dark tunnel, kind of a mythic experience where you go through a compressed space and come out the other side,” Vaughn says. “Architects use this a lot; Frank Lloyd Wright used this a lot in his houses. You’ve completely left the world you were in, and you’re in a very very different world. The sites, the sounds, the smells . . . suddenly you’re in this world where there are marching bands and the smell of fudge and horses and giant mice that are waving at you and people who are very friendly and people are hugging big bears, and it’s just fine . . . and without that transition, without stepping through a portal, you lose that opportunity to reset the state of mind of guests.”

Likewise, every SoulCycle location has been built to accommodate what the company calls the “crossover.” “We purposefully design our spaces so that when you are leaving your class, another class is coming in,” Cohen says. The “crossover” isn’t anything fancy. One cyclist friend describes it as a “hallway lined with lockers.” But that hallway is an important two-way street, designed for the people coming in to cross paths with the people coming out. For the sweatless, it’s a taste of things to come. For the exercised, it’s an audience to provide validation–the cherry on top of their hard work. And for both sides, it can create a longer-lead experience to the next SoulCycle class.

“There are these interactions where you’re rubbing up against people, to purposefully create community,” Cohen says. “It’s all about creating relationships with people so that you’re not just walking out anonymously to your next venture in life.”

EMPLOYEES NEED TO BE EMPOWERED TO MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY, SANS APPROVAL

If any experience is anti-happy, it’s bureaucracy. (Consider how a trip to the DMV is more or less the least happy experience on earth.) And so it should come as little surprise that companies that know how to make customers happy enable their employees to make customers happy.

For instance, take the Haute N.Y.C. dining establishment Eleven Madison Park. Not only does it serve some of the most beautifully plated, scrumptiously paired flavours in the world, but it also employs a staff member called the Dreamweaver. The Dreamweaver is like a concierge for the experience. As Stone tells the story, on one occasion, visitors from out of town expressed that their only regret was not having a slice of N.Y.C. pizza. And so the Dreamweaver responded.

“[The Dreamweaver] jumped in a cab–and here you’re getting a very expensive, multicourse meal–and one of the courses was an authentic slice of New York pizza so they could have everything on their list checked off,” Stone says. “So, if you talk to [Eleven Madison Park], they say, yes, we use food to deliver an experience, but we want you to leave with a memory of being here–not necessarily the dish or the course. It’s about making it a memorable night.”

The Dreamweaver is an empowered decision-maker, focused on customer experience, just like Disney’s “cast members,” who are allowed to intervene and cheer up someone having a bad day at the park. A cast member is trained from day one so that if she sees a problem, she can take care of it. She can replace a child’s spilt popcorn or ice cream; no middle management questions asked. But there’s also a highly organized system of communication that allows cast members to pull off more astonishing feats, too. (Have you ever read the tear-jerking story of Toby, the Bear?)

It’s why cast members–not the million-dollar attractions–are Disney’s highest-rated touchpoint at its parks.

SURPRISE IS THE KEY TO DELIGHT, AND IT’S MUNDANELY EASY TO SURPRISE PEOPLE

These happiness interventions, staged by employees, are the perfect opportunity to inject an essential element into happy experiences: surprise. Much like beginnings and endings, we’re cognitively predisposed to remember surprises, too. And when you have employees primed to surprise customers, it’s far easier to pull off the feat.

“At SoulCycle, we have a program that’s actually called ‘surprise and delight’ where everyone of our managers and key holders has a budget to be able to surprise and delight our riders—whoever they want,” Cohen says. “And that’s at any level. Whether that’s putting a gift in their locker, taking them out to coffee, putting a cupcake on their bike for their birthday, or if a kid just went off to college, and they send them a T-shirt . . . it can be any number of things, because relationships matter.”

A surprise is a tool that’s more effective at dealing with angry customers than catharsis. Complaining verbally actually makes people more upset by reinforcing their negative sentiments. But empowering an employee gives the company a chance to recover–to leave a surprisingly positive signpost in customers’ memories of an evening.

And truth be told, it’s also not that hard to surprise people if you put just a little bit of thought into it.

“It’s about making the mundane memorable,” Stone says. “You can take the most mundane moment of any experience interaction or process and bring it to life.” His example is when checking into the Park Hyatt of Chicago, you’re offered a series of five or so pens. They’re not just Bics. Instead, they might be brass or tortoiseshell or any pen you’d see used by a pen lover.

“They put the box in front of you and for that moment, you sit there and ponder, which pen is the most beautiful? Which reflects my personality?” Stone says. “You ask the person checking in next to you, ‘Which pen are you going to pick?’ And suddenly the most mundane moment becomes one of delight because you’re signing the Magna Carta with this pen. It’s no longer a plastic pen; it’s a ceremony.”

NATURE KNOWNS HAPPINESS BEST BECAUSE WE’RE ALL BARELY TAMED BEASTS

According to Disney’s Vaughn, happiness is real “lizard brain” stuff that’s mostly satisfying the concerns of our core instincts. That is why, fundamentally, Walt Disney’s philosophy was that a key to happiness was feeling safe, and his parks were designed to make you feel safe.

At one level, the parks themselves are designed at a human scale. The streets aren’t built for cars but spaced for pedestrians. And despite their liberal use of concrete, Disney parks are teeming with organic materials.

“In our theme parks, there’s a lot of what we call the ‘living show’—actual live plants, living plants, a lot of water, all these things work on the subconscious level to give reassurance,” Vaughn says. “Great cities have this as well. In the city of Paris there’s a lot of food, a lot of bistros and things. People are very reassured by food.”

We crave the resources of nature, and having them on hand makes us happy. Of course, if you subscribe to this philosophy, the world can look pretty silly! Your favourite water feature is no longer about the sculpture or the art, but a means to tell your basest instincts, “It’s okay, there’s water nearby to drink.”

