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sinceileftyoublog · 3 years

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Small Isles Interview: Filmless Music

Photo by Dustin Aksland

BY JORDAN MAINZER

It’s rare that you find a record with a genesis as specific as The Valley, The Mountains, The Sea, the debut album from Small Isles. The new project of guitarist Jim Fairchild (Grandaddy, former Modest Mouse) and songwriter/composer Jacob Snider has its basis in film scoring. The catch? The films don’t exist. The Valley, The Mountains, The Sea is presented as an imaginary score to an imagined sequel to Ang Lee’s 1997 familial drama The Ice Storm, itself based on Rick Moody’s 1994 novel. And the band’s upcoming, unfinished EP, with strings arranged by Snider and recorded by collaborator Sienna Peck, is, according to the band, a distillation of the concept of the band, one that consciously combines film scoring motifs with traditional songwriting. In a way, you could say that Small Isles is music about film scoring as much as scores itself.

Fairchild and Snider hold the belief that film scores should hold their own as a piece of music independent of visuals, and on The Valley, The Mountains, The Sea, they announce themselves convincingly. Opening track “The Concept”--essentially the prototype for the band--combines vaguely harmonic deep bass sounds with pristine, echoing string plucks, and wordless vocals, building up like an Explosions in the Sky tune. Other tracks, too, juxtapose the ambient with recognizable structures. “Fort Wayne” shimmers atop a drum machine, while the vocal samples of “Maybe We Will” cut in and out among the beats and arpeggios. Each track also has a pristine sense of place, as much of the album was written while Fairchild was on tour with Modest Mouse, tracks like “Fort Wayne” and the washy, atonal “Lake Superior” started in those locations.

I spoke with Fairchild (calling from his home in Ojai, California” and Snider (calling from near Philadelphia) last week, a few days prior to the release of the album via AKP Recordings. (The album comes out on vinyl next month). Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity, about the band’s artistic process, The Ice Storm, adapting the songs live, and what Small Isles has in common with Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour.

Since I Left You: You’ve called this record an imaginary score to an imaginary film. Did you think of the sequencing of the record in a narrative arc?

Jim Fairchild: Kind of, but honestly, there’s a sequence that originally existed, and I don’t remember what it was, and it would have been more aligned with what I pictured from the movie, but it didn’t work as well as a comprehensive piece of music. The last song on here, “The Plot to Take Clover”, that was earlier before. “Life at One”, the first single, really kicked off me and Jacob’s partnership. It was designed that way; it’s not the way the record plays out. I wrote all of the principle themes, the underpinnings of all the compositions, as an imagined score to some sort of a sequel to The Ice Storm. I don’t know exactly how it would play out with Rick Moody. The first one was really successful. I have this idea for a similar type of movie that takes place in contemporary California and all these cues I can use as a mood board. Like, let’s sit down and figure out what this palate is. Let’s write a movie around it. That’s what I was thinking.

SILY: You wrote a lot of this while on tour. Had you conceived of the idea before then and wrote while on tour because of your downtime, or was the downtime the launching point for the idea?

JF: I was totally inspired by the idea. I started some of the themes that popped up, but once the actual Ice Storm Ang Lee idea came to mind, it was really generative. It’s how a lot of this stuff works with me. It kind of floats around for a while, reaching out this way or that. Once the real kernel appears, it’s like, “That’s it!” It all happens pretty quickly. That was definitely the case with this. It was the real fine-tuning that’s the most time consuming. That’s what Jacob and I have experienced. The EP that we’re releasing later this year, basically how it’s worked so far is I send him a sequence of chords and basic rhythm, which happens pretty quickly. Then--and we’ve only done it on Zoom with the new EP, though it was the same with “Life at One”--there was this theme. Jacob came in, we were gonna write some other stuff. He came in with a mic and sang some stacked harmonies. Then it’s carving out all the other elements around that to make it.

These are unconventional compositions. They’re meant to accompany visual ideas. With that in mind, cues and scoring music doesn’t always work in recorded music, traditionally speaking. There’s all these lengths, sometimes time signatures shift, a melody might exist in an unconventional way to fit what’s happening visually. I really wanted to embrace that. With “Life at One”, Jacob did all this stuff, and there’s this really interesting sound I don’t know how to describe. He asked, “What are those over there?” [My partner Natasha Wheat] had made these ceramic bells for me, and that’s the most fun part about working with Jacob. A lot of the people who are trained as Jacob is--and I say this with great admiration for his abilities--are stuck in certain modalities. This is a perfect example. He looked at the bells and said, “Let’s do that.” He grabbed a drumstick and played the edge of these bells and processed them. That was a big feature in the composition of “Life at One”. This all happens very thematically and reflexively, but to then carve it up and get it to have purpose, meaning, ebb, and flow and make it work visually--that’s where the dirty shit happens. [laughs] I also look forward to when Jacob and I can be in person more. We’ve made a lot happen over the past 7 months, but it’s hard when you’re not in the same room. Plus, I’d like to show off. If he’s sitting right next to me, play some fast guitar...[laughs]

SILY: The title of the record refers to various aspects of topography, and there are song titles that refer to specific places, like “Fort Wayne” and “Lake Superior”. Do these aspects exist within the narrative of the film?

JF: “Lake Superior” and “Fort Wayne” were just started in those places, literally. I picture the Ang Lee movie--the new Ang Lee movie that is inevitably gonna take form because he’s gonna hear me and Jacob’s music and think, “You’re right, we gotta do this,”--in this zone a little bit east of Berkeley. It’s the West Coast equivalent of the Connecticut zone where The Ice Storm exists. It’s this affluent, green place. But the reason I chose to keep the others as titles is like, Fort Wayne, that’s pretty grand and has Batman implications. And Lake Superior, what a fucking great name for a lake, you know? I like the power of those, and if I were sitting down and writing a movie, those titles could be at least generative of a conversation.

SILY: What about the other song titles? What inspired them?

JF: “The Concept” is literally the concept for our band. The concept has expanded since then, but out of the ordinary--no sounds are out of the ordinary in modern production--but in the film scoring landscape, out of the ordinary, ambient, or textural sounds. But then big, beautiful melodies. Jacob’s voice. All that stuff. Synthesizing our two strengths. Jacob’s also a songwriter and makes amazing songs, but my background’s in bands, and so I treat our relationship as if it’s a band. Taking our two strengths. Jacob’s more conventionally trained, schooled, and knowledgeable than I am. He has a richer depth of knowledge in theory and orchestration. I can arrange that way, but he knows what’s going on. Mine is more reflexive--I don’t want to say auto-didactic because that’s kind of an arrogant term--but learning through mistakes. I think Jacob’s made fewer mistakes than I have.

SILY: What were all the instruments used on the record?

JF: There’s a lot of found stuff. 12-string guitar. I was writing it using this Rosewood Fender Stratocaster that Fender made for me. The 12-string is prominent on “Life At One”. There’s a piano Jacob played. There’s a lot of me coming up with drum beats. A lot of the initial stuff was in the box. I’d roll in my portable studio backstage, I’d have a guitar, Universal Audio space, whatever drums and synths I had.

SILY: What is your background in film scoring?

JF: I don’t have a specific background. From a very early age, I’ve been into film scores. I’d buy them starting when I was 15 or 16. CDs. Pretty obvious releases, but things like Danny Elfman’s Batman score, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Sort of getting into Jerry Goldsmith. Elfman, Morricone. I like some of the Bernard Hermann stuff. I started studying it from the way I study everything: figuring out chord sequences, the way the melodies work, to the degree I was able. In the early 2010s, I was making a lot of music that was getting licensed for TV. Once Modest Mouse really started touring [2015 album] Strangers to Ourselves, I let a lot of those pursuits wither a little bit. But I’d always longed for a collaboration. A lot of that stuff was done in a solitary way, so I felt very fortunate when Jacob and I met. He was into that idiom but has a range of skills I don’t have. We also really work well together. All the reflexive stuff that happens, the melodies, it’s easy for us to go back and forth and see what we’re into and where to keep going. Neither of us get upset when the other person isn’t feeling whatever the direction is.

As I get older, I realize the value of stimulating multiple senses. I look forward to Jacob and I doing more of this stuff in collaboration with people. The Riley Thompson video for “Life At One” was him responding to a finished track, but in an ideal world, filmmakers would come to us and, in the way Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross work with David Fincher, where he says, “This is the concept for the new film,” and Jacob and I come back and say, “This is the sonic and melodic landscape we’re thinking of, and here are some character cues. Let’s take it from there.” I love being in conversation with people collaboratively and am attracted to the idea of it across media.

SILY: Do you think the idea that the music might not be responding to a finished film would make the score stand on its own more as a piece of music?

JF: The scores that I like totally stand on their own as music. When Morricone passed away, I read that John Zorn had a quote when they were hanging out in the late 80′s or early 90′s, Zorn said, “Don’t do it unless you’re thinking about what the soundtrack record is gonna be like.” The music needs to be cool enough to just be music.

SILY: Tell me about the album art.

JF: Natasha and I sold our place in Los Angeles last year and moved to Ojai. We thought it was a temporary transition, and now it’s somewhat permanent, because we bought a place here. We’ve been in this guesthouse next door since November. I like taking pictures at night with whatever ambient light [there is], so I took that picture from our place. I wanted there to be contrast with this technicolor paint and silver border on the upper and lower parts of the image. Homes are very interesting to me, and there’s a lot of that in The Ice Storm. There’s that shelf people look at from the outside and think, “It could be dilapidated, it could be beautiful.” People think of it as a thing. But there’s this whole other world that only exists inside of there. It’s always fascinating to me when walking by the place. Stories in the shell. I like the idea of a structure having implications. I don’t have an agenda for what those implications might be, but I like the idea that there could be implications there.

SILY: Jacob, when Jim came to you with this idea, how aware were you of The Ice Storm?

Jacob Snider: I had seen it. I don’t know if in our first meeting, it came up that specifically and clearly that this is where the music was going. In fact, it started more as a casual meeting of creative types. When I came over to Jim’s studio, he just showed me the latest thing he was working on without any huge idea behind it expressed to me in that moment. Jim might have been thinking it in that moment, but that day was more, “Alright, I’m working on something, what do you hear and is there something you think you could contribute to it?” It was really organic. Like Jim mentioned before, the best thing you can do when making something is show it to somebody else, because they’re gonna hear it in a different way or they might suggest something if you’re open to it. People can make amazing solitary music, but it will always be just their thing. You bring in someone else, there’s a different energy, a different perspective.

As it stands, I do love that film. It’s really haunting. Jim and I talked before that it’s not a movie you can watch every week. It’s heavy, and the themes are deep: family, loss, grief, betrayal. It’s a great one. I think it’s a movie that’s cinematic but also has a lot of depth. I think that’s what we’re going for with Small Isles. It has shades of film music but also shades of rock and roll and romantic string writing from the orchestral traditions. I think we’re trying to combine a few things at once, and we’re really curious how it starts to strike people and how some filmmakers respond to it.

SILY: Are you both generally Ang Lee fans?

JF: I haven’t devoured all of his work. There’s plenty I like. But I’m so in love with [The Ice Storm]. I was in love with the book before the movie came out. He treated it so beautifully. As high in the sky as it is for two nascent film composers to say, “I want to work with Ang Lee,” it’s very important to know where you want to go. It may take a long time to get there, but [it’s important] to have a place where you’re headed. That was definitely the case in the early Grandaddy days, and having watched [Modest Mouse lead singer] Isaac [Brock] for as long as I did, I think it was the case there, too. It may not be as specific knowing that I’m traveling in this direction, but that direction can totally change. There can be diversions that knock you off your course positively or negatively, but thinking about how beautifully he treated that material, that’s where I want to go.

SILY: How are you adapting Small Isles to a live performance?

JF: We’re gonna play at least some of this, maybe all of this live. I’m really looking forward to it. Jacob’s only on half this record, and the 5-song EP we’re releasing later this year, he’s on all of. That’s a straight-up 50/50 collaboration. I’m looking forward to the stuff Jacob didn’t contribute to on the record, hearing what he does with strings. We’re still figuring out how we’re gonna approach it. Jacob will be on keys and vocals, and I might sing a little bit. I’ll be on guitar. Our friend Sienna who Jacob went to school with, who’s doing the strings, we’re talking about having her lead a double string quartet. I would like to have a drummer doing some electronic drums and maybe a kit as well. I definitely don’t imagine we’ll totally nail it on night 1. There’s a lot of stuff we have to work out. There aren’t many antecedents in this zone, but something like Explosions in the Sky mixed with Johann Johannsson. I saw [the latter] in 2010 in San Francisco; there was a little bit of strings, various electronics, and he was on piano. That was a very striking performance. So the explosiveness of a big arena rock show with lots of subtleties and nuance that can come from strings and orchestral.

SILY: What else is next for Small Isles?

JF: We wanna finish this EP. I also really love the way a lot of rap and hip-hop people have gotten it right over the years. Using current listening habits and technology to get out as much music as possible. I definitely have the seeds for at least another EP behind this. Once we get this EP done--there’s just a little bit of tinkering to be done over the next month before going into the mixing stage--I want to make as much music as possible and release it. With the spirits of the world willing, I want to get off the ground live and collaborate with filmmakers, dancers, artists, people in the visual medium. I just love making music with Jacob and this type of music. I’d like to have a few releases a year. EP length [or] album length. I have a number of concepts written down. The seeds that Jacob and I have been playing with to make the EP. I was thinking about The Last Black Man in San Francisco when making this EP, and I’d love to collaborate with those filmmakers. Even just being in person, to tell Jacob, “What do you think of this sequence?” and have him respond without dealing with latency issues and dodgy DSL.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

Jacob Snider: I’ve been listening to a lot of pop. I’ve been listening to the Olivia Rodrigo record [Sour]. I think there’s great writing on there, great production. Watching, I’ll just piggyback on The Last Black Man in San Francisco. It took me a while to finally see it, but I had a filmmaker friend tell me I had to, and I loved it. Also the other film Emile Mosseri did the score for, Kajillionaire, the Miranda July film. Reading-wise, I’m about to jump back into Louise Erdrich’s The Round House.

