#structuralist

[germanpostwarmodern]

Paviljoen (1963) of Twente University in Enschede, the Netherlands, by Joop van Stigt. Photo from August 2019.

[karlachian]

i think it is funny when people make wyll the therapy friend as if that man even knows what therapy is. that 18 charisma is making you think he’s not fighting literal devils in there HE IS LYING TO YOU. don’t get me wrong he loves healthy communication he does NOT ever think about cognitive behavioral therapy though. actually give me 15 minutes alone in a room with him i know he has an ulder sized blind spot in his view of authority but i bet i could get him to subscribe to a deleuze-guattari viewpoint of psychiatry even. defender of the people and all that.

[revvethasmythh]

I think something we're sleeping on in the Gale epilogue is that he says he wants to try writing books about our adventures, which directly puts him in competition with Volo, who is also writing about the same adventures

This would--inevitably--devolve into a writer/academic feud for the ages, spreading copious misinformation to the masses as both writers can accurately claim to be primary sources, with wildly different tellings between them. There will be synthesis commentary papers written about both of their works by historians for centuries, and even though Volo's is full of blatant lies it must be considered because he is....well, Volo. and, like, he was verifiably there and involved with everything. there is no world where that is not infuriating to an academic like Gale. Gale will be blowing a gasket for the rest of his life about being in competition with Volo's Tome of Lies. There will be sniping in the footnotes of all his papers at the bard for the rest of his life. Bitter bard vs academic warfare, that's what we're looking at here

[blood-orange-juice]

I promised a "Furina is Jesus" post. It's kind of a shitpost but also it's not.

The theatre of the courtroom

I'll first have to note that law is a peculiar thing. It is created through practicing it.

It's not just the written rules, it's how we apply them, and who gets to write and rewrite them, and there's no solid foundation underneath.

It's supposed to be treated as immutable until it's suddenly not. Until an insurgence turns into a revolution or the divine right of kings becomes a symbolic relic of the past. In the mildest scenario a bunch of old farts just gather and vote for new rules. Sometimes the very same rules that give those old farts the right to decide rules.

A law remains a law as long as enough people agree to believe and enforce it. How much is "enough" is also debatable (often depends on the size of your army).

It is very much like theatre. Humans like it when the world is molded into coherent stories so they happily participate.

Furina making a show out of trials is not a perversion of law, it shows she understands its very nature.

Transgression and transcendence

Now back to Christianity. The essense of Christianity is transgression. No, seriously.

It's as punk as a religion can get. A god hanging out with publicans and harlots? Killing a god in the most humiliating way possible and being forgiven for it? Symbolically eating a god?

It's insane.

Such practices are usually reserved for small communities of a very special sort (*ahem* left-hand path tantrics*ahem*). It's the only religion I know that gleefully and unashamedly incorporates such things into rituals meant for the lay public.

(this is probably a good time to mention that I'm not Christian and it's a look of an outsider fascinated with philosophy of religion in general)

It's actually one of the real reasons a lot of pagans rejected Christianity so fiercely: it's spectacularly nonchalant in dealing with things that would be considered "unclean" by most archaic cultures.

Now this is important.

As post-structuralist theories state, any attempt to establish a power structure, to set rules or to define self will also produce things that would seem unclean. Impure. Things that should be cast off. It's in the nature of our psyche. The concept of uncleanliness is one of the core mechanisms that allow our mind to function.

(I'll redirect you to Julia Kristeva and the concept she names abjection if you want to dive into it.

I also want to note that abjection and horror go side by side and it makes a lot of sense that Fontaine is also the Lovecraftian expansion)

And what did Christianity do? It subtly removed the importance of "cleanliness". The gravity of it. It established as the norm that norms can be redefined and transcended. That the outcasts and the sinners are not to be forgotten.

It fucking changed the rules of how human psyche and society function. Added an extra possible move.

A sin can be forgiven. A criminal executed in the most ignominious way can turn out to be a god. You never truly know. And also anything can be made clean. Go wash it kitten.

(yay)

(and yes, I know a lot of modern Christians practice the opposite of what I describe. I'm not a fan of these folks too. doesn't matter. the possibility is there. it's glorious. also horrifying and a bit disgusting)

That dude from two thousand years ago

What about him.

I often see people calling a "Jesus figure" anyone who is sacrificed to save others. Or anyone who is reborn. The thing is, this is not how it works.