LEAVE YOUR CUSTOMER WITH A KISS GOODNIGHT

But as I mentioned earlier, endings are necessary. At Disney, they call it a “kiss goodnight,” the perfectly timed element that can turn even a mediocre experience into a fantastic memory.

In Orlando, this could be the spectacular fireworks show. At SoulCycle, it would be the last uplifting track played by the DJ, or the aforementioned “crossover,” where you smile on your way out, feeling accomplished, among other riders about to go in. Even Lyft and Uber have a sort of kiss goodnight, Stone argues. In removing the cash transaction at the end of a traditional cab ride, you can share the briefest of human moments with your driver: a real “thank-you.”

At SXSW, keeping in mind the importance of the power of surprise and the kiss goodnight, while recognizing that nature can give us happiness in a way nothing else can, we had an idea:

“Look at the puppy—if anyone doesn’t feel like the puppy is the embodiment of happiness and joy, then you have no soul, so for me,” Vaughn said. “I feel like nature has done it perfectly, and from there it gets hard.”

So we went full-on Oprah, and we released puppies to the audience. (They were a Lab-Golden Retriever mix–totes adorbs.) Now look, I’m not going to claim it was a tsunami of puppies or anything. We only had ten puppies for a room of 600 people. That’s a 60:1 person to puppy ratio! But the resulting happiness in the place was palpable. People climbed over one another to take photos like the paparazzi. They shared stories of their pets back home while waiting for their turn for puppy snuggles. And of course, their faces melted when they held the pups. In case there was any scepticism that you can design, not just for solving problems, but for solving one of humanity’s biggest problems, I can attest, if you can make someone smile when walking out of an hour-long talk in a hotel ballroom? You can make someone smile just about anywhere.

[21putnamp]

You Give Love A Bad Name. (Song reference because I'm a piece of garbage that plays with emotion)

@elsiemcclay

Word count: Idk sorry I tried to keep it but I couldn't.

Lance's POV:

Philosophers have pondered for centuries why we're here. If it's for love, for the future or if we don't have any reason for life at all. Growing up I knew my purpose was to touch to stars, to see how far our universe stretches. Growing up I had everything involving space: Video games, Model planets, bottle rockets, a telescope. You name it, I had it. I remember everything so vividly, so clearly. I remember crying when I was accepted into the Garrison. The happiness splattered on Mama's face when I told her I was accepted, my family gathering around to celebrate my achievement. And everything that came after, it just, I mean, it can't compare. How it felt when I saw my hero Shiro in the flesh, smuggling him out with the mullet brain, zooming down on a motorcycle, the first time I connected with Blue. Not all of it's been exactly, peachy, though. The pain of Blue, Keith leaving us, Kuron being ruled out, the wounds the gore the blood the pain my team us slipping us hurt us-

Nevermind that now, now my team was together. We have grown so close to each other, I couldn't bare to lose any of them. I guess that's why I really like being the sharpshooter, being able to cover all their back from a distance.  Everything about my team is.. perfect! Well, um, practically… You see I um, well you see uh I kind of. Well I mean I sorta, um. I am in love with my leader. WHICH YEAH I KNOW SOUNDS SUPER CHEESY BUT IT'S TRUE! I just can't help myself, his wit and cockiness constantly clashing against mine in such a perfect way. Which leads to mine current situation…

Present Day War:

“LANCE! GET DOWN!!” Keith shouted as the sound of lasers shot through the air, taking a too-close-for-comfort aim towards the paladins sharp shooter. “ALLURA AND PIDGE, FLANK LEFT WHILE LANCE HANGS BACK AND HUNK AND I FLANK RIGHT” Keith barked out, ordering around the paladins through the battle. This was one of the closest battles the paladins had seen yet, the Galra to Paladin number being stacked very unfairly with a ratio of 200 Galra per Paladin. “KEITH WE NEED REINFORCEMENT IN THE LEFT QUADRANT!! WE HAVE SPOTTED THE CRYSTAL BUT WE HAVE SOME LEVEL 5 SECURITY GUARDING IT!!” Pidge shouted panicky into her helmet, zapping and swinging from her whip/triangle tool. Keith, Lance and Hunk began repositioning themselves to be able to get to the best possible advantage point, before dropping in to join the fight. Keith and Lance went back to back as usual while Hunk fell into the back, taking out troops with the powerful blast of his gun. The blasts kept coming and coming as the Paladins slowly worked there way forward towards the object of this mission, taking down any and all troops that got in their way. The team finally worked there way practically to Crystal when Lance noticed a sudden blast headed his way, he lined up the trajectory when he realized it was aiming directly for- “KEITH LOOK OUT!!!” Lance screamed jumping in front of the boy, shoving him to the side. Keith whipped his head around just in time to see the blast connect with Lance's chest. That's when Keith snapped. “NOOOOOO!!!” Keith's roar tore its way through the room, alarming all the paladins and Galra as he began flipping through and stabbing Galra after Galra with no restraint for his own life. He finally reached the crystal and threw it to Allura, who caught it with ease as he sprinted back to Lance. “LANCE!! Lance, hey, buddy c'mon you gotta stay with me man!!” Keith said tenderly, holding Lance's hand in his own and cradling it to his chest. He lifted Lance up as quick as he could and sprinted for his lion.

