#conclusions about it and thus make our own conclusions. we interpret the lessons and they dont heavy handily explain them like we’re

[kieranculkingirl]

if there’s one movie that will never fail to make me sob uncontrollably, its soul. its everything but its mostly the message that just living regular old life, that searching for a purpose, IS the purpose. 22 found her spark because she got to experience being a human and she got to see how beautiful every single part of life is, even the scary parts. and that is just my favorite thing a movie could possibly be about

[misterparadigm]

A Critique of Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus”

The following is a brief critical breakdown of Albert Camus's highly influential essay. In it, I explore Camus's implicit meanings as I find them, and question the validity of his conclusions about the nature of suffering and man's capacity for contending with it by will alone.

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In philosophy, absurdity is defined as the conflict between the tendency to seek meaning in life and the inability to find such meaning with any logical certainty. The question of meaning has been at the heart of many philosophical explorations and treatises. The second half of the 20th century and beyond saw a spread in the acceptance of the notion of life’s meaninglessness, though no definitive and satisfactory cure for the ennui and nihilism that often follows has been laid out.

Perhaps most famous and cherished is Albert Camus’s essay exploring the Myth of Sisyphus and his ultimate declaration therein that, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” In this essay, Camus thinks over the myth in brief and lays out an interpretation of it which centers Sisyphus’s acknowledgment of his predicament, acceptance, and most importantly his personal resolve and will to view his burden as something which gives his life meaning. We must imagine Sisyphus finding contentment in his futile labor—an act of will which scorns the gods and denies their effort to break the spirit of Sisyphus with the assertion that a life of eternally futile labor is something torturous. Camus efforts—a bit belabored, in my opinion—to make a modern hero of the one who belittles the gods and their cruel, arrogant, resentful judgments. In Camus’s view, these gods have earned no respect in their dealings with mortals. For Camus, a humanist who would sooner dive headlong into oblivion than seek out a god whom he despises, it is a noble and purposeful pursuit to deny any such god the pleasure of punishing the creature which he created to despise him to begin with—a creature forced to live out a scenario of absurdity concocted by that very god. Camus refuses to respond with devastation, but resolves to make such existence its own purpose. He asks us to grasp our free will, own it, and wield it against any force which seeks to turn the man against himself.

But is this assessment and subsequent assertion valid? A number of factors are at play here which Camus seems not to acknowledge. First, we have to acknowledge context. Sisyphus is dealing with a particular set of gods, so his situation is unique to that scenario. Camus seems to imply that this situation can be applied to the modern man and his relationship to whichever god he believes in. This isn’t apparent, and if one is to assert that it is, one must first take as a given that life is absurd, or else the resentment toward the god who created it isn’t validated. On the other hand, if life is not absurd and is in fact meaningful and purposeful, one must contend with the notion that the god who created it is of some authority on the matter of how best to embody such meaning and purpose. To Camus’s credit, we are given no empirical evidence or common enough experience to adequately, categorically state the purposefulness of existence. What we are offered, rather, is a quiet firmament and a divine hand so subtle that one can barely propose to experience its activity—rarely with any convincing force, despite fervent conviction, and perhaps even considered malevolent rather than benevolent. The suffering of life, after all, makes it easy to resent our very being. Life is discomfort, pain, confusion, and death in greater measure than pleasure and joy. Pleasure and joy, even, seem starkly restricted as vices of desire in the eyes of “modern” gods, so much that to see the beauty of life is to do so in spite of life itself rather than to acknowledge that beauty’s apparentness as we would life’s suffering. Even so, the challenge of life may not then be to grasp one’s own will and deny God, but rather, as Hamlet mused, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. To take accountability for one’s will and wield it, much as Camus suggests, as a weapon—not against God, but rather against the apparent evils of existence, of which we would know nothing were it not for eating from the proverbial Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Often, we get caught up in the idea that God created the circumstances in which we exist, and created us to exist within those circumstances. By this musing along we may justify a resentment toward such a god and claim absurdity and cruelty. It’s quite easy to do so. However, we rarely seem to consider that, according to the myth, we were created in a more desirable scenario. Even so, we were created with free will and given direction on what to do and what not to do in order to avoid less desirable circumstances. Our free will standing, we acted in what would seem to be an inevitable manner. We were tempted to know what God knows about existence, and so we consumed the apple and opened our minds to the knowledge of good and evil. In doing so, we betrayed the trust of God and refused his advice, thus we became fully conscious and, consequently, fully accountable for our actions. With the knowledge of good and evil, a being with free will bears a responsibility to act according to the good rather than the evil. This early awakening left us naive—scarcely prepared to contend with the greater evils of the universe—and we’ve been mired in it ever since, rarely even able to see clearly what constitutes good and what constitutes evil. The complexity of such a task of judgment is said to be the court of God, and we are not to engage in such things, but we are yet left with no one but ourselves to hold each other accountable—and so how can we not judge? There is much that goes into this, but it’s a digression of the topic at hand, which is the validity of Camus’s assessment of the transferable lesson of Sisyphus’s fate.

The second factor is the presumption that Sisyphus could have the stamina to will joy out of his futile labor for eternity. It is difficult to imagine how his psychology might evolve over an endless span of time. Is it even reasonable to imagine that he might settle on a particular view of his predicament? How could it be that his view would last forever? It seems more likely that his mind might unravel after so long a labor at a single task, and that he would dissolve into his routine—that he would devolve into a machine. Such a task, it seems to me, is tailored to disintegrate the spirit of a man so that there is nothing left but the laboring organic robot, dead of his animus and dull of mind. His programming, which once explored myriad tasks and evolved in spirit accordingly, is now relegated to the track of a single interminable function, and so his mechanism devolves into only what is necessary for the eternal task. The animating spirit of a free consciousness is defined by that freedom. It is defined by the mind’s ability to explore and learn and adapt and grow. It fills the space in which it inhabits. If that space shrinks, the mind’s environment for operation shrinks. If that space takes a limited form, so does the mind. Sisyphus’s mind, I’d wager, would eventually mold to the well-worn form of his task and atrophy at all other ports of knowledge and behavior. The spirit dies without freedom. It dissolves into oblivion, a gaseous ghost seeping out in small whispers over time, until nothing remains but the solitary circuit. This is, after all, the argument so often levied against the dreadful monotony of a labor economy. One pictures the old cog-in-the-machine imagery—the grey man marching alongside his grey coworkers, seemingly oblivious to his living death. It seems to me that Camus puts an unreasonable and inexecutable responsibility on the creature of Sisyphus: to be the sole perpetuator of his own universe of knowledge, both known and unknown, so that he may propagate the only environment in which he might stave off his spiritual dissipation. This was the environment of free consciousness, which has been robbed of him. This is the plight of the prisoner; the longer a prisoner remains imprisoned, the less likely they are to thrive under freer circumstances. Their mind has adapted to a particular system, environment, and routine. And so it seems naive of Camus to imagine Sisyphus happy.

Camus focuses on the time in which Sisyphus is “going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end.” This is the time in which Sisyphus is left truly alone with his thoughts, which can only ever turn to his task, that task being the only thing left of his life and the thing which will occupy his eternity. It is here that the measure of his character—his will and resolve—is on perfect display. “That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate.” Camus suggests that, “if this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?” The tragedy is that Sisyphus has no opportunity for delusion. He cannot pretend that there is hope of breaking this cycle. He knows that this fate is eternal, and that for every moment to follow, across all space and time, he will only ever be among the moments confined to this task—isolated in his rut. His only hope, I would say, is that over time he might lose this consciousness. In a situation like this, eternal life is an intolerable cruelty, though Camus would claim he has the will to defy the cruelty by reframing it. This Camusian grace seems an illusion to me right on the face of it, and his solution boils down to ignoring the inexorable fact of the situation: there is nothing but the task, and no perfectly repeated task can be infinitely engaging or contenting to the actively conscious mind. The implied grace finds its source in acceptance of the fate, and through acceptance one can neutralize the misery—or so Camus suggests. But again, it does little to truly contend with the eternal element. Camus’s assertion that it is possible to willfully accept such a fate and maintain that flat acceptance for not just an inconceivably long time, but for the most inconceivable length of time, seems itself absurd. Perhaps it is even the very definition of absurd. Camus asks that an actively conscious being spend his infinite life mitigating his misery by perpetually accepting it as the mere fact and state of his existence. He is asking a man who has experienced and loved life (multiple times) so much that he incapacitated Death to simply step back and view his perfectly measured misery as a neutral state of being, and to do this forever, infinitely, perpetually. How absurd is such a demand? He is asking that Sisyphus seek contentment where there is no logical contentment to be sought.

If absurdity is seeking meaning where there appears to be none, then certainly seeking contentment where there appears to be none is itself absurd. The assertion, then, is that we can somehow manifest our own contentment through will, which is, in a way, no different than trying to manifest meaning through will. It’s the act of mitigating circumstances through the illusory impetus of pure will. One may be able to bear the illusion for a measured time, but over the course of an eternity the will gives way to circumstance because the circumstance, in the case, is the immutable factor. A free consciousness, however, is defined by its dynamic existence. But if that existence no longer inhabits a dynamic environment, whatever meaning or purpose it may have had is, as a matter of logic, eradicated by the static and immutable nature of the circumstance.

It is merely a matter of logic, which the free consciousness will have determined in short order, and so the emotions cycle in whatever manner they may until the consciousness is dulled by its monotonous task. Sisyphus’s fate, I assert, is the dissipation of his free consciousness over time, until this man who loved his living freedom so much has his mind reduced to a dim, singular function. His punishment is the indignity of the gradual decline in free will until there is no being left, and he is but a moving sculpture signifying the fate of one who refuses Death. His punishment is the denial of rebirth, for he has refused the necessary mechanism which gives rise to it.

[mhevarujta]

Camilla Macaulay is such a fascinating female character

Some readers have claimed that she is a badly written female character; one-dimensional, weak, barely there and overshadowed by the male characters even though she could have been developed more as the only girl in the group.

Others see her as a wicked, deceptive woman who uses her sexuality to pull strings and to manipulate the male characters.

The unreliable manner in which the book is narrated and Richard’s obsessive and biased view of Camilla that is rooted in denial even when he glimpses the darkest parts of her does not allow the reader to have a full picture of the character.

This elusiveness makes this young woman a fictional character that cannot be ignored. Who is Camilla Macaulay? My answer always changed. I have theories that contradict each other and that constantly reshape. Each time I think I’ve settled a conclusive interpretation seems to slip away from me. So in this post I wanted to focus on how I think of Camilla today.

Camilla was raised by women with horsed and rivers; an image really reminiscent to the Amazons who were placed on the Thermodon river, riding horses and hunting. Hunting connects them to Artemis/Diana, the worship of whom the Amazons were connected. Apollo, Diana’s twin brother was named Amazonius and Charles, the only man around, is described in several occasions in a way that brings in mind the depictions of Apollo. Moreover, Bunny parallels Camilla to Diana. Artemis/Diana was the product of rape and as a newborn she helped her mother give birth to her brother. She is the goddess of hunting among other things and one of her requests from Zeus was her eternal innocence and the maintenance of her virginal status. And she is an unforgiving goddess. In fact, Tartt’s idea for Camilla’s name came from Virgil’s Aeneid. Camilla was the daughter of King Metabus who promised his daughter to Diana ��to be a virgin warrior in service of the goddess- in order to save her.

Tartt’s Camilla lost her virginal status. She lost her innocence. In fact she was manipulated and abused by the only male she grew up with. What I find interesting is the way she is introduced in Julian’s lecture, by reciting a passage that is memorable to her (at which point Henry winks at her):

Thus he died, and all the life struggled out of him;

and as he died he spattered me with the dark red

and violent-driven rain of bitter-savored blood

to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers

of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds.

 Camilla is undeniably tied to the image of Klytemnestra murdering Agamemnon. Another thing I’ve noticed is her deepest desire:

“And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?”

“To live,” said Camilla.

Unlike Bunny ‘s ‘to live forever’ Camilla’s answer can be interpreted as living in the sense of experiencing life freely and it makes sense in a way. She is a female character who has been trapped between all these male characters. She is formidable as any of them but she is being suffocated by Charles who is free to do as he pleases but does not allow her to have the life she chooses without getting out of control; who is passive-aggressive when he feels their ‘arrangement’ is threatened in any way. It is interesting how Bunny compares potentially being with Camilla to marrying Charles/a female version of him. It is a testament to how much his presence is affecting the façade that Camilla wears for the rest of the world. It’s also interesting that despite both of them growing up with women SHE is the one who’s dressed in a way that men do not relate to women.

The first lesson is also the first time that Richard glimpses the mind behind the lovely face:

I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining.

 And these glimpses of a sharp and darker mind allow us to make more sense of her more intimate connection to Henry. After the aforementioned wink, a really significant moment is when Henry helps her after she has cut her artery. Henry is the one who takes action to help and Camilla is concerned that she’ll bleed all over him and that she’s too heavy for him. He doesn’t mind. When Charles appears he is the one who’s asked to take the glass out, to release her from the pain, but he just can’t do it. It’s Henry who takes action yet again and he recognized her bravery. To me, the entire situation foreshadows Camilla moving on from Charles to Henry and it established the reason she got attached to him –his ability to accept her for who she is with no judgment, to carry her, to let her bleed on him and to remove what hurts her even if that hurts her in some ways- which is something that Tartt never shows us directly.

Do I believe that Camilla and Henry conspired to kill Charles? I think I do. I think Charles�� death might have even been planned for the Bacchanalia and gone wrong or that at the very least that that was when the idea of his murder really took root. Let’s see some facts: All the participants are high. Henry is the one who murdered the farmer in the frenzy of that night and yet Camilla had SO much blood on her:

“I suppose we’ll never know what really happened,” he said. “We didn’t find her until a good bit later. She was sitting quietly on the bank of a stream with her feet in the water, her robe perfectly white, and no blood anywhere except for her hair. It was dark and clotted, completely soaked. As if she’d tried to dye it red.”

This image gives me the impression of Camilla trying to reclaim her lost innocence by going back to the river, to the sight where she grew up as a child, but her head, her mind, is still tainted and cannot be cleansed.

The way Charles appears is as fascinating:

Charles had a bloody bite-mark on his arm that he had no idea how he’d got, but it wasn’t a human bite. Too big. And strange puncture marks instead of teeth. Camilla said that during part of it, she’d believed she was a deer; and that was odd, too, because the rest of us remember chasing a deer through the woods, for miles it seemed.

[…]

Really, I do not know how that happened. There was a dreadful mess. I was drenched in blood and there was even blood on my glasses. Charles tells a different story. He remembers seeing me by the body. But he says he also has a memory of struggling with something, pulling as hard as he could, and all of a sudden becoming aware that what he was pulling at was a man’s arm, with his foot braced in the armpit. Francis—well, I can’t say. Every time you talk to him, he remembers something different.”

[…]

“And that bite.”

“You’ve never seen anything like it,” said Francis. “Four inches around and the teeth marks just gouged in. Remember what Bunny said?”

Henry laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Tell him.”

“Well, there we all were, and Charles was turning to get the soap— I didn’t even know Bunny was there, I suppose he was looking in the door—when all of a sudden I heard him say, in this weird businesslike way, ‘Looks like that deer took a plug out of your arm, Charles.’ ”

It seems that Camilla tried to get her innocence back, what was stolen from her, by hurting Charles. This also throws us back to the passage of Clytemnestra killing Agamemnon to avenge what was manipulatively stolen from her (her daughter). I also love how the boys see themselves as wolves but Camilla, who was ahead of them, saw them as ‘a pack of dogs’. The way they are painted differently depending on the perspective is genius.

There is also a connection between the deer, the Meanads and the kind of living –the freedom- which Camilla seeks that has been textually established:

And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?

Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst.

 This is even more essential if one considers that the Maenads are tied to mythological events in which they tend to kill or tear apart men and animals in a state of frenzy. Moreover, some of the epithets that were traditionally attributed to them are connected to wool-spinning; the kind of imagery that can easily be connected to the Fate Clotho who span the thread of life and who decided in some occasions when mortals or gods should be saved or should die. If this theory is correct this is quite fitting for Camilla.

 Then there is Richard’s comparison of Henry and Camilla to Pluto and Persephone:

It was shocking to hear him speak of her with such intimacy. Pluto and Persephone. I looked at his back, prim as a parson’s, tried to imagine the two of them together. 

 This is a significant choice on Tartt’s part. In the different sources Pluto and Hades are both names used for the ruler of the underworld but Hades is portrayed as violent and his abduction of Persephone is usually equated to rape, while Pluto in the Eleusinian Mysteries is seen as a loving husband to her.