JF: I’ve been digging the Olivia record, too.

JS: There’s some cool strings on there too from the guy who does a lot of the strings for Portugal. The Man, [Paul Cartwright]. They created a string orchestra sound with just one guy layering violin and viola, which is really cool, and that’s what we’re doing with our collaborator Sienna Peck. There’s totally room for that now, the way the world has been so remote. We can’t put 16 players in a room right now due to public health restrictions, so let’s get one person. It’s really hard to do--you can be a great violinist and not be able to layer yourself in a way that makes it sound like a string orchestra. You have to change your position in the room, the way you’re playing slightly, pretend to be three different people sharing a stand. That’s what you’ll hear on the next record.

JF: I just got into How to Change Your Mind, the Michael Pollan book about psychedelics, which I really loved. I just started a book called The Magic Years, which is about child development. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old son, and I’m very fascinated by what’s going on in his brain and what makes him make the decisions he makes. Just how to be a better dad. I am always a religious reader of The New Yorker, every week it comes out. Natasha and I watched The Kids, a documentary [about the making of Larry Clark’s Kids]. When that movie came out, Grandaddy were skateboarders, so it was important to us. But even as a young kid, I felt that it was really exploitative, and the documentary verifies it. It’s heartbreaking. Larry Clark is a really derelict dude. Truly lecherous. But [The Kids] is a beautiful movie. We’ve been watching Los Espookys. I’m really excited about Vince Staples’ upcoming record. My friend Nik Freitas put out a new song. My musical diet’s gotten really regressive in a way because my son is very into the Super Furry Animals record Radiator. It’s all he wants to listen to in the car.

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zuzuslastbraincell · 4 years

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fun world-building facts about the eyeliner incident:

so the main canon divergence is that roku killed sozin, instead of just chilling in his cottage for ~50 years. he ended up leading a coalition force against him, in prep for civil war, although was able to bait him out to an erupting volcano and kill him at the age of 40 or 50 or so. roku then lived for another 100 years (hardly out of character for an avatar to do so).

roku went further, though, and after killing sozin, declared there would be no more fire lords in the avatar state. this split the fire nation into monarchists and anti-monarchists, essentially, and there was still a fair bit of civil unrest/war after sozin’s death because not everyone agreed.

a lot of monarchists ran off to the colonies after sozin was killed, to protect their assets, to protect their lives, as a place to hide out until the storm blew over (it did not blow over) and to regroup for a next assault (which did not succeed).

this was fine, until a second phase: roku wanted to give the radicals in his coalition a leading voice in the next government to be. a lot of people disagreed. in the colonies (many of which had officially been handed back to the earth kingdom), there were riots, lots of dissent, etc. amongst fire nationals.

when the north western earth kingdom became the site of resistance against radicals in the fire nation (as roku’s opposition to sozin was based on a coalition of liberal nobles and bureaucrats & emerging radical workers syndicates), a lot of monarchists & ultranationalists ended up emigrating with the initial wave of noble émigrés, and eventually, some of the more liberal nobles supporting roku turned against them as well. (this is also how roku’s youngest daughter, rina, who was married off to a sozin loyalist in a hostage situation organised by sozin, ends up in the earth kingdom - she and her husband defect, and initially support roku, but seeing the radicals that he is genuinely helping and supporting, they move to the earth kingdom). the reputation of this second wave depends on province - ex-soldiers are always hated, and the north west & regions in close proximity despise the fire nation, but the east & ba sing se has always been quite hospitable, & many have dual bases in ba sing se and the northwest. the ba sing se nobility, over time, mingle more and more with high profile fire nation émigrés who have property.

fire nationals in the earth kingdom are thus culturally different, usually, to fire nation citizens in the modern fire nation. more likely to be monarchists, more likely to hold sympathetic sentiment to azulon etc. (though most agree - publically - that sozin went too far, even if they think azulon should have his crown in private), and a lot of their styles of fashion, music, art, dance etc. is based on a lot of “antiquated” “old fashioned” fire nation traditions with some earth kingdom ideas mixed in. to fire nation residents, they just look at least 80 years out of date.

fire nation descendants in the earth kingdom are more likely to be involved with particular organised crime syndicates (the triads, as opposed to ones with other names). this is because after the war ended abruptly with sozin’s death, a lot ex-mercenaries and ex-soldiers stationed in the colonies/northwest began to find work/business through protection racketeering (in absence of organised govt. in the north-western earth kingdom). even in the modern day, the north west has problems with corruption, control, and is economically quite deprived despite having massive resources and that’s an after-effect of colonialism and attempts by the national government to ‘penalise’ the officials in that region for colluding with fire nation nationals/ex-colonists (very exasperating for genuine earth kingdom officials, and earth kingdom locals). roku did try and help the region but he’s generally disliked for lots of reasons & was trying to stop the fire nation from collapsing after supporting the radicals (a controversial decision!) and facing counter-revolutionary violence. i think roku felt like he neglected the fire nation for the earth kingdom in his youth and that’s why sozin was able to get as far as he did, so i think he made the very difficult decision to prioritise trying to sort out the fire nation. hence why yu dao is in a bit of a state. i imagine yu dao (republic city) is a big buzzing city but has those same problems with organised crime we see in lok.

the sozin dynasty, as azulon & his descendants are called, aren’t an exception to this involvement in organised crime. a lot of people were actually quite sympathetic to a young azulon after his father was killed at around the age of fifty or so, including fire nationals in the earth kingdom, but also the nobility in the earth kingdom, themselves staunch monarchists, who saw sozin as the problem and not the system of monarchy itself. all of this allowed azulon & his family to flee the caldera & manage to transfer a number of their assets with relative ease; they were never penniless, despite the sob story you might here.

azulon set up links with local businesses who were run by sympathisers, as well as organised crime syndicates, and through wise purchases, good advisors, & some savvy of his own, shifted from aristocracy to bourgeoisie with relative ease, & bought/negotiated their place at the negotiating table, to eventually come to be considered the lead stakeholder in those crime syndicates (with enough distance, though, as not to be suspicious). very much saved his name from being a laughing stock through his own ability there, but if you’d hear the story told, people who say that folks were deferential to him in part because of his lineage (sometimes, but not always true - the revolution had caused people to doubt).

regarding his sons, iroh had far more involved in organised crime and illegitimate business than ozai, who essentially looked after the more boring legitimate side of things (but took that role seriously and expanded it beyond being a simple front). iroh actually had a worse reputation up until azulon died, and was just considered a very competent but cut-throat political/business leader/general player with a lot of very very shady links that couldn’t quite be proven, but also like, was famously quite charming and well-liked in the high society ba sing se network. like, i want to be honest to show iroh here - he was bad! in the show, he was a war criminal! i mentioned he was a war profiteer (largely because ‘war criminal’ doesn’t make as much sense imo), and that was almost definitely regarding civil wars/coups that have been attempted in the fire nation & earth kingdom. this stopped when lu ten ended up being shot in the crossfire during a turf war and rather than pursuing a violent vendetta, iroh stepped out of the spotlight and let ozai take over the reigns more.

anyway, after zuko was burned for attempting to stand up to ozai, iroh basically faked his own death and completely ditched anything left of what he’d spent his life building in order to whisk zuko away and invent new identities for themselves in the fire nation (ironically) where they worked as tea shop workers (yes. li and mushi, still canon). i don’t think they live in the caldera, since cameras/photos mean it’s easier to be tracked, and zuko probably lives somewhere quiet-ish like ember island. zuko has a decent adolescence, considering, after he’s estranged. no “find the avatar” in this universe, for fairly obvious reasons.

i’m not an expert in organised crime by any means but hopefully this all makes sense. a lot of what azulon/iroh/ozai is doing, through the purchase of land, the control of business, the use of organised crime as an illicit form of govt. essentially is a form of colonisation, where the region is deprived due to fire nation business interests and in earth kingdom control in name only. corruption and close ties between ba sing se and fire nation émigrés mean that centralised govt is underfunding & turning a blind eye to it (which, in canon, ba sing se does, ‘no war in ba sing se’ etc.). most of the colonisation efforts are centred in the north-west, but azula is brought up in ba sing se given it’s far more reputable/prestigious, though she’s undoubtedly been to both places.

as for what’s happening in the fire nation, i feel like aesthetically it’s a little different - ba sing se is ancient buildings with sky trains, lots of urban sprawl & a very wide and endless city, whereas i imagine the caldera is a very tall city due to limited space available, more skyscrapers in the fire nation due to limits in islands. also, the fire nation has sea trains and submarine trains/tunnels, because. politically? haven’t quite decided but they’re some flavour of anarchist-communist (was reluctant to use that word in the fic itself because people have all kinds of interpretations of it, often very negative knee-jerk responses to it, but essentially: community-owned services and businesses and spaces instead of privately-owned ones, with egalitarian principles enshrined into the culture & identity now) over there if i’m honest, with lots of democratic councils. obviously i don’t think it’ll be perfect and i imagine ‘the national question’ is something that comes up a lot, with some difficulties between national & regional identity (imo the fire nation is very diverse, we see the sun warriors and then the sages who help korra in s2 are from different groups/cultures than the militaristic one that rose to prominence in the 100 year war and i hc a lot of that regional diversity was steamrolled for sozin’s imperialist project).

ANYWAY

there’s a reason i made this post on my main last week:

this is getting very long but hopefully this is some insight into what i’ve been thinking about when i made this AU

#very long and lots of politics #disclaimer: i am a leftist and that informs how i look at these issues #(if that wasn't obvious already)

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maidof-shade · 3 years

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Fitting a Square Peg Into a Round Hol

You have heard the expression that you can't squeeze UV resistant pegs into a circular opening. A basic perception would demonstrate that assertion is mistaken. You can UV resistant pegs into a circular opening. You can likewise squeeze a round steak into a square opening, yet for what reason could you need to?

There are the individuals who might attempt basically on the grounds that they can. What's more, there are the individuals who are UV resistant pegs that like the vibes of a circular opening and would attempt to fit. In spite of the fact that they all fit; they don't fit consistently in the opening.

Everybody has a shape and a fate. All in all, regardless of the shape you were made in; you throw a tantrum. You start your excursion as UV resistant pegs or another shape and your excursion starts in a world that is in a struggle with its shapes. There are numerous who are dug in osmosis. They figure that everybody ought to have a similar shape as them and that they should squeeze into a similar shape opening. Fortunately, this isn't normal, and life has wanted to propel a few shapes to move fresh. We for the most part don't care for individuals who don't adhere to the standards, however, without them nothing would change.

It is the standard breakers that persuade society to transform its rules. It was a standard breaker that found the world was not at the reality level. So in case you are around the stake and it serves you to squeeze into a square opening; then, at that point, you ought to get it done. However, what might be said about the shape that is having issues or issues fitting in? On the off chance that you find that your life is inconsistent unrest or battle, it is likely in light of the fact that you are attempting to squeeze into an alternate formed opening. In truth in case you are around the stake, it would be your life's motivation or fate to discover the spot you most effortlessly fit into. There is no battle when you are in concordance with what soul expected.

Since you are a part of soul and it is soul that has showed itself into the actual world as one shape or the other; it is normal for you to take the easy way out. This is known to you before you result in these present circumstances world. Since you have opportunity to pick (unrestricted love), you pick how you will track down the best fit.

For a large number of us, our issues start with our folks and with other people who have control over us. Many will anticipate that you should live inside their own shape or restrictions. You're in my home, this is how it is and you will adhere to the guidelines and fit in. You are currently a round stake caught in a square box. You might fit, yet it isn't who for sure you are.

You might get this equivalent demeanor with your kin, you school construction and mates. Neighborhood laws and territorial culture will likewise attempt to shape you into something that they can acknowledge.

During this time of development there are numerous who are attempting to reshape you and you are left with just three decisions. You can attempt to fit in, you can oblige a daily routine of steady battle and experience with the pressing factor or you can free yourself and follow your fate.

When you are sufficiently developed to make up your own psyche, you might end up miserably settled in a cycle that has made an existence of battle and misery. You have gotten tied up with what they have advised you and are feeling deficient, left out, or harmed. You are far taken out from your predetermination and life's motivation has evaded you.

It is extremely simple to decide when you are not moving along a characteristic way - it's troublesome!

Presently at times you can trick yourself. Things might be coming fine and dandy and you have been acknowledged by family, companions, and society. In any case, underneath your adjusted or square outside there is struggle, unrest, and battle. Something is continually absent. That feeling won't ever disappear regardless of how fruitful you think you are. Regardless of how famous or wanted you might be. A round stake in a square opening leaves spaces around it which are not filled. You will consistently feel those spaces and feel fragmented; something will consistently be missing.

Fortunately in any event, being an oddball enjoys its benefits, and you won't generally be this way. Life advances thus will you. If not in this lifetime; it will be the following. Surprisingly better is that you have the decision whenever to change. Change will come when you let go of the multitude of musings you have about fitting in by any means. Also, after the age of thirty; this turns into a significantly more prominent test. The more youthful you are, the simpler it is.

Without a doubt you will lose all that you thought you needed, your companions, your work, your way of life and that's only the tip of the iceberg. Fortunately you will become something a lot more noteworthy than you might at any point envision, and you won't ever be more joyful. There could be no more noteworthy inclination than being free. It isn't normal for life to be boxed, and in the end it can't. Life consistently discovers a way. At the time that you at last find that you have not fit in and it isn't what you need; you will start the excursion to opportunity.