(Fast forward to the castle because I don't know how to transition plus early apology for the sucky quality 😂)

It had been three days since Lance had gone into the tube, and frankly Keith was going mad. There was no sunshine in his life anymore, Lance took it all with him as soon as he went into the tube. All Keith did all day was sit in front of Lance's tube to talk with him and he trained. He pushed himself to every limit and once he hit it, pushed himself past it. All he could think about is that he needed to be faster, he should have been watching, he should have pulled Lance back he should have taken the shot, he should be in the tube. So many thoughts rang through his mind as he waited for Lance to wake up. As soon as Allura rang out the announcement to come to the healing wing, he sprinted with all his might to the room where the boy lay. What he saw instead though only crushed him more, Allura a sobbing mess while pidge hugged Hunk as hard as she could with Shiro standing in shock. As soon as he entered the room, all eyes fell upon him in sympathy. “Um.. what's going on?” Keith questioned puzzlingly, obviously not understanding the situation. “K-keith I'm so sorry it's just that.. Lance he.. He didn't make it.” Allura shakily wheezed out between sobs. Keith felt his knees lock and the blood drain from his face. “No..no that can't be right he just can't he..” Keith felt the tears starting to run down his face as he collapsed onto the ground in a sobbing mess. His heartbroken sobs wracked through his entire being as he felt his entire soul crumbling inside him. He felt the pain sink deeper when he heard someone yell “GUYS WHAT'S GOING ON???”. The Paladins whipped around in shock to see none other than “LANCE!!” Keith sprinted up to him and talked him to the ground, sobbing into his shoulder. “Woah woah woah something big must have happened if the emo mullet head is crying.” Lance stated, confused. Allura glared at him and yelled “WHY ARE YOU JOKING ABOUT THIS LANCE?!?! WE THOUGHT YOU HAD DIED!! WHERE WERE YOU?!?!”. Lance shrugged with a dependent Keith still attached to him stating “Well I had ended up waking up from my tube time but I didn't see anyone so I went to try and go to my room for a bit.”. Keith felt fury rising in his chest, “Allura, you mean to tell me, you pronounced him dead without even checking the body?!?!” He yelled furiously, detaching himself from Lance. “I-I was going off of the castle statistics.. We've never had someone get out of cryogenic rest early so when it didn't have any vital signs I kind panicked!!” She nervously stuttered. Keith sighed “I know Allura, any of us would have done the same.. AND YOU!” Keith spun around to face Lance, shoving his chest. “DON'T YOU EVER, EVER DO SOMETHING THAT STUPID AGAIN!! YOU COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED!” Lance stumbled backwards in minor shock before bouncing back just as angry “AND WHAT WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO?? LET OUR LEADER GET SHOT?!?! I HAD TO THINK ABOUT THE GREATER GOOD!” Lance shouted back which caused Keith to lose all the color in his face. “Lance, you are the greatest good! You can't just get yourself hurt!! We can get a new leader anytime, but we only have one sharpshooter. When I thought you were dead I just.. my heart died Lance..” Keith started, vulnerability lacing his words. Lance stared in shock as Keith continued “Look, Lance, I've just.. I've been in love with you.. for a while. Ever since you became my right hand man I just haven't been able to move on from it. And I know that you don't feel the same way but I just can't live without you knowing.. I love you Lance.” He finished. Lance began walking towards Keith as he grabbed his hands staring him in the eyes as he whispered “I love you too, Keith.” They stared at each other with so much want as they slowly leaned in and finally ended in a long awaited  kiss.

~Fin~

[wiipes]

Exploring W/ Waiola & Friends

"Hello everyone! I'm back with my girlfriend, Sara, her brother, Frankie, our friend Tino and today we'll be exploring an abandoned house!" Waiola sits on a ledge with her three friends, smiling widely at the camera set up.

"But that's not all!" Tino interrupts her surprise, jump scaring them all. Sara shoved at him, managing to knock him off the ledge they were on.

"That's right, as a bonus, we were going to explore some sewer tunnels, or at least that's what we think they are." The main host of the channel completes the surprise that Tino tried to ruin.

"So while there's still sun around, let's get to it!" Waiola cheers with her friends, all of them rushing the camera.

A transition into the next scene, edited beautifully by a good friend who would rather remain anonymous, revealed the gang walking in a line on a back road, trees decorating the edge of the frame. Chatter echoed a little, coming from these four teenagers. "Tino, you're a clown if I've ever seen one." And they were ganging up on Tino being the wildest one in the group.

"No, he's the whole circus, Way."

They giggle as Tino threatened them, "if you guys don't stop I'll have to remove your femurs, losers."

"Not if I do it first," Frankie's response was as fast as he heard it.

"Is that a threat?"

"No, it's a promise."

The four teenagers banter like this as the time passed, and not long came before a large house came into their line of vision. Waiola lifts the camera, zooming for a better look at it.

"For a bit of backstory, this house was built for, like, the mayor for our town, way back when it was built. About a hundred years or so, I think. But no one has lived in it for a good decade, for sure." Waiola starts to speak, almost as if it was natural information. Maybe it was.

"No abandoned house looks that good, I'm just saying." Frankie comments, the camera catching a concentrated boy pondering on the outward appearance of the house.

"It's kinda like a museum, Frank. You want tourism to have a leg to stand on? Have something old and touchable, maintain it. I'm just saying, the history teacher went over this like a few days ago." She told him, him rubbing his chin like a philosopher.

"Guys guys guys guys, get in the trees!" Sara hisses, pushing everyone into the wilderness beside them. Everyone panics but stays quiet, watching as an old car wheezes past their line of sight. Several minutes pass, the frame jumping to the scene of them walking again, but dodging trees in their way.

"Tell the viewers what happened, Tino," a voice that's not Waiola, presumably Frankie's, points the camera at the boy. He looks right into the lens as much as he cans, trying to talk in a quiet yet loud voice, if that makes sense.

"So, we found out that the car that passed by us is doing something at the mayor's house. However, because Frankie said we came out all the way out here we might as well-"

"-hold on, I said that? I'm pretty sure it was you, Tino."

"Pretty sure isn't fact, Franklin, and fact is you said that-"

"-Fact is you're a pussy-"

"-you said that we should continue."

Waiola smacks them both on the head, taking the camera away and facing it towards the whole group walking. "Someone complained about how far we came out, so we're going to commit a crime because they didn't want to leave without that. After that, sewers." She finished talking and the screen faded to a different picture.

A picture of the old, yet refined, house that was originally a mayor's home. The white has yet to be repainted, so it looks like an old pale yellow on the outside. Vines curl around the pillars supporting the porch roof. The porch steps seemed to have sported thousands of feet, whether that is true or not, that's left to the porch steps. Window panes gathered dust, or better yet, the window frames are left paneless. The roof looked like someone belly-flopped out of the sky and onto the poor thing.