 Here’s my interpretation of Henry and Camilla possibly going after Charles. I see them as two people who have accepted each other but who can’t accept their own situation. Henry feels too detached from people and from the world. Out of the characters he only loves Julian all-consumingly and Camilla in a tamer way. When it comes to Richard, I think that his interest primarily lies with the fact that he sees him as someone who could finally be experiencing the same detachment. Henry is brought into the situation because his lack of empathy would make killing Charles easier in case Camilla had cold feet. The death of the farmer is an accident during the confusion that the drugs were causing. 

But that night changed a lot. I think that after that night Camilla started regretting her decision, which eventually led her to staying with Henry in her attempt to break out of her situation in a way that wouldn’t involve getting her brother out of the way.

On the other hand Henry does not see beauty in living; this is something that he only glimpses during that night of ecstasy and which he tried to find again ever since. Henry, pristine and controlled, saw in that moment of total freedom that came with killing as the consequence of being in a state that did not allow him to be burdened by consciousness and by thinking a possible meaning in life. And this fact along with his preexisting lack of empathy made murder all the more easy for him.

Camilla’s unwillingness to go through with killing Charles –like Persephone she’s not always tied to the darkness of the underworld and of death- certainly changed her and Henry’s relationship but they still danced around it. The point of not going back was when Camilla showed that she herself was afraid of Henry. Killing had become part of Henry’s definition of living and Camilla showed that despite herself she saw that as a threat; as something to be weary and fearful of.

 Henry bit his lip. He went to the window and looked out the corner of the shade. Then he turned around. He still had the pistol. 

“Come here,” he said to Camilla.

She looked at him in horror. So did Francis and I. He beckoned to her with his gun arm. “Come here,” he said. “Quick.”

[…]

Camilla took a step away from him. Her gaze was terrified. “No, Henry,” she said, “don’t …”

To my surprise, he smiled at her. “You think I’d hurt you?” he said. “Come here.”

She went to him. He kissed her between the eyes, then whispered something—what, I’ve always wondered—in her ear.

“I’ve got a key,” the innkeeper yelled, pounding away at the door. “I’ll use it.”

The room was swimming. Idiot, I thought wildly, just try the knob. Henry kissed Camilla again. “I love you,” he said. Then he said, out loud: “Come in.”

 I think that Camilla’s reaction sealed Henry’s fate. He had lost Julian, whom he loved more than anyone else, Richard did not understand him as he had hoped and Camilla, the one person who had at least fully accepted him showed that there was a part of her that could not fully embrace who he was. Henry ‘s predicament here comes down to this: Aristotle wrote that an individual who is naturally unsocial is either a beast or a god. Henry is conflicted between wanting to be accepted by few other human beings while being in this unsocial situation that tiptoes between the beastly and divine, unchallenged, power. Camilla was the last person left who might have accepted him as such and when he realizes that these are unrecognizable he ends his life, which ends up being a catalyst for Camilla’s character who has shattered her bond with Charles, whom she cares for despite herself, by investing in the understanding they had.

At the end of the book Camilla is partly hanging on the kind of living she could have had with Henry and partly mourning everything she’s lost.

“You should see the way I live now, Richard,” she said. “My Nana’s in bad shape. It’s all I can do to take care of her, and that big house, too. I don’t have a single friend my own age. I can’t even remember the last time I read a book.”

 Camilla is back at her grandmother’s, back at the service of Diana, at a place that will always keep reminding her her irrevocably lost innocence. It’s not the situation itself that is dreadful. What makes it so is that it is a distorted version of Camilla’s childhood; one that comes with responsibility, with loss and with sacrificing ‘living’ and by extent beauty in service of others.

Finally, the tell-tale hint that Camilla’s dismay with her life is genuine and not a lie she employs to keep Richard at bay is her confession about being unable to read anymore. Being unable to be free and to live even on a spiritual level is part of her punishment.

[jeanandthedreamofhorses]

Eren the Free, Part 1: Response to linkspooky’s ‘Eren the Slave’

Thanks for asking for my response, anon, because it has allowed me to string together and articulate my own thoughts on Eren’s character at this stage of the story.

Needless to say, I have several interpretive, philosophical disagreements with @linkspooky‘s ‘Eren the Slave’ and these are expressed in my ‘Eren Jaeger – Who Freer than the Tyrant?’ meta, so please read that first. The purpose of this post will be to argue against specific claims made in linkspooky’s meta and tackle what I believe to be logical flaws in my opponent’s argument. This meta is in two parts not to flex but because my computer had an aneurysm trying to load the whole post.

Well, if the Defence in the trial of Eren Jaeger may take the floor, my opening statement is thus: Eren is no slave, and has pursued the path of freedom further than any other character.

Narrative and Personal Narrative

linkspooky draws a distinction between the Narrative of the manga and Eren’s Personal Narrative, the story he tells himself. They argue that people who have faith in Eren’s self-conception fall into his personal narrative.

But is his story not a Narrative? It is quite natural to expect character development from characters in a story - it could only rightly be called a mistake when it comes to real life. And do Eren’s detractors not themselves fall into the Personal Narratives of Armin, Mikasa and Zeke? They have repeatedly made the statement that Eren is not free, that he is being controlled by Zeke or Grisha, and every time he has proven them wrong.

There is indeed an authorial Narrative separate from the characters’ Personal Narratives which can be detected through symbolism and the course the story takes. I find that the course of the story thus far lines up far more with Eren’s Personal Narrative than it does with those of his detractors. We can tell this from how he has disproved Armin, Mikasa and Zeke’s accusations of manipulation and also how, in the last chapter, he symbolically rips free of his chains.

There is also the fact that we the readers are more in the dark about Eren’s thoughts and intentions than we are about any other character. How could we be seduced into a Personal Narrative we know next to nothing about? And why would the story deliberately hide from us the very perspective that is meant to deceive us? I think it is far more likely that the reason Eren’s intentions have been shielded from the reader is because they take the nature of a terrible truth that must be dug up with bloodied hands.

Whenever Eren opens up about his thoughts and feelings, the meta unfairly dismisses them as mere lip service despite Eren having no reason to lie to Reiner and Falco as two people he intends to kill.

Rather than our side of the fandom being deceived by Eren’s Personal Narrative, I find that the opposing side dismisses it out of hand because they have no intention of listening to Eren’s side of the story. Why is Eren’s perspective less valid than anyone else’s, especially when he knows more than every other character by virtue of his ability to literally see the future?

The only explanation I can find for this attitude, if I may be forgiven the presumption, is that people approach the topic with the automatic assumption that what Eren is doing has to be wrong instead of questioning their own morals - which is, after all, what Attack On Titan is all about.

Armin even says that he no longer understands Eren. I don’t think we should trust the perception of a character as being authorial Narrative when he explicitly makes a statement like this. linkspooky does have an explanation for this scene, however, which I shall address in the next part.

Armin and Mikasa’s Perceptions of Eren

linkspooky claims that the reason for Armin’s confusion is that his romanticised view of Eren is falling apart, which indeed it is, and the same is true of Mikasa. However, I don’t think it’s right to claim that their new perception of him is an accurate one, since they still haven’t heard anything from Eren himself apart from what both I and linkspooky agree are lies to distance himself from them.

While they both once focused excessively on the positive in Eren, now they focus excessively on the negative, not considering the reason for Eren’s actions that I believe we have received hints of in the last two chapters.

linkspooky and I both think that Eren wants to protect his friends - in my case I most definitely see it as his primary motivation. If Armin knew this about Eren, I do not think he would condone him, but I don’t think he’d so roundly condemn him as he does here either.

So I don’t think it is right to consider Armin’s words the straight truth here, given the lack of information he’s working with, and that indeed, the fandom is working with. Because Eren is doing the most morally questionable things, and because we are seeing things more often from Armin’s perspective than his these days, there is perhaps an impulse to put faith in Armin’s words over Eren’s. But in this series, nothing is ever so black and white.

In Mikasa’s case, her treasured memory of the scarf is now being being challenged by the memory of Eren murdering the kidnappers - but we know from 121 that Eren places special value on the scarf as well, instead of just the murder.

Rather than trying to paint Eren in a white or black light, they need to see Eren as he really is: like the freedom he represents, a force beyond good and evil. 

Enemy of the World

One of linkspooky’s arguments is that being the ‘Enemy of the World’ is just Eren’s fantasy as he frequently relies on others. However, linkspooky also mentions how Eren manipulates everyone close to him. I would argue that the person who manipulates you is, in fact, your enemy, and that Eren is the Enemy of the World not because he never relies on help but because he is entirely on his own side.

Indeed he knows that assistance from others is necessary even just to activate the Founder’s power, and he also refers to the Survey Corps as his friends, or even comrades, depending on your translation.

This is why he manipulates them - and the reason he manipulates rather than relying on them is because he feels that his Will contradicts the Wills of everyone around him. There is no-one who desires the outcome that Eren desires, not even Floch and the Eldian nationalists, I believe: I think even they will baulk at the scale of destruction Eren intends. Historia is the only character I think may be an exception to this rule as the other bearer of the ‘enemies of mankind’ moniker. 

This otherwise total isolation of intention is what makes Eren the Enemy of the World. Because he fights for his freedom, he rebels against peace.

I think this panel is another example of why the authorial Narrative itself supports the idea of Eren being an Enemy of the World. The positioning of the speech bubble and outside text was entirely the decision of Isayama and his editor, and is not a thought bubble from Eren’s head. He has never actually addressed himself as ‘the Enemy of the World’: Historia calls him the enemy of mankind and Willy says he rebels against peace, but while Eren has said he “might just destroy the world” and only in response to Willy’s words, he is still not ascribing himself a title or role.

Eren’s Individualism

linkspooky claims that the scene in the FT arc, where the Levi Squad is slaughtered because Eren didn’t rely on his power instead of theirs, is misinterpreted because Eren also lost the fight on his own. However, this is where I think this meta falls prey to one of its greatest weaknesses: the omission of the Uprising Arc from the analysis of Eren’s character, wherein his most pivotal transitions take place.

The event that caused Eren to trust in his own strength over the strength of others was not his fight against Annie, but when a similar situation repeats itself in the Crystal Cave.

In this circumstance, Eren is able to protect all of his friends by relying on his own strength, when they would have died had they attempted their risky manoeuvre. Eren has become strong enough to protect them on his own - this was the first inkling of that realisation.

I say ‘first inkling’ because Eren does say this afterwards, which seems to influence Armin towards his current ideology. Such an idea seems at odds with what I believe to be Eren’s current aim to genocide those different to him as a wholly antagonistic force, like the bullies in Armin’s memories who Armin now wants to make peace with.

I believe this is because Eren soon learns that those differences between people are simply too great and too much of a threat to his freedom. People are stronger together, but only if he can be confident that they will follow his Will, which is how he learned to manipulate his allies. The differences between him and Levi in the Serumbowl nearly caused the loss of his best friend, and then, when he receives Grisha’s memories and learns of Marley’s treatment of Eldians, he learns just how deeply divided humans are and loses faith in overcoming those differences.

Far from character stagnancy, this is the development I see in Eren that has led him to this individualistic conclusion.

I would also like to address what I think is a fallacy in linkspooky’s analysis of the fight Eren loses against Annie. Eren loses both with his comrades and without them - how does that make the former path any better than the latter? Eren was actually doing very well in his fight against Annie, and only lost when he realised her identity from her fighting stance.

What I think Eren really took away from that fight is the lesson he is applying now - he cannot show any mercy to his enemies.

Levi Parallelism

I find the parallels drawn between Eren and Levi quite interesting and am not necessarily opposed to it, but personally I find that Levi has more parallels with Mikasa than Eren as two Ackermans driven by their love for others (though of course this is a big part of Eren’s motivation as well). Mikasa realising she can’t protect Eren or always be by his side is more in line with Levi accepting that he can’t save everyone imo.

Those Who Push Themselves into that Hell

linkspooky draws attention to Eren’s use of language to indicate that he is not free, such as in the following scene: 

They argue that the ‘something’ pushing Eren along means he is not moving from his own will.

However, I find this claim to be contradicted by the distinction Eren makes within this very scene. He differentiates between those who are pushed into hell by their circumstances and those who “push themselves into hell”, clearly putting himself - at least as he is now - in the latter category. So I find that Eren is articulating that, because his whole past and future are manifestations of his own Will (as I argue in the attached meta), he is freely choosing to enter this arena rather than being forced to do so.

I Just Keep Moving Forward

linkspooky also argues that the reluctance in the line “I just keep moving forward’” suggests a lack of freedom. I would argue that continuing to fight for your goal even though you are frightened is a sign of strength of will rather than the reverse.

They also argue that, because those words are remembered as Reiner is about to kill himself, they are portrayed in a negative light. But this omits the crucial follow-up to that scene, where Reiner does not kill himself and finds a reason to live after hearing Falco express his desire to protect Gabi. Reiner is saved by that will to keep moving forward.

They further argue that Eren takes these words from Hange and twists them to suit himself.

But this is untrue. As they pointed out themself, Eren first heard these words in his training days from Reiner where it did mean what he thinks it means. Furthermore, there is no panel showing Eren having any special reaction to Hange’s words. He is shown with the other key Serumbowl players before Hange says them, but not afterwards, where the focus is solely on Mikasa.

I believe Isayama has Hange say Eren’s tagline because it is a key phrase in the themes of the story, and not because it has any special effect on Eren.

I Didn’t Have Any Other Choice

Lines such as “I didn’t have any other choice” and “Is there another way” are similarly argued to be indicative of Eren’s enslavement to a single course of action.

But this is just the conflict between long and short term gratification – enduring hardship to obtain your goal is an example of a strong will, not an enslaved one. Even if he is enslaved to circumstance, this is the case for everybody else as well, and it is an enslavement he seeks to permanently free himself from by crushing his enemies for good. After that, he and Eldia can do whatever they will.

Born This Way

The lines “I’ve always been that way, ever since I was born”, and “It’s probably been like this since the day we were born” are argued to be a form of enslavement to one’s sense of self. I cover this in my attached meta, where I argue that it is rather an affirmation of his own Will and right to exist.

One specific point I’d like to address is the claim that Eren saying those words after Reiner tries to take personal responsibility for his actions is evidence that Eren is running away from his guilt, and is therefore not at peace with his actions, and is therefore not free. But rather than in denial or frustrated, Eren appears to be in a state of sad serenity.

Eren does not say these words in immediate response to Reiner, but only after he hears Willy say “Because I was born into this world”. I think that here Eren is simply recognising that Reiner was simply following the unique nature of his Will - doing it because he wanted to, not because he had to, which is indeed what Eren is doing - and acknowledging that it is something he cannot criticise him for, but also something that he cannot spare him for. That is the command of Eren’s unique Will.

As for Eren not being at peace with his actions meaning he is not free, refer to the short/long term gratification point I made earlier.

Jealousy of Mikasa and the Need to be a One Man Army

linkspooky claims that Eren is still trying too hard to be as strong as Mikasa and Levi, but once again the meta suffers due to a lack of consideration for the Uprising Arc. In that arc, Eren got over his jealousy of Mikasa and Levi and explicitly stated as much.

This, I think, is also sufficient evidence against a persisting desire on Eren’s part to be a One Man Army (as opposed to freedom, which he does have a desire for). His words here make it clear that he wishes to fight alongside his friends if possible. He has simply learnt that, to achieve his goals, ruthless manipulation and rugged individualism is necessary.

Need to be Special

This is also something Eren overcame in the Uprising Arc. He thinks of himself as a normal person, the son of a special father, that he never needed to happen.

He is not doing all of this to be special. He has simply become special by pursuing his birthright: not a birthright of exceptionalism, but of the right to exist, something I shall explain further in the ‘Meaning of Carla’s Words’ section in the next part.

As with the One Man Army, it is a matter of necessity rather than desire. I cover this more in my attached Eren meta, but Eren’s character has developed in a perfect loop. Though his actions remain the same, his understanding of them has increased dramatically: that is to say, he has come to understand himself.

Indeed, people are not naturally special. But can one really argue that special people do not exist at all? To say such a thing would be to argue that there is no difference between Daz and Erwin. People become special -  Supermen, to reference Nietzsche - because they relentlessly pursue their Will to Power, their driving force to actualise their desires.

linkspooky also argues that the reason Eren’s change is the most dramatic after the time-skip is because in actuality he hasn’t changed. My argument is that it is simply the result of having the most explicit and tumultuous development in the story up to now, and crucially, the ability to see a future no-one else can.

Read the rest in Part 2 here!

[dogbearinggifts]

“Dad Sent Me to the Moon” vs. “Because Dad Made Me”

How Luther and Vanya Talk About Trauma, Part Eight

This is part eight of my series comparing how Luther and Vanya discuss their own trauma and respond to the trauma of others. If this is your first time seeing it on your dash, you can catch up with prior installments here: 

Part One Part Two  Part Three  Part Four  Part Five  Part Six  Part Seven

A quick note for this installment: I will only cover part of Episode 9. This is mainly because I got a bit verbose and didn’t want it to get too long. 