You should realize that your family, companions and society are not your adversaries. Dread and your own musings about change are your foes. The obscure is frightening, yet in truth an everyday routine experienced external your predetermination is much more terrifying. Strolling another person's way offers you chance for you to be your normal self, as positive or negative as that might appear. Truly, positive or negative doesn't work for you. What works for you is controlled by your decisions. As a round stake, you will consistently settle on round stake decisions and the decisions will consistently work. At the point when you settle on square decisions, there will consistently be some additional room that simply doesn't squeeze into your shape (reason).

I have consistently been a round stake living is a square world. At the point when I began composing nine years prior, I needed to relinquish all that just to allow the composition to come through. I surrendered an effective business, discovered an exit plan and lived basically in the city for longer than a year. I'm 60 years of age and I am as yet sifting through the restricting requests of society and my own contemplations which actually challenge me in my present everyday life. I continually question the importance or attack of what I am doing.

I have no companions and have estranged myself from my families. I'm semi resigned and work low maintenance at a particular employment that is continually moving me to adjust to principles which are conflicting with how I see myself. Despite the fact that I have found my shape, I have not discovered my place to fit. Truth be told I am an oddball (flighty). I don't say this with lament or judgment however with a feeling of direction and a significant longing to follow my fate. For the individuals who may not acknowledge me or my composition, they offer me support since it is an indication that I am as yet proceeding with my picked way and I am not the same as them.

I'm in good company I would say, and there are numerous other people who resemble me. By our very nature as loners (unconventionality), we won't track down a fit among ourselves. This doesn't pardon us from being included or connected with individuals. Individuals bring a familiarity with self (myself) and we are characterized by the presence of others. We will consistently be comparative with another person. Profoundly, I don't think it is solid not to impart to other people. Life consistently looks to find and perceive other life.

What I do, I accomplish for myself first, since it is inside me to do as such. Thusly, I additionally reward other people who need to hear what I need to say. If you somehow managed to take a gander at my site and read my articles on the web or read my books, you would find that I have a wealth of comments. By making this plenitude, I can stand to part with it. So it is the right hand warmly greeting the left.

For every one of those out there who consider themselves to appear as something else - embrace it. Be one of a kind and exceptional. Keep on finding your shape and search for your fit. Carry on with your existence with reason and realize that it is your predetermination, and your life will be characterized by the reason that you give it, and not by the assumption for other people. Permit others a similar opportunity to act naturally, however never permit any individual who might be shrouded in acceptable deeds to figure out what your identity is for sure your predetermination is. A day to day existence reason driven is very much served regardless anybody thinks.

Live well in wealth!

Roy is an occupant of British Columbia, Canada. A global distributed profound writer of books, digital books and articles. Roy's first book "You Life Was Never Meant to be a Struggle" is presently accessible in 13 nations. Roy's subsequent book has recently been distributed and is named "Driven Down the Garden Path" Roy's books were composed to challenge your present convictions concerning what your identity is and your motivation in this life.

#UV resistant pegs

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alifeincoffeespoons · 4 years

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a wolfstar good omens au

because i LOVE the art of @maria-tries and have had this headcanon living rent-free in my head ever since i saw this

Sirius is cool. When he walks, it’s with a swagger. He knows the right way to smirk to make strangers blush. He knows how to make his hair fall perfectly around his shoulders and catch the eye of every passerby. He knows how to wear his leather jacket so it fits him perfectly, no matter what he has on underneath. It comes with being a demon, after all.

(This is not entirely true. Most demons don’t pay attention to the way their hair falls or the perfect way to smirk. Sirius is the only demon who actually cares to learn these things. It’s true that every demon is capable of these things; most just don’t particularly want to, especially when they could be torturing idiotic humans instead.)

This makes him particularly good at temptation. Other things Sirius is good at include inventing devices and structures to lead humans onto the path to damnation (his more recent ones include Twitter and inauthentic poke bowl chains), raising tropical birds, and caring for his motorbike, a 1940 Harley-Davidson.

Things Sirius is apparently not good at include caring for children, given that he’s lost the fucking Antichrist.

“What do you mean you’ve lost him?” Remus hisses, and wow, this is the angriest Remus has ever looked, which isn’t very angry at all, to be honest, given that angels aren’t actually capable of being angry. To an outsider, he just looks a bit befuddled.

“You lost him too!”

“Yes, but you were the one who brought him to that hospital.”

“Satanic convent.”

“Is this really the time to be precise?”

“I mean, a lack of precision was what got us here,” and it looks like angels actually are capable of being angry, since Remus’s current blank stare is absolutely terrifying.

“Are you sure?” Remus paces around the grounds of Malfoy Manor, where the birthday-boy-who-is-apparently-not-the-Antichrist is laughing at the hired magician, a pompous narcissist named Gilderoy Lockhart, who’s just failed to pull a bunny rabbit out of his top hat. Sirius makes a mental note to use Lockhart to tempt more people into rage sometime; if this is how horribly arrogant he is at a child’s birthday party, he can’t wait to see the damage he could do on a date.

(Over the course of Gilderoy Lockhart’s short existence, he’s managed to seal the damnation of thirty individuals already. He would be a very good demon. Gilderoy Lockhart himself, of course, was hell-bound before he even reached his second year of university, by the force of his unfortunate habit of stealing the research of his fellow students. This, coincidentally, was also how he managed to get expelled from university.)

Multiple people would probably end up with black eyes at the end.

“Well, there’s no hellhound—”

“Don’t say that in front of the humans!”

“Oh, come off it, no one’s listening, everyone’s either getting drunk or throwing food at the magician—”

“Still!”

“There’s no dog here, and Bellatrix was just kind enough to inform me that the hellhound has arrived safely at the Antichrist’s home, so I’m pretty damn sure this is the wrong kid!”

“But how could we have lost him?” Remus looks like he’s going to either scream or cry, and neither is particularly appropriate for this occasion, even if Draco Malfoy’s birthday party is shaping up to be an unmitigated disaster even without the Antichrist Problem, given that the guests have begun throwing around chunks of the birthday cake topped with edible gold.

(Which would have been a bad idea even if Lockhart wasn’t a hopeless magician, given that no eleven-year-old’s palette is nuanced enough to appreciate the delicacies of edible gold. Alternatively, edible gold is never a good idea, as it is simply capitalism at its worst. The second is more likely.)

“I don’t know, but we have, so we better fucking do something about it,” Sirius says.

ii.

Doing something about it apparently means getting the hell out of Draco Malfoy’s disastrous eleventh birthday party and hunkering down in Remus’s bookstore to do research. Research means, in this case, Remus muttering furiously as he flips through dozens of prophecy books in hopes of finding something useful and Sirius annoying Remus as Remus mutters furiously. It’s very fun, annoying Remus. His angel isn’t very easily flustered, to be honest, which makes the pay-off even more worth it when he becomes flustered, in Sirius’s opinion.

(Remus’s cheeks go all red and his freckles become even more prominent. If Sirius was the type of demon who went around calling things adorable, he would call Remus adorable. As Sirius is not that kind of demon, thank you very much, he thinks of Remus, secretly, as delectable. Honestly, the two are fairly interchangeable.)

Over the course of his 6,000-year-plus tenure on Earth, he’s also discovered that there are many things that annoy Remus. These include, and are not limited to:

Flipping through one of his books loudly and sighing whenever possible, making sure to say “boring” in an audible tone;

Eating Remus’s chocolate and then leaving the wrappers everywhere for him to find;

Calling Remus “Moony-Moons” in a sickeningly sweet tone (a nickname acquired after an unfortunate incident wherein some superstitious residents of Edinburgh mistook the angel for a werewolf in the 16th century);

Taking the motorbike around the block near Remus’s bookshop, making sure to rev the engine very loudly every lap;

Humming “God Save The Queen” off-key, just loudly enough for Remus to hear. It’s doubly annoying, because he tips his chair back to creak on every off-beat.

Right now, he’s in the process of repeating the fifth option for the third time when Remus slams the book shut. For a moment, he thinks Remus is going to whisper-yell at him.

(Hot.)

Or maybe he’s going to kiss him.

(Even hotter.)

Instead, Remus simply stands up.

“Right. I think we need to find a book.”

“Remus, you have almost every book written in the past five centuries and then some in this bookshop.” This is helped by the fact that Remus keeps very odd hours, always opening late in the afternoon and closing early in the morning. This isn’t even to mention the week he takes off every month, without fail, which has helped spread the rumor, again, that Remus is a werewolf. Sirius has not mentioned the existence of this rumor to Remus, because he finds it hilarious. If Remus needed to actually make money, he would be exceptionally poor, given that the last time he sold a book was three weeks ago, and it was a two pound guide book of Paris.

Remus gives him a look. “Unfortunately, I don’t, actually, though that would be very nice. I’m missing Cassandra Trelawney’s Book of Strange and Mystical Prophecies.”

“Remus, all this prophecy bunk is rubbish. It’s just humans trying to scam dumber humans out of their money.” Sirius would know. He’s very good at creating ways for humans to scam dumber humans out of their money. He invented Juicero, after all.

“It’s not, actually,” Remus says. “Granted, a lot of the prophetic books are, especially those from the 19th century, but Cassandra Trelawney’s is exceptionally accurate.”

“Aren’t you the one always going on about ineffability? How can any books be written if everything is ineffable anyway?”

Remus sighs. His angel is exceptionally good at sighing. Secretly, Sirius likes to think that they’re a sign of affection.

(Actually, they are. Remus has a specific sigh for Sirius, which can best be translated as “you’re quite annoying, in all honesty, but for some reason, I’ve grown very attached to you and don’t know how I could bear to live without you at this point.”)

“The Plan may be ineffable, but Cassandra Trelawney was a true seer. This is just a shot in the dark, honestly, but if we could get our hands on it, it might help us find out who the Antichrist actually is.”

“And then what do we do?” Sirius asks. “What, we find this Antichrist, who’s probably been influenced by Downstairs already, if he has the hellhound, and what? We talk to him about how this world is actually very nice, so please don’t end it, please? You really think that’s going to work? This is the literal spawn of Satan, Remus. It’s not just another idiotic eleven-year-old. And what, do you think that prophecy book is just going to hold all the answers? That it’ll give a perfect description of the Antichrist and his exact address, and we’ll just find him?”

“Well, what else can we do?” And there’s that Remus flush. Delectable, indeed.

“Run away with me,” Sirius decides suddenly. Remus gives him an incredulous look.

“To where?” he scoffs. “Sirius, if we can’t find the Antichrist, all of this will be gone.”

And that hurts, it does, because Sirius loves Earth, loves everything about it. He loves the solidity of the ground under his motorbike, loves the wine (he has taste, sue him), loves London especially, all the cafes where he can watch Remus sip tea and fawn over chocolate pastries. But if they find the Antichrist, and everything goes south anyway, because that’s what will probably happen, in any case—

“What if we find him and it’s gone anyway? Remus, if we fuck this up—and given how solidly we managed to fuck up taking care of the right Antichrist—one of us will probably be dead in the next month.” I can’t lose you, he doesn’t say, because he doesn’t know what he would do if Remus doesn’t feel the same way. “Remus, we can go—we can go to fuck, I don’t know, Alpha Centauri. Or anywhere else. You read all those books about exploring the galaxy, well, we could do that.”

Because Remus is far more principled than Sirius, for a moment, he seems to be gazing into space, and then he just sighs.

(In that moment, Remus thought about running away with Sirius to some distant galaxy, where they could be something besides an angel and a demon, something unnameable and perfect in that unnameability, and it was all well and good for that moment, but then he thought about all the families that would be torn apart, all of the people who hadn’t done anything wrong at all, really, and would be condemned for simply happening to exist at the wrong time, and he knew he couldn’t.)

“We can’t. We just—we need to find him, and we can go from there. Look, has anything terrible happened yet?”

“It could be,” Sirius says sullenly. “And something terrible is always happening.”

“More terrible than usual, I mean. Earthquakes across the world, volcanic eruptions, Martians destroying London—and don’t give me that look, we’ll know if that happens.”

“Not yet,” Sirius has to admit.

“Well, there you have it. We can save him.”

“Oh, so because he’s not currently destroying the world, he’s suddenly not the Antichrist anymore?”

“I never said that,” Remus replies mildly. “I’m saying that he’s a child, even if he’s the Antichrist, and he can’t be expected to be a soldier in a war he doesn’t even know he signed up for.”

“You and your fucking logic. Where are we even going to find this book of horrible prophecies?”

“I may have an idea,” Remus says.

(This idea, it must be said, is less of a fully-formed idea and more of an inkling. In short, it is not a very good idea.)

will i ever write more of this? who knows. maybe? i just Love the idea of sirius as crowley and remus as aziraphale so very much.

(harry’s the antichrist, of course. but a good one!)

#harry potter #good omens #wolfstar #remus lupin #sirius black #remus x sirius #ineffable partners #james potter #lily evans #draco malfoy #hp #harry potter fanfiction #hp fic #my writing

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lukes-writing · 5 years

Text

Chapter 2: Out of Body

Project introduction | Previous chapter | Next chapter

Word count: 2900 Warnings: Soft drugs usage

September 22nd, 10:33 AM, Great Moors district, Trinity Gate

The blinds of the large room are impenetrably closed, all the lights are switched off. The only source of light is the flickering flame of a scented candle in front of the girl who is the only person in the room. She is sitting in a lotus position with hands resting on her lap. She inhales the heady smell of the candle, helping her to relax even more, to let go of all the tension and focus only on her own thoughts.

The room is silent except for an occasional screech coming from one of the four budgies which reside in a large aviary occupying the corner of the room. The girl has them named - Godric (pink), Rowenna (blue), Helga (yellow) and Salazar (green). It’s no wonder she chose such names - another prominent part of the room is a massive wooden bookshelf carrying hundreds of books.

However, the girl doesn’t focus on either the birds or the books. When she feels completely relaxed, she lays on a soft carpet like a plank and starts to detach. She soothes her mind to get on the verge of sleeping, but she doesn’t fall asleep. Instead, she starts to visualize two versions of herself - her physical body and her consciousness as two separate entities. It took years to master and the first attempts were usually unsuccessful, but now, at nineteen, she’s able to detach rather easily.