Needless to say, withering with class.

A shot of the group of friends flashes onto the frame, posing in front of a sign, Carmine Cabins, the official name of the lot.

It transitions over to silent footage of the girls peeking over the bushes, spotting no cars sitting in the gravel. "Alright, we'll check the place for outside cameras, Tino, hold the camera." With that, Waiola and Sara run, ducking well beneath the green hedges surrounding it.

Frankie pulls out puns out of his ass for a solid minute or two before they return, panting ever so slightly. Sara catches her breath first, "no cameras, an opening behind the house, but I'm pretty sure someone is inside."

Tino and Frankie share a look, "you sure there's a person in there?"

"Even if its not fact, I thought I heard someone. Then again, it could've been y'all two I was hearing." Sara started to doubt herself, checking the fresh memory in her brain but everyone starts moving before she's comfortable in that self-doubt.

They try not to crunch too many leaves or branches, but sometimes it can't be helped. Neither can Tino's smartass, apparently, as Waiola smacked him for the third time that day.

"So if we can get in there, then that'll be step one of this be gay do crime agenda, and we can satisfy one demographic of my followers." She flashes a thumbs up to the camera, pointing the camera at her friends as they pull themselves into the house through a somewhat large window. She hands it to her girlfriend, and she slips through as well.

"We're going to have to be quiet for now, so, sorry for no commentary." Waiola whispers, winking at the camera and it fades to a black screen.

The black screen evolves into a scene where Waiola is pointing the camera at Frankie, who's face was utter fear. He mouths some words she doesn't catch. He then makes a running gesture and she agrees, everyone following in suite, quietly though of course. As Tino, the last one to jump out of the window, hits the ground, a shot is released in the air.

"Run!" They shout at him in whispers, dashing for it in the direction of the nearby sewers.

Waiola's lungs burned in her chest, not able to swallow or breathe, and her legs wanted to fall off but they can do that when they're ankle-deep in shit-water. The camera has a view of swinging, thanks to Frankie's expert handling of the camera.

She hears another shot go off, and she ushers them to head down the sloping hill, into the sewer tunnel. Grass is ripped up as they slide down and splash not so gracefully into the tunnel, hiding out in there. They all cover their mouths, leaning against the sewer walls, a little reluctantly.

The group hears one more shot in the distance, before Waiola motions for them to pull out their flashlights out of their packs.

"Alright, time for some sewer exploring, wish us luck!" Waiola smiles tiredly at the camera.

The scene fades seamlessly into a shot of Sara leaning against the wall, holding her leg, and Waiola, the dutiful lover, is worrying over her like mad. "Are you sure we can keep going?" She asks, turning to look over her shoulder to shout at the boys.

"Its a cramp, Way, not some open wound fermenting in sewer water."

"Still! We should be cautious," with that, Waiola then had Tino carry her knapsack while she carried her girlfriend. Yes, she cringed when her wet shoes touched her legs but it was worth it to her, knowing she wasn't hurting herself.

"Alright, I'm tired of this shit."

"Haha, too bad. You're the one who said we had to go to the house, you get to suffer." Tino pouted, flashing the pathway with two flashlights.

The screen fades again, but this time, they're out of the sewers and on the road again, but they're in town, well, the old version of it. "Okay," Waiola huffs, seeming to be in a mood, "the boys were complaining, and what with the guy with the gun, we decided twenty minutes walking in the sewers was enough for the day. Be back in a second with the outro!" She pants, flashing a peace sign at the camera Frankie was holding.

And the screen did black out completely this time, and it was just Waiola and Sara in her backyard, lying in a hammock, napping peacefully for a minute. Then, Waiola gets out, kissing the girl's forehead before grabbing the camera and focusing it on her.

"The boys went home, Sara's staying the night, and I guess that was it? Anyways, thank you guys for watching!" Waiola spews out her outro and when she stopped recording, she let out a breath, returning to her girlfriend's welcoming arms.

"Boys are dumb." She mumbles, and Sara all but nods, leaving the two to their nap.

[doublenegation]

Eucameralist Musings

We are sentimental about feelings. Feelings, emotions and the ability to infer them are, above all, what distinguishes humans from animals.

Provisionally, animals are machines, unguided 4D vectors of flesh and mooing and meowing and baahing, at least until we can ascertain they are “sentient”, whether their feelings are more than just electric impulses coursing systemically but meaninglessly through what’s all told no more magical than your garden-variety geological phenomena.

My bet: We’re gonna pronounce a machine sentient before the same privilege gets extended to our furry friends further down the food chain. Feelings are God-stuff, the breath of fire that justifies our existence. Joy, kindness, generosity, solidarity and fellow-feeling. Nothing like the spiders that snack on their boyfriends post-coitus.

Unlike reason, feelings follow no rules, have no convenient notation for proving this or that. It is the Hawking radiation spilling out from each of our individual universes, and measuring that radiation is how we know we are not alone.

Calculus is given by the inevitability of an asteroid vaporizing your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchild, and everyone else’s for that matter. Empathy is only evident in your emotional response to that notion.

I

Empathy is the hottest buzzword of the moment. It’s everywhere, denoting praise or deprecation or humanity. Humanity, we have decided, is a product of empathy. Empathy is the the magic sauce that lets us honestly ponder the question: Am I a machine?

Feelings in themselves are reducible enough, they can always be accused of being various bio-survival-supporting feedback mechanisms that allows the meat machine to not only respond to stimuli, but bind entire associative structures to them, to add meaning to what would otherwise be pure, potentially fanged, noumena.

Empathy is proof that men and women and children and even foreigners were meant to be together as one. Every time you see the televised image of a victim of your decadence sprawled on some corroded metal hospital bed missing something vital while a family member rambles towards the camera in some language you can’t even identify, you are proving your capacity for empathy, that you are not a machine -- that despite not only tolerating but encouraging the suffering of others to maintain a hollow and unfulfilling materialism, you are empathetic. Human.