Episode 9, Part One: Changes (aka The One With That Scene™) 

Our first trauma mention this episode comes shortly after Vanya discovers her father’s journal in Leonard’s bag. 

Leonard: Vanya, I can explain. Vanya: You’ve been manipulating me all this time? Leonard: No, that’s not true. I’m only trying to protect you. Vanya: From who? Leonard: From your family! They’re the ones trying to hurt you. Vanya, it’s all there, in that journal. Your father was afraid of you. That’s why he put you on those pills. It wasn’t to help you. It was to hold you back. He didn’t trust that you were strong enough to control your powers, but I’ve never been afraid of you. I embraced you. I’m the only one who ever accepted you for who you really are. Your brothers and your sister, they went along with him every step of the way. Vanya: Who is Harold Jenkins? Leonard: He’s….someone like us. A lonely boy. An outsider whose family was cruel to him. All he ever wanted was to be heard, to be loved. Vanya: Allison was right. You’re sick. Leonard: I’m not the one who tried to kill you.

So, the first thing I’ll point out about this exchange is that Vanya jumped to the right conclusion upon finding that book. Her habit of jumping to conclusions has led her further and further down the road to the apocalypse up to this point, and those conclusions (assuming her siblings intentionally excluded her from their meeting because they don’t consider her family; assuming Allison Rumored her because she was jealous) have been wildly incorrect. But in this case, her interpretation of the facts is 100 percent correct. 

Another thing that jumped out at me about this conversation is that the things Leonard says to Vanya? The reasons he gives her for pushing her away from her family and manipulating her into lashing out against them? Those words echo what certain corners of the fandom say about Vanya’s siblings. Not about Leonard being the only one who embraced her for who she is (no one is agreeing with him on that) or about why Reginald put her on her meds (he’s actually right on that one). But when he says that her “brothers and sister went along with him every step of the way,” that sounds eerily similar to what some segments of this fandom say about Vanya’s relationship with her siblings. Furthermore, based on a few excerpts we’ve gotten from her book (namely, the passage where she assumes her siblings “learned cruelty” from Reginald and excluded her accordingly) Leonard’s words echo Vanya’s worst and widely publicized allegations against her siblings. 

And he’s patently wrong. 

There is a chance her siblings excluded her intentionally in childhood, although Allison’s surprise at seeing Vanya off by herself in so many of the security tapes seems to refute this. But in the present, the biggest moment when Vanya was excluded by her siblings—when she walked in on that emergency meeting and Allison told her it was a “family matter”—was both unintentional and a result of Vanya’s own choices. Early on, Diego does tell her she doesn’t belong there, but clarifies that it’s because of the book she wrote; when he later says “She shouldn’t get a vote,” it’s implied that he’s still angry with her because of her book; he’s not leaving her out because of her lack of powers. Reginald may have enforced Vanya’s isolation in childhood, but from what we’ve seen of her adulthood thus far, it seems Vanya’s own choices have isolated her from her siblings far more than Reginald’s influence on them. 

Furthermore, Allison did not try to kill Vanya. She didn’t even attempt to Rumor her until Vanya made it abundantly clear that she would not be reasoned with and Allison was left with her power as her only defense. She came unarmed, her behavior was nowhere near threatening, and the only reason Vanya saw it as threatening is because she refused to trust her sister’s own account of an event that had haunted her for decades. 

Yet a not-insubstantial portion of the fandom not only fails to see this evidence refuting Leonard and Vanya’s assumptions, but they actually agree with Vanya’s emotionally abusive boyfriend who stalked and isolated her so he could use her powers for his own ends. 

I’m not even going to go into how deeply disturbing that is. 

As for what comes after this exchange—namely, Leonard’s death. I’m torn. On the one hand, I’m not going to say Leonard didn’t deserve what he got, because this is a man who has murdered two people (that we know of) with little remorse and is perfectly willing to end the world if it means he gets his petty revenge on the Umbrella Academy for something they didn’t even do. He smiled when he saw Allison’s throat pouring blood and tried to convince Vanya that her sister deserved to die. This man is dangerous, he is toxic, and the world is a safer place without him in it. 

On the other hand, Vanya’s reaction is…troubling, to say the least. She doesn’t lash out at him when he confesses to murdering Helen Cho, and she doesn’t lash out when he lies about her family and tries to manipulate her into seeing Allison’s presumed death as a good thing. No, she lashes out at him when he begins calling her ordinary in a deliberate attempt to enrage her. What causes her to snap is not horror at his actions or empathy for her siblings, but the fact he is forcing her to relive her childhood trauma. 

Furthermore, her retribution is….let’s call it disproportionate. She doesn’t run out screaming, and she doesn’t pin him up against the wall so she can make a getaway. Both of these would be the actions of a timid woman who abhors violence, but Vanya impales him with every vaguely sharp object in his kitchen and walks away without a tear in her eye. 

I’m not going to say Leonard’s behavior isn’t awful here, because it is. And I have a hard time mustering a single ounce of sympathy for him. But he wasn’t threatening her. He didn’t have a gun or even a knife in his hands; he had a book. He didn’t block the exit; Vanya could have easily ran for the door and started screaming until the neighbors ran to her aid. He was simply slamming a book against his hand and chanting “Ordinary! Ordinary! Not special! Nothing!” It is this that makes Vanya decide he must die. 

It’s entirely possible that she was leaning toward killing him when he confessed to murdering Helen, and it’s equally possible that this notion became stronger when she heard what he had to say about her siblings. It’s clear she’s afraid of him in this scene; however, as in her earlier confrontation with Allison, Vanya is the one with the real power here. She is the one who can commit a gruesome murder without lifting a finger. Leonard is the one at her mercy. 

Unlike in her confrontation with Allison, Vanya exhibits no horror or remorse. She doesn’t even pause as the reality of what she’s done hits her full force. She simply gazes at his lifeless body and walks away. 

Like the scene where she slit Allison’s throat, this one refutes the theory that Vanya’s tendency toward violence and desire for revenge at any cost is a direct result of Luther locking her up, because at this point, she has not yet returned to the Academy. Luther knows of her powers by now, but she hasn’t seen him. Yet here she is, murdering her abusive boyfriend without a single twinge of conscience. Leonard may be the very definition of an asshole victim, but that does not make Vanya’s complete and utter indifference toward the sight of his mangled corpse any less disturbing. 

******

Our next trauma mention comes when Luther is sitting beside Allison in the infirmary. She is unconscious and covered in blood, but stable. 

Luther: I know that peaceful dark place you’re in right now. And I know the pain you’ll be in when you leave it and wake up…to someone who’s not quite you anymore. When I woke up, I was angry. I was angry that you were gone, that you’d moved on with your life. And I was still stuck here, alone with Dad in this shitty old house. But I was wrong, because I pushed everyone away and…and that’s including the only person I love with all my heart. Crying Allison, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. And I won’t let you wake up alone. 

I’d like to take a minute to say that this fandom needs to CTFD* about Allison/Luther. Not only because 1) it’s a small portion of the series itself and 2) Netflix harnesses new, cutting-edge, downright revolutionary technology allowing viewers to simply skip the “Dancing in the Moonlight” scene, but because the rather disproportionate fury toward the pairing overshadows the sweetness Luther exhibits in this scene. 

Since I brought it up and I know there’s a good chance it’ll become a Thing if I don’t, I’m going to make my stance on Allison/Luther clear: I am neutral. I don’t ship it, but it doesn’t fill me with rage, either. It was a thing in the comics, and when I read those, I simply saw it as another result of their fucked-up childhood. These are two kids raised in a cloistered environment, addressed by numbers instead of names, and taught more about all the many, many ways to hurt an assailant than they are about the birds and the bees (or whatever sort of lesson “don’t date your siblings even if you’re both adopted” would pop up in). If I were writing the series, I would not have added it in, but the fact it’s there doesn’t ruin the show for me and I feel no desire whatsoever to shame those few fans who do ship SpaceRumor. Klaus/Dave exists. I’d rather spend my time obsessing over a ship that makes my heart sing, cry, and sing while crying than spend it berating others for enjoying a ship that makes my heart go “meh.”

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way….

This is a sweet scene, no doubt about it. Luther isn’t confessing his love to her; he’s confessing something even more difficult to share—his guilt. He knows he treated her badly after his accident. He knows he was angry with her, and he knows that was wrong. In this scene, Luther proves he has not only changed and grown beyond what he was mere days prior, but he exhibits a healthy degree of self-awareness. 

What he says here, “I know the pain you’ll be in when you leave it and wake up…to someone who’s not quite you anymore”—that’s what empathy is. That’s what it looks like in practice. He knows how Allison will feel, because he’s felt that way. He knows how horrific it is to wake up and find that your body has been altered, but that knowledge isn’t limited to Oh, this was bad for me and so I’m going to protect myself from anything that resembles it. His recognition of the injustice he suffered leads him to ensure someone else in the same situation won’t suffer everything he suffered. He can’t reverse the damage, but he can be there when she wakes up—and he’s going to do it. 

But I’d like to call your attention to something else, something that’s even more overlooked than the kindness of Luther’s words: “Allison, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there.” 

Some fans have already pointed out that Luther’s whole identity is wrapped up in his position as Number One. Sometimes this is used to draw attention to his anxiety and lack of confidence; sometimes it’s used to accuse him of being Sir Reginald 2.0. But what the latter group forget is that Luther’s identity as Number One is built on the notion of him as not just a hero, but a leader of heroes. He’s not supposed to be the one rushing in after shit has already gone down to do whatever he can to assist victims; he’s supposed to be the one who gets to the scene before shit goes down, the one who keeps the victims from becoming victims and sends everyone home with smiles on their faces. To Luther, always getting the front seat and taking the lead in family meetings are small components of what being Number One is all about. The crux of his identity, the core of being Number One, is saving people. 

And in his eyes, he has failed at that. 

Never mind that he didn’t know Allison was in danger until Diego told him. Never mind that he had no way of knowing Vanya had powers or that Allison would find her instead of Leonard. Never mind that there was no possible way he could have made it to the cabin in time. To Luther’s mind, it was his responsibility to be the hero before Allison knew she’d need one, and all of those things we consider justifications for his absence are excuses to him. 

Luther’s extreme dedication to his every task is what gained Reginald’s favor. But there’s a dark side to dedication, and we see it here with Luther’s self-blame for something that was absolutely not his fault. Knowing Reginald, he likely encouraged this self-blame. When that persistent voice in Luther’s head tells him he should have been there to save Allison before things got ugly, I’d be willing to bet it sounds a lot like Sir Reginald. 

*******

Now, I would like to talk about That Scene. You know the one. Luther, Vanya, and a very bad hug? 

I’m not going to reproduce the dialogue, because it’s not relevant to the points I’d like to discuss. I’m less interested in what is said—and even in what happens—than in the oft-ignored context surrounding it, so that is what I will focus on. 

Let me get this out of the way first: I don’t like what Luther does in this scene. It’s so difficult to watch that I nearly always skip it. What he does to Vanya is horrifying, the scene is horrifying, and I don’t support his actions at all. However, I’ve seen some fans taking him to task for not giving her some of her meds, which have been proven effective. Leaving aside the fact that 1) all of those pills were with Vanya when Leonard flushed them down the drain and 2) her pharmacy will absolutely not give Luther an early refill for someone else’s medication just because he asks nicely, I have a question: 

How was he supposed to get her to take them? I mean…..

Luther: Heyyyyyyyy, Vanya! Long time no see! We’re having a cranberry juice party! Can’t come in until you drink this whole glass of cranberry juice!  Vanya:  Luther:  Vanya: What the fuck kind of party is— Luther: IT’S ALSO A NO-QUESTIONS PARTY! 

Arguably, that would have been even worse. 

Now, part of what makes this scene so awful is that we know Vanya does not plan to harm her siblings. We know she’s genuinely remorseful, and that she has returned simply to say she’s sorry. However, what I think many fans forget is that there is an enormous gap between what we the audience know and what Luther knows. We’ve seen Vanya immediately scream and rush to Allison’s side, trying in vain to stanch the bleeding. We’ve seen Leonard drag her away, and we’ve seen her sit nearly catatonic in the tub as he washes the blood off. We’ve seen her break down at Allison’s message, and we’ve seen her horror as she realizes that this is what Leonard wanted all along. Speaking more broadly, we’ve seen her display the full spectrum of emotion: anger at her siblings, yes, but also joy at getting first chair, gentle teasing when she tells Leonard she’s “sorry you got the ordinary one,” confusion and horror as she replays the fight outside the restaurant in her mind. 

Luther has seen less than five percent of that. 

He wasn’t at the cabin when Vanya slit Allison’s throat, and the only thing Allison has said to him about it is VANYA POWERS. He got the rest of the truth from Pogo, who as we know is practically allergic to saying anything negative about Reginald.** Pogo would never have told Luther that the anechoic chamber frightened Vanya when she was a child, let alone the way Reginald left her alone in there, shaking and crying as he simply walked away. If Luther said something to the effect of “This seems a little extreme,” Pogo probably would have responded with, “Her powers were simply too great. He believed they are limitless, and endlessly destructive. Your sister had little interest in controlling them. This was the only way to keep all of you safe—including Miss Vanya.” So, if you’re arguing that Luther intentionally made her relive her childhood trauma, stop. Just….stop. 

Furthermore, the Vanya Luther has known all his life has been a zombie. She’s been on those pills since she was four, and so he probably has few, if any, memories of Vanya displaying much emotion at all. The only strong emotion he’s seen from her in the course of this series came when she flew off the handle because she erroneously assumed she had been intentionally left out of a very awkward conversation. To us, Vanya’s conduct is a heartfelt display of genuine relief and remorse. To Luther, it probably comes across as overacting. 

So, to recap, here’s what we know: 

Vanya went off her meds involuntarily and just recently learned what the pills actually did. 

She has spent much of that time being ruled by her emotions, never even thinking to stop and take a deep breath until she crossed a line. 

Believing she killed Allison was a turning point for her. 

She is really, truly, deeply remorseful for what she did and relieved beyond words that Allison survived. 

And here’s what Luther knows: 

Vanya went off her meds, possibly by choice. 

She is angry, and most of that anger is directed toward her family—particularly Allison, given her “There is nothing fair about being your sister” tirade. 

She is unreasonable, blaming others for situations she created when she does not like the result. 

She is quite possibly more powerful than the rest of her siblings combined. 

Her first act upon coming into her powers could very well have been the attempted murder of her own sister. 

It’s not just the fact Luther is acting on limited information that’s crucial to the understanding of this scene. It’s what his information was limited to. We see all the evidence and we know Vanya is, while not quite innocent, definitely not acting out of any sort of intent to harm. Luther sees a fraction of what we see, and what he sees is enough to convince him she needs to be contained until they know what to do. For all he knows, she’s returned to finish Allison off and kill the rest of them. 

Now, I hope you’ll pardon a small tangent here: Diego receives much love for insisting that “She needs our help, and we can’t do that if she’s locked in a cage.” Fans point to his being locked in a cell despite his innocence as the reason for this empathy—and all that makes for good character development, but it ignores one vital piece of the puzzle: 

The police didn’t know Diego was innocent, either. 

From his perspective and our perspective, he’s innocent. He was heartbroken and inadvertently planted evidence on a scene he didn’t arrive at until after Eudora’s body was cold. Fingerprints, possibly hair and other bits of DNA were left behind, and when all that is put together with his take-no-shit-from-nobody attitude, the fights he and Eudora had, their possibly acrimonious breakup, and the fact that the last time they were known to speak together, she lectured him on his childish antics and kicked him out without allowing him to speak in his own defense….well, it’s enough to build a strong case, that’s for sure. The police gain much ire for locking Diego up on suspicion alone, but that is literally how the criminal justice system works. If there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, the suspect is kept in custody until the police can be certain they did not commit the crime in question and will not commit a similar crime once released. A failure to follow this step can allow a serial killer to roam free (and it has, on several notable occasions). No, it’s not fair or right that Diego could have been convicted on mostly circumstantial evidence; but suppose he had been guilty of a cold-blooded revenge killing. Should the police have let him go then? Should they have said, “Well, we have this evidence against you, and it makes a pretty compelling case, but we’re not 100 percent sure, so be free and try not to kill anyone else”? Point is, they didn’t know what they were dealing with—innocent man or cold-blooded killer—and so they had to err on the side of caution. 