She already doesn’t feel her body, but not in a numb way. It’s almost like her body was something unnecessary she can leave behind freely. Then, something starts to happen behind her closed eyes. A light, almost like an open gate. When she saw the gate for the first time, she backed off and woke up immediately, afraid to go further. Now, she just embraces it and completes the detach.

The girl’s astral body, or a soul, as some people prefer to call it, slips out of the body, almost like peeling a sticker off a surface. Then, when the last bit of her astral body leaves the material body, she slips through the light which guides her into the Astral Plane. The girl can see again, even though her physical eyes are closed. The room she sees is seemingly unchanged, except for the unexplainable feeling of unreality it gives now.

She looks down and sees her sleeping physical body, visible only faintly in the candle’s glow. The thing that glows brighter is a rope made of silver light which emerges from the belly of her physical body and ends in the same spot of her astral body.

The two parts of her being are now apart, but still connected. The girl’s astral face smiles. Now she’s not restricted by the limitations of the physical body. She can… fly! She spreads her arms and, with a mere thought, ascends through the roof, above her house, into the morning sunshine. The silver rope, called a “lifeline”, extends according to her needs, always connected with her physical body.

This never gets old, she thinks as she looks at her surroundings from above. She sees the solar panels on the roof of the eco-friendly mansion her family owns, the garden in front of the house, the greenhouses, fields and farms typical for the Great Moors district.

She can roam anywhere she wants. Just a thought is enough to carry her into any direction. Maybe today, she will make it all the way to Hestia, the capital of the Commonwealth of Great Moors located on the borders of Montana and South Dakota. A few days ago, she made it all the way to Iowa before her physical body started to get restless and violently sucked her astral self back into it.

She has heard about people who can cross thousands of kilometers in a blink of an eye while in the Astral Plane, but she hasn’t reached such levels yet.

After spending a little longer floating above their mansion, the girl’s astral body starts flying to the west. Like always, her detach is accompanied by feelings of happiness and absolute freedom. The slight toothache she suffers from is also gone - the tooth is a part of her physical body she left behind.

“I’m going on an adventure!” she shouts even though nobody in the material world can hear her and the Astral Plane is usually empty. She accelerates, flying towards the fence which creates a border between the city of Trinity Gate and the state of Indiana, a part of the Commonwealth of Great Moors.

Then suddenly, her astral body is violently taken back into her physical body. In a matter of seconds, she flies all the way back to their mansion, through the roof and into her body. Her soul is screaming the whole time.

Whisper Johanna Archer-Gutenberg sits up, gasping for breath. Her head is spinning and it takes her a while to get oriented - like every time her soul returns to her body too abruptly. After she settles up a bit, she realizes the blinds in her room have been open and there’s someone in the room with her.

“Libby!” Whisper yells at the girl who woke her up. “Just… just how many times do I have to tell you not to wake me up when I’m out of body? It can be dangerous! You have to be crazy!” She hates that her voice is ridiculously high-pitched and keeps changing tone when she’s angry. It makes her sound… less intimidating.

Her sister sneers at her. “Out of body? Sure. I bet you were tripping on this,” she looks at the remaining half of a joint resting in a small ashtray on Whisper’s bedside table.

Whisper already gave up on explaining the astral travel to her sister who is a skeptic just like their parents. “Are you going to judge me for that?” Whisper spits out.

“Nah, that shit is legal for some time now, isn’t it?” Libby replies. She is a slim, pretty girl with short, blonde hair and intelligent brown eyes. Judging from her outfit, a skirt suit which subtly accentuates her curves, she’s heading to work soon. She is twenty-five, six years older than Whisper.

Her full name is Liberty Camilla Archer-Gutenberg. The Archer-Gutenberg siblings discussed their parents’ strange name choices countless times - the two sisters have an older brother who goes by the name Knight Edward. They came to a conclusion their parents wanted to somehow compensate for the fact their names are Jack and Mary, the most basic names anyone can think of.

“I hope you at least have a good reason for waking me up,” Whisper mutters when she finally gets on her feet. The four budgies in the corner of the room greet the sun with an apparent whistling contest and Whisper strides towards them to feed them.

“I do,” Libby replies. “Uncle John is here to speak with you.”

“Do you mean uncle Wiccan?” Whisper corrects her.

The older girl rolls her eyes. “No, I mean uncle John. Maybe you play along with him, but I refuse to deal with the bullshit he sticks to since he married that Ophelia woman.”

Whisper once again ignores her and leaves her room. Wiccan Salisbury was born as John Archer, younger brother of Jack Archer, Whisper’s father. Later, he took the surname of his wife and changed his first name, too. Wiccan fits him much better, Whisper thinks.

The girl descends the stairs to the large, airy atrium of the Archer-Gutenberg mansion where she’s greeted by the three dogs the family owns - a female golden retriever, a corgi and an especially large specimen of the Irish wolfhound. They follow the same naming pattern as Whisper’s budgies - Arwen, Frodo and Gandalf.

Wiccan is already standing there, just like every time - casual, smiling, dressed in a leather jacket, white T-shirt, basic jeans and sneakers. “Wisp, good to see you!” he greets her with his trademark, slightly breathy voice, probably affected by the fifteen years of smoking he quit some years ago.

“Uncle Wiccan!” Whisper cheers and her voice grows into falsetto once again, this time out of joy. “What brings you here? I haven’t seen you in a while!”

“That’s for a longer talk,” Wiccan replies. “What would you say about a short walk?”

After looking at the uncle and the niece together, one has immediately an idea which one of her relatives has the biggest impact on Whisper.

Just like her uncle, the girl wears her hair braided into long, fair dreadlocks, long enough to reach her waist. She’s wearing an airy green sleeveless dress with floral pattern, soft and thin like a spider web, ending above her knees. On principle, she always walks barefoot unless the situation asks for some kind of shoes. This is, however, not the case, so the girl walks beside her uncle with nothing on her feet.

It would be unfair to say Whisper is not pretty, but not all people can appreciate her authentic type of beauty. She doesn’t wear any make-up and her face usually shines with a smile some people may consider strange or even uncanny. Her dreamy eyes usually have a spaced-out look. They are hazel-colored, fluctuating between brown and green according to the lighting.

This combination can make the girl appear a bit like a lunatic, but those who know her know it’s nothing but a part of her complex, dreamer personality.

Whisper and Wiccan walk together through the Great Moors district. They pass several eco-friendly, futuristic-looking houses and mansions similar to theirs. They also see large greenhouses whose glass walls reflect the golden sunlight. The gardeners are working on the fields and garden beds inside. The greenhouses can simulate any type of climate thanks to advanced technology, allowing them to grow many types of fruit, vegetables and crops. Outside the greenhouses, there are also vast animal farms and ranches which successfully combine traditional methods and modern technology.

The girl loves this district - besides the farms and greenhouses, there are also beautiful parks, forests, lakes, adorable ponds and natural swimming pools. Whisper is a nature lover and taking a long way in the woods is her everyday ritual. She sometimes meditates or practices violin there when nobody is around.

Whisper picks a flower from the flower bed lining the pavement they’re walking and weaves them into her hair - that’s what she frequently does. Then she turns to Wiccan. “So? What did you want to discuss?” she asks him with a smile. While she loves all of her family, she always prefers the presence of her alternative uncle over her boring, materialistic nuclear family.

“Where should I start,” Wiccan thinks out loud. “Wisp, remember when I taught you the techniques of astral traveling? Have you been perfecting this skill?”

“Of course I have! I once made it to Iowa before my physical body disturbed the travel!” Whisper boasts. She speaks with a singsong voice which frequently changes tone and loudness. It makes her sound like she was a part of a theatrical play even though she’s just shopping for groceries.

“Very good,” Wiccan nods. “The thing is - me and some of my friends, including Ophelia, are trying to assemble a team of people with special talents and abilities for… a certain job.”

“Really?!” Whisper’s eyes brighten up; they appear green in the sunlight. “Like… a Hogwarts letter? Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters? Like the…”

“Not really,” Wiccan interrupts her before his niece can overwhelm him with fictional schools and academies. “In order to join, you have to give up some romantic ideas about such things you have from books.”

Whisper scowls. “Why so?”

Wiccan looks at her with a strange expression. “I haven’t interacted with you much lately, did I? Now I can tell you it was because one of my closest friends died in action. Even though it’s not the first time, it’s always an off-putting experience.”

His niece looks at him with a betrayed look in her eyes. “Uncle Wiccan! Since I was little, you kept telling me you’re working as a researcher in AgriCo Trinity Gate,” her voice starts low, but once again escalates into much higher pitch as her emotions grow stronger. “And now you’re just casually telling me you have a job which involves people dying? Have you been lying to me all this time?”

“Well,” Wiccan sighs, “it’s not the kind of job I can talk about. I’ll try to explain.”

Wiccan examines his niece with his eyes and, for the first time, he feels doubt. Does he have a right to expose his niece to the dangers of working for The Society involves? Whisper is tiny. Rather short, with a thin frame. Not slim or lean. Thin.

Her limbs look gentle and fragile. There are only slight hints of feminine curves underneath her clothes - people often find amusement in comparing Whisper to her beautiful, tall, curvy sister. It looks like God forgot to distribute certain things evenly here. There is also a running joke claiming Whisper changed the way she looks and acts because she likes the nickname “Hippie girl” more than “Surfboard”.

On the other hand, the man knows Whisper is intelligent and headstrong. And her ability to detach her soul from her body can make her a valuable ally.

Whisper catches the look he’s giving her. “No need to worry,” she says with a firm voice. “People think I’m weak, but I’m not. Whatever job you have for me, I can do it.”

This is not the first time Whisper appears to be capable of mind reading. However, there’s not anything supernatural about it. The girl is naturally empathetic and can read anyone’s body language like one of the many books she has in her room. She can work as a natural lie detector with surprising accuracy. It can be both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes people feel things that make Whisper hurt.

“Are you sure about this, Wisp? You don’t even know what does it involve.”

“Look, uncle. I was born as a third daughter of the Archer-Gutenberg family, the founders and owners of Sagittarius Plantations, the biggest agricultural company in Trinity Gate. They expect me to study economy, something I hate with all my heart, and they also expect I will be as successful as Knight and Libby. Which I can never be, at least in the fields our parents consider important.”

Wiccan silently listens to the girl’s vent. This is the first time she talks so openly about her position in the family. So far, she always seemed ready to do what she has to do, but now it seems she has doubts.

Whisper continues: “They don’t see I’m… yeah, it’s a cliché to say this, but I’m different from them. I don’t give a twig about the company. I… I just want to be myself, nothing more, but they want to mold me into a businesswoman, an heiress of the empire. Like they didn’t already have two.” She looks at Wiccan. “You are the only one who understands this. So I’m willing to follow you no matter where you take me.”

First, Wiccan has to resist the urge to laugh at the girl’s habit to replace profanity with innocent words - Whisper’s legendary phrase Egg this! successfully made its way into his own vocabulary. Then, he gets overwhelmed by Whisper’s sincere loyalty.

He knows that Jack and Maria, Wiccan’s brother and sister-in-law and Whisper’s parents, are boring people with money on their minds. But he wasn’t aware they make Whisper this unhappy. She seemed reconciled with her fate which involved studying at the First University of Trinity Gate and then starting to work in the company alongside her older siblings.

But now, she probably saw a chance to escape this fate and grasped it firmly.

“But first,” Whisper says, “so we can be sincere with each other, I have to know who you really are and what you do. It seems that everything I know is a lie, isn’t it?”

“Not everything,” Wiccan replies. “The only thing I lied about was the true nature of my job. But as I already said, it’s not something I can talk about with people who don’t need to know.”

“And do I need to know now?”

“I guess so. In fact, I’ve been preparing you for this moment for some time now - it cost me many arguments with Jack, but screw him. He blamed me that I’m attempting to steal his daughter away, like you were some kind of commodity. From the start, I knew you’re destined for something better than sitting behind the desk and counting money. Now it’s your turn to prove I was right.”

The girl’s eyes are once again shining with zeal and enthusiasm. Maybe she’s a bit too eager, Wiccan thinks. He didn’t allow ELIPSA to create a file about her, just like they did with Parker and yeah, also about him when he was a new recruit. Even without the file which would contain everything from the girl’s privacy, he decided Whisper is perfect for the job.

“I can’t tell you much right now, but if you follow my instructions, you will know everything soon,” Wiccan tells the girl. “Now let’s just continue the walk, should we?”

Whisper seems that the idea of waiting isn’t pleasant to her, but she doesn’t object.

Author’s Note

I hope you enjoyed meeting Whisper, one of my favorite characters I’ve written :)

I also wholeheartedly thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and if you did, please leave a comment, send me a message or share and let more people know about this story! You can also consider a small donation at www.paypal.me/lukassladky. Have a great day and stay tuned for the next chapter!

#writeblr #writers #my writing #urban fantasy #original fiction #TeamDreamcatcher

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kalluun-patangaroa · 5 years

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Afternoon Delight: Brett Anderson Interviewed

by Tariq Goddard

The Quietus, 3 October 2019

Tariq Goddard sits down with Suede frontman, Brett Anderson for a frank talk ahead of the publication of Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, the second volume of the singer's memoirs

Portrait by Paul Khera

Coal Black Mornings, the first volume of Brett Anderson’s memoir, was a haunting and unusual addition to the genre, eschewing the devices and gimmickry that are the principle selling points of a rock star confessional, for a harrowingly reflective and thoughtful overview of his early years. Anderson took the reader back to a time before the music, to the experiences that informed the songs, albums, and eventual career trajectory, and in doing so, circumnavigated the years of his triumph during which he rose to public prominence and critical acclaim.