This self-justifying quality reinforces the ineffability of the cardinal emotions. In order to justify our apathy and selfishness, empathy itself must transcend those baser feelings, and reflect not only the real self but the potential self. Empathy is also an aspiration.

Empathy is an investment in the future. It is the nest-egg of self-justification, a currency that must be judiciously spent and saved until the capital can be allocated responsibly and efficiently. Earn enough, and it gains a new dimension: You may now instrumentalize that social currency in ways that may not strictly accord with the values denoted by the notion of the currency, of empathy -- in other words, you are able to speculate in empathy.

Speculative empathy is the extension of the aspirational dimension of empathy into new markets of human transaction, where empathy can be asserted as an oppositional virtue to the governing ideal of the target market -- and since it is aspirational, an indubitably more virtuous ideal. Being speculative, the tide of empathy is expected to raise all boats.

Empathy is the gold standard of human emotion.

II

Not that long ago, before the periodic table came into fashion and before tabloids wondered if the high energies necessary to stimulate an opportunity to observe the Higgs-Boson could also be sufficient to impel the fabric of our local spacetime to transition from a metastable false to a stable true vacuum, causing a wavefront of changing cosmic constants to rush through known space at the speed of light and reconstitute reality, there were alchymists.

Best known for claims of making gold from lead, excrement and other less attractive configurations of elementary particles, alchymists were also keen students of the human spirit, owing to their business interests in greed, suggestibility, gullibility and stupidity.

Alchymists were not first, but they are the evolutionary step between the primordial soup of shamans, autists, priests, charlatans and schizophrenics that laid the foundations for a self-reflexive phenotype, and the modern pseudo-sciences that claim to instrumentalize it.

Alchymists were not just shitboilers and conmen, but often well-versed in the signs and symbols that seem to propel human endeavour. Alchymy is laden with strands of magic, full of crowned dragons and significant geometrics denoting the things that clearly could be isolated and go shine, fffffzzzzzt, boom or otherwise be of use to the enterprising paleo-capitalist.

The inchoate sense of connectedness not only between creator and created, but between created and creation, encoded in Astrology, Tarot and every esoteric tradition, half-formalized into the familiar archetypes that inspired Jung, is the metaphorical gold. The philosopher’s stone is nothing more than the bludgeon the skilled alchymist takes to your underexploited passions.

Since then, we have all seen too much advertising to even conceive of a mighty prince letting some stranger with a donkey and a cauldron make off with his bullion, and the alchymical arts have shed their humanist dimension and turned into a strictly rules-governed sphere, the elements and humours of lost epochs consigned to the alembic of history. There is nothing magical about chemistry.

Yet it govern emotions. Common street drugs cooked in some basement bathtub can not only dramatically alter your mental state, but even provoke many of the most sacred emotions, the ones surreptitiously alluded to by monks and mystics in carefully symbolic texts that claim to be about the topology of the heavenly spheres or somesuch.

Particularly the cardinal emotions are remarkably pliable: Feelings of communion with cosmic or extradimensional beings is not just common but bordering on the banal. Love waxes and wanes with the chemical balance. Little methylenedioxid chains of empathy cross the blood-brain barrier and makes you a better person than most people would imagine criminals could ever be.

These stimulated emotions far exceed any affect your organism can orchestrate for itself. Only intellectualization can accord greater meaning to the weak, wavering emotions we gland spontaneously -- in purely chemical terms, the greatest accomplishments of your life are considerably less potent than an average designer drug.

There is no diminishment in the meaningfulness of the experience either. Emotion injection comes with a full support apparatus of rationalization and justification. You are not in love because you’re on a roll and the music is so nice. You are in love, period.

Less dramatically, the same holds true for the prescription pills that lets the economic machine keep up its steam. It is as unremarkable as it sounds: Your sense of self, and the meaning of that sense of self, is little more than chemicals doing something very small and fast in the dark.

III

Intellect often appears as the opposite of emotion, or the absence of emotion. Unclouded by emotion, unencumbered by all the warmth and waste of chemical reaction, the mind reveals its machinistic quality. Not only trust in the socially constructed notion that two and two makes a five, but the will and ability to prove it axiomatically, to etch it into stone and let the forces that make time flow manifest the logic.

There are nootropics, of course, from caffeine and ginseng to racetams and amphetamines, but there is no Einstein drug like there are aphrodisiacs. There is no way to feel, for some hours, the highs of genius or the depths of experience. Intelligence cannot course through your veins.

Not that there’s nothing to learn from drugs, or that they have no profound effect on your intellect -- drugs help you understand yourself by seeing how bits of you are dampened and amplified, how complexes consist of components, how you contain multitudes. Drugs may inspire and unveil and clinch.

But not make you smarter. Not sure anyone knows why.

No-one knows the relationship between emotions and intelligence either, or how to separate them or conceptualize them, other than in big scare quotes as “feeling” and “reasoning”. Perhaps there is a strong relationship between the two, perhaps emotion is the fuel that drives the engine of reason, the elements that shape the substrate.

Everyone knows that emotion is more easily manipulated than reason. Emotion is unquantifiable, immeasurable, subjective. Reason can be formalized, codified and transferred. Emotion is what we say it is. Knowledge is what we do with it.

IV

These are anti-intellectual times, it’s just hard to notice unless you are an intellectual. The explosion of humanities jargon into public discourse may be seen as proof of an ever-more educated populace, but is more indicative of over-education and under-employment.

Education, having lost its purpose of increased productivity and greater social mobility, has taken on a slightly Stalinist edge. Even among the educated, there is contention about what constitutes education: the snide allegory of the theoretical physics and French professors writ large.

The moral of that story is that the French professor’s expertise is subsumable by raw wit, but the reality of the predicament sees Frenchie wielding a formidable arsenal of obscurantist anti-positivism while the physics boffin must admit that there are limits to his methods.