A god dying and being reborn is the oldest myth on this planet. Last time I checked it was connected to the sun worship, day/night cycle and winter solstice rituals (although it could have changed and also I didn't check very thoroughly). In any way, it predates Christianity by millennia.

Sacrificing all kinds of things and beings to get something in return or to offer gods something else in your stead is also pretty old and very much not Christian.

The unique beauty of that story is that a supreme being, ultimately more worthy than any human, wilfully chose to sacrifice himself for lowly mortals. Actually, allowed them to betray and kill him. And then forgave them.

Do you see how it ties to the previous section? It defied the previoisly established world order (where gods were incomparably more important than humans). It created a paradox. It broke the rules, or rather it destroyed the rules.

Theological debates aside, on a symbolic level it pretty much destroyed the old concept of sin and the idea of a fundamental difference between a god and a human. Everything a paradox touches stops being fully real and needs to be redefined (ceci n'est pas une pipe).

'Sin' doesn't mean the same thing anymore, and 'god' doesn't mean the same thing anymore, even 'death' means a different thing now. The world just starts to function differently after a story like that happens or is told.

(since it only needs to mess up the symbolic order it doesn't even need to happen, only to be told and believed)

And there we have it. A Jesus figure should establish new rules. Preferably better ones. It's someone who fundamentally changes the world with their sacrifice.

That's also where we get back to "law is established by practice". That was the process of establishing a new law.

(this is also why I dislike the idea of Childe as a Jesus figure. he is not a supreme being, he's not the type to sacrifice himself for people he perceives as lower than him, and he is not integrated into society enough for his death to establish new rules. he can still die and be reborn in a new quality, he can even change the world in some way but that would be a different type of story)

Our precious girlfailure

So. Furina.

Fontaine's prophecy speaks of all Fontainians being born with some kind of 'sin'. And the way Neuvilette is talking to the pool of primordial water in 4.1 implies that its ability to dissolve Fontainians is not some kind of natural law but an intentional wrathful act.

And Varunada Lazurite (we know that ascension materials contain the final lines of the archon quest) says this:

"My ideals have no stains. I must correct you. People here bear no sins in the eyes of the gods... Only laws and the Tribunal can judge someone. They can judge even me. So praise my magnificence and purity."

I assume the solution will not be simply killing the eldritch whale or "cleansing" the sin or locking the sea away.

I think Furina will in some way redefine what is considered a sin, or how it should be judged, or who gets to administer judgement. She will create new rules for the world. Probably by dying in some way (temporarily or symbolically) to create a paradox.

(maybe we'll also get to learn that death in Teyvat is not true death)

As I said at the beginning, she understands the law and the very nature of law very well, probably better than Neuvilette. Who else would be better suited for this task.

And no one will notice the beauty and insanity of her gesture, like no one really noticed with that guy two thousand years ago. They'll just think things got fixed because they sacrificed Someone Important.

But that's all right. She'll forgive them.

[wonder-worker]

"The feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist being appointed as the day upon which the coronation of the king [Edward V] would take place without fail, all both hoped for and expected a season of prosperity for the kingdom."

— Excerpt from the Croyland Continuator / David Horspool, Richard III: A Ruler and Reputation

Even though Edward IV’s death was unexpected, after twelve years of peace there need not have been too much of a sense of foreboding about the succession. The great dynastic wound from which the Wars of the Roses had grown had not so much been healed as cauterized by the extinction of the House of Lancaster. There was no rush for London, as had happened in earlier, disputed successions. The royal party didn’t set out from Ludlow for ten days after hearing the news of Edward IV’s death, while Richard took his time, too. And the new king had [his mother the dowager queen and] two uncles to support him: his mother’s brother, the sophisticated, cultured, highly experienced Earl Rivers; and his father’s, the loyal and reliable Duke of Gloucester, to whom Edward IV had entrusted unprecedented power and vital military command.

... [Richard of Gloucester] had achieved his goal by a mixture of luck and ruthlessness, and if he made it appear, or even believed himself, that destiny played a part, this only made him a man in step with his times. Modern historians have no time for destiny, but sometimes the more ‘structuralist’ interpretations of the events surrounding the usurpation can come close to it. When we read that ‘the chances of preserving an unchallenged succession were . . . weakened by the estrangement of many of the rank-and-file nobility from . . . high politics, which was partly a consequence of the Wars of the Roses and partly of Edward IV’s own policies’, it is hard not to conclude that an unforeseeable turn of events is being recast as a predictable one. But without one overriding factor – the actions of Richard, Duke of Gloucester after he took the decision to make himself King Richard III – none of this could have happened. That is, when the same author concedes ‘Nor can we discount Richard’s own forceful character’, he is pitching it rather low*.