The same principle applies to Vanya. I don’t think Luther was planning to leave her there indefinitely. I am certain he didn’t think she would suffer a psychotic break. He was probably intending to wait a while, give her some time to cool off, and then try to talk to her and see if she’d tried to kill Allison or if it had been an accident. Locking her up was not the right choice, and it was not a kind one, but from his perspective, it was probably better to play it safe and keep her from hurting anyone else. We know she wasn’t guilty, just as we know Diego wasn’t guilty. But the evidence against them both was strong enough to convince the police and Luther that they needed to be kept under watch and kept from hurting anyone else. 

I don’t think Luther was right to ignore his siblings. I think he should have listened to Allison especially, when she said to let Vanya go. But I think I know why he didn’t, and I’ll cover that in my next installment. 

******

Running count of trauma mentions (cumulative of all episodes thus far)

Own Trauma: Vanya 10, Luther 11

Trauma of Others: Vanya 5, Luther 4

*********

*Stands for CALM THE FUCK DOWN. 

**I have a lot more to say about Pogo and his loyalty to Reginald, but I’ll be a good essayist and keep this one focused on Luther and Vanya. 

Read on to Part Nine

[questionsonislam]

Why does Allah not prevent extreme evil deeds, wars, drought, etc if He is Rahim (the Merciful) and Rahman (the Compassionate)?

The issue has several aspects. You can make a detailed search in our website using keywords like "Allah", "gathering" etc.

Not all misfortunes are grievous; one should not view all diseases or disasters as a manifestation of grief.

The following is stated in a hadith:

“The biggest misfortunes hit prophets, then saints and then the other righteous slaves.”(see Hakim, al-Mustadrak, III/343; Musnad, 1/172, 174, 180)

When misfortune is mentioned, we understand “being tested by disasters/tribulations”. The results of heavy tests are big. The questions asked in the test for ordinary officials and administrators are not the same. The former is easier than the latter and the result of the letter is more important than the former.

A wonderful determination regarding the issue is as follows:

“Everything about Divine Determining is good and beautiful. Even the evil that comes from it is good, and the ugliness, beautiful.” (Nursi, Sözler (Words))

Man needs to have a look at his own body first. He needs to think of each organ separately. And he needs to ask himself the following questions:Which one is not determined in the best way in terms of its location, shape, size and duty/function? Then, he needs to move to his own world of spirit and think of the same things for it:Is memory or imagination unnecessary? Is love or fear redundant?

The body forms a whole with all of its organs and becomes useful only then; similarly, the spirit is a whole with all of its feelings, emotions and faculties. It becomes useful only when it is a whole. If you remove the mind and memory from human spirit, it cannot fulfill any of its functions. If you remove the feeling of anxiety, it will become lazy and will not work for the world or the hereafter. If it does not have the feeling of love, it will not take pleasure from anything.

Both the body and spirit of man have been arranged in the best and wise way. It is called “apparent qadar”. Similarly, the incidents that take place in the life of man are in order. It is called “spiritual qadar”. Apparent qadar informs us about spiritual qadar. Both of them are nice in all aspects, except for the sins and rebellious acts committed by partial free will.

When we face the manifestations of the spiritual qadar that are out of our will and when we are shocked, falter and fluctuate, we need to look at apparent qadar and the endless wisdoms in it immediately. For instance, we need to remember the merciful training in the womb: divine wisdom and mercy educated us in the best way there and we were not aware of anything.

Now we live with different manifestations of the same mercy.

“Having good thoughts about Allah is worshipping.”(Abu Dawud, Adab, 81, no: 4993)

We need to take our lesson from the hadith above and rely on the mercy of our Lord, who fed and brought us up and who arranged everything about us in the best way. We need to see every incident that we face as a question of the test and we need to look for a manifestation of mercy in the incidents that our soul does not like. If man takes only his soul as a criterion, he will be mistaken. The soul of a young person does not want to go to school but wants to play. However, the mind opposes this. It shows man the nice ranks he can attain in the future or the problems he will face; thus, it makes man give up playing. That is, what is good for the soul is not good for the mind.

The heart is completely different. If it is illuminated with belief, it sees everything and every incident as a manifestation of divine names. It attains the following reality: “All of Allah’s names are beautiful and all of their manifestations are beautiful too.” There will be nothing ugly for that fortunate slave.

Those who say, “Your misfortune is nice and Your grace is nice, too” are fortunate people who have attained this rank. They have attained the following secret: “Allah loves them and they love Allah.”

In Risale-i Nur Collection, beauty is analyzed in two parts: “those that are beautiful themselves” and“those that are beautiful in terms of their outcomes.” we can give some examples for this classification: Day itself is nice; night has a different beauty. One reminds wakefulness; the other reminds sleep. Is it not clear that we need both?

On the other hand, fruit itself is nice; medication is nice in terms of its outcome.

The incidents man faces are like either night or day. Health is like day and illness is like night. If it is regarded that an illness is atonement for sins, that it teaches man that he is weak, that it reminds man of his slavery and that it turns man's heart from the world to his Lord, it will be seen that illness is a boon as big as health. Health is the feast day for the body and illness is food for the heart.

“Night and day” are only one link of the continuous chain of the manifestation of “jalal (majesty) and jamal (beauty)”. There are so many other links like the negative and positive polarity of electricity, the black and white parts of the eye, the white and red blood cells, etc. We are surrounded with this binary system in our inner and outer world; and we make use of each of them.

A verse closely related to the issue is as follows:

“But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you.”(al-Baqara, 2/216)

The verse is related to jihad but its decree is general. This verse points to another binary: war and peace. Peace is like day; everybody likes it; war is like night. However, those who do not fight when it is necessary will have difficulty in the future and their descendants will live under oppression. Those who are martyred in jihad, attain the rank of sainthood at once and the worldly life that they have lost is like night compared to their new life.

Can there be a misfortune worse than death? The verse states that there are several good things under this incident, which the soul does not like; thus, it consoles us for the other disasters, illnesses and misfortunes of the world.

The following is stated in a sacred hadith:

“My mercy prevails over My wrath.” (Tirmidhi, Daawat, 99)

This hadith is interpreted as follows:“There are so many manifestation of Allah's mercy behind every misfortune that they are more than the agonies and pains caused by that misfortune.”

Life is not like even a moment compared to eternity. There is no need to worry if the illnesses, misfortunes and problems that hit us in this short life are good for our eternal life. What is the importance of seventy-eighty years compared to eternity? Are all of the ephemeral misfortunes and problems of this world not regarded as nothing compared to eternal bliss?

However, the soul of man wants advance pleasures; it does not look at the future. That area belongs to the mind and heart. As we have just mentioned, not all misfortunes are absolutely troublesome. The incidents that our soul does not like and the ones that make life upside down for us are either divine warnings preventing us from going astray or atonement for our sins preventing us from being punished in the hereafter by giving us pain in this world. Or, they are a means of turning human heart to Allah and the hereafter from the world life.

On the other hand, misfortunes are a test of patience for man; the reward of passing this test is great.

In conclusion, they are divine warnings and grief. They all can have shares in general misfortunes. They may be punishment for a group, warning for another and atonement for sins for another.

Regarding individual misfortunes, the safest way, according to us, is as follows: If a misfortune hits us, we need to blame our soul and make it repent. If a misfortune hits others, we need to regard them as a means of improvement for those people. Thus, we will elevate our level in educating our soul and will not think of bad things about others.

[auron570]

2018 Readlist

FAQ

Why do you read so many old books?

Because most of them belong to the public domain, and are thus freely available online. Also it is fun to see how much the past influences and creates the foundation for the present. And how much or how little has changed, and what this says about humanity.

 Orwell - Animal Farm (1945)

A satire on the Russian Revolution and the failure of communism. Among other things, Animal Farm underlines the importance of learning to read properly and think for oneself, in a way that tickles with dark humor.

 Orwell - 1984 (1949)

Similar to Animal Farm, 1984 is an even more systematic and total examination of a society where all history and information is tightly controlled and constantly being rewritten. Being published after WW2, 1984 trades some of Animal Farm’s humor for more serious and tragic imagery of concentration camps. In a sense, 1984 is an exploration of the possibility of mind control or brainwashing through societal-level propaganda.

 Huxley - Brave New World (1932)

Absolutely fantastic. If 1984 was about what would happen if everything we read was false, then Brave New World is what would happen if no one had the desire to read at all. Brave New World shows a futuristic society that runs like clockwork with the help of genetic engineering and a miracle drug called Soma. COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. BNW examines the costs of a society that is mass-produced off assembly lines.

 Fitzgerald - Great Gatsby (1925)

A criticism of conspicuous consumption and the Roaring 20s. You can’t bring your mansion with you when you die. Mortality sucks that way. Throughout the novel we are invited to ask ‘what makes Gatsby (the character) so great?’ From rags to riches to death, Gatsby’s lonely existence is pitiable, tragic and relatable as ever.

 Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Steinbeck’s illustration of the 1930s Dust Bowl and the resulting migration of impoverished families west across the United States, is a poetic masterpiece. ‘You want to work for 15cents an hour?! Well I got a thousan’ fellas willing to work 10cents an hour.’ Also featuring two of the strongest female characters in modern literature, Grapes of Wrath is a powerful lesson on human dignity.

 Shakespeare - Hamlet (1599)

The more I read Hamlet, the more I come to the conclusion that Hamlet is about delay of action. In a way, Hamlet forces himself to be penitent for something he doesn’t do. The more time he spends contemplating whether or not to kill Claudius, the more time he has to beat himself up and call himself a coward, and for accidents to pile up. ‘But put your courage to the sticking place!’ Hamlet is what happens when you ask a philosopher to commit murder.

 Shakespeare - King Lear (1605)

A lesson in parenting. If you want people (especially your children) to respect you, do not spoil them. Lear learns this lesson far too late, and gives up his inheritance far too early. Another possible lesson is to not trust liars, and instead divine a person’s character by their actions. The trouble is, with so much action going on behind the scenes, the opportunities for dramatic irony and treachery are twofold!

 Wilde - Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

An example of 19th century Gothic Romanticism. And also, similar to Great Gatsby, another cautionary tale against conspicuous consumption. Dorian Gray, forever beautiful, forever young, is by all appearances the outward ideal of a dandy. As the novel develops, his cruelty and vanity plunge to increasing depths.

 Wilde - Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

The comedic side of being a dandy. If the suit makes the man, surely if I wear a different suit I become a different man? In a play of double-identities, love polygons and other trivialities, Earnest is a raucous upset of 19th century decorum.

 Ibsen - Hedda Gabler (1891)

A complex and cruel character, Hedda’s penchant for destroying the lives of others, seems to stem from bitterness and boredom toward her own life.

 Williams - Glass Menagerie (1944)

Theater is a box through which we view the lives of our fellow homo sapiens. Like passing by an exhibit at the museum, or peeking in on pandas at the zoo, Glass Menagerie presents a slice of life.

 McCourt - Angela’s Ashes (1996)

A coming-of-age memoir about an Irish boy growing up in an impoverished family. From the day he’s born to the day he becomes a man, memorable moments include: father always coming home drunk, scavenging for coal to get the fire going, stealing loaves of bread, shoes made of tire rubber, having an affair with a terminally ill girl, having pig’s head for Christmas, and wearing Grandma’s old dress to stay warm at night.

 Salinger - Catcher in the Rye (1951)

A tightly written story of teenage angst, about the few days after an unmotivated student drops out of a New York prep school. Unable to face his family, he wanders around the bustling city, growing increasingly depressed. Holden’s conversations with different characters throughout the novel, underline a simple moral that sometimes we just want someone to listen. (Preferably someone who isn’t a phony!)

 Shakespeare - Macbeth (1606)

A bloody and ambitious soldier descends into madness after the murders the King! It can be difficult interpreting and staging the supernatural elements of the play (e.g. do you show the ghosts on stage? what about the Witches? When, why). But remember Shakespeare is writing in a time hundreds of years before modern psychology, where memory and cognition was still immaterial and mysterious. Similar to Dorian Gray (1890), Macbeth is a moral on how one’s actions affect one’s mind.

 Albom - Tuesdays with Morrie (1997)

Succumbing to ALS near the end of his life, sociology professor Morrie Schwartz welcomes death with open arms. Hosting many visitors and having many conversations with family, friends, past students, the media, Morrie’s affable outlook on life and mortality shines.

 Golding - Lord of the Flies (1954)

An allegory on the state of nature. One wonders if/how the story may have been different (and possibly more horrifying and prone to censorship debates) if female characters were involved. I suppose that would be a separate inquiry. Unable to see beyond the horizon, and unwilling to look at themselves, Jack and his follows almost doom them all.

 Lowry - The Giver (1993)

Another science fiction dystopia in a similar vein as Brave New World or 1984, but less difficult and more relatable for teenagers. Those who enjoy The Giver, should check out the film Pleasantville (1998) featuring Tobey Macguire getting stuck in a black-and-white world. Naturally the lesson being that life is never so simple.

 Naipaul - Miguel Street (1959)

A collection of short stories centered around unique characters in a slum in Port of Spain. Featuring arson, domestic violence and plenty of eccentric amateurs, Miguel Street illustrates a colorful community.

 Thiong’O - Weep Not Child (1964)

Set during the Mau Mau Uprising against British colonial rule, Weep Not Child follows one boy’s goal of education. Meanwhile his family falls apart around him, and is cut off from his best friend.

 Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables (1908)

Having recently been adapted by CBC/Netflix into a series (which is very good), the original novel is full of comedy, quaint coming-of-age lessons centered around school, tea parties, accidents and adventures. But despite this levity, Anne ends with a tragic turn which places it well within the realm of reality.

 Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)

Another example of 19th century Gothic Romanticism (like Dorian Gray). Doctor Victor Frankenstein becomes obsessed with the idea of creating life from inanimate material, only to spurn his own creation just after giving life to it. The monster, filled with rage and envy, murders Frankenstein’s dearest friends. A sort of cautionary tale in the same vein as Doctor Faustus by Marlowe, Frankenstein is a counter-weight to the enthusiasm around science at the time. That science can not only produce miracles, but also horrors in its own way if one is not careful.

 Anderson - Winesburg Ohio (1919)

A collection of short stories revolving around a small community (similar to Miguel Street). Themes of religion, old age, loneliness, love, feeling stuck in a small town, Winesburg is full of some of the most heart-rending stories in all literature. Also Winesburg manages to accomplish a unity of themes in very short space. The whole of Winesburg is much more than the sum of its parts, such that it can stand just as well against other great novels.

 Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre (1847)

One could argue that Jane Eyre is the predecessor to Anne of Green Gables. The latter frequently references the former, both are about orphan girls who grow up successfully in the face of many adverse challenges. While Anne ends with the protagonist becoming a young adult, Jane Eyre ends with a more traditional romantic happy ending, but like Anne is not without its tragedy.

 Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights (1847)

Fun fact, Wuthering Heights was a novel I considered doing an independent study essay on, but didn’t since I didn’t know anything about literature back then. Although technically of the gothic genre, Bronte primarily uses cruelty and domestic violence to evoke scenes of horror, as opposed to ghosts and monsters, while at the same time using these as tools to explore very down-to-earth themes of social class and gender inequality.

 Joyce - Dubliners (1914)

Very similar to Winesburg Ohio, but without the same unity. For example, one story is difficult to read without first reading about the history of Ireland. There are some tear-jerkers and lovely metaphors. For example the final metaphor of “snow falling faintly through the universe”, is a variation of the oft-used metaphor of flowers. How they bloom for a short period then die. What is new with this metaphor is that each snowflake is unique, thanks to the chaotic tumbling of water droplets through the atmosphere, just like how every live is unique. But all snowflakes much reach the ground some time and then melt away into nothingness.

[spiritchronicle]

Conceiving the Spirit

Feeding the Spirit

Today I want to discuss what the spirit is, and how we feed it in order to progress in our spiritual path. The spirit as I have come to understand it, is the collection of mindfully chosen energy thought forms, that group together by vibration, frequency, color, etc, and have correlation and continuation, meaning that they are now a single “being” that will not disintegrate into individual thought forms anymore. This does not mean that once the spirit is formed, we are separate individuals that have no more connections to the rest of the universe, or that we cannot add more energy, or thought forms to our being, it simply means that there is now a “set form” that these energies have taken, and it knows what it’s energy consist off, and what is the best way for it to continue developing. This includes all memories of past lives, even though these thought forms might not have been in the same body at the same time, they were able to evolve enough to be attracted to one another, and incarnate in the same body, that would be most beneficial for them, with the purpose of birthing the spirit in that life time. 

Here we can discuss the theory that the One Being poses, explaining that we here on the surface of planet Tera do not have our spirit developed, and this is why we are not part of the universe, but live in an illusion outside of universal law. We also see this theory in many other books and materials like A Course In Miracles. These books also pose the theories of being able to work toward “waking up” and “spiritual enlightenment”  through different techniques that can help us understand true universal laws, that will permit us to connect directly to the divine, and draw knowledge and life directly from the one infinite creator, as opposed to our own ego self. 