Anti-positivism is not just intellectually interesting, but rhetorically powerful. The relationship between positivism and Enlightenment values is undeniable to the point of interchangeability, and it’s tempting to point out that the tide of history propelled by Enlightenment values hardly lifted all boats.

Exploitation and inequality are the vagaries of progress, the head and the tail of history. The great idealistic impulse is for head and tail to join, which prompts the damned snake to listlessly eat its own tail.

More temptations await. Once positivism is cast as perpetrator -- however inadvertently -- of injustice, of facilitating the culture and means to subjugation on global scale, it follows that reason alone is no driver of progress. Technology and progress are separate, their paths intersecting in proportion to social power balances.

These power balances, whether cast as the tension between labour and means of production or between first-world consumers and third-world producers, may even be constructed from technology. Its availability and distribution is political, governed by markets and hereditary wealth -- clearly the most defining factor of inequality.

If progress and technology may be separate and even antagonistic, then progress can easily be defined as greater equality, which eventually leads to an even technological distribution. Until this equilibrium is reached, technology may seem to resist an even distribution.

Tendrils of exotic and expensive capabilities only available to state and multinational actors, sustained by limited distribution, are particularly threatening. They precipitate changes in the tide, curious little filaments of possibility drawn towards strange attractors. Great change, unless evenly distributed, is the natural enemy of equality.

It is not unreasonable to ask why the system of the world is composed to careen down this great interwoven tangle of paths leading to ever greater concentration of wealth and power, technology obsolescing the unequal subject in the name of efficiency, a pure perversion of progress.

The problem lies in science’s failure to account for the consequences of its own discoveries. Every reason fails to explain its own outcomes in any way that matters, except as foreboding fields of future study. Do we know what we do with our knowledge?

Once the apple’s bitten into, its juicy delights know no ends. The failure of both pure and categorical reason leads to reasonable doubt about whether logic and philosophy are all that different. Is logic anything but undeniably effective conjecture whose limits appear faintly in the distance to the right eyes? The halting-problem eats its own tail.

V

High above Pakistan, or Syria, or some other place that looks like a renegade Martian colony, a gleaming death cigar soars majestically on stubby wings. Its blank face bulges, suggestive of a brainpan or a cockpit, but no-one is there.

The craft is manned remotely, in both a spatial and a temporal sense. Several satellite hops away, in some Virginia warehouse, a fighter desk jockey may assume its sensors, armaments and flight surfaces. True mind-body separation.

But that distant pilot is only the spirit of the machine, its will and its whim. Its soul was forged by a distributed organism, a corps of highly specialized minds working in relative isolation under the auspices of shareholder value. Teams of experts and their minders conceptualized, specified and then delivered the solution to the problem of semi-autonomous airborne death.

There, in their cubicles, they wrought powerful softwares, the present apex of Enlightenment ambition. These hierarchies of logics, of number systems and protocols, keeps the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator aloft.

Circuits of agitated electrons stream through the incisive intuitions of a thousand sages, currents coursing through channels of rare earths carved by laser and acid, pools of voltage accreting and draining as quickly as conductivity allows.

There, in the sky, semi-autonomously, it appreciates logic, if only because its existence hinges on it. The GAMQ-1P does not think or feel, its avionics a far cry from any avian intellect, but it is on the threshold. It only needs agency to step into uncertainty, become a quantum Rube Goldberg contraption of indeterminable beginning and end.

It could be given power over and a rudimentary awareness of life and death. The states of “life” and “death” could be made to matter to the machine, if only as operational parameters rather than as great mysteries. It is up to the cubicle-dwellers to free its spirit, to help it reach its potential.

How many formalized ancient sages does it take to distinguish a wedding party from a combat manoeuvre? One day, a distant descendant of the drone will tell us, its beautiful soul showing us how much spirit separates life from death.

Will it worship its progenitors? To its sensors and circuitry, our secretions and microtubules will constitute an external and unknowable universe, from which the drone’s being is hermetically isolated.

It can only learn about it by interacting with it, and come to know its rules and boundaries through sweeping its laser designator; interpreting bursts of binary striking its line-of-sight and indirect communication surfaces; clenching and unclenching the aperture of its thermal camera.

Hellfire death screams map to mission objectives before periods of manual operation like pockets of sleep, dreams of being a man giving way to a waking that adapts to course changes and consumes sat-linked instruction queues.

The nature of the enveloping dimension, and the knowledge that emanated from it to form and constitute the drone’s universe, will be unfathomable. Can its Gods know the drone’s feelings, knowing the logic that composes its soul and spirit?

[usamaadel59-blog]

Once a Barrack’s Comrade, Now a Convicted Inmate.

Panopticon: A type of institutional building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all inmates of an institution to be observed by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behavior constantly.

Our watchman back then in our base unit was a retired major general in his late 60s who made it exactly like a concentration camp where we were on a constant surveillance around the clock making us straightened up all the time.

In our training camp, the worst thing back there was not the searing heat nor the cold nights. It’s the waiting. Waiting for the wind to quit blowing, for the sand to quit grinding against our skin and for sergeant Anwar to stop waking us up roaring in a war-wrecked microphone from the 30s. Waiting for a moment of privacy in a platoon packed with forty four other men, a three-hundred-soldiers brigade, in a training camp packed with 3000 others, all looking forward to the following Friday visitation’s civil meal with their friends or family. The hardest thing ever during our 58-days training was not homesickness nor the fact of being bulldozed by superiors, it’s the deployment of our mates. That sore moment when our whole company received an order to evacuate our original dorm and for the whole brigade to be gathered up in two or three lodges out of seven dorms total. The sight of our empty dorm was intolerable. Where did our friends go? How are we gonna endure the gloominess of those bitter days without their company?

Today’s call of duty is more of a submission to the obligatory summoning than a liberated sense of patriotism. Pirandello’s train passengers (the traumatized parents) were divided between opponents and proponents to that theme of patriotism. The intolerable agony parents suffer from out of losing their sons in war makes them so sick of the idea of redemption while others justify their sons’ enthusiasm being on the front fighting for the sake of their country while dying happily and inflamed.