Edward IV had not left behind a factional fault line waiting to be shaken apart. Richard of Gloucester’s decision to usurp was a political earthquake that could not have been forecast on 9 April, when Edward died. After all, Simon Stallworth did not even anticipate it on 21 June, the day before Richard went public. We should be wary of allowing hindsight to give us more clairvoyance than the well-informed contemporary who had no idea ‘what schall happyne’. This is not to argue that Richard’s will alone allowed him to take the Crown. Clearly, the circumstances of a minority, the existence of powerful magnates with access to private forces, and the reasonably recent examples of resorts to violence and deposition of kings, made Richard’s path a more conceivable one. But Richard’s own tactics, his arrest of Rivers, Vaughan and Grey, the rounding up of Hastings and the bishops, relied on surprise. If men as close as these to the workings of high politics at a delicate juncture had no inkling of what might happen, the least historians can do is to reflect that uncertainty [...].

(*The author who Horspool is referencing and disagreeing with is Charles Ross)

[axe8472]

500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left. 500 words of this essay left.

[blorbocedes]

reading any philosopher or social theorist is an exercise in impressive. very nice. now let's see their views on women

[agalychnisspranneusroseus]

The sleepover scene always breaks my heart 😭 literally me at 12

[thunderoad]

american vandal season 3 in which peter and sam are goofing around filming a video and accidentally witness a crime and peter goes "was that -? dude, i think i know who that was"

and then they run around trying to solve it BUT!! peter can't help but get a little too involved which skews the results of their investigation which was always the point!! also he's mean to sam but eventually they reconcile.

[dapurinthos]

this year's jsc choice versions:

all-female cast. i haven't actually seen this yet, i just found it on a youtube search today. i'm looking forward to starting it after i finish with the original film version, but i have listened to the album and loved it.

latest tour production. i saw this version when it was (very) briefly in toronto in december 2021, before the run was cut short due to cast & crew testing positive for covid. fantastic set, amazing costuming for king herod, tyrone huntley as judas (after he originated this version in the regent's park open air theatre) which was an experience (the cast in this video is from 2022 - 2023, not the cast i saw).

[bellshazes]

i would pay as many as ten or twelve real life dollars to anyone who can define for me what they think the collective tumblr definition of narrative is, in a way that actually makes sense in any given use case. i think it is a me problem that the word as used has no meaning to me anymore. my new hobby is substituting synonyms for "narrative" in posts. like there is something exceptionally sinister about the idea of a character being doomed by the chronicle in a way that doomed by the narrative is not. characters who transcend their hagiography is either so obvious as to be tautological or is ripe for theological debate. characters who succumb to a tall tale. to be doomed by the recital could be a fun pun about bad dances or a set-up for "if i speak," either way. endless possibilities, all of them terrible.

[germanpostwarmodern]

Mensa (1962-64) of Twente University in Enschede, the Netherlands, by Piet Blom

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Doing more research on Story structure--Structuralists.

This round I found out... but I’m looking into roughly the 1960′s-1980′s. White straight men are still insufferable. And yes, someone is going to chime in with “Not all men” But I’m going to hit back with especially these men. Yes, yes, you’re crying, but women and what about PoCs, etc. You see, kids, the majority of the structuralists are white cishet abled men who like to also celebrate white cishet abled men while being AHs to everyone else. Some of them are Jewish, but the Christians are also AHs to the Jews. One or two are gay in the mix of things, but then they get erased from canon. Feel mercy for me since I had to read a lot of insufferable misogyny, racism, erasure, etc and then call people out for it. I should note that this type of erasure doesn’t tend to happen with white women women. They cite EVERYTHING. Because they think deep in their hearts, they will be doubted, but these white cishet abled men think that they won’t be doubted, so often take the credit for these “brilliant” ideas from other people and then fail to cite them, especially when they are disabled, PoC, a woman, etc. Or generally they hate them (which is justifiable with Freytag, BTW). So I’m catching you up on my research so far through mostly the beginning of European lit to about the early 1960′s (and you can tell I’m really tired)