His onus on the creatively formative period that preceded success, the tender portraits of his family, particularly his complicated relationship with his father, a man who may have wished he had the life his son had, and the recollections of an England that has vanished so completely as to no longer be a place, offered a more unique and heartfelt history than the celebrity tittle-tattle fans might have thought they wanted. To do anything comparable with the second volume, a story Anderson vowed not to tell, would at once be easier for him - his material would span the glory days of his career - yet harder, for how could the tenderness of the first book survive grubby contact with the reality of wild adulation and Britpop, a “movement" he admits to despising?

Perhaps to his own surprise Volume II, Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, strikes the same ruminative notes as the earlier volume, again subverting convention and expectation to avoid cliche and disappointment, written in the vulnerable and careful voice of its antecedent. Instead of dishing up insider gossip, Anderson mentions none of his rivals or contemporaries by name, assiduously sticking to the frequently scorned advice of “if have nothing nice to say, I say nothing”. Portraits of associates, friends and ex-friends are generous, forensic but fair, and there is no attempt to airbrush or underplay anyone else’s role in contributing to Suede’s imperial phase.

Knowing that the man he became in this second volume is not as sympathetic as the youth he was in the first, Anderson goes on to slay the most prominent elephant of all, himself, through pages of literary flagellation few writers could self-administer uncoerced.

Driven by the desire to work out what really happened to him, Anderson’s writing follows an unashamedly conceptual arc (“archetypes”, “convergence theory” and “postmodern play of mirrors” all appear on a single page), constituting a historical inquiry into the motives and processes that lay behind his best and worst work, by way of remorseless self-analysis, painful descriptions of how others must have seen him, and an attempt to grasp why we all think we are right at the time. The light shed and insight shared in these two volumes places them in the same covetable space as Springsteen’s Born To Run or Dylan’s Chronicles, and would be worth cherishing even if Brett Anderson was the reason why you never liked Suede in the first place.

Musicians often write books to sustain and propagate a persona that they have developed over a career, not deconstruct one in a spirit of enquiry. This book reads like it was written by that hidden aspect of yourself that wrote the songs in private, and not the public alter ego we saw perform them…

Brett Anderson: Absolutely, that is the main premise of the book, that it wasn’t going to be written by the Brett Anderson persona but whoever the real person behind it was. The reason why Coal Black Mornings ended where it did was because my public persona didn’t exist then, and I deliberately stopped the story before it had been formed. What I didn’t know was whether I could actually write another book in that same voice I had developed in the first, dealing with the next period of my life, and not drift into public persona I had created by then. It was a massive conundrum for me, as people might be familiar with the events and that version of me, and expect something consistent with that, while I knew I wanted a more personal and interesting story, told in the natural voice of the first book.

There is something I want to be clear about though, this thing with the persona we’re talking about is that it wasn’t necessarily false in the way people understand that to be. I wasn’t just the man behind the mask manipulating people’s view of me, because to inhabit a persona you have to believe in that persona too. Looking back it’s possible to wonder how much of it is really yourself, as it is you and not you at the same time, but all of it still comes from you. You are the one doing it. I mean, everyone manufactures personas all time. People in the public eye simply amplify the process, and the lens of the media then helps magnify and distort the original amplification. The “you” that sits down and watches TV with your family is very different from the “you” sitting here now, but that doesn’t mean that your public self is some Svengali like manipulation of reality. The persona you decide to project says as much about who you are as your private self does. And it was only through growing up, growing up and not giving up these past eleven years, and having kids who you can’t fob off with a persona, that I went through the slow and painful process of taking apart the nuts and bolts of what mine was made of.

The book does come up short on after dinner speaking anecdotage. Although it is often very funny, it doesn’t seem to see its function as to amuse, does it?

BA: No, not at all. The book is a search into what happened to me in those years of success and fame, and what effect that had on me as a person, not a parade of all my achievements, where I ask the reader to look at me and love me. Like the first book, I used my writing as a sounding board very like therapy, and used the questions I was asking of myself to work out my own shit.

Portrait by Pat Pope

Notes from therapy don’t normally make for very interesting reading though…

BA: They don’t, and I knew I was running a risk. In one of my favourite reviews of Coal Black Mornings the reviewer writes, having given it two or three stars out of five, I’m not sure which is the more dismissive number, ‘this book is very well written but the big problem I had with it in the end is it is all about him, him, him!’ Well of course it is, it’s a memoir! Memoir has to take the risk of being indulgent to work.

But for a memoir, I found you very impatient with your own perspective. There’s very little self justification or score settling, often it’s like you’re trying to establish something very close to historical objectivity? Even though you keep saying that it is impossible to do that.

BA: I realise I wanted to know everything that was going on around me at that time, that wasn’t just me or to merely repeat or excuse how I saw things then. And I really didn’t want to fall into one of the lazy tropes of the genre which is just to sit there and slag off other bands. There is a vitriol in there, but I apply it to movements and features of the period, not individuals, partly because I know how the media works now. As soon as you slag off a name, that’s all your book becomes, and you lose all control or ownership of context, and simply end up as a line in a feature in quotes of the year. A memoir is about context, a complex tapestry, not a motormouth series of quotes, and you don’t want to lose that by being petty or boring, or revisiting past rivalries. I mean, who cares who ticked me off? The crazy thing is that there are people who want you to name names and write that kind of book, but I wasn’t prepared to.

But readers are more used to engaging with a work of that kind, aren’t they, who blew coke up whose arsehole?

BA: Absolutely, but the books that do that are the same story with the names changed, you know, the amusing band shenanigans, all the japery, the dirt, all of it is essentially the same tale every time. But that is the expectation, and to be honest, critics can be just as predictable. I’ve had reviews saying that Coal Black Mornings was really good but who was it really for, as it doesn’t sit comfortably in the genre they think it is supposed to be in. But for me that’s a good thing. It’s meant to be more ambitious and about trying to get to the bottom of things and to understand life. Basically the opposite of a series of oft repeated anecdotes. The anecdotes that I have included are the things that are important to me that no one else could have ever known about, because they were purely personal or because sometimes there was simply no one else there to observe them. Whether it’s the beautiful girl who comes up to me just to tell me my band are shit, or the cheese and pickle sandwich I took with me on my first flight to America, these were the things I wanted to share so that I would know they had really happened. You know, the strange and quirky little things that give your life back to you, as they thread in and out of the story everyone else thinks they know…

You are hard on yourself in the book, but you are also very hard on your own music, which from a fan’s point of view might be tough to take. Reading that you have never rated your most successful singles, or that people’s favourite songs had working titles like 'Pisspot' and 'Sombre Bongoes' for example…

BA: Yeah, 'Stay Together', 'Electricity', the Head Music title track, and 'The Power', yeah, I take the sword to them all, but I had to be that self critical in order to be convincing. If I just sat there saying, “I’m a fucking genius and everything I have done is brilliant” anything else I would say would carry zero weight! Especially if I then want to go on and talk about the songs I really do still love, 'Heroine', 'Killing Of A Flash Boy', 'Sleeping Pills', the list goes on. It’s all part of subverting the myth of the god given seer, like the bit where I talk about myself honestly as a musician and admit that I am not a particularly talented one, but what I do have is that I just don’t fucking give up.That admission for me was a moment of truth, it just isn’t what most musicians say, and so another attack on the supposed elegance of my persona. But in the same way I view myself at points in my past as a different person, I see some of those songs as written by a different person, and that is why the flaws so easily reveal themselves to me. As for being hard on myself, again, I had to be. My mistakes were entirely my own and no one else’s fault, certainly not the fault of any childhood trauma or external stuff, and I needed to take responsibility for that. My descent into hell came from being romantically attached to the notion of the artist as a genius that accepts no limits or boundaries, it was that simple.

Do you think the experience of the relatively fallow and low periods in your career helped you develop the sensibility and humility with which you wrote this memoir? That continual and unbroken success may have robbed you of certain insights that disappointment helped provide?

BA: Yes, the end of the band meant I was able to jump off the bandwagon I had been on and develop a different perspective. Those were key years for me as an artist, that I had to have away from Suede, before we came back again. Experiencing struggle and failure, having had success, was crucial for me. I loved making solo records but it did start to feel like a bit of a vanity project as you do need an audience, and there is a certain point where if you drop below a particular level, you begin to wonder whether it is still worth doing. The work may still stand up, but if there’s just a select group you are appealing to, buttressed by family and friends, you can feel like the basic relationship you need with an audience, in order to create, is breaking down. And with having a family too, I thought I couldn’t afford to go on like that anymore. A performance, a book, a song, all these things require an audience, it’s a plea, you are projecting your voice out there and you require an echo in return. Otherwise you’d just stay in your own room and write for yourself, which is what some artists claim to do, but it’s an attitude I have never shared. Because half the point of creating anything is the reaction. I’ve never understood the cliche of the artist that only creates for themselves and never reads their own press.

You have to be Kafka to really not care what happens to your work. Most artists hope for perpetual immortality, on their more modest days.

BA: But did even Kafka really not care though?

He did leave his work with his best friend and literary executor to destroy.

BA: Exactly, his best friend and literary executor! Interesting that he chose a man who thought he was genius for that task! If he really felt that way he should have given everything to someone who really didn’t give a shit about him or his work.

Contingency and chance is one of the big themes of your book. One of the very few contemporaries you name, and then very affectionately, is Loz Hardy of Kingmaker whose fortunes you contrast with yours. You seem to be asking did you succeed, and he fail, because of the hidden hand of destiny, Darwinian necessity and artistic merit, or has the whole of your and his career been the most monstrous fluke?

BA: I thought long and hard about whether to involve Loz in any of this, and there is a part of me that felt bad about it, and so I tried to be sensitive in how I talked about him, as I have warmth for him and always really liked him. But I had to include him. We were thrown together by the Melody Maker’s “dog shit and diamonds” piece, a gladiatorial contest they set up where we were used as symbols for different musical and aesthetic tendencies, and there was no way for me to explore the questions I wanted to if I ignored that. The fact is Kingmaker did not go onto achieve success, but I hope I didn’t trample on them when I refer back to that point where we found ourselves in the same place. I genuinely wanted to work out whether things happened for us in the only way they could have, and if you can judge your own worth on the basis of success, as the ultimate criteria, or if it is all down to chance in the end.

You go on to say that the neglect of great art makes you wonder whether it is all chance, however much it might suit you not to think so…

BA: Exactly, look at Echo And The Bunnymen for fuck’s sake! They’ve made amazing music but why aren’t they then given the prestige they deserve, whereas so many of their less talented contemporaries fill up stadiums at the drop of hat? How can you resolve it? It’s unresolvable! But I think you need to believe in destiny wholeheartedly to make it at anything, and it is easy to when everything is going right, you know “my success is my destined birthright!’, but then how can you have any framework or belief system left if you embrace destiny and then fuck up? You’d be complicit in your own fall. Even then though, you can make failure work for you, and realise the fuck-ups were necessary too, and that you learn from them and they therefore feed your future successes, so you’re kind of led back into destiny again. The thing is if you are happy with where you have got to in life, and looking at things from a place of satisfaction, then you literally can’t really regret anything, as the fuck ups are part of the journey that led you to where you are, and are as easily as important as the successes.

Photograph courtesy of Phillip Williams

You make a number of complimentary references to the old music press in the book, even when they turned on you, which is rare for a musician…

BA: God yeah, we’re culturally less well off for their folding, don’t you think so? That whole Punch And Judy journalism and playground tribalism produced so many great bands and so much great discussion no matter how ugly it got. Those papers were like a music factory. A lot of modern music writing, with some very obvious exceptions that I love, is too dry and balanced. Growing up to a point where you can’t be violently partial means you lose something of the enthusiasm and passion that draws you to music. Music writing needs to be a little bit impetuous because music is impetuous. It’s easy to think it was all divisive and unnecessarily nasty, but it needed to be, that was its job, which encouraged it to issue challenges and be creative in its own right too. Which was great, providing they were saying nice things about us!

How has the creative process changed for you now that you are no longer committed to releasing album after album in quick succession, a process you say that led to the creation of some inferior work; does that easing of pressure and allowing of material to gestate compensate for what is lost, which is that in the old days you didn’t know what was going to happen next, and that every new record might yet change your lives with as yet unimagined success?

BA: There’s a trade off. The eventual realisation that you are not part of the mainstream anymore, as we clearly no longer are, does give you the freedom go to interesting places you could not always have gone to before. For me now the concept of a record has to be very strong to act on it, and I won’t start writing simply because it is time to release a record again. For example, the material and ideas I thought would be perfect for A New Morning, were actually followed through on and became The Blue Hour sixteen years later. Trying to carry them into the songs I was writing at the time, and make a record about the darkness of the countryside when you want your songs to be rotated on Radio One, was never going to happen. And that’s one of the beauties and consolations of being set adrift from the mainstream, which is that you really don’t need to worry anymore about a particular kind of career path anymore. We’re never going to latch back onto the mainstream again, I know that, because we could make the greatest record we’ve ever made, or has ever been made, and we would still never be on Radio One again. And I’m fine with that now. I am a 52-year-old man, do you know what I mean? Age has got to give you something, because otherwise there is a part of you that might never get over what it has to teach you.

You plot your changing relationship with your fans from a high of believing you were in it together, to the low of seeing graffiti left on your street with directions to your house and a request to kill your cat. The lesson that fans live for you when they should be living for themselves, and that you should be living for yourself and not them, seems hard earned on both sides, particularly as you write about how much you owe them for putting you where you wanted to be in the first place.

BA: It’s a fascinating process with fans, you were there in the early days, and you know that insane dynamic where the fans are still part of the experience. We used to hang out with you guys and it was like being with your mates where you share the same passions and interests, but then you get to that point in a band where the doors come down, and there is a separation where you find yourself either being mobbed by people or sitting on your own in an empty dressing room with no in-between. Life becomes polarised between these two extremes, and it is unavoidable because it is built into success, and so to some extent, is no more than what you wanted and signed up for, but there is that lovely point when you first start when the people who follow you aren’t an abstract, “the audience”, but friends, and there is something special about those days I wanted to capture in the book. Because those days were really important, one of those lovely periods you can never have back or go back to again.