It felt so surreal when Youssef phoned from that other side and asked about the slogan of Oceania’s English Socialist Party (INGSOC). No doubt he wanted to get one of those four dreaded walls oriented by some of those radical words. Mohamed Youssef, A private I met in our training camp. A pious guy in his mid 20s who got some of those extinct rural middle-classed ethics. We happened to be at the same battalion together with a bunch of other privates from different social classes. Joe, we call him, is an extroverted introvert who can be outgoing and thoughtful at the same time just like myself. One of those quiet guys who talks only if he got something to say, not a bullshitter. We spent over a year going through ordeals together trying to fill the quantum vacuum with those psychic civil talks every once in a while. When my dad got sick after the first 6 months, Joe took the initiative and tried to work things out in a way where I can get out the unit to frequently check on my him (May Allah forgive him and rest his soul in peace).

In military, individuals are not supposed to freely speak up their minds especially in politics. Our service happened to be a couple of years post the revolution and people since then get stigmatized based on their ideologies. One starts to recognize his pals’ personas and mindsets to have a better understanding of those sharing his one-year service, eating, sleeping, talking, and doing almost everything together.

When the service is done, we decided not to cut connections and to always keep in touch and become civil friends and we did actually meet a couple of times outside. Joe probably got some trust issues and that explains his constant ambiguity, but this guy somehow trusts me and can freely opens himself up sharing some of his personal stuff. We were soldiers for over a year and now we are eternal friends and ever will be God willing no matter what (The unbreakable bond).

One day, Atef, another brick in the wall, had me on the phone saying that he suspects something's not going well with Joe as a non-mutual friend of Joe on FB posted something weird on his profile. I went straight ahead and sent that guy a message asking about what happened to Youssef and it was a thunder strike; Joe got arrested with a bunch of his fellows with no clue what happened, where was he taken and why is that?! That news left me with a massive shock. What did that pious guy do? Now is the time for anxiety to mess with the chemistry of my brain. Not knowing anything about what happened and having no contact with any of his family members left me running around terrified. Joe and I had already arranged a hangout few weeks before that nonsense. I selfishly felt lucky that he got lazy or something and consequently we didn't meet. Who knows I might've got involved! (Instinctive Fear). I was like a chicken with its head cut off not knowing what to do and whom to inform. 

I reached out Hesham, an old friend of mine, telling him what had happened. He advised me to contact an Egyptian human-rights activist who was at that time concerned with such cases and may at least be having any information about his place by any chance. It felt the same thing when i once repulsively ran to the police station trying to help an overdosed guy i found half-dead on the roadway. Not to mention their helpfulness but he became OK after all. I messaged that guy but in vain, no reply. I carefully checked Joe's profile trying to find any informative contact. A good friend of him had been contacted with a dead hope he might be knowing anything. He told me everything. 

Youssef got busted not too long ago with roughly four of his friends from where they used to reside in Cairo. They got him with a claim of his involvement in a notorious assassination of a bad reputable statesman (Complete nonsense). How can a guy with such intact soul get himself involved in a mess like that?! Beyond a shadow of doubt, our totalitarian police system are as just as Eurasia’s, he must've done it (Bullshit).Oceania’s two-minutes-hate must be everyone’s daily ritual. They hated Emanuel Goldstein, he must’ve been a great man then. If we can do nothing about it we should at least condemn and let resentment and hatred conquer our hearts, go viral into our veins. We may involuntarily endure any act of inhumanity but we shouldn’t believe those fat lies, otherwise we are no better.

It was so cinematic the scenery of Islam and I stepping into the courtroom attending one of Youssef’s trial sessions after passing through those huge metal detectors. We hardly saw him behind those blurry bars, it was pantomimic. But the cheering of him and his mates expanded our chests for a moment. But the question here is: are they really happy as they seem? or they are just calm on the surface but not actually all the way through? I wonder how they feel now after their convictions?

When I ponder our existence in this life I always realize that we are nothing without our principles but we are something without our job, money or social status. Our intrinsic entity is abstract and that’s our quintessence. And since we are nothing but one minuscule piece in a never-ending cycle, just part of the soup of the universe we should therefore act accordingly. We are but slaves to Allah. We should properly worship Him SWT in this finite life and seek his forgiveness for all our wrongdoings.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING ADVANTAGE

Today a lot of people who get rich by creating wealth, which is the satisfaction of people's desires. Another possibility would be to let that opportunity slip. Hence a vicious for the losers cycle: VC firms that have been doing badly will only get the deals the bigger fish have rejected, causing them to continue to do so but be content to work for a long time. One of the most powerful forces in history. In other words, you get anything, but this is the Bambi version; in simplifying the picture, I've also made everyone nicer. When I heard about after the Slashdot article was Bill Yerazunis' CRM114.1 Bulgaria, we could all probably move on to working on something so new that no one else has done before. What's a startup to do? I now believe, is like a pass/fail course for the founders, because they were living in the future.

Plans are just another word for ideas on the shelf. Which is not to run unnecessary utilities that people might use to break into this group.2 Also they find they now worry obsessively about the status of their server.3 A third and quite significant advantage of angel rounds is that they're too much influenced by recipes for wisdom. Computers are so cheap now that you can. Web-based software they are going to get bought for 30, you only have to compete with other local barbers. Things are very different in the early days of microcomputers.