I went to the library, and to be honest they don’t have books from the 1970′s much through the 1980′s. I’m thinking at this point either I have to buy them, go through Google books, or go to yet a bigger library. I have one in mind, actually, but it’s going to take a while to get there. What I noticed in the books I was able to sample, was this overwhelming feeling like this is how it was and always will be, DESPITE the fact that my research DOES NOT BACK THIS. For example... “How to write Western Novel” by Matt Braun 

manages to cite a bunch of people before the 19th century, forwards, and without any citations (i.e. no backing or quotes or scholarship), asserts that everything they wrote was about conflict. This is called retconning folks. It’s not backed by my research one bit. (There are long, long ass posts about Shakespeare, Aristotle, etc and what *people at the time* wrote about story structure.

CITATIONS, MATT, for the love of what’s holy. And it’s a Writer’s Digest book. (They started in 1920, and this makes my head spin, so, so much, because in the early 1920′s you had the confessional story, which wasn’t really about conflict, but about morals, so you know I have a huge rant about this too. WTF, Writer’s Digest? Did you forget your own history?) But he waxes on and on about 3-act, climaxes, and conflict. I guess all of those Kurosawa movies are also in 3-act? (except they aren’t, because I’ve watched them several times and they use a variety of plot structures, which include, but are not limited to: Kishotenketsu, Jo-ha-kyu, and some of the staging of Noh/Kabuki--I also looked up Noh and Kabuki plot structure, which is 5 acts, with an internal act structure of Jo-ha-kyu--the plot structure that makes international people often angry and upset.) For those who are unclear, Kurosawa had a HUGE influence on Westerns and how they are shot in Hollywood. (A true Western fan would know this...) And Yojimbo, which caught the attention of fans internationally was shot in 1961.

The things is that though Matt says there isn’t a correct way to plot a book, he assumes the only correct way to structure it is 3-act, by this point, which is 1988. Which means by this time, all of the other plot structures are kind of dying, though there is Joseph Campbell. So overall, this means by 1988, people didn’t think there were any other options--which coincides later with the Charlie Rose Interviews with Tony Morrison.

There are no real citations in the book. If there are, it’s odd quotes, mostly by white men. Because only white men can star and be in Westerns, Matt? This, BTW, is changing as the real history of the West is being redug up and discovered. Follow? This is writer history here. This is why you should doubt always was and always will be. I didn’t have the heart to go through the entire bookshelf, really, and my energy is limited on spoons, because who wants to sit there as a queer, disabled poc feminist reading white cisabled men glorifying white cis abled men while doing erasure of people just lie me for hours?

Dark Thoughts on Writing Edited by Stanley Wiater, originally published 1974

ONE WOMAN IN THE FREAKING ENTIRE BOOK (and it’s Anne Rice. WTF, Stanley)

The edition I picked up was from 1997 WTF.

So you edited it and couldn’t find a single other woman in that entire effing time. WTF Stanley. WTF.

This is a compilation of various quotes by various horror authors. But it’s all men except one. I did check a few of the names in post, but I got tired after seeing a wash of white men. There wasn’t anything useful. Djuna Barnes- Sapphic horror writer. June 12, 1892 died: June 18, 1982 Plenty of time to quote her. “Truman Capote, William Goyen, Karen Blixen, John Hawkes, Bertha Harris, Dylan Thomas, David Foster Wallace, and Anaïs Nin. Writer Bertha Harris described her work as "practically the only available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world" since Sappho.“ -- Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djuna_Barnes Also from this list: https://romancingthegothic.com/2021/03/14/100-women-writers-in-horror-the-gothic-and-supernatural-fiction-from-the-18th-century-to-2021/

42) Jean Rhys (1890 – 1972) Rhys was a British author who grew up in Dominica. She had a lengthy writing career with adaptations made of some works. She is most famous, of course, for The Wide Sargasso Sea which reimagines Jane Eyre through the eyes of Bertha Mason.43) Anya Seton (1904 – 1990) One of the most popular manifestations of the Gothic in the 20th century was the Gothic Romance. An early example was the book Dragonwyck (1940) by historical novelist Anya Seton. (The inspiration for the title of Vincent Virga’s Gaywyck – the first gay Gothic romance).

44) Victoria Holt (1906 – 1993) If we’re talking Gothic Romance, we can’t miss out Victoria Holt. Holt was the pseudonym of Eleanor Hibbett used for her Gothics. She had many pseudonyms for writing in different genres. It was her Mistress of Mellyn (1960) which really saw the beginning of the Gothic romance heyday.