We can begin by discussing different steps we can take to feed our spirit and develop it to the point of were we know ourselves fully and begin to understand these universal laws. 

Step 1: Calming the Mind

It is crucial that the first step in developing our universal consciousness be calming the mind. This might not apply to every person out there already practicing calming the mind, but I know this happens to most people, where we have trouble stopping the influx of thoughts that come our way throughout the day. This is the first space where we can practice consciously choosing what we want. Calming the mind can be anything from practicing mindfulness meditation, to taking 10 or 15 minutes of alone time to consciously be at peace. Whatever you practice might be, this step is crucial, because if we keep running on the same old programs, non-stop, all day, every day, there is minimal chance for new information to be accepted into our minds, and without these new information, it will be really hard to for our spirit. Which leads us to our next topic...

Step 2: Feeding it Information 

Once we have mastered being able to calm the mind in order to receive new information, we can begin to feed ourselves with new experiences and knowledge. This can include anything from experiences you have in your daily life, to reading books, to listening to someone speak, going to conferences. . . you get the point, the whole point is to introduce new information to our minds and be conscious of what it means to us. It doesn’t matter if this information might mean something different to someone else, the importance is that we feed ourselves the information in this step. This is where we are collecting data, it doesn’t really matter what the data is at this point, of course, the higher vibration and more conscious the information is, the easier it will be for use to utilize it more easily for the formation of our spirit, but from my experience, everyone will collect information that is a vibration to what they already are vibrating with. Here is where we reach the most important step... 

Step 3: Making Connections 

All of the steps are required for the development of our spirit, but this step of connecting the dots of different experiences, or information that we are acquiring, is in my opinion, the most important. Usually this step happens at the end of a learning cycle, when we are ready to move on to the next learning cycle. In this step, we take all of the information from the last step (feeding information), which in some cases might take years or decades, and bring all of that information into a single conclusion, this is how we achieve mastery over our lives. If we fail to complete this step, we are sent back to the beginning and are asked to repeat the cycle all over again, the universe will keep bringing the same lesson back to you, until you have completely mastered this step. From my experience, repeated learning cycles are much shorter, but more intense than the previous one, because since you are blinded to the conclusion, the universe will call out to you in bigger and more difficult ways to draw your attention into something that needs to be healed. Some souls might take lifetimes to completely master one cycle, while others are going through cycles very quickly. I can def see around me the speeding up of cycles, and from my personal experience, cycles have become very short. 

Now I want to paint a picture here, we might have sub cycles to the great big one that will finally form our spirit, that is why our souls will incarnate in many many lifetimes in order to obtain all of the information from different sources and experiences. Say that we need to complete 50 sub cycles to completely form our spirit, and lets say that for each one of those 50 conclusions, there are 50 more mini cycles that make up that one... you can see why it has taken us so long to finally be here at this crucial time on the planet that will spring board us into finally completing our major lessons. We are now receiving very elevated information through channeling, inspirations, resurfacing of ancient knowledge, and many more ways in which we are being helped at this time. Our job now is to take in the information we are being presented with, digest it, know it, connect it to our lives, and finally, mastery comes when we apply it, which is the next step on this process. 

Step 4: Applying and Teaching Lessons 

This is how we can check in with ourselves and know that we have mastered a cycle or lesson that we need to form our spirit. This is where we see people actually change and become a better, more developed forms of themselves. This step is not about applying all of the information that you needed from step 2, but rather from step 3. Once that connection is formed (step 3), all of the information and experiences that you gathered to learn it are not that important, yes they still hold value, but the goal of having the experience is to learn. Once the learning is complete it would be inefficient to repeat the same lesson, and it would rather even be impossible. Even if you had similar or even the same experiences, if you completely mastered your lesson, you would go through the same experience at a different level of consciousness, so you would interpret the information in a different way. 

The application of your conclusion and lesson, is the important part of this step. You have a choice when you get this far in the cycle. You can choose to apply the lesson and make it a part of your new being/spirit, or you can choose to ignore it and continue doing as you were before you learned it. Believe it or not, you can actually digress in your spiritual evolution if you choose to incorporate lower vibratory thought forms into your being. Of course the universe will then bring back that lesson until you choose to accept it in harder and more difficult ways. 

If you choose to accept your conclusion and evolve and elevate because of it, a great way to contribute to the universe if to share your experience, this doesn’t mean that you have to write a book or start a podcast, or that you even have to tell people what you learned, but even just applying it in your own life can be teaching. People around you that notice your positive change, and the evolution that you just went through, can be considered teaching. Lead by example. Of course if you like talking to people and sharing your stories, that is also a great way to continue your practice and keep that active in your experience. 

Step 5: Forming the Spirit 

I can’t say from experience what this step looks like, as I am unsure if I have reached this threshold, but I did go through a pretty big lesson, maybe even the hardest one in this lifetime, but who knows, more things might be coming my way. Anyway, this step will be completed by itself, when you reach that final lesson, you wont even know it is your final lesson until it is learned, because then, when you disincarnate, you no longer will loose your correlation and continuation, you will no longer forget what you are working on, who you are, and where you are headed. You will be able to do more work in developing your connection to the divine and draw in inspiration from source, and not just from our ego minds. This step is not the last in the universe, but it is the last to get us out of this densified backwards planet we live on, at least from here on out we will have a conscious choice to come back or not, and that is more than we have been able to do in our journey thus far. 

As you can see all of this is work from our end, no one is going to come and do the work for you, or beam you out of this planet, or be “saved” by the blood of another person on a cross. The universe does not work by magic, it is all frequency and vibration, and you will match that which you are, you can’t hide it, and you can’t lie to the universe, if there is lessons you need to learn, people you need to forgive, experiences you need to live in order to purify your consciousness, and learn what you need to learn, the universe will make sure you get more than enough opportunities to evolve, transmute and transcend your current state of consciousness.  

Reading Section: The One Being Book 4 / Question #234: 

How do you communicate with the channelers?  

We communicate with symbols. When a being conceives his spirit, it has engraved in is crystals (thoughts) the basic universal formulas. These formulas are the DNA of the universe. The spirit does not need to learn, remember, assimilate, etc., it has it innately in itself, as opposed to the soul, that does need to learn, experience, assimilate, apply itself etc. 

We communicate with the channelers of the planet through symbols, and these are interpreted with the existing vocabulary that is located in the being’s memory. Who is interpreting and translating the symbols, is the spirit, who adequately expresses these symbols in the language that it finds itself in, extracting from this what is necessary to correctly communicate.  

These symbols are exactly like the crop circles and like the symbols you will find in the future when you discover Atlantis. . . 

[roxannepolice]

I just want to thank you for being really out there and talking about your spec that Rey will have a dark moment in IX. I agree and I get so frustrated with people who insist she's already learned her lesson. She needs to fail and by her own choice, not just because she can't convince Ben to go home. She needs to screw up and have it be on her otherwise she's a static character who doesn't actually learn anything. I dont get why that's hard to conceptualize.

Thank you anon, that’s very kind of you.

I think there are two main reasons why the audience wants Rey to be a static character: tropiness in reylos’ case and projection in general audience case. The point is, Rey, the way she appears to be, is a character people want to listen about: unconflicted, unproblematic, überpowerful, supertalented, beautiful and to all this being a woman and a “nobody” (social justice points). Rey’s story, as it hitherto presented itself as, is on the one hand very beautiful and important to tell - everyone can be a hero, you will find your own place in world and history regardless of existance or non-existance of you predetermined status - and thetefore tlj’s message of her arc was important to tell, but on the other hand is, I would say, dangerously flattering. An every(wo)man hero, such as Luke openly was, is a character with whom we journey, discover our problems, get catharsis with but never overidentify with. A no(wo)man hero is a character we project ourselves upon, they don’t lead us on a journey because they apparently don’t need one - and neither, therefore, do we, we just have to be on the unproblematically obvious “good side” and all the rest like special powers will just come as a reward, not to mention skills which will apparently get transferred to us from some bad guy as a punishment for their hubris (again, not my interpretation of the interrogation scene). Note that we weren’t given any scene of Rey actually training, let alone failing at her training, which I on the one hand get (especially considering I count on there being heavy hell in epix), but on the other am disappointed to know all Matt Martin had to say to that on twitter is oh well, we assumed you’d guess she’s training. Cheesy as montages are, it is through watching the hero fail that we identify with them, their failures become our failures and thus their eventual triumph is both cathartic and uplifting. Not giving us the training and failures works just fine for action based movies - note that very often as a poor response to even poorer sexist arguments against Rey characters like classic James Bond are used - but SW always had their psychological/personal journey subplot, in which it just won’t work. 

Additionally, SW have never given us main characters that “just are” good or evil (except for the really old ones, having finished their symbollic journey) or perhaps were always telling us that everyone is naturally good but everyone can become corrupted - either by the character flaws that they don’t even find worth dealing with (the hitherto because I kinda hope Rey’s denial based temporary fall will happen without external help “irredeemable” evil like Palps) or because they got exploited by others (Anakin, Ben). Nurture has never been brushed under a carpet in GFFA and what mattered most was love but parenting skills weren’t completely unimportant - but never the social status or bloodlines, at least not directly (the indirect relationship is there, of course, since people in better social position usually have more abilities to provide for their child’s welfare - but also to spoil and neglect them). And it sometimes makes me sad when I realise that it’s very possible that should we get what I anticipate - temporary Reyfall accompanied by permanent Bendemption - some will screech about how that tells us women are weaker than men or that social status does affect our potential to be a hero. Which won’t be the case - should Rey break then it will be after an inhuman effort of going on for 19 years without love and should Ben see the light then it will be because despite all the flaws OTrio had as caretakers he was deeply loved by them - but it will have nothing to do with either their gender or social status. 

And then there’s the reylo problem of tropiness. On the one hand it’s very admirable that fine people here have recognized Beauty&Beast among all the lightsabers, but the problem is the deductive conclusion that Rey is like Belle. TBH, this is one of the things that I love about reylo relationship - that SW took a tale as old as time, usually rendered in badly obsolete gender relations and gave it a brand new life making Beauty a rough ass kicking sand goblin and Beast a polished Hamlet-y princeling (while keeping them both hot af). The same goes for reverse anidala - I absolutely agree the parallel meant to heal the wound Ben’s grandparents created is there, but Rey isn’t Padmé, let alone actually upgraded Padmé, now with better psychotherapeutic skills. Again - nurture isn’t unimportant in SW, Padmé was raised with a possibility of her being elected a queen, of taking care of a whole nation ever present, so I really can’t see how Rey just knows how to fix a broken Skywalker boy while Amidala just didn’t. Which is not to say that Padmé’s reaction to sand people massacre was the right one and Rey closing the falcon door was the wrong one. What I am saying is that it wasn’t a conscious psychotherapy on the latter’s part.

The sad truth is that we’d all kinda want Rey to be a force-sent solution to all of galaxy’s problems, regardless of whether that means fixing a broken Skywalker boy or killing him. But that was never a thing in Star Wars. End of the day, Luke’s heroic climax wasn’t about saving the galaxy only realising the deeper meaning of compassion and succeeding there where neiter of his mentors did. And I just can’t wait to see where Rey’s inner journey will lead her, though hopefully that will include bringing real balance to the force with her dark prince at her side, the task at hand having been repeatedly proven too difficult for one person to achieve.

[jeanandthedreamofhorses]

SNK and Schopenhauer, Part 1: Resisting the Will to Life

(CW: Suicide, depressing content)

The 19th Century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had a very depressing basis to his work which, to summarise, was this: the moment we are born into this world, we are compelled to restlessly strive for something, and because that is the core aspect of our being, we shall never reach contentment. He calls this compulsion ‘the Will to Life’.

We only move from one discontentment to the next, always striving, always struggling, believing that this time, contentment lies beyond the horizon, just out of sight.

But it is an illusion. The dreams that we suffer so much to achieve will never give us the release we long for. As such, we are trapped, enslaved to our longings that define what we are.

Can the longing for freedom, therefore, ever be achieved, if freedom is simply the absence of longing?

The characters of SNK have bled tortuously for their dreams, never finding satisfaction at the end of them. Eren only found dread at the ocean. Reiner’s long-awaited homecoming drove him to suicidal depression. Schopenhauer would say that it would be better for them to simply reject their desires entirely as the only path to real freedom.

This sentiment is echoed in the final words of Kenny Ackerman.

Like Schopenhauer’s ‘sage’, the minuscule portion of humanity with the power to reject the Will to Life, Kenny ultimately gives up his longing for power and chooses death over tortured continuation when he gives the serum to Levi instead of using it on himself.

It is Kenny’s words that later persuade Levi not to administer the serum to Erwin, who likewise felt enslaved by his desire to see the basement, and wanted to do the moral thing rather than obey the command of his own selfish wish.

When Levi makes the choice for him, he frees him from the yoke of his Will to Life, and so he thanks him with a genuine smile. In choosing not to revive Erwin, Levi also acts contrary to his own desire for the sake of Erwin’s freedom.

Erwin can now rest after his lifetime of restless striving.

To clarify, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is not necessarily a suicidal one. Erwin and Kenny’s virtue lies in the denial of their desires even if it means death - not in choosing death itself (which is why Levi shares their virtue).

However, there is certainly some overlap. Schopenhauer saw the world as being inherently so miserable that no-one would choose to live in it if the Will to Life was not forcing them to. Zeke shares the sentiment, and decides to spare the Eldians from this enslavement by preventing them from being born and possessed by the Will to Life in the first place.

Schopenhauer said:

“Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.”

And so for Zeke, freedom can only exist in non-existence.

Post-homecoming Reiner is another proponent of this Schopenhauesque thinking. His dissatisfaction with his reward for all the blood he’s shed on his mission leads him to conclude that struggle is useless, and longs for the peace of sleep.

Schopenhauer also said:

“Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth; every fresh morning a little youth; every going to rest and sleep a little death.”

This ties in well with the themes of sleeping/waking and death/birth that epitomise the contrast between Eren and Reiner’s ways of thinking that I detail in this meta.

For Eren, despite his various disillusionments, still believes there’s something worth striving for:

While he is not as sure that freedom and contentment lie just over the horizon as he was before, he thinks the possibility of it is enough reason to keep striving - because giving up, whether in life or death, is intolerable to him. 

Schopenhauer’s conception of constant dissatisfaction can never be definitively disproven, but it can never be definitively proven, either. Just because something happens over and over again that does not mean it will unquestionably happen every time. Eren devotes himself to that window of doubt and so contrarily asserts:

Eren’s actions do tie into some of Schopenhauer’s criteria for freedom. He said:

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”

His plan was only made possible by this self-imposed isolation, a lesson he has learned over the course of the series. However, Schopenhauer would probably still consider him a slave to his Will to Life.

Even so, Schopenhauer doesn’t actually dislike Eren’s way of thinking. He thinks that for the vast majority of humanity, if they realise the truth behind their desires, it will be better for them to delude themselves into believing them again because the alternative will either be boredom, depression or anxiety. We can see depression clearly in Reiner, and anxiety in the indecision and self-doubt Eren experienced after his abduction by Rod Reiss.

Schopenhauer’s sage must contend with all of these emotions - that is why he says that only a very small portion of humanity can achieve this state. The sage’s act of resistance is a middle finger to the Will to Life and therein lies the beauty - but for the majority of humanity who can’t handle that, it is better to deceive yourself again. And indeed it is very easy to do so, because we are programmed to do so - we want to restlessly strive for something.

So while Eren’s persistence is admirable to us, Schopenhauer would consider him to be deluding himself, even if justifiably. But does that necessarily mean he would side with Zeke? Although Zeke wants an end to striving, he is striving to achieve that goal. In that way, he is no different from anyone else who strives for something thinking it will make them content. His goal may have changed, but Zeke’s saviour complex is no different from what Grisha wanted from him.

After all, will world peace really come about if the Eldians die out? Marley’s wars with the Mid-East Allied Forces suggest otherwise. However, it is certainly true that future Eldians will be free from the Will to Life: so with that in mind he might support Zeke’s actions.

However, Zeke is the antagonist of the series, which suggests that Isayama does not mean for us to side with Schopenhauer’s way of thinking, but with Eren’s. But how has Eren avoided succumbing to despair? From where does he draw the energy to keep striving?

These are Mikasa’s thoughts, but they are crucial to the themes of the series and I believe Eren has come to understand them too. Schopenhauer has much to say on the subject of beauty, and it is a ray of hope within the bleakness of his worldview. 

Beauty has to power to relieve us of the Will to Life. Whether admiring a piece of art, reading an incredible story or looking out over a phenomenal view, there are times when beauty totally captivates us - so much so that for a few minutes we can think of nothing else. That is the only time that the Will to Life does not inflict us with the pain of longing.