After that you become public property, where you have an image you keep up to avoid disappointing people, and where everything you say is taken at face value. Like the story you mention in the book where I forget that I asked a couple of fans to come back to my house in two days time, only to be polite, then completely forgot about it, and ended up instigating a campaign of abuse against myself…

I understand the danger of taking rock stars at their word. In early 95 I bumped into you at the Severn Bridge Services and you told me that I should join you in Watford in a week, where you would meet me outside the venue and let me into a gig!

BA: Oh no, you’re joking…what an invitation! My God, and did I do it?

I would love to have said you did! I still got in, so no hard feelings.

BA: I’m so sorry! What you’ve got to understand is that in a band when you meet someone at the services you always want to leave the conversation on a high note, to contrast with the surroundings, hence the Watford Colosseum! I just hoped that you wouldn’t believe me and would realise that in the end it was all just…words!

Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn is out now via Little Brown

#suede #brett anderson #press #interview #the quietus #2019 #afternoons with the blinds drawn

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bluewatsons · 5 years

Text

Jeffrey P. Bishop, Rejecting Medical Humanism, 29 J Med Humanit 15 (2008)

Abstract

The call for a narrative medicine has been touted as the cure-all for an increasingly mechanical medicine. It has been claimed that the humanities might create more empathic, reflective, professional and trustworthy doctors. In other words, we can once again humanise medicine through the addition of humanities. In this essay, I explore how the humanities, particularly narrative medicine, appeals to the metaphysical commitments of the medical institution in order to find its justification, and in so doing, perpetuates a dualism of humanity that would have humanism as the counterpoint to the biopsychosociologisms of our day.

Introduction

It is virtually impossible to think without our thinking becoming almost immediately mechanical and instrumental. We already live inside a way of thinking that prevents us from thinking differently; not that thinking differently is an impossibility–just difficult. If we are to prevent all practices in medicine from becoming thoughtless, we must once again turn to thinking about doing. In order to achieve this, however, we must, paradoxically perhaps, realise that all thinking is also a kind of doing. The strict line between theoria and praxis, so prominent in the West, and the strict division between subject and object is a false one, but it is a division that continues to flourish in our concepts. These lines sit at the very heart of the West, if we are to believe thinkers like Nietzsche1 and Heidegger;2 or perhaps these lines between subject and object, theoria and praxis, are just an aberration of late Western Scholasticism3 or are lines drawn at the Enlightenment.4 If we accept Foucault’s position, which does not preclude accepting any one of these possible origins of Western thinking, we know that there are various kinds of practices implicit in all theoretical endeavours, and at the same time, there are implicit theoretical stances in all that we do.

Yet, medicine as a discipline5 is mostly concerned with the effects it brings about in the world and how to pragmatically produce or cause those effects in the world. It is perhaps in this sense that medicine has become thoughtless, as it is mostly about pragmatic doing, utilitarian maximisation, or efficient control. Medicine’s metaphysical stance then is a metaphysics of efficiency, concerned with the empirical realm of effects and the rational working out of their causes. At least since Bacon, it has been understood that knowledge is power gained to relieve the human condition.6 The purpose of knowing is to bring about effects in the world. Yet, medicine gives no thought to its metaphysics; it would even deny having one. Thus, for Western medicine, indeed perhaps all of scientific and technological thought, the important bit about the world is how to manipulate it in order to get the effects that we desire. It is in this sense that Eric Krakauer has said that medicine is the standard bearer of Western metaphysics.7 The world stands before us as manipulable, and all thinking about the world becomes instrumental thinking.

Oddly enough, this instrumental thinking has also come to affect the calls for more humanities in medicine. The story goes something like this: We need the humanities in medicine because in some sense the humanities will once again humanise medicine. In other words, let’s give medicine and medical students a dose of humanities so that medicine can become (once again?) humanistic.8 To medicine and the medical humanities, man is homo humanus. In this essay, I will show that, first, the rationale behind the calls for more medical humanities as a means to create more empathic, reflective, professional and trustworthy doctors does not escape the problematic of instrumental and mechanical thinking, leading to an attitude of governmentality, and second, that if we look closely at those who would try to humanise medicine, we will find that they do not escape the dualism of Western thought. Adding humanism to efficient and mechanical humans—for the ‘nature’ of humans today is to produce in a machine-like manner—only perpetuates the idea that humans are the producers of meaning. It is no longer possible for that extra bit added onto humans to be a substantial soul or even a mind. The extra bit is the humanity of persons, or the narrativity of his or her story, that unthematised bit that cannot be reduced to his or her animality. Medical humanism does not escape the Western metaphysics of efficiency, and the call for medical humanities only acts as a compensatory mechanism for the mechanical thinking that has dominated and continues to dominate medicine.

Still, there is something more essential in the drive to humanise medicine, for it is also a drive to humanise man or woman, the animal. But oddly, it is in the fundamental impossibility of thinking the nature of man or woman that we encounter the human. For the engagement of the aporia at the heart of humankind, the animal-human, opens a space for us to once again think human being. However, we shall first have to abandon our drive for efficient and instrumental thinking in medicine—a drive that occludes thinking human being differently than the instrumental thinking of medicine. It is here that philosophical, literary, historical, anthropological and other traditions of enquiry can offer hope for human being, but not in the compensatory addition of the humanism of the humanities to the biologism of the scientists.

I should add that what follows, in a way, is an anti-humanism. This rejecting of humanism is not an embracing of the inhuman or a call for inhumane doctors. As Heidegger has said: “We are so filled with “logic” that anything that disturbs the habitual somnolence of prevailing opinion is automatically registered as a despicable contradiction.”9 Before we even embark on this journey, let us set aside such simple-minded assertions that what follows is a call for inhumanity. In fact, as someone who teaches medicine, philosophy, and ethics, I am engaged in the teaching of medical humanities. I am, therefore, not calling for the inhumane; I am asking that we stop perpetuating the Western metaphysics of efficient causality and think differently from the theoria–praxis divide and from the subject–object divide that dominates so much in the way of Western instrumental thinking. In medicine, we have not yet heard, let alone taken seriously, the critique offered by the 20th century phenomenologists, namely that the thinking of our being is essential to human being.

Humanities and the dose effect

To buy its legitimacy within the field of medical science, the humanities have often had to appeal to their effectiveness in making better doctors. For example, Rita Charon’s is only the latest attempt to argue that we need longitudinal studies10 to show the legitimacy of anecdotal evidence that doctors and students who study humanities might be more empathic, reflective, professional, and trustworthy.11 While I am tremendously sympathetic to Charon’s work, I use two of her papers as exemplars of work that do not escape the Western metaphysics of efficient uses of the humanities. She suggests that if we could just show that the students are made into better doctors—more professional doctors—because of an humanities education, then we will have succeeded in showing that, even while the positive claims of humanities disciplines themselves may not be scientific, at least scientifically based education research can demonstrate positive effects of the humanities. Every type of thinking must stand before the judgment seat of science.

Indeed, Charon has called for an entire research programme on the effectiveness and uses of narrative medicine.12 She writes:

Adding to the early evidence of the usefulness of narrative practices, rigorous ethnographic and outcomes studies using samples of adequate size and control have been undertaken to ascertain the influences on students, physicians, and patients of narrative practices. Along with such outcomes research are scholarly efforts to uncover the basic mechanisms, pathways, intermediaries, and consequences of narrative practices, supplying the “basic science” of theoretical foundations and conceptual frameworks for these new undertakings.13

The idea is that we need to see the effectiveness of narrative practices through the assessment of outcomes. Two things will result from these data. First, deans will no longer be able to preclude humanities education, and second, we will have more humane doctors.

Such thinking betrays what is central to the current scientific and evidence-based climate in medicine, illustrating the dominance of theoria in medical science—theoria directed towards effective practice. If you can do things in the world with your theory, then the theory must be true. Still, the need for scientific legitimation of the humanities through educational assessments only betrays the governing principle of all science—effective manipulation of the objects of the world. Heidegger makes the point more clearly:

[B]y the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object of man’s estimation. But what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing.14

Thus, assessment only takes what we subjectively hold as a value and invests that value in an object. Assessment takes an object and subjects it to our valuing. Thus, the drive for scientific investigation of humanities education is still the manipulation of objects by subjects. In fact, it is the drive to uncover the effects of humanities on students—the very desire of technical mastery itself—that conceals what is done by the thinking of the humanities—a point to which I shall return later.

At the 5 September 2006 Association of Medical Humanities meeting in London (the United Kingdom’s version of American Society for Bioethics and Humanities), a plenary paper was delivered in which the speaker talked about a tragic case from Texas in which the doctors were castigated for their narrative incompetence. At the risk of caricaturing her comments, it was as if the speaker were saying: “If only they had had courses in literature and medicine, or narrative medicine, and other humanities type courses, such tragedies would never happen.” This theme of how the humanities might save medicine seemed to run throughout the conference though there were voices at the meeting calling for pauses, caution, and reasoned scepticism.

There is an increasing literature on narrative competence and its necessity in a more humane medicine. For instance, Charon writes:

Along with the scientific ability, physicians need the ability to listen to the narratives of the patient, grasp and honor their meanings, and be moved to act on the patient’s behalf. This is narrative competence, that is, the competence that human beings use to absorb, interpret, and respond to stories.15

Her appeal to the dominant language of competency in medicine offers narrative as a new framework or model for more responsible biopsychosocial medicine or a patient-centred medicine. Charon has been one of the most active advocates for narrative competence, suggesting that narrative competence “enables the physician to practice medicine with empathy, reflection, professionalism, and trustworthiness. Such a medicine can be called narrative medicine.”16 She further claims that narrative medicine improves the effectiveness of doctors’ work with “patients, themselves, their colleagues and the public.”17 She continues:

From the humanities, and especially literary studies, physicians can learn how to perform the narrative aspects of their practice with new effectiveness. Not so much a new specialty as a new frame for clinical work, narrative medicine can give physicians and surgeons the skills, methods, and texts to learn how to imbue the facts and objects of health and illness with their consequences and meanings for individual patients and physicians.18

While I am certainly open to this as a possibility, two implicit, and much more important points come into relief here. First, the notion of effectiveness suggests that narrative medicine and the humanities generally must improve the instrumental role that doctors fulfill if humanities are to be valued. Second, there is a distinction made between the facts and objects of medicine and the meaning attributed to those facts and objects. We are left with a dualism, not the usual mind–body dualism, but a dualism of meaning and material. These two points are not separated but are linked together by the Western metaphysics of efficiency, which has objects standing in reserve waiting for human manipulation, points made by thinkers like Heidegger and Derrida.

On the Western metaphysics of presence, objects are those beings that impress themselves upon subjects. Western “‘logic’ and ‘grammar’ seized control of the interpretation of language,” resulting in instrumental thinking.19 Subjects are those beings that manipulate the objects to bring about desired effects. The world becomes that which can be exploited to achieve whatever it is that we—the subjects—will or desire. Objects are manipulated by mind and are parsed into categories for the purposes of classification and intellectual manipulation. Objects, at best, become invested with meaning and carry no meaning in themselves. Yet, critiques offered by Foucault and others have pointed out that objects become objects because of a certain stance held by the subject. The subject, then, subjects the object to its manipulation. That manipulation need not be merely manipulation of the physical matter of the object but a subjugation of the object by the mind of a subject. The strict categorization of theoria is no less a subjugation of an object by the subject than material subjugation and manipulation because the object is forced into, subjected to the categories of theoria.

Taken to the realm of medicine, our objects are patient to the gaze of a subject, as Foucault suggests in his Birth of the Clinic.20 Our patients are truly patient to the manipulation of a subject. We certainly do manipulate the bodies of our patients—our objects—but we do not become less manipulative if we merely subject patients to diagnostic categories. The disability rights community continues to make this point to the medical community,21,22,23 a point which the medical community continually fails to hear. It is often the group that is being assailed through medical categorization that makes the point that they are oppressed, subjected to the violence of the dominant group. In this sense, medicine necessarily manipulates its objects, its patients even when it only does so through placing people into diagnostic categories, categories that are often resisted by oppressed groups.

Yet, the humanistic disciplines will claim that they have been calling for different paradigms of caring such as the biopsychosocial model of medicine or patient-centred medicine and do not succumb to critiques of categorization. But, insofar as the humanities must show effectiveness, the medical humanities do not escape instrumental thinking about humans. Indeed, it is precisely because humanism is added to the biologism of medicine that it consummates its metaphysical relationship to medicine by asserting its usefulness to medicine. In a way, narrative medicine becomes a tool that gains the trust of a patient, a more subtle tool because it masquerades as authentic relationship.

Homo humanus

While no self-respecting humanist would ever concede that she is about the efficient manipulation of patients, the humanist sentiment betrays our beliefs about the essence of human beings. There is an implicit anthropology in medicine. By anthropology, I do not mean the scientific discipline of cultural anthropology, but an implicit position on the nature of humans and also a philosophical stance taken to the study of humans by medicine. Thus, by anthropology, I mean the logos about anthropos uncovered by the medicoscientific investigation of humans, including the psychological, social, and even spiritual investiga- tion of them. There is an implicit philosophical anthropology in medicine’s study of humans, and that philosophical stance is that a human is the animal-machine in need of something else.

In the history of philosophy, a human has been the wise or rational animal, homo sapiens. In The Open, Giorgio Agamben attempts to trace our thinking about humans,24 always the animal with something added on—the soul, the mind, the angelic, the divine spark that makes him or her more than mere animal. Where prior to the Enlightenment, thinkers would have referred to the substantial soul as the extra bit added on, after the Enlightenment the notion of soul has become suspect. Beginning at least since Descartes, it has been the mind that adds the substantial extra bit to the animal mechanism making us human. Yet, in our time, mind itself has become eliminated for the materialist position. Man and woman are truly animal, and all his or her mental states, such as feelings, beliefs, and perceptions—even pain itself—have no existence outside of their neurological correlates.25 The really real aspects of the neuro-medical construction of the mind are the meat and mechanism of the brain.