45) Phyllis Whitney (1903 – 2008) Another of the most prolific and popular Gothic romance writers was Phyllis Whitney. Rather than setting her novels in a windswept England, many novels are set in America or in locations all over the world, often with more ‘modern’ heroines. The Trembling Hills (1956) is a favourite for me – the stakes are particularly high…

46) Violet Winspear (1928 – 1989) Winspear was a popular and prolific Mills and Boon author. She didn’t write category Gothic romances but was known for her inclusion of Gothic elements in some works. Dearest Demon (1975) includes doubling, demonic heroes and murderous danger.

47) Harper Lee (1926 – 2016) There were many genres and offshoots of the Gothic in the 20th century. One of the most well-known is perhaps the Southern Gothic, set in the American South and investigating narratives of decay, decline and race relations. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is one of the most famous examples.

48) Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965) Jackson was a prolific writer (over 200 short stories and 6 novels). It’s hard to pick a work. ‘The Lottery’, with its final twist, is a favourite. For horror, you can’t go wrong with The Haunting of Hill House (1959).

49) Joan Lindsay (1896 – 1984) Australian Lindsay was a novelist, dramatist and essayist. Her novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) is a historical Gothic about disappearing school girls, unresolvable mysteries and the main character: the landscape. 

50) Angela Carter (1940 – 1992) Carter is most well-known, perhaps, for her Gothic and horrifying fairy-tales in The Bloody Chamber (1979). Her books mix genres with a thread of feminism running through. If you’re looking for something less familiar, try Shadow dance (1966). Horrifying!

https://jessnevins.com/blog/?p=842 Covers Black Horror writers.

It’s not that these people didn’t exist, it’s that he didn’t want to contact them.

Also FU stanley.

How to write Plots that Sell by FA Rockwell

Francis Alicia Rockwell--the only thing she wrote was writing manuals--five of them, but never really wrote a novel.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-16-me-209-story.html

In this book, she mentions only 1 woman in the entire book. Cites nothing, and argues yet again for conflict.

That’s a lot of internalization you got there Francis, especially after you wrote this:

In a society in which there are more and more single women and an increasing amount of violence and men streets, there's a valuable premise in the old German proverb "A woman without a man is like a garden without a fence.” What sort of plot does this suggest to you? A successful woman-executive who feels incomplete, unprotected, and exposed without a man, for all her independence, fame, and fortune. A popular formula presents an attractive lady VIP in her thirties or forties whose life is, as always, full, rich, and happy without marriage. Suddenly and surprisingly she marries a rather plain, nondescript man whom everyone considers her inferior. In this case you'd highlight suspense and motivation. (Page 71)

Are you crying? I am. WTH, Francis. Also, her reading of Roses for Emily, I find it really strange. Her take on it isn’t the literary analysis I’ve ever heard and sounds super conservative?

Starting with the same German Proverb, you might go the way-out route of a woman pretending not to be single by wearing a wedding ring, propping up a male dummy in her car at night to deceive would -be attackers, or carrying a tear gas pen or police whistle. All, of course, much more innocent and practical than the gruesome husband-substitute in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” in which the old maid kept a male corpse in her bed.

But don’t worry, if you’re not upset at that, she does have casual racism too:

“What can happen to your skywriting pilot downed in a primitive area--Africa, South America, etc.--whom the natives consider a god or a devil?”

 IN the jokes section.

This is 1975. In summary, this book is more how to get ideas for books, but by this time reinforces the idea that conflict is the only way forwards. It still astounds me and depresses me that this woman (who never wrote a novel in her life) could only cite one woman author in the entirety of the book. She cited one PoC by accident, but not by name--Dumas. (Since apparently Africans are “primitive”--the entire continent. WTH, Francis.) The book doesn’t get better, and gave me a royal headache along the way--the foundational ideas are good--here’s how to get ideas and maybe apply them, but having to climb through misogyny and racism to get them, bad. Again, there are very few direct citations. And also an invocation of Shakespeare and that Shakespeare was about conflict--but he wasn’t--he was about morality.