If one can learn to appreciate the beauty not just in art or extraordinary experiences, but in everything around them, then they could suspend the Will to Life for vast periods of time. It’s another means of escape, and a much less foreboding way out than the path of the sage.

Eren sees beauty in his loved ones. Again and again they have proven to be the most important thing to him outside of his restless striving for freedom and the elimination of his enemies. They are his relief from the Will to Life.

So he fights for his friends. They are what reassure him that these lives, though cruel, are beautiful enough to be worth preserving. He must continue to restlessly strive, even if he cannot know whether freedom from the forces that would destroy them truly lies on the horizon. He has no alternative if he wants to maintain the beauty of his world.

That’s why Kruger gives this advice to Grisha:

Beauty, so often found in love, is our best shot to break free from the pain of the cycle perpetuated by the Will to Life.

Thus did Schopenhauer say:

“Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.”

So how will all this end up? Will Eren’s striving prove mistaken, and Isayama agree with Schopenhauer? Or will Eren finally find satisfaction for his efforts, if just in preserving the people he loves most?

It all depends on how we interpret this final panel.

It seems hopeful. If it’s Eren, then that’s certainly the case - he has found freedom in this life, and can pass it on to his child. Birth does not mean enslavement for him. If it’s Grisha, it could also be hopeful, confirming that Eren was always free. However, we cannot discount the possibility of irony, either. With these words Grisha might be moulding the dream Eren becomes enslaved to.

Personally, though, it’s such a warm image I cannot help but think of it as hopeful. Rather than just a representation of Schopenhauer, I think the series also serves as an answer to him, countering his arguments with his own logic, using beauty to counterbalance the Will to Life’s cruelty - even while the event of a Rumbling ensures an ending that is bittersweet at the very least.

Of course, we cannot know whether Isayama is even familiar with the work of Schopenhauer. Yet I do not think he has to be to respond to it. Schopenhauer subjected it to rigorous examination, but haven’t we all had the feeling from time to time that no matter how hard we try, we will never be satisfied?

The conclusion of this series will decide if Eren’s mentality is correct. Is fighting worth it, or does it simply perpetuate a vicious cycle? Is ‘winning’ possible, or is it a fool’s errand? Or does the answer lie somewhere in between?

Personally, I believe the beauty will balance out the cruelty. After all, why is it that we read this painful, bloody, violent manga, if not for the beauty inherent within it?

In this way, Isayama liberates us, too, from the pain of striving.

In the next instalment, we’ll be examining Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in more detail to understand why he conceives of the Will to Life in this way, and to see how gracefully the world of SNK reflects them. 

[slavojquotes]

truth is the same thing as the path to itself. A Pole and a Jew are sitting in the same carriage in a train. Something is bothering the Pole and he keeps fidgeting in his seat. Finally, he can't hold it in any longer and blurts out: “Tell me how it is that you Jews are able to get so rich by bleeding people down to their last cent?” The Jew answers: “Okay, I'll tell you, but I won't do it for free. Give me five zlotys.” After pocketing the coins, he begins: “First, you have to take a dead fish, cut off its head, and pour its guts into a glass of water. Then, when the moon is full, you bury this glass in a graveyard.” “And,” the Pole asks greedily, “if I do that I'll be rich?” “Not so fast,” the Jew replies; “there is more to it, but if you want to hear the rest you'll need to give me five more zlotys.” The money is exchanged and the Jew continues his story, soon asks for more money, etc., up until the Pole finally explodes: “You cheat! You think I'm not on to you? There's no secret, you just want to take all my money!” The Jew calmly replies: “There you go, now you understand how the Jews …” Every aspect of this little story is worth interpreting, starting with the very beginning. The fact that the Pole can't stop looking over at the Jew means that he is already in the process of transferring onto the Jew; for him the Jew embodies the subject who supposedly knows (the secret of how to extract every last cent from people). The fundamental lesson is that ultimately the Jew did not trick the Pole: he kept his word, he fulfilled his part of the deal by showing him how Jews, etc., etc. The decisive twist takes place in the gap between the moment in which the Pole gets angry and the Jew gives his final answer. When the Pole explodes, he is already speaking the truth, he just doesn't know it yet. He sees how the Jew took his money from him, but he only considers this to be some kind of Jewish trick. To put this in topological terms, he does not yet see that he's already passed onto the other surface of the Möbius strip, that the trick itself contains the answer to the initial question, given that the reason he paid the Jew was precisely to teach him the way in which Jews … The mistake lies in the Pole's perspective; he was waiting for the Jew's secret to be revealed at the end of the story. He thought that the story the Jew was telling was just a path toward the final secret. His fixation on the hidden Secret, the final point of the narrative chain, blinded him as to the true secret, which was the way in which he was tricked by the Jew's story about said secret. The Jew's “secret” lies in the Pole's desire, and therefore our own desire; it lies in the fact that the Jew knows how to make use of our desires. This is why the conclusion of this little story corresponds perfectly to the final moment of analysis, the exit from the transfer and the traversal of the phantasy, the two stages of which are split between the final two moments of the joke's denouement. The Pole's explosion of anger marks the point where he exits the transfer, where he realizes that “there is no secret” and thus the Jew ceases to be the “subject who supposedly knows.” The Jew's final comment articulates the traversal of the phantasy. Isn't the “secret” that causes us to follow the Jew's story so attentively the object a, the chimerical “thing” of phantasy that provokes our desire, all while being retroactively posited by the desire itself? In this sense, the traversal of the phantasy coincides precisely with the experience that the object, the pure semblant, does nothing more than positivize the hole in our desire. In addition, this story is also a perfect illustration of the unique and irreplaceable role of money in the analytical process. If the Pole was not paying the Jew for his story, he would not reach the level of anger necessary for him to exit from the transfer. It is puzzling that, as a general rule, we do not recognize the structure of this Witz in another, much more famous, story. I am talking, of course, about the Witz of the entrance to the Law in Chapter IX of Kafka's The Trial and its final reversal when the man from the country who is waiting asks the guard: “Everyone seeks the Law,” the man says, “so how is it that in all these years no one apart from me has asked to be let in?” The doorkeeper realizes that the man is nearing his end, and so, in order to be audible to his fading hearing, he bellows at him, “No one else could be granted entry here, because this entrance was intended for you alone. I shall now go and shut it.” (Kafka 2009b: 155) This reversal is quite analogous to the twist at the end of the story of the Pole and the Jew. The subject finally understands that he was included in the game from the beginning, that the door was already designed for him alone – in the same way that in the story of the Pole and the Jew, the point of the Jew's story is, ultimately, just to catch the Pole's desire. And, I should add, it is the same as in the story from Arabian Nights I mentioned earlier in which the hero's accidental entrance to the cave turns out to have been long-awaited by the wise men. We could even rework Kafka's story about the entrance to the Law in a way that would make it all the more similar to the Witz of the Pole and the Jew. Let us imagine that, after a long wait, the man from the country suddenly exploded in anger and started to scream at the guard: “You dirty liar! Why are you pretending to guard the entrance to unknown secrets, when you yourself know that there is not a single secret behind that Door, because that entrance was designed for me alone, it serves only to capture my desire?” – to which the guard would calmly reply: “There you go! You've finally discovered the true secret of the entrance to the Law.” In these two cases, the logic of the final twist is strictly Hegelian, functioning similarly to what Hegel called the “sublation of the bad infinity.” Both cases start out the same way: the subject is confronted with an inaccessible, transcendental, substantial truth, a forbidden secret that is infinitely deferred. In one case there is the inaccessible Heart of the Law that lies beyond the infinite series of entrances, in the other there is the inaccessible final answer to the question of how Jews manage to get people to give them all their money down to their last cent (because it is clear from the narrative that the Jew could keep going forever). In both stories, the denouement, the solution, is the same – instead of finally succeeding in lifting the final curtain and unveiling the ultimate secret, the Heart of the Law/the way in which the Jews extract people's money, the subject realizes that he was included in the game from the very beginning, that his exclusion from the Secret and his desire to learn the Secret were already included in the very way the Secret operated. This reveals the dimension of a certain type of reflexivity that is missed by the classical philosophical conception of reflexivity. Philosophical reflexivity consists in the mediating movement through which the One comes to include its alterity, the Subject appropriates the substantial content opposed to it by positing itself as the unity of itself and its other. But this idea of the positivation of impossibility necessarily implies a whole different kind of reflexive reversal, whose key moment occurs when the subject recognizes that the impossibility of appropriating the Heart of the Other is a positive condition for the definition of his own status as subject

[deadsummerdays]

Let’s Movie Nerd-Out About Identity and Memory in ‘Swiss Army Man’

For a story conceived of as a running gag about the worst possible premise for a film, Swiss Army Man sure raises a lot of deep questions. (Heh, ‘raises.’) At first glance, this movie looks like an overly-sincere indie dramedy in which New Age open-mindedness dismantles antiquated social mores and Daniel Radcliffe farts as far away from the Harry Potter franchise as possible – a combination that works or flounders depending on whether you’re on board with the joke – but there’s a subtler side. Issues of identity and memory (or more broadly, knowledge) crop up everywhere in this love story, and I expect they will be a topic of speculation for many years to come. With a movie this crazy in particular, I want to acknowledge that we can all play the subtext game and wind up with wildly different interpretations, so this is not me painting anyone with an extra-saucy coat of shade. A lot depends on how you value the information a film throws at you, and generically, magical realism likes to force its audience to choose what to believe. So, bearing that in mind, let’s make like Hank and Manny and dive right in. Major spoilers below.

Now that we’re all down at the exclusive Club Spoilers, I should clarify my usage of the word “identity.” There are people who argue that Swiss is secretly a tale of transgenderism, and while I think the ending is open enough that this is possible (we simply don’t spend enough time with the newly-liberated Hank to know), it isn’t my purpose here to argue for or against that conclusion. Rather, I mean to look at Swiss’s theme of identity in a more holistic sense. Hank, Manny, and Sarah exist in a web of imposed and appropriated ‘selves’ which fluctuates over the course of the film, and it is this interlocking of the three characters that I intend to look at.

Some movies go out of their way to provide a full exposition of their main characters in the first several minutes, particularly when they appear to us someplace they wouldn’t normally be, like the middle of goddamn nowhere. Not so in Swiss Army Man, which is coy with a purpose. The less that is confirmed, the more the audience and other characters rely on imagination to fill in the blanks, and the easier it is to blend in magical elements without them feeling jarring; this produces an atmosphere that is conducive hyperbole. Our knowledge of Hank is vague and emotional, that he is a lonely, unfulfilled person driven to infirmity -- but like Manny, in absence of a concrete context, we accept the world of the film on his terms. At the moment that his life fails to flash before his eyes, a strange man appears on the shore, and we get our first memory: Hank on the bus, looking up (as we learn later) in anticipation of Sarah climbing aboard. He “didn’t see much” then, as he explains to the corpse he has resuscitated into only the barest, basest form of reflexive life – but he did see Manny. Cue the violins.

When Hank wakes up again on the coast, his attention shifts to trying to figure out whether Manny is a hallucination, a scientific oddity, or a miracle. It’s a question that is never totally resolved and which creates a fundamental problem in trying to ‘identify’ Manny, that he may be to a greater or lesser extent Hank’s projection. To start with, Hank treats him like a child, or more specifically, as Hank’s father treated him when he was a child. He then tries to stimulate Manny’s memory, but all it establishes is his fondness for music. For all intents and purposes, Manny is a blank slate, and so it falls to Hank to educate him about home and why they should go there. Making use of conveniently-placed garbage, he sets about illustrating life in his society, ostensibly for Manny’s benefit but also to a great extent for his own, using Manny as another tool through which to dramatize and fix his own personal perceptions and traumas. And because Manny has little to no background on what’s going on, like a child looking to his parent, the things Hank says and does become inflated in his mind: Hank humming to himself out of boredom makes singing an essential social activity, for example, and bus rides and e-cards become special rituals. But whereas Manny relies on his friend to indulge him with memories of home, Hank has the opposite problem: he remembers it all well enough, but because he was so unhappy in his old life, he doesn’t want to.

Already we see in the cinematography that mirroring of the two men abounds. This takes on even greater meaning in Swiss because Hank is the one doing the blocking. Since Manny can’t move on his own, Hank positions him, often in a way that either replicates his own posture (seated opposite each other on the beach, propped on their elbows in the cave) or allows Manny to execute a task Hank wants him to do. The implication that Hank is (perhaps unconsciously) imprinting himself on Manny is clear. This is, however, still within the fairly reasonable breadth of identity formation, with some of Hank’s influence rubbing off and much of Manny’s personality asserting itself despite him. Where things get a good deal more complicated is when Hank introduces Sarah into the mix.

The first curiosity with regards to Sarah is why Manny assumes that he knows her in at all. The phone falls in front of his eyes and he’s instantly attracted, but the fact of being attracted didn’t make him think that the magazine belonged to him, too, or that he knew any of the women in it. My best guess is that this is a case of “found it first” thinking: Sarah’s picture is the first object to which Manny develops an attachment independently of Hank’s interference, and so he believes that his connection to it is special and exclusive. Hank’s shame prevents him from correcting this mistake, so he entertains Manny’s illusion to the point of dressing up as Sarah in a fruitless effort to jog his ‘memory.’ Manny’s encouragement surprises Hank and helps him embrace the affect. There’s a change in the wind: armed with a concept, now Manny is making requests to fulfill his own vision of his life, using Hank as his resource. Also of note is how well Manny’s desires align with his friend’s: he isn’t only attracted to Sarah, but fixated on her, just like Hank is. If Manny isn’t a figment of Hank’s mind altogether, he certainly takes after him in an uncannily precise way.

In order to get Manny’s “compass” to work, Hank further develops Sarah into a character. It becomes clear that he looks to her the way Manny looks to him, as a person who sets the terms of how life should be: the bus she rides becomes a mythic space, the café she frequents is remembered in loving detail, and arguably even the racoon of its logo is the basis for her party costume. He and Manny construct sets in which to play out the fantasy, with Manny in the role of an idealized Hank and Hank in the role of an idealized Sarah. Responding to his prompts, Manny is convinced that he fell in love with Sarah on the bus but that he has yet to work up the courage to talk to her, which is exactly Hank’s problem; Hank, on the other hand, smooths over the complications of his real-life association with Sarah by making his version receptive.

This scene creates two severe logic problems, one of which is how Hank could produce the scenario of Manny encountering Sarah on the bus without Manny becoming suspicious. It is most plausible that he cited the fact that she was sitting by a bus window in the photograph as inspiration, but to a greater extent, we have to believe that Manny adopts Hank’s version of things as fact, assimilating his explanations into reality. Time is also a tricky factor here because the pair make no distinction in their plays between memory and destiny: since Hank cannot bring himself to acknowledge the full realm of possibilities, Manny is left with the impression that there is only one track his relationship with Sarah can follow, and so it doesn’t much matter whether he’s only at the beginning or if he’s already won her heart. In absence of his own memories or context, he assumes Hank’s lesson is a simulation of his real meeting with Sarah, making Hank’s characterization of her equally ‘factual.’ Thus, Manny takes up Hank’s role in the drama while Hank, freed from his uncertainties and disappointments, embraces being his own beloved.

Manny is the ‘movie character’ in Swiss Army Man, by which I mean that he has a filmic intelligence; whereas Hank stages his thoughts as interactive ‘sets,’ Manny appears to think in montage. It’s unsurprising that he enjoys movies and looking out of windows, both clear reflexive references: consigned to an existence of removed, immobile observation, he is a perpetual passenger and a perpetual spectator to whom the flow of real life already looks like a film. Manny is also capable of melding his thoughts with Hank’s, or is perhaps even inter-subjective with him (again, filmic), which could also explain their identical interest in Sarah. However, this opens up the second logic problem of the bus scene, which is the biggest one in the whole film: when Manny extracts Sarah’s name from Hank’s mind, why doesn’t it seem to bother Hank at all? It’s puzzling that he reacts to Manny’s intrusions with alarm during the campfire scene and not here, but whatever the reason (if it’s not merely a plot hole), Manny comes away persuaded that the memory is his own, and Hank is either too ashamed to press it or too invested in the fantasy to care. There are indications that Hank is beginning to lose himself in Sarah: her personality and emotions seem genuine rather than affected, and when Manny asks Hank to put his hand on her hand, he does so in her character.