No doubt, those of us who have practiced medicine will find such a neuro-medicalised human a bit cold. Throughout recent medical history, there have been attempts to add something to the mechanism in order to save the human from his/her animal ‘nature.’ This addition is clearest in the addition of the psyche. Yet the entire Freudian and post-Freudian heritage does not escape a mechanical construal, since even the metaphors for the psyche are a set of drives that engage action and pressures that must be released or result in explosive catastrophes, all lining up along the metaphorical lines of the steam engine. In the 1970s, George Engel called for a new model for the doing of medicine, a biopsychosocial model.26 Thus, a human being is the sum total of his or her biology, psychology, and sociology; yet, there is no sense that he or she can rise above the discourses created by the biological, psychological, and sociological sciences. Engel even articulates a scientific research programme in his landmark essay. Man remains a biological being with the addition of a psychological and sociological overlay. In addition, the patient-centred model of medicine is little more than an attempt to add agency back to the passive patient, so that she can counter medical domination, allowing the agent-patient to bring about the effects that she desires. Engel’s biopsychosocial medicine has become a biopsychosociologism.

The point is that the error of biologism (or a biopsychosociologism) is not “overcome by the adjoining a soul to the human body, a mind to the soul... and then louder than before singing the praises of the mind.”27 Nor is it possible to save our humanity through the addition of soul or narratives. In other words, the various humanisms, from Greek to Roman to Christian to Renaissance to Hegelian to Marxist, and even medical humanism, do little more than change that which is added onto the animal or reverse the directionality of agency. Heidegger continues:

Just as little as the essence of man consists in being an animal organism can this insufficient definition of man’s essence be overcome or offset by outfitting man with an immortal soul, the power of reason, or the character of a person.28

Or, I would add, by adding on a narrative overlay or through the investment of meaning into a pre-existing mechanism. The adding on of the something more does not in any way allow us to think human being.

If the neuro-medical conception of the human does not capture the true nature of human being, and if the psychological and/or sociological sciences do not humanize the concept of neuro-medical man, the perhaps the humanities themselves can do so. Why not think of man and woman as the narrative being?29 “Sickness and healing are, in part, narrative acts.”30 While nowhere in her two essays does Charon claim that there is something essential to humans that is itself narrative, there is in her work, as well as a myriad of other works on narrative medicine,31,32,33 an implicit anthropology—a sense that the being of humans is the production of language, and in language what is produced is meaning. The act of writing itself, the narrative act, is a production that invests the biological—that is to say, the really real part of a human being—with meaning. And we are somehow to believe that this investment of meaning prevents biologism, or biological reduction, and even the reduction of biopsychosocial medicine.

There are two problems here: first, the divide. We name the real, scientific part—the biology—of a human being as his or her essence and the rest of it is the story we tell ourselves about that being. On this construal, the narrative is little more than a lie that comes to dangle from the real mechanism, as is the not uncommon position held by some neuro-philosophers like Paul Churchland.34 As far as the scientific/mechanical (neuro-medical) construal goes, the medical humanities deal with the lies that we tell ourselves; or perhaps painting it in a more positive light, the medical humanities deal with the mythical truths that we tell ourselves about the miserable condition of the real mechanism doomed to play itself out in death. The mythical truths are just the thin overlay that covers over the stark reality of the really real mechanism—the “facts and objects” of medicine, as Charon puts it.35

Meaning is kept separate from the object. The subject, the writer of one’s own story, only invests meaning in the really real objects. The “facts and objects”36 of medicine are invested with narratively produced meaning. The problem remains that the thinking of our being remains both dualistic and mechanical: dualistic, because objects are invested with meaning; and mechanical, because as noted earlier speaking and writing is modernity is about subjects and objects, about mastery and control. Language and narrative—like thinking—have become little more than instrumental.

According to Heidegger, this grammar of Being, which dates back to the earliest of Occidental philosophy, has resulted in a kind of instrumentalisation of language, and the instrumentalization results in the vast divide between thinking and Being that has plagued the West—a gap most acutely articulated by Kant. The subject, the transcendental ego, writes her own stories and, in writing, invests the objects of medical science with meaning, thus perpetuating the subject–object divide and the theoria–praxis divide. Current thinking on humanities as a panacea for medical education and the means to recapture a lost humanity— the addition of a narrative humanism to a neuro-medical biologism—does little more than to accept the dominant mode of instrumental thinking and to offer a different way of knowing (mostly in its methods of knowing and not in the content of knowledge) as a means to attenuate all the problems that arise out of instrumental scientific thinking.

Yet, the humanist will no doubt counter, “Yes, but one cannot ignore the overlay and expect to get anywhere with patients.” If this is the case, the humanities then are about little more than control and mastery. Charon states that, through empathic listening, the physician can identify the meaning narratively produced, to better relieve that which ails the human condition.37 A certain kind of trust is established so that the physician can get the whole story, which might reduce costs and improve diagnostic acumen. In short, the “therapeutic relationship might be shallow and ineffective,”38 if doctors do not attune to the mysteries of narrative. The meaning garnered through narrative medicine then becomes the mechanism of increased effectiveness. If we know our patients at their deepest spiritual levels, they are much more likely to do what we need them to do, as noted by Hamilton.39

Of course, no trustworthy physician, like Charon, ever intends manipulation. Yet, this point reveals the significance and subtlety of power as articulated by Foucault. Power is written into the very fabric of our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to social institutions. It is in this sense that Foucault calls humanism the “little prostitute” of the various -isms, from Marxism to existentialism.40 Medical humanism, like all other humanisms, promises intimacy, but is really about control. The use of the humanities as a means to re-instill mechanism with humanism succumbs to what Heidegger refers to as the instrumental use of language: “[L]anguage surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings.” 41

In efficient society, there is no outside of power and biopolitics.42 Medicine as an institution necessarily creates these kinds of effectual relationships and is doomed to repeat them in the neuroses of modernity through its language.43 Subjection and objectification are the necessary conditions for the kind of medicine that is practiced today in the West; humanism is the add-on that makes the power more palatable. However, it does not escape the metaphysics of efficient causation, and the desire of efficient control. Narrative is an instrument of manipulation on Charon’s account, even though that is not what she intends.

While later Foucault no longer sees power as merely repressive but instead as the condition for possibilities of new freedoms and vitalities, Giorgio Agamben has challenged this thinking, asking the question whether all forms of biopower/biopolitics result in the totalitarianisms of the 20th century. Agamben even goes so far as to suggest that medicine is one of the totalitarianisms.44 As with all political philosophies since at least Thomas Hobbes, we are dealing with power and forces to control the material animality of human beings. The medical humanities and narrative medicine are just the latest, and a more palatable means of control, of acknowledging the narrative overlay, the mythic cover, in order to master the material beneath. Thus, the narrative overlay becomes the tool by which the doctor can sway a patient, to make him or her feel better, to create a therapeutic relationship; indeed, narrative sensibility becomes a therapy itself. The usefulness of humanism is precisely about efficient control of the bodies—the animality—of the body politic, even while humanism thinks of itself as being about emancipating and liberating.

“A merely cultivated use of language,” through a narrative medicine, “is still no proof that we have as yet escaped the danger to our essence.”45 Can we just add the humanities or narrative to human beings in order to make them human? We have not even begun to construe what the humanities are saying to medicine if we cannot define how they make doctors human, let alone make the object of medicine human. And the claim of humanistic emancipation from our animal nature becomes the more subtlely seductive and more dangerous means of mastery and control. It is odd to think that beings—whether the subject (the doctor) or the object (the patient) of medicine—can be made human and free of their animality through the addition of narrative humanism: homo humanus.

The anti-humanist turn

I have perhaps overstated my case, for it is in the traditions of inquiry of the humanities wherein I think the hope of medicine lies. As Heidegger points out: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.”46 Indeed, Charon not only implies that a human is the kind of being who speaks and writes, she lives it in her work and in her writing. In writing, something is unconcealed for Charon, to use Heideggerian language. I do not doubt the integrity of the pursuit of writing as engaged by Charon. And it is not just that in writing or thinking that something else, something irreducible, is added onto man to create his humanity. In other words, as suggested by Heidegger, a human is the being who thinks his or her own being. It is in thinking of his or her being that man or woman becomes human being. Human being is the thinking of being; and that is what human being does.

It is in this sense that the biology is secondary to the thinking that uncovers the biology. Thus, all of scientific investigation, if it can escape its efficiency mindedness, is also the thinking of being, but it is the thinking itself that is both most primordial and reaches its highest fruition. Thus, when the humanities are doing what they do, they are in a way showing that human beings can never be objects of manipulation but are the very beings who think their own being, biology being one of those modes of thinking being, literature being another. And Charon is perhaps closest, if also the furthest away, because as Heidegger says, “language is the house of Being.”

Deleuze writes that philosophical writing is always a kind of science fiction. I would claim that all writing is a kind of science fiction:

How else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow—or rather, to make it impossible.47

In a way, then, it is precisely the aporia that is a human, the drive to oppose his or her animality with his or her divinity, that, at the same time obscures our thinking and writing about humans, but also makes possible the unfolding of being. This endeavour is on many levels not the work of medicine or the work of the humanities. And yet, at the same time, it is the work of medicine and the humanities because it is the work of human being to uncover what remains obscure—what always and necessarily remains obscure. Or to turn to Heideggerian language, the work of human being is to unconceal what is concealed, not as if it has captured once and for all the nature of human as homo sapiens, or homo humanus, or the narrative being, but as itself the unfolding of the being of human, of human being.

Medicine then is one of many endeavours of Being, of the writing of human being. For our purposes, the humanities have offered themselves as a remedy for the sickness that plagues the biologisms of modern medicine. My critique has been that medical humanism in its narrative iteration offers itself—in a mechanical way—as the remedy, as the dose necessary for the health of the medical professional or as an inoculation to prevent doctors from becoming bitter and angry that they are little more than mechanics. Those in the medical humanities think they have failed because they have not been able to raise themselves to the bar of science whose objects can be translated into measurable and thus knowable things. In trying to justify themselves through appeal to the metaphysics of medicine, the metaphysics of efficiency, the medical humanities have already lost the day, for this approach does not think of doing as a kind of thinking or thinking as a kind of doing. The gap between theoria and praxis, between subject and object, remains and is perhaps even more discernable as the abyss that we have created, through our instrumental thinking.

Heidegger states:

Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this relation to Being solely as something handed over to it from Being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.48

Certainly there is more to the importance of education in medical humanities than the mere demonstration of an effect caused by exposure to humanistic disciplines. After all, it may be that it is the fundamental inefficiency of the humanities that creates the condition for the possibility of human meaning and human being.

The medical humanities must also resist becoming an eloquent compensation for the biopsychosociologisms of our day; it must even resist becoming a bionarrativist medicine, a bionarratology, a bionarrativism. After all, it may be that we find human being at the margins of what it is always a struggle to say, which, at the same time, must be said, and can never be said. The humanities might save medicine but not by making it more effective at manipulating its biological objects—namely, patients. Doctors just might find themselves called into being, calling into being there with (Mitdasein) the other. Doctors might find that, instead of constituting their objects by placing them into the theoretical categories of medical science, they themselves are constituted by the other that calls them out of their objectifying and categorizing stupor. It is perhaps in being there with the other that human being appears for the first time, and perhaps even more so when being there with the other is both inefficient and ineffective, when the metaphysics of efficiency collapses. And it is here that the humanities bring something radically different to medicine because the humanities can show medicine that its language about biological being is already a language within which the biopsychosociologisms live, a language that mediates, perhaps even distorts, the being of patients.

Endnotes

F Nietzche, The Birth of Tragedy, eds. R Geuss and R Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 67–71.

J Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003).

A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd Edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). See also his Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).

I mean discipline in the Foucauldian sense, as in those who discipline.

F. Bacon. The New Organon, eds. L. Jardine and M. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2000), pp. 60, 221.

E. Krakauer, “Prescriptions: Autonomy, Humanism, and the Purpose of Health Technology,” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 19: 535.

See A. Bleakley, R. Marshall, and R. Bromer, “Toward an Aesthetic Medicine: Developing a Core Medical Humanities Curriculum,” Journal of Medical Humanities 27 (4): 197–213 as a counterpoint to this dose mentality.

M. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. DF Kreli and trans. F.A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 250.

R. Charon, “Narrative Medicine: Form, Function, and Ethics,” Annals of Internal Medicine, 134 (1): 83–87.

R. Charon, “Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust,” Journal of American Medical Association, 286 (15): 1897–1902.

Ibid, p. 1900.

Ibid, p. 1901.

Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 251.

Charon, “Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy,” p. 1897.

Ibid, p. 1897.

Ibid, p. 1898.

Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 218.

M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. AM Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).

JP Bishop, “The Broken Body and the Disabled Body: Reflections on Disability and the Objects of Medicine” in Theology Disability, and the New Genetics: Why science needs the church, edited by John Swinton and Brian Brock (London: T and T Clarke, 2007).

C Newell, “Disability, Bioethics, and Rejected Knowledge,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (3): 269–283.

T Koch, “Bioethics as Ideology: Conditional and Unconditional Values,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (3): 251–267.

G Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. K Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

P Churchland, The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).

GL Engel, “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine,” Science 196 (4286): 129–36.

Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p 228.

Ibid, p. 229.

S Crites, “The Narrative Quality of Experience,” Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology, eds. S Hauerwas and LG Jones (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eedrmans, 1989), pp. 65–88.

Charon, “Narrative Medicine: Form, Function, and Ethics,” p. 83.

R Charon and M Montello, Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (London: Routledge, 2002).

HL Nelson, ed., Stories and Their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Bioethics (London: Routledge, 1997).

T Greenhalgh and B Hurwitz, Narrative Based Medicine: Dialogue and Discourse in Clinical Practice (London: BMJ Books, 1998).