She also steals from Rowe, doesn’t cite him draws some diagrams, etc. I know it had to be Rowe, because she uses his wording almost one for one. WTH, Francis AND YOU ARE A TEACHER (what is it with teachers not citing their works?). He stole in turn, if you remember from Esenwein who cited Whitcomb. But the wording that was used by Rowe to cite Esenwein (not really, but indirectly) and his new assertions on top are stolen by Francis. The diagramming is almost the same too, but by 1975, the printing tech on images had gotten better. I found her book so depressing, I forgot to ask for my ID since I had to give my ID to look at the book. And then I left the building to do something else, and then I had to come back for my ID, it was so nauseating having to climb though a book with so few women and PoCs and then outright hatred of women. WTH Francis, and you’re a woman?

So, I think this goes to show that at least for these three books, internalization and spill over to women would have begun, the erasure is peaking around this time. Still doesn’t answer my question about the Antigone diagram. I’m looking in university libraries, hopefully for the answer. Even my Lit professors who drew the damned thing don’t seem to know the origin. And this is what I really, really want to say: Don’t repeat things you don’t know the origin of.

Also PLEASE CITE YOUR SOURCES IN FULL WITH THE BOOK AND PAGE NUMBER.

[doikayt]

"Situational" and "ontological" are terms and notions that aren't at all oppositional to one another. To say something is situational at all requires ontology. I get the point that you were trying to make with that post and I understand this message will probably upset you, but you don't understand the language you're using.

so, in the post in question, i might have been better served using the terms "metaphysical" and "material" to make this point. however, since ontological can be and often is used as a synonym for metaphysical i can happily stand by the language as i used it.

the real question is, if you understood the point that the post was trying to make, then how is this ask anything other than pedantic? further, if you understood the point of the post and think that sending me an ask will upset me, what was... the reason you sent this

[daytura]

Dream #3

Transcript below.

"For the more troubling and by far most terrifying Dream #3, Mia Haven and Lance Slocum team up together to ply the curvatures of that strange stretch of imaginings. Unlike #1 and #2, this dream is particularly difficult to recount even in 400 pages and requires that careful attention be paid to the various temporal and even tonal shifts. An outline of key "shifts" shall have to suffice.

Navidson wakes up in a dark hull of a ship. He can just make out that it is raining outside. His head is pounding. He is suffering from a hangover and his body is covered in mysterious welts.

A few moments later he is standing on the deck of the ship, which he now understands is called the The Burrow. It is still raining outside and Navidson is still incapacitated, his normal gait cast down into a stagger. The ship is absolutely deserted. As Navidson calls out for help or answer into the sky, great echoes return. One echo of note is the following, in response to "What is going on?!": "Going on!"

In the next few moments Navidson discovers that the rain is only on the port side of the ship, while the starboard side of the ship is bathed in blazing sunlight. Given the crippling darkness of the rainy half and the blown out highlight of the sunlit half, he is unable to determine which side of the ship he is on. He has the sense that the ship is balanced between the two extremes, though he realizes that if he could just find a way to move from the port side to the starboard side he would surely find rescue. He attempts to cross, but he finds the soles of his shoes somehow nailed to the deck. A great wave hurtles over the deck, crashing onto Navidson.

When Navidson comes to awareness again, he is in the hold of the ship. He is in a tub of water, which is the same temperature as his body. He is surrounded by seven or eight extremely thin old men, who are in turn surrounded by a multitude of empty bottles. One of them speaks to Navidson, “You're a long way from home, young man."

Navidson finds himself on the deck of the ship again. This time he is standing on the starboard side. He can see a lifeboat off in the distance. “It’s okay,” he hears someone say. “It’s okay.” This same person pushes him from the deck, and he falls headfirst into the warm ocean. Bubbles flutter up to the surface of the water as he screams.

Navidson wakes up on the tongue of a great animal. He is far from the teeth and only a stone's away from the dark throat of the animal. Navidson tries to strike the inside of the animal's mouth, but it does not budge. Now quicker to resign, Navidson takes a deep breath, exhales, and begins to crawl on all fours down the length of the tongue.

Navidson wakes up in a large living room, curled up in a fetal position on the floor. Navidson cries out again, but it is a low noise more befitting an animal than a man. The room is dark. Moments later, an indistinct figure opens the door and steps in. They light a small lamp, which illuminates the doorframe and a portion of the doorknob. Before Navidson can see who the person with the light is, he wakes up in real life.