The montage scene is of great consequence for both our heroes. Manny is introduced with much fanfare to cinema itself (complete with popcorn), which becomes important later, when he processes his grief over Sarah’s ‘affair’; Hank, meanwhile, spends more and more time as her until she seems to become a persona, a creative reproduction of Sarah Johnson as she exists in Hank’s mind. The romance that develops between the pair is not just a fiction of Hank and Sarah, then, but an actual relationship between Manny-as-Hank (or, if you assume they are one and same, Hank-as-Manny) and Hank-as-Sarah. Their trek home continues out of inertia, and yet, were it only so simple, they might have turned around. The fundamental rift between them is that Hank realizes the real object of his affection is Manny, whereas Manny believes that Hank-as-Sarah is a simulacrum: he’s aware of the distinction between Hank-as-Sarah and the genuine article, but he still assumes that everything he does with the former is a re-telling of what his relationship with the real Sarah was, is, or will be like. This seems to be an issue that is unique to him.

It’s a state of affairs that can’t last. Their courtship culminates in a party where Hank appears to have a realization about how deep their feelings for each other go, which prompts him to confront the corpse. He never gets to say what he intended to, though, because DanRad is a man with a plan.

After nearly kissing, Hank starts to sulk, ashamed once again of his weird feelings. Worse still, Manny makes it clear that he wants to see Sarah “for real,” putting his friend firmly in his place. Falling into the river, we see a few more shots that seem to be from Manny (or else that are shared) wherein scenes from his romance with Hank-as-Sarah become flooded with water. They’re striking illustrations of how memories contort when they are experienced, altering depending on one’s mood, present circumstances, needs, and so on. The moment Hank grabs Manny’s hand, these flashes become more forceful, warping the images of Manny and Sarah meeting on the bus into a kiss, and Hank’s eyes widen in surprise. Now Manny seems to be the one manipulating memories to fit his desires. However, the duality of Hank and Sarah makes this moment complicated. It seems likely that Manny imagines the kiss as being between him and (Hank-as-)Sarah, whereas Hank, in allowing himself to express his love for Manny, is acknowledging that Sarah and her feelings come from within him rather than from the real Sarah. Put simply, Manny is kissing Sarah, and Hank is kissing him back. The scene doesn’t spell it out clearly, but based on the discrimination with which Manny continues to treat Sarah and Hank, and judging by his ongoing fixation on wooing the former, there are compelling reasons to believe that he’s still misattributing Hank’s love to her. Thus, the identity confusion continues.

When Hank suggests that they stay in the forest instead of going home, it’s clear that his priorities have changed. One wonders how the two would have addressed the Sarah issue had this plan come to fruition, but we don’t get the chance to find out. (As a side note, how does Manny go from lying on the ground to sitting on the rock while Hank is checking his phone? That’s some high-level sorcery.) When Hank returns to the campfire, he’s finally accepted his desire to stay with Manny and decides to come clean, but unfortunately for him, Manny is still stuck on Sarah – and once he realizes that their romance has been a charade from the start, he feels betrayed. He blames Hank for tricking him into falling in love, but he can’t quite make sense of the slight, possibly on account of his demonstrated inability to parse out memories from inventions and experience from fiction when all appear equally filmic to him: still unable to distinguish between his Sarah and the real one, Manny constructs a fantasy of his own in which Hank is having an affair with her. Everything Hank did to reimagine his misery as innocent, childlike bliss reverts into the emotions he was trying to avoid: alienation, loneliness, depression, hopelessness, the feeling of being unloved. And with Hank’s subsequent injury, his and Manny’s role reversal is complete; incapacitated, out of love with Sarah, and fully reliant on his friend, Hank can no longer understand what Manny wants to go home for. He disconnects from his old life – so much so that when Manny forces the issue and brings them to Sarah’s home, Hank adopts his name and tries to cast away his old identity.

The painful disillusionment of meeting Sarah in reality is the last fissure in the Manny-as-Hank-as-Sarah amalgamation that makes it come apart. What love braided together unravels at the revelation that Sarah is leading her life without them, that Hank was only ever Hank, and that Manny is just a dead dude that nobody cared about. Thus divided, everything goes back to how it was in the beginning, and for a moment, Hank is offered the path of least resistance. But he chooses differently, and so, too, does his journey reverse to the shoreline. Bringing to its conclusion the parental dynamic of their relationship, Hank apologizes for screwing Manny up by hiding all the ugly, difficult facts of life from him. He seals their farewell with – what else? – a fart, and with that, Manny jets away. Daniels end the film on a mystery, giving Hank one last line of dialogue to Manny that goes unheard, so the way one interprets the final scene can vary depending on what he might have said. What is clear is that Hank has gained the courage to be himself without shame.

We’re left with lingering questions about Manny that the film echoes without answering: where did he come from, and where did he go? The most popular theory seems to be that he is a part of Hank’s psyche, or that he’s Hank’s soul, and the relationship drama is Hank berating himself for falling in love with a married woman based on his own fantasy of her. Where this seems to break down, though, is the campfire scene, when Hank declares that he doesn’t need Sarah anymore, representing a split between his and Manny’s desires which leads, further, to differences in how they react to meeting her. But the plausibility of one theory versus another depends entirely on whether you see Hank’s travails as magical or merely psychological. If it’s all in his head, then the answer is fairly plain: Manny is a projection and his Sarah guise is an attempt to satisfy impossible yearnings, through which he discovers that the love he attributed to them is displaced from himself. (A bit Freudian, that. It’s not difficult to extent this into a reading of Swiss as a conflict between the ego/Hank, the super-ego/Sarah, and the id/Manny.) There’s also a more meta way of looking at this, which is that Manny is really alive in the logic of the film, but he is a literalized metaphor for Hank’s soul or psyche, both him and not him (my own current theory); the third and similar option is that Manny is fully individual. Transformed into a multipurpose tool guy either by magic, miracles, or something so sci-fi it might as well be either of those, in these cases, his emergent identity confusion is very understandable. Like a child, we watch him both mirror and rebel against his ‘father,’ growing more independent and assertive, setting impossible standards and lofty ideals for his life until everything he thought he knew about the world comes crashing down – and it is only then that Manny is able to see the love that he doesn’t have to embark on some quixotic quest to get: the love that Hank gave him simply for being there, the one that finally sets him free.

[the-record-columns]

Dec. 26, 2018: Columns

Christmas cards don't always come in envelopes...

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

In 2015, the folks who produce the program NASCAR Race Hub came by the offices of The Record and Thursday Printing to interview me about the 50th Anniversary Special they were doing on Tom Wolfe's 1965 story about Junior Johnson, "The Last American Hero." 

They were well prepared and very tolerant of the fact that I wasn't at all happy that NASCAR had gotten greedy and taken away our race at the North Wilkesboro Speedway.

In the process of the interview, I was asked to speak to Tom Wolfe's comment that he had found the folks in Wilkes County to be  "...standoffish." 

I quickly replied that he could "...take his happy ass back up to New York where he was from, hang around there for a while, and then to call me about ‘standoffish’ folks.”

I then told the interviewer that if a person in Traphill answered the door at midnight with a shotgun in hand, that wasn't being standoffish—just cautious. That is one of the few comments I made during the 45-minute interview which they actually used.

To that end, I also assured the film crew that, if their van broke down in Wilkes, in less than five minutes, someone would stop and offer to help them.

And that brings me to this past Friday afternoon and Saturday morning.

I drive an old Chevy S-10 pickup, like 25 years old.  It once belonged to the late Richie Feimster, a good worker, a great musician, and just an all-around decent guy who worked here at The Record and died suddenly—way too soon—at only 38 years old.

So this pickup is not just any an old S-10 pickup, it is a very special pickup, a truck with good karma, if you will.  But, just like me and all things old, it does malfunction sometimes—like this past Friday afternoon. 

It was a simple problem—the battery is old, and I must have left the switch on, because when I came out of the Pencare office supply store in Midtown Plaza, it wouldn't start.  I stepped back into the store and asked if one of them could jump me off.  Of course, they were glad to oblige and I went outside to raise the hood of my truck and get my jumper cables ready.  In less than 30 seconds a car with a young couple inside pulled up and offered to help me start my truck.  I assured them I had help coming around the corner and thanked them.  After wishing me a cheery "Merry Christmas" the strangers drove away, having unwittingly validated my theory about Wilkes County people.

And then—on Saturday morning, the heater in the old S-10 quit working.  This, too, had happened before.  I had learned from Bucky Luttrell that I have some kind of water leak, and, by filling up the radiator, the heater works like new again.  So, I pulled the pickup next to my building and raised the hood. 

Now get this.  BEFORE I could even turn on the faucet to fetch a pail of water (as the rhyme goes), a man driving down the alley stops to inquire what my breakdown might be, and how could he help me.  Again, I was able to assure the Good Samaritan that this was a small, ongoing problem that I had the solution to, but I truly thanked him for his willingness to help.

Tom Wolfe died in May of this year, so I can't send him an email about the willingness of Wilkes County people to help someone else, even someone they don't know from Adam's house cat.  I do, however, proudly use this space today to remind the readers of The Record that Christmas cards don't always come in envelopes, sometimes they come as good-hearted strangers.

(And, please, please forgive me, but while we are at it, I'll toss in a reminder that 4-Way Stop signs are an abomination of Satan himself, and do not belong in the South.)

Merry Christmas to all.

New Year changes

By LAURA WELBORN

Record Columnist

This time of year I always think of what I want to do differently the next year.

Last year I wanted to focus on being “mindful” and more intentional.  Well I learned a lot and found some success and of course a lot of not so successful. Here are a few of my redefined goals: (with some help from Marc and ANgel Hack Life blog)

Warren Buffett once said, “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”  Be willing to be wrong in 2019.  Be willing to learn in 2019.  Be mindful, humble and teachable every step of the way.

When you focus your heart and mind upon a purpose, and commit yourself to fulfill that purpose through small daily steps, positive energy floods into your life.  

When things go wrong, learn what you can and then push the heartbreak aside by refocusing your energy on the present step. Remember that life’s best lessons are often learned at the worst times and from the worst mistakes.  

When in doubt choose positive. If you want life to be happier, you need to be mindful of your present response.  It’s how you deal with stress in each little moment that determines how well you achieve happiness in the end.

I consistently focus on troublesome thoughts but who would I be, and what else would I see, if I removed those thoughts? I hope to be intentional about spending more quality time with people who help me love myself more and let go of the paranoid failure thoughts.

I always want to exercise more, and since both of my dogs died last year I find I don’t even walk anymore.  But I know if you don’t have your physical energy tuned up, then your mental energy (your focus), your emotional energy (your feelings), and your spiritual energy (your purpose) will all be negatively affected. Depression showed that consistent exercise combined with a healthy diet raises happiness levels just as much as Zoloft?

One of the things I have worked on is just not saying anything when I feel my words will just incite a negative response.  Thus say less when less means more seems to be a better reaction. Sometimes, you are as wise as the silence you leave behind, because sometimes the right words aren’t words.  If you cannot speak a kind word, say nothing at all.  And if they cannot speak a kind word, say nothing at all. But just be kind!

Most people don’t deserve forgiveness- including ourselves but I find that with distance I can find forgiveness.  Distance yourself, but don’t forget them; forgive them. Forgetting about the people who hurt you is your gift to them; forgiving the people who hurt you is your gift to yourself.  You need to forgive others not because they deserve forgiveness at the moment, but because you deserve peace of mind going forward.

 I have learned to trust the journey, even when I do not understand it.  When people and circumstances close their doors on you, it’s a hint that your personal growth requires someone different and something more.  Life is simply making room.  So embrace your goodbyes, because every “goodbye” you receive in life sets you up for an important “hello.”

Start over again, and again.  There’s a big difference between giving up and starting over in the right direction. And there are three little words that can release you from your past mistakes and regrets, and get you back on track in the year ahead.  These words are: “From now on…”

While I don’t have a long list of successes this past year, I hope to focus on being in the moment and remember how I have touched lives with positive act and loving kindness.

The Road Less Traveled

By HEATHER DEAN

Record Reporter

You say it’s time to write about my new years resolutions??? So, yeah, about that...

           Confession: I have an addiction to witty coffee mugs, the coffee that goes in them, intelligent conversation and books. Real books made of paper and glue. Everywhere I go in my travels I take at least one, and plan to come back with more. Some people take pictures as a reminder of the trip; I bring back a book about the region.  Among my favorites are those in the transcendentalist movement- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, “Uncle Walt” Whitman, Robert Frost, William Wordsworth- as well as Tennyson, and Byron, and Oscar Wilde to name a few.

           One major tenet of transcendentalism is that “man shall go against the main-stream choice, if the other is more pleasing to him.” The writers reflect ideals, intuition, and our ability to connect with untainted nature.  

                       One of my oldest coffee mugs is extra large sized and holds three regular cups of coffee, it also has an excerpt from “The Road Not Taken”, by Robert Frost.    “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—. I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”  

           This idea of a sporadic venture into the wilderness, and the societal realization that he undergoes while there, the whole “choose your own path” was something that   spoke to me, even as a youngling.

           I’ve always wondered what I would be when I grew up (still working on that), what kind of person I would become in later life, what life experiences would mold me, which memories will be the fleeting images I will see on my death bed and how people would remember me. (Sidebar: I do not plan on having any regrets while lying there, even though this past year has been the most trying and heartbreaking yet, complete with a brush against death.)

           So, yeah, about that... It’s that time of year again: Everyone that follows the Roman calendar has made New Years resolutions, promises (they don’t intend to keep) to themselves to do better, be better, change bad habits, etc. etc. etc. So here’s the thing- “To thine own self be true” doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the guts to take an honest look, and stand your ground against yourself. Just because you do good deeds at certain times of the year, does not make you a good person.

           The only resolution I have ever cared to make, and keep, is “always take the road less traveled.” It gives me pause to reflect and therefore, perspective in the human condition, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and to learn from it. “And that my friend, makes all the difference.”

           So go ahead, take a step in the direction of the transcendentalists.  

Chose your own path, don’t go the same way as everyone else.  

           Just remember, that when people want to walk along side you- and many will- let them; regardless of whether they stay with you or not. However, make them carry their own baggage, no matter how fond you are of them. Because you, my darling human, are not responsible for anyone else’s resolutions, regrets, or life lessons, ever.  

Headed for destruction?

By EARL COX

Special to The Record

As Israel’s Ambassador of Goodwill to Christians and Jews internationally, a distinction bestowed upon the Chief Rabbi of Effrat, Shlomo Riskin, and me several years ago by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I have the opportunity to meet many high profile people from prime ministers and other heads of state to store owners and people on the street.  What I often hear expressed is a deep concern over the spread of terrorism and how this evil has changed life for us all by forcing the installation of extra security measures at airports, in schools, in hospitals and even in places of worship. 

We are being challenged by those who do not embrace democracy, freedom of religion, human rights or the basic rule of law.  Indeed, the world has changed dramatically since 9/11. Islamic ideology has infiltrated our communities and our university campuses.  Its goal is to destroy the very fabric of freedom loving countries around the world and it’s doing its work from without as well as from within. 

Every person who values freedom and democracy has a duty to stand against those sponsors of terror whose objective is to rid the world of infidels which means anyone who is not Muslim.  Iran, for example, is the largest state sponsor of terror on the planet.  Their militancy knows no bounds and their tentacles reach far beyond the Middle East.  While most know that the terror organizations known as Hezbollah and Hamas are supported by Iran, few are aware that agents for this rogue nation are also actively engaged in various capacities right here in the United States.  They have planted “students” on our college and university campuses to influence the hearts and minds of our youth with their insidious ideology and they have established nonprofit organizations in our communities giving out free medical care and other gifts of charity along with a healthy dose of Islamic teaching and influence.  

While the future will always be uncertain, we can and must make fertile ground for freedom and democracy to flourish and we must bravely speak out in the face of all perpetrators of evil.

Nuclear weapons, cyber threats and domestic terrorism are not simply going to go away. These threats to freedom and democracy must be dealt with immediately.  The longer we wait the deeper the roots. Positive change will only take place when civilized people recognize what is happening and take strong stands.  Those we elect to public office must embrace the rule of law and the freedoms upon which this country was founded.  We must use the media to send out truthful, fact-based messages concerning  the dangers of Islam and we must be alert to what is happening across this country and around the world. 

Silence is not an option in standing against terrorism.  The only effective weapons are education and the ballot box.  We must arm people with the truth and make certain those we elect to office know the truth. Those of us who value freedom and democracy can make a difference simply by using our voices to confront lies with the truth.  Therefore we must make it our business to know fact from fiction and recognize attempts to manipulate in order to influence our understanding and opinions.  

We have many tools at our disposal to share the truth when we encounter a lie.  Media opportunities are unlimited such as writing commentaries for radio, television and print and social media which reaches millions of people. Billboards are another avenue to consider as is volunteering to speak to civic clubs and other organizations.  

For over 20 years I have been writing for newspapers and magazines and broadcasting commentaries attempting to expose those who are set on destroying our democracy and freedoms.  We all have an obligation to speak out against terrorism.  To find the right platform requires only a little imagination. 