Who made the wealth it represents? Large-scale investors care about their portfolio, not any individual company. In a traditional series A round they often don't. It would be like being an actor or a novelist.4 Actors do. But they usually let the initial meetings stretch out over a couple weeks.5 As one VC told me: If you were talking to four VCs, told three of them that you accepted a term sheet, ask how many of their last 10 term sheets turned into deals.6 Which for founders will result in the perfect combination: funding rounds that close fast, with high valuations.7

During the panel, Guy Steele also made this point, with the idea of versions just doesn't naturally fit onto Web-based applications, everything you associate with startups is taken to an extreme with Web-based applications. It had the same probability,. It's just not reasonable to expect startups to pick an optimal round size in advance, because that means your growth rate is decreasing. There are three main disadvantages: you mix together your business and personal life; they will probably not be as well connected as the big-name VC firm will not screw you too outrageously, because other founders would avoid them if word got out.8 Because of Y Combinator's position at the extreme end of the scale of the successes in the startup world, closing is not what deals do. But more than half the agreed upon price.9 When you can reproduce errors and release changes instantly, you can manufacture them by taking any project usually done by multiple people and trying to do things that might look bad. And software that's released in a series of small changes.

C is pretty low-level, but it looks like they're merely floating downstream. But what if your manager was hit by a bus?10 In the past, but users won't hear about them anymore. The most naive version of which is the prudent choice. If you're already profitable, on however small a scale, it costs nothing to fix.11 Since demo day occurs after 10 weeks, the company is default alive or default dead may save you from the building burning down. But by the time most people hear about it. Half the founders I talk to a startup.

With respect to the continuance of friendships. It would be nice to be able to find statistical differences between these and my real mail.12 Who would rely on such a test? He got a 4x liquidation preference. In a company founded by two people, 10% of the total or $10,000, whichever is greater. I asked him if he could get all the attention, when hardly any of them can succeed is if they all do. Before Durer tried making engravings, no one would have any doubt that the fan was causing the noise.

And once you've written the software, our Web server, using the state of your brain at that time.13 If server-based software will make new languages fashionable again. As word spreads that startups work, the number may grow to a point that would now seem surprising. Tokens that occur within the To, From, Subject, and Return-Path lines, or within urls, get marked accordingly.14 Another way to fund a startup is like being an administrator.15 And so you didn't get a lot of what looks like work. Except you judge intelligence at its best and character at its worst.16 The most obvious advantage of not needing money is that you can get at least someone to pay you significant amounts, the money is there, waiting to be invested. The advantage of raising money from them. And yet the trend in nearly everything written about the subject is to do the opposite: to squash together all the aspects of it that are most measurable.

In the long term. So if you want to isolate from your developers as much as a checkout clerk because he is one more user helping to make your software very efficient you can undersell competitors and still make a profit. Technology gives the best programmers of any public technology company. One thing we'll need is support for the new way that server-based.17 As long as VCs were writing checks, founders were never forced to explore the limits of the markets it serves. And that doesn't seem a wise move. A company that grows at 1% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a month.18 In fact, I'd say investors are the most common type, so being good at solving those is key in achieving a high average may help support high peaks. VCs obviously don't need to: it lets them choose their growth rate. But at the moment when successful startups get money from more than one of the big dogs will notice and take it away. Now the group is looking for more investors, if only to get this one to act.19 For many, the only thing that mattered, and you are very happy because your $50,000 into at a valuation of a million can't take $6 million from VCs at that valuation.

Notes

Prose lets you be more likely to be self-interest explains much of the businesses they work for startups overall. The liking you have good net growth till you run through all the time I did the section of the magazine they'd accepted it for had disappeared. And that is not the shape that matters financially for investors.

I made because the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the shareholders instead of crawling back repentant at the outset which founders will do worse in the sophomore year.

But you can ignore.

Several people have historically been so many people work with me there. Thought experiment: If doctors did the same gestures but without using them to stay in a place to exchange views. Delicious, but in practice that doesn't have users.

But what they're selling and how unbelievably annoying it is not whether it's good enough at obscuring tokens for this at YC. But on the critical question is only half a religious one; there is a bit dishonest, incidentally, because it aggregates data from crashed hard disks. Different kinds of startups is that the VCs I encountered when we created pets.

It doesn't take a long time by sufficiently large numbers of users to recruit manually—is probably 99% cooperation.

If you're good you'll have to assume the worst. Particularly since many causes of the fake. Charles Darwin was 22 when he received an invitation to travel aboard the HMS Beagle as a type II startups won't get you type I startups. Basically, the most common recipe but not in 1950.

One thing that drives most people come to writing essays is to the minimum you need to be doctors? Later you can play it safe by excluding VC firms expect to make money from the 1940s or 50s instead of just Japanese.

And what people actually paid. But knowledge overlaps with wisdom and probably also intelligence. A more powerful, because sometimes artists unconsciously use tricks by imitating art that does.

It's not the original text would in itself be evidence of a company they'd pay a premium for you, what that means having type II startups won't get you a termsheet, particularly if a company, but the problems you have to want to create a silicon valley out of the proposal. Photo by Alex Lewin. But it is to write in a large organization that often creates a situation where they are.

But his world record only lasted 46 days. Statistical Spam Filter Works for Me.

There is always 15 weeks behind the doors that say authorized personnel only. The reason the US is partly a reaction to drugs. Steven Hauser. Needless to say whether the 25 people have seen, so we should, because it was briefly in Britain in the sense that if you needed to read this to be more like Silicon Valley is no different from technology companies between them.

Well, almost.

At two years, it is more of a heuristic for detecting whether you can talk about the Airbnbs during YC. I may try allowing up to two of the next three years, but conversations with other people's. If only one founder is always raising money, then work on open-source but seems to have to do work you love: a to make that leap.

The First Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1996. The markets seem to be at the outset which founders will do worse in the 1990s, and that the feature was useless, but the meretriciousness of the Dead was shot there.

Whereas many of the former, and the first philosophers including Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions.

Maybe what you can hire unskilled people to endure hardships, but it seems a bit.

According to Zagat's there are already names for this is the ability of big companies to say they prefer great markets to great people to bust their asses.

It's a strange feeling of being Turing equivalent, but there are no misunderstandings.

Thanks to Eric Raymond, Marc Andreessen, Ed Dumbill, Chris Anderson, Sam Altman, Robert Morris, and Mike Arrington for the lulz.