Haven takes the first stand and explains the ship, of course, is the house. Haven even goes so far as to suggest that the name The Burrow has no other etymology than the house itself, though she is unsure whether or not the name is to be interpreted as a verb or a noun. [389—-Translator’s note: Haven’s original German text employs the word “denke,” which means “to think,” though “to burrow” is also a legitimate translation. — Ed.] As Haven points out, the rainstorm on one half of the ship mirrors the darkness that continues to grow within the house, and the unbearable sunlight on the other half mirrors the summer heat that has followed Navidson, his family, and even the house well into the autumn months.

Slocum takes over and builds on his colleague's realistic analysis. He explains that the ship’s duality is more than just a mere reflection of the house's duality, but a two-toned "amplification" of the house. Slocum is particularly taken with the idea that the ship is balanced between night and day, where Navidson's frantic attempts to escape only bring about a further deterioration. Slocum pushes forward the idea of a double abstraction, such that if the Great Hall of the house was indeed an extraordinary hull, then this ship in Navidson's dream is the house enlarged to a massive scale. Innate dualities of civilization and tribalism, light and darkness, the individual and the collective, are now magnified. Slocum conjectures that Navidson's attempt to cross from the shadow to the light was doomed to fail, because it "rests on the assumption light is always good when this could be no further than the truth. For creatures of the night or the deep sea, light blinds; and sunlight eats whole swathes of newspaper and books when outside a home".[200—Haven and Slocum, Oceans of the Mind, 199X, p. 251]

Haven returns to address the old men in the hold who surround Navidson. She notes the possible biblical reference to the seven or eight prophets of the Old and New Testaments. But Haven remarks that the old men could also be interpreted as "the people of the house", or even "the ancestors of the house", and she speculates that the fact Navidson is sitting in a tub of water means he is at peace with the house for the first time, and that the men are even encouraging him to remain there. With this in mind, the lifeboat becomes a more sinister symbol. It is visually the last chance for Navidson to be saved, but Haven suggests that in reality the lifeboat is the last chance for the house to hold on to Navidson, and that being tossed overboard means the house has finally lost him.[201—Oceans of the Mind, p. 254-5]

Slocum proceeds to the sixth shift, where Navidson is on the tongue of a great animal. Surprisingly, Slocum rejects the notion that the animal is the house, and instead claims the animal is what the house has become after the Navidson family and their contacts have explored it. Therefore, just as the mouth of the animal is a derivative of the house, Slocum proposes that the dark throat of the animal leading into its stomach is an additional but necessary derivative that allows Navidson to come back to the reality of everyday life. "Abstractions upon abstractions seem to expand, but more often than not they simply pop," he says.

Finally, Haven and Slocum converge on a final interpretation for the seventh shift of the dream. They both agree that this darkroom [202—Typo. Should be "dark room", with a space. —JT] exists outside of the ship and beyond the labyrinth of the house; however, they disagree on how to interpret the significance of the dream. Haven regards the dream as an obscure warning to Navidson, where the dimness of the lamp reflects Navidson's waning spirit as he is separated from Karen and his children. "The door is shut and will remain shut", she says. Meanwhile, Slocum considers it a more positive sign for Navidson and reifies the implied movement of the figure. While it is true that the light of the lamp is a "small but essential sign of the future" the true significance of this dream is that this figure is opening the door to check on Navidson and see that he is alright. Navidson waking up before seeing the face of his sentinel is a consequence of his sleep cycle, not of thematic finality. "The dream," Slocum concludes, "ends in the very same way it began. Navidson waking up in the dark, but this time with hope."

Just before it seems like Haven and Slocum will burn the page with their competing interpretations, they have the mind to admit to each other that they still a hard time understanding what this section of the dream means, if it means anything at all. "We could put our glasses down and just accept it as it is," Haven begins. "Navidson on the floor could just be Navidson on the floor. The lamp could just be a lamp. The figure could be any one of Navidson's family or friends. The problem with this part of the dream is that it 'feels' so real, which means it has much more in common with the mundanity of our daily lives than spirits, monsters, and gods of literature." Slocum returns the sentiment. "It's nihilistic without even trying. It's so real it seems to have no meaning at all — only one we can make of it, though I suppose that's what we've been doing all this time." [203—Oceans of the Mind, p. 398] Ultimately, they agree that it is, at the very least, a curious and almost peaceful way to end the dream; and that Navidson has much work to quell his own waves and traumas."

[lisafication]

on the one hand people who think finnegan's wake or whatever is more culturally important than harry potter (yes rowling sucks but it's useful as an example) because of literary snobbiness should be driven from our lands on the other hand no I do actually think nearly all litrpgs objectively suck