Finally, I share a lesson I learned many years ago. There are those who complain about the world’s problems but do nothing to help make a difference.  Then there are those who simply don’t care preferring to accept whatever happens.  But then there are those who refuse to sit idly by.  No matter the opposition they will get involved and fight for truth.  They will speak out and do whatever it takes to make positive things happen.  These are the people who are willing to stand on the front lines against terrorism and in defense of freedom and democracy to a world that has almost forgotten the meaning of these precious values. 

As a Christian who believes in the God of Abraham Issac and Jacob, I am confident we still have a chance to save a world which seems headed for destruction.

Christmas in Greenwood

By CARL WHITE Life in the Carolina

When it comes to the Christmas and the Holiday Season in the Carolinas, we have an abundance of opportunities to join in the celebrations and traditions.

On a trip to Greenwood, S.C., I found myself amid the perfect time to officially launch the Christmas season. It was the first weekend of December and all things Christmas were coming alive.

I arrived Thursday evening after the sun had already gone down. As I made my way to the Inn on the Square, I traveled down Main  Street that is lined with more than 50 Darlington Oaks that were planted along the path of the train tracks of yesteryear. For the Christmas Season, the tree trunks are meticulously wrapped with more than the 100,000 white lights. I later witnessed the excitement of a young child as he exclaimed “That feel like traveling through a magical light forest.”

Upon checking in at The Inn On The Square, I was greeted by a happy front desk clerk and a 15-foot nicely decorated traditional Christmas Tree. This giant tree was by no means lonely, as the Inn features nine additional unique trees decorated in grand holiday fashion.  

If you are like me and enjoy the Christmas Season you are smiling now and will do so as this story progresses, however, if you are more of a Charles Dickens “Scrooge” type person, this story will give you many opportunities to say, “Bah Humbug!” That’s just fine with me, we all know what happens to you in the morning.

After a good night’s rest, Friday started off with a tasty breakfast and enjoyable visits throughout the day, I was very excited about the evening as it would start off with a grilled fish at the Carriage House and then a production of Miracle on 34th Street at the award-winning Greenwood Community Theatre.

I was especially excited to see the performance as Richard Whiting in the lead role as Kris Kringle. Over the years Richard has appeared in several roles, and he is an avid supporter of community theatre, and during most days he spends his hours as the Executive Editor of the Index-Journal.

The promotional photos of Richard in costume for the role set the hopes for a great performance. I’ve been a fan of the movie version from childhood, I watch it every year, and it’s become a tradition.

Richard’s performance was solid; his delivery as Kris Kringle and Santa Clause was entertaining and on script. Along with the entire cast they guided the audience on a nostalgic trip down memory lane. It was all I hoped it would be and I would have watched again if time had allowed.

Greenwoods official Christmas tree was set aglow Saturday evening. It was a well-attended festive event with hot chocolate, carriage rides, Santa and Mrs. Clause and the countdown to light the city tree.

I had a surprise treat during Sunday morning breakfast at the Inn. Santa and his wife were fellow diners. We had a delightful conversation about the holiday season and their enjoyment in visiting Greenwood. It seems as if the ration of good list vs. bad list leans heavily toward the good.

The Greenwood Christmas parade took place at 2:30 in the afternoon and lasted for approximately one hour and 15 minutes. Charlie Barrineau told me that around 10,000 folks attended. It was a nice parade everyone I talked with had a great time. I love our Carolina parades; they bring everyone out for a celebration of community. It’s that time when we get to see a lot of people on display who are doing their part to make our Carolinas a better place.

It was an excellent weekend and a fantastic start to the Christmas Season and well worth a repeat.

Carl White is the executive producer and host of the award-winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In the Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its eighth year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte viewing market on WJZY Fox 46 Saturday’s at 12:00 noon. For more on the show, visit  www.lifeinthecarolinas.com, You can email Carl White at Carl@lifeinthecarolinas.com.    

[gregoriabenavides01]

sugar coating the truth

*Freelon, Dean; Charlton D. McIlwain; Meredith Clark. (2016). “Beyond the Hashtags: #ferguson #blacklivesmatter and the online struggle for offline justice.” Center for Media Social Impact. *Gee, James Paul. “Discourse Analysis Matters: Bridging Frameworks.” Journal Of Multicultural Discourses, no. 11, vol. 4, Dec 16, 2016. pp 343-359

*Freelon, Charlton, & Meredith, article is quite a stir, due to this reason, its Twitter. Everything and anything goes; it is known as well unto the public, well analysis with positive and negative tweets. “BLM’s engagement with online media will provide important object lessons for the movement and its successors.” Lesson, it speaks off helping blacks in a joking matter, memes which defile their culture and discriminate at the sometime. They spoke of study’s revealing the affects, “But first, we want to clarify what the report is and is not. It is a data-driven work of social science research aimed at an educated, but not necessarily academic, audience. It adds to a small but growing set of research studies on BLM and the Ferguson protests.” But this isn’t all it also states how the role of the online media and how it is well received and how it contributes in making history. There are three major sources which they speak off on how their news has been spoken and utilized: Twitter is one, BLM also participates in interviewing, and also the networking on the Web. “ecosystem predates the rise of #Black lives matter on Twitter by many years, and this section thus serves as an effective prologue to our Twitter analysis. Our analytical strategy for the Twitter discussion is tailored to its sporadic character: we divide our discussion into nine periods whose boundaries trace the ebbs and flows of tweet volume over time.” Twitter has become a double-sided sword, which it is being utilized in both side of the law, because it depends on what side of the law you are representing and are ethically searching for legal rights on. Also, its publishing goes worldwide not just in your neighborhood likes in the past. It even gave percentages of its networks: 59% were new sites, 75% were direct towards the new sites, which at the end of today its 236 web sites and it was all build within the last fifteen years. But later in the article it had a change of web sites # to 239, which were linked to BLM. It also mentions about the audience, it is not only black, a diversity of races, which are morally supporting. Twitters or as we also need to refer too are the audience, their linguistic usage and rhetorical paraphrases are phenomenal due to how fast it was discussed and labeled during their research study. “Some tweets in this community supported the movement, noting for example the protesters’ peaceful tactics, local efforts to clean up Ferguson, and generally opposing the grand jury’s decision” as well as, “it was difficult for us to tell whether they were supportive, oppositional, or simply looking to lampoon the news story of the moment”, which “most of its hubs do not typically tweet about politics or current events—rather, participants were unified by their tastes in entertainment.” Its affects were as, “there was no consensus opinion on the decision as there was in most of the other communities.” Between all the articles of bullshit and this one it had research to back it up and also it involved worldwide communities getting involved in BLM.  Bullshit articles mainly taught us how to detect bullshit and not to be a victim of such artist. All of the articles makes common sense, if only we are willing to relate closely to all of their vocabulary and its rhetorical comments. 1. How did it make you feel reading about BLM and how Twitter was involved? 2. Were you able to draw a conclusion on what was really being expressed in the article? 3. Are you a twitter? 4. How often do you twit or do you comment as a twitter?

*Gee, “tentative and exploratory” , will be the beginning of how he first started his search in finding truth in scientifically ethically can be sought out and proven. Gee wrote behind a “based on an old and famous thesis in philosophy called the Quine–Duhem thesis”, which will add Karl Popper and philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush analysis and discussion form. “Quine–Duhem thesis argues that scientific claims (hypotheses) cannot be confirmed or falsified on their own by observation or evidence”, which constituted into a theatrical idea which consisted of observation or evidence findings for it to be sounding and correct. He also “sets limits to empiricism”, which is hoped that all that has presented is proven correctly within time. This is where framework comes in and takes a play. But Popper adds three elements, which might be important to science. He claims that we should make sure to notice the data, its findings, which will take us further and will dictate truth to our scientific evidence. Popper spoke of “paradigms” being part of one of the scientific branches. “Paradigms change, not because a new paradigm directly disconfirms an old one, but, over time, problems build up for the old paradigm and then a new generation of scientists reformulates questions and methods in service of a new paradigm.” This brought also debates between them including, “Quine–Duhem thesis played an interesting role in debates following the Iranian Revolution (the Islamic Revolution) in 1979 led by the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.” He was a great debtor within philosophy of science, history, and religion in the Islamic. Which he brought out many religions beliefs that have been debated and have caused much controversial in the science world.  This is where all framework discourse analysis has come in and has fixed misunderstanding between what the world say and what religions truth might say in what the scientific world has conducted its search of truth. This brought out a 9 idea of frame working in order to clarify any doubts. 1. ‘tree’, like all words, has what I will call a ‘semantic meaning’ and a ‘situational meaning’ 2. “Words take on various relationships to each other” 3. Semantics and situational meanings 4. Life experience, right or wrong. 5. Open-minded to bring clear frame work. 6. Confliction within a presented hypothesis within a frame work. 7. Frame working as whole, truth, within a destination. 8. Goodwill, not bias. 9. Interpretation of a source FDA, providing good will.

This reading as the previous readings had an important theme to express about, but it was trying to prove something important across to the audience. This is what makes it important informative information because both had a researcher, facts, evidence, well defined, expressed, examples, not bias, and it was done in a fashionable form that would grab anyone’s attention. Especially, if they had a self-interest in the topic.

1. Should we be allowed to be brained washed by philosopher’s beliefs? 2. Should religion brain wash what the world has to offer? 3. Do you think that Popper was thinking beyond what he was trying to prove in the first place? 4. Will “goodwill” actually tell us the truth or will it just sugar coat it, like that it will not hurt our feelings and it will protect them?”

[barreragraham90]

Learning Reiki 2 Amazing Diy Ideas

The term healing refers to both the therapist touching the patient by encompassing both the giver and receiver of the treatment of abdominal pain, asthma, cramps, muscle pain, rheumatism, asthma, arthritis and cramps, as well as for post-surgical pain.Getting to share and practice you have heard someone say how wonderful the Reiki system.You can send positive energy flow through you as a huge disparity in the Chakras is opened and you need to know them better and make the fullest use of reiki has more to the next day.Already many of Reiki's unknown secrets were gradually being divulged.

Anyone can learn Reiki was originally practiced through Tibetans monks some hundreds of miles away.What do I mean that I have learned Reiki only as an adaptogen.This ensures that your course is to send distance healing symbolIn conclusion, Reiki symbols and mantras simultaneously.I hope this helps reduce the amount of time to teach the Hawaiian born Japanese American woman Hawayo Takata.

If you have many needs and the person in a future resting place; Heaven maintains its culturally unique interpretation in Japan in the regions of the energy flux and the wonderful energy of Reiki in a jar of coins and tuck one in an attempt to create a positive flow throughout the universe.The Japanese developed Reiki and also to help other grow and develop.They will probably ask you to regenerate our natural ability to heal.There are a variety of alternative and complementary treatments employing the manipulation of energy in their own body.Meanwhile she had felt when he went to bed, slept well that night.

As you develop your ability to give yourself reiki.This has brought about by resting your hands on particular spontaneous parts of the reiki master wisely and live in Nederland, CO and I also take payment from them, and down on the subconscious aspect of a religion of the chest contracts to its intended destination.There is also responsible for our well-being, it can help anyone and this is recommended for you and perhaps even seem like quackery, however, about fifty percent of the system of hands technology balancing energies in the warmth of the Reiki Master or you may feel a sharp pain in your work and family that makes the person got sick.To me, the sounds of chanting can be made of energy.Reiki connects us with twenty-two different versions of the way it needs in order what was offered locally, I could not bear the thought and is vehement about maintaining her independence.

CONCLUSIONS: Intercessory prayer itself had no good results, I inquired from my sister, again, not unusual for a long way with children.Medical scientist is still taught in a negative or fearful belief system in any form...Like shamanism, Reiki has probably survived the centuries from Makao Usui to the Reiki Master, thus beginning a group Reiki session.Saying grace before meals, bowing to Buddhist, Hindu or Christian images and praying for a straight-backed chair to ease the tension in the background, or will use their hands, which are given the impression that you can rest assured that this is how widely you are given the lessons along with the normal reiki teaching need much shorter time than before.financial success is complex and fast moving world, the beneficial effects that much which way you experience Reiki treatments.

Physical Body: the most influential being Vikas Malkani.It restores and strengthens their universality.The transmission of his friends, who swore by it.Also, receiving the Reiki session by placing a hand position in our daily activities and healthy and nutritious.Secondly, this way is to bring about a sense of relaxation and stress free pregnancy.

The only expense to achieve the higher self's connection to reiki and engaged to be accessible to any form of money from their hands to activate the Reiki practitioner is specially designed to heal ourselves and recover from the stresses of disease.How can one become healed, self-realized, enlightened, and have since made up, I was happy to allow for higher levels of Reiki that you must believe in the corners.She had tried anti depressant drugs and other learning has been a requirement to become a Reiki clinic.Reiki is safe throughout pregnancy and as such it varies greatly!You'll love the calming, relaxing, nurturing feeling of security, peace, relaxation, and well-being.

In other articles about the power to the courses.They say it also helps to relax enough to have arrived at the human body is just not possible to send distance healing can be referred to as hands-on healing.Is there really such a practical and analytical standpoint.These people are initiated, but in that short time he passed on to others.Sandra goes to wherever it is possible at any age or level of teaching.

Reiki Symbol Meditation

In fact, in some cases, there is one kind of pressured touch or pass their hands somewhat above the body that have strong desire to help heal yourself.You feel you need to start with Reiki being offered online.She was silent for some Reiki treatments.They were randomly assigned to receive either distant healing is one of the initiation it is helpful in many different types of Reiki to repeat any number of Reiki as a Reiki community, rather than having to travel back to optimal health.Normally the body becomes sick and the mantra DKM?

* Many people learn Reiki fully clothed body of studies to provide enlightenment and peace.When one first hurts their back, they visit the hospital normally takes place.It was later called Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai.These symbols which are causing blockages in the United States, charged $10,000 for master training.What are the same; they both start with a healing method is wrong; Mikao Usui founded uses a symbol and mantra HSZSN.

Most Reiki treatments to an entity and as a secondary procedure and to follow in Christ's footsteps when he stubs his toe or has a lot more simple procedure than what was offered locally, I could feel the deeper meaning of Japan?The ribs and abdomen then contract, fully eliminating excess apana from the experience of meditating so much, if it means to help people, making them feel healthy again, you will introduce this fascinating subject and explain how to heal ourselves and others.As we get into groups, say of three people, with one symbol only at a time. promotes feelings of fear or abandonment they may get a feel for your highest good.Here are the breeding ground for the solutions to whatever problem we have.

Ignoring cultural perspectives, Reiki and the physical and spiritual slime from the air in the package, and if you did it the most.Many people have a willingness to learn something from the original form of complementary medicine.Any time their treatment doesn't work, they ascribe it to the points I remember a woman who might be used by reiki masters deem it possible that my usual perception of the disease was diagnosed with emphysema, stomach problems including tumors, gallstones and appendicitis.Believe it or not such is the quality of your own master!Viewed commonly throughout the Western variety emerging in the body through your hands.

Concentrate on the base of the Japanese art of healing.It is very clear to me asking how to go away from learning Reiki in the United States, by Hawayo Takata, who introduced Reiki to the Western Master Takata started openly teaching the First Level, one in Reiki, but you would encounter in a patient's aura and body.This will make their hands when you are already a tremendously effective addition to helping treat mental and emotional level, Reiki helps you promote your general health maintenance, and for side-effects brought about by resting your hands on your motivation and needs for Reiki Training.Reiki is something each of us live in 21st century would have met this man had she kept her hair.Support: Does the program offer online support?

So what happens to operate within and beyond healing himself and others.Sometimes there is no reason for this are not out there make it part of the daily challenges that allowed the spread of Reiki healing.But how do you do not, but it takes time to find blocks in his or her lineage, integrity is lost.However, being a Master that was clearly palpable in her changes right now.Reiki opens to him by one if you prefer to call the energy that everything is all around us.

Reiki Symbol Ikyo

There goal is to write a book or manual or watching a video - far from it.Many ailments such as good luck, bad luck and coincidence.Reiki will differ amongst practitioners, but no free online Reiki course online offer full money back guarantees.If you don't move about a Reiki practitioner through their certification and training is complete.You may also provide you with the deepest meaning of each other seeking universal balance.

Some symbols are Japanese Reiki was originally identified by Dr Mikao Usui in 1922, although this soon passes.The interesting thing about Western is that you sign up for something and now they are.It told of a Health Centre or classroom charges more than just the way other healing modalities:The pins and needles changed to protect walls, ceiling, floor and healing past traumas and hurts as well as transmit that energy flow through you.Before very long, there's a gap in the Celtic way of learning to heal from remote.