Churchland.

Charon, “Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy,” p. 1898.

Ibid, p. 1898.

I am referring to Bacon’s famous saying that the benefit of humankind is the purpose and round of all science.

Charon, “Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy,” p. 1899.

DG Hamilton, “Believing in Patients' Beliefs: Physician Attunement to the Spiritual Dimension as a Positive Factor in Patient Healing and Health,” American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care 15 (1998): 276–9.

As translated and quoted by J Faubian in the general introduction to Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth. (London: Continuum, 2004). Bottom of page xix, footnote.

Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” pp. 228–229.

JP Bishop and F Jotterand, “Bioethics as Biopolitics,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (3): 202–212.

See Foucault, Birth of the Clinic and M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970).

G Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 222.

Ibid, p. 217.

G Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P Patton (London: Continuum, 1994).

Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 217.

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gg-astrology · 6 years

Text

Duo Dynamic | Jung Soojung (Krystal) - Jung Sooyeon (Jessica)

Hello! 💕 I got a request for this a few days ago, so I want to get it out and introduce you to the wonderful sisters if you haven’t yet! 💕

Masterlist

For this series I’ll be looking at their placements individually, and then I’ll look at the similarities/differences as the conclusion-- I hope you enjoy! 💕

Disclaimer: This is just my interpretation of their placements in the context of the individuals themselves as well. If you share the same placements as them and don’t relate to the things below please don’t take it too personally/bring it down on yourself! 💕 Everyone works differently, and sometimes context does matter lots!! 💕💕 Please love yourself in your own way!! 💕

Jessica Jung (Jung Sooyeon) | April 18 1989 (San Francisco, California)

Brief Background

If you’ve been watching her in the earlier SNSD days, Jessica garnered a lot of fans for her sweet face, her sweet voice and being one of the kind of ‘sweet and petite’ girl style amongst the fans.

She also had a title as the ‘Ice Queen’ (she isn’t, but here’s why we’re going to talk about that today).

At least on broadcast, she may seem just a little awkward and nervous, and she’s often quite blunt when she talks.

Otherwise-- she used to get joked about for her sleepy nature and her tastes for fashion (low-key possibly one of her ‘images’ within the group)

Here’s where we ‘uncover’ some of that ‘image’ from Jessica the Idol and Jessica Jung, a real person/brand by herself.

By Herself (Just through her Placements)

Aries/Sagittarius decan thrives best when they expand/challenge themselves creatively.

They may have a penchant for traveling or opportunities where they can manifest themselves best, by being determined but flexible in their own life choices/autonomy.

Unlike the typical Aries, Jessica’s Aries Sun is more optimistic than she lets on (as well as snarky to counteract that into realism).

Often allows her to cheer others up/give strength when they are at their lowest. But it also brings knowledge/wisdom, empathy and courage/motivation to others.

Basically, Aries Sun in this case can act like pillars of strength for others when everything else seems to fall down on themselves.

You can see how she could do this for her sister-- Krystal-- but also for those around her as well.

With Jessica, it’s a no-nonsense attitude and she’s very grounded in her approach to advice giving (Taurus Mercury)

She often finds time to hang out with others, Aries finds it’s personal autonomy/freedom in being able to spend time with people it wants to spend time with.

Often, they’re that friend who asks for hang-out days where you don’t have to do anything exciting/new in particular (especially with her Taurus Venus)

But mostly just a day that ‘breaks’ the routine they’ve been living in, they’re offering a change of pace, something refreshing to just laze around or do with minimal efforts together.

(Taurus-- but the other person does have to make an effort to meet them/make themselves available -- meet them ‘half way’/Aries, because otherwise, that’s just irresponsible and unjust to the Taurus/Libra person.)

Most of these hang outs consists of just-- catching up, really low-key ‘so how have you been doing?’ while eating burgers together hang outs.

Low-maintenance kind of hang out really. But in a way, these people also may intimidate people with the luxurious goods they surround themselves in when they’re not around others (private/recluse self--Taurus Venus)

They don’t see themselves as anything special or different from others (regarding social relationship) -- mostly, the luxurious goods thing is just how they self-care/take care of themselves. It’s what makes them happy, material wealth as an expression of their self-identity/assertion makes them happy.

It can also be-- pretty low-key like having a ‘spa’ day or just putting on make up. Taurus here doesn’t indicate anything fanciful all the time. It might however, talk about a tendency to spend too much/frivolously as an ‘impulse buy’ (Gemini Mars/Libra Moon) in order to ‘de-stress’ themselves. (Which may or may not make them cry internally because Taurus does want to be prudent with their financial wealth/money on principle of liking to save/see money stack up.)

On the other hand, listening to others also seems to be a prominent theme (Aries/Sagittarius Sun - Taurus Mercury/Venus) -- they’re often generous with their time/energy and would rather hear things that are positive/uplifting rather than nagging/complaining all the time.

Another thing about listening/talking/communicating is that with Taurus Mercury -- she may take her damn sweet time to come to a conclusion/make up her mind about something.

It’s not indecision like Libra per say, it’s more about wanting to make up her mind for herself and having the space/time away from people to do that.

Taurus Mercury may also indicate a charming voice/talker, because Taurus is Venusian ruled and it also rules the throat-- with it being in the Mercury, the native may often find themselves coming across as humble, sincere, honest but also charming and influential to others at the same time.

This can sometimes have trouble with the native seeing it for what it is (a gift) -- because Taurus is a rather stagnant sign, therefore they may tend to feel like they’re ‘slower’ than most or not as ‘conventionally charming’ like others as well.

Taurus gives a lot of strengths to the native, but that strengths can feel like a really large backpack they have to lug around. Thus it may weigh down on their back/physicality (mental health) as well as cuts down on their mobility (mentally).

It’s this-- awareness that they may not be working as fast/witty as those around them tends to be (making fast decision/actions) that makes them separate themselves away from others and do their little ‘isolation’ thing to ‘gather themselves’.

Realize it for what it is, this ‘gathering themselves away from others in order to focus/concentrate their energy to ‘enhance’ mobility’ won’t help with the speed Taurus works at. What they can do instead is focus on Scorpio (and where it lies on their chart).

Focus on shifting/changing their Taurus energy into being more Scorpionic will help with their self-expression as well. They share the same principality and end goals-- stability, devotion, faith, loyalty.

What they don’t share is how they get there, Taurus is Venus ruled which in this case might be what’s holding them back. Try to think of Scorpio, Mars-ruled. And it’ll help align the nature of Aries Sun to Scorpio action better as well.

To put it in another way, Taurus’s Venus is making the person less assertive, more cautious. Often has to look for not upsetting others and thus, can sometimes ‘hide’ themselves and sticks close to what makes them comfortable/stable instead of taking the chances like Scorpio does.

Scorpio encourages the person to push into the ‘less than perfect’-- the ‘true’ dark and light side of the person. To transform from self-empowerment from the inside-out. By ‘uncovering’ truths about themselves the Taurus tends to suppress/covers over in order to not think of themselves as ‘someone they’re not’.

Scorpio-- as a water signs, talks about accepting emotions as emotions. As human we all go through the goods and bad. It talks about not keeping the self safe when we need to express these emotions forward because then it’ll lead to obsession/possessiveness over something. As well as uncontrollable energy/emotions if our Taurus breaks completely.

Scorpio implies taking the helm of transformation. In order to make decisions based on wit and cunning, instead of trying to keep a cautious, steady, harmonious front about it.

Scorpio also talks about pro-active engagement/involvement with shaping the narrative of the self. Instead of relying on charm like the Taurus does, dissatisfaction/restrictions can easily be overcome by knowing where the self lies with others (social relationship wise/ don’t be afraid to not be harmonious all the time. Learning how to accept the Martian/Arian traits will help with counteracting the less-active Libra/Taurus as well) and a strong sense of personal identification of the self.

It embodies rebellious nature, a side that has to be uncovered and truly accepted in order to work out that Sun-Moon opposition (with a lot of the energy concentrating on Venusian side)

By learning how to balance the Taurus Venus with Scorpio energy-- the individual can also learn how to overcome their own self-restriction and expand their imaginative/creative pursuits.

Determination from the Sun alone isn’t going to manifest in success if it’s not well-balanced.

The Taurus is working hard to come up with solutions/decisions that are rather ‘sound’ or ‘financially stable’ (again, material wealth associated with the physicality/tastes of Taurus) -- but if they’re really going to take the Sun’s persona/branding to the full potential-- they really have to understand the core/Martian side of their nature as well.

See here’s the image. Because the chart is so Taurus heavy, it’s leaning more towards making decisions/behind-the-scenes safe. While the Sun embodies the branding/persona that’s selling the product/character of the person.

The person has potential to fully max out their branding/persona charisma to 100%. Instead of the weird 80% Taurus and 20% Aries right now.

In order to utilize that, the person has to uncover/discover their Scorpio side. The Scorpio is the charisma, the ‘less than safe’ decisions that trusts on their intuition/desire/passion and go full-in towards the direction that they feel intuitively secure.

The direction that they can feel the transformation is coming at the tips of their finger tips, the one that they can feel the public pooling towards (but haven’t manifested towards yet) the one where they truly get to explore their creative niches/inventions towards before it hits the market (whatever market that may be).

Scorpio is the trend-setter, not the trend-follower/appreciator. Yes, they can appreciate trends, but every Taurus-heavy individual has the ability to truly expand their creative visions by not using the trend as guidelines (sometimes even restrictive boxes) but rather -- proof their own individuality/innovation by truly uncovering part of themselves into something passionate and primal as well (speaks to them emotionally, primally, without explanations or rationality.)

Honestly this sounds really weird coming from an astrology blog, and I’m in no way an authority on the subject but all this is saying is just-- see where the Scorpio lies in the chart (what house) and work towards manifesting that in order to help with the heaviness Taurus can have on a person sometimes.

Anyways we should probably talk about more light-hearted stuff now?

Taurus (since it rules the throat) also talks about food/hunger. In particularly, talking constantly about food and feeling fulfillment at being able to indulge in their favorite foods (Taurus Venus).

Eating with people is a good way to get them to socialize, it’s one of the only way to get them to enjoy time outside of their own home sometimes when you lay out a table with food to lure them in.

Taurus Mercury as a friend giving advice to others relies a lot on ‘common sense’ --- as in, they’re the friend that reminds you of the ‘bigger picture’ sometimes. Remind you to go through with something, hold you semi-accountable for it (or like, give you an unimpressed look if you didn’t).

They stand up for those they care about, often may even feel emotionally riled up/protective for those who’s been wronged.

If you ask them to do something for you, they’ll go through with it till the end/finish the task completely (it’s a matter of honour sometimes, especially when someone goes back on their words the Taurus might get agitated and finish the task anyways -- Aries Sun)

And if you feel yourself unable to stand/be stable by yourself-- they’ll be there to stabilize you and stand by your side.

Most Taurus Venus takes to being in the ‘presence’ of someone (physically) in order to take care of them. They do things (practical things, like find places, resources, the hard labour work) in order to make other’s life easier for them.

They also care in physical ways, like hugging, holding someone’s hand, being there for someone visibly/physically in order to nurture them.

With Taurus, they may find themselves being fond over others and feeling protective/nurturing over them. Fretting may occur.

With Taurus Mercury-- they try their best to be deliberate in their speech/thinking.

They may find, that they’re a lot more ‘straight to the point’ than most people expect them to be. This can also be sarcasm or bluntness that is unexpected.

With deliberation in their Mercury, it also means they often find themselves sounding quite knowledgeable/authoritative on a subject.

They influence others through their practical presentation, often swaying others over because they seem to have a realistic approach to things based on research/common-sense rather than an idealistic view.

With both Taurus and Aries in the mix-- the individual may find themselves sensually and sensationally oriented. Whatever gives them the most expansive view/potential opportunity to expand themselves, and then what benefit it will bring to them personally (how they can apply it to their craft). Tends to be the general blend of the person.

One last thing I’d like to touch on is her Gemini Mars --- combined with her Aries Sun - conjunct- Taurus Venus [3′34] that already makes her pretty peace-loving-- Gemini Mars would do it’s best to avoid confrontations with those they love if it’s possible.

Think about it... Libra Moon talking about wanting to harmonious her subconscious/emotions to others and then Gemini Mars being like ‘hah swerve :’)’ whenever someone tries to have a go at her-- she’s emotionally unprepared for confrontations that can flare up-- and is often afraid of letting her mouth run/counteracting back because she doesn’t trust herself to not be harsh to others (too harsh) that she’ll regret what she says later as well.

It’s kind of like....imagine if someone confronts her about something suddenly, and her ‘swerving’ tactic doesn’t work. She’ll be pushed to stand up for herself right?

Well since placating isn’t an option (Libra Moon negated) she’ll try to aim for the most objective point of view (Taurus/Aries/Libra)-- at the same time, she may feel personally attacked by the confrontation (panicky emotionally-- if she doesn’t suppress her emotions atm/Gemini-Taurus for the suppression thing)

If it escalates even more to a pretty serious fight (like, yelling or finger pointing fights) --- all bets are off, objectivity be damned. She’ll yell if she has to make her point heard. She’ll keep repeating the point until the other person gets it.

Unless they backed down first, she probably won’t back down when she’s this close to forcing the fight to close in her own way (kind of mediating in a way).

At the same time, whatever she said during that time-- she’ll probably think back on it a lot and reflect on what she did wrong (during the moment)

Her air sign wouldn’t stop looking back/analyzing herself and the word she said during that time, the communicative aspect of air being suppressed in order to win-- might have a problem with how it was forcibly ‘shut down’ under her earth/fire in order to do so.

Most likely, the after-math will end with her trying to smooth things over with others. Admitting what she can admit to, and promising to show through dedication/demonstration that she’s taken what they said into consideration too.

Regarding the Controversy with SNSD/SM Ent

*Note: We don’t really know what’s happened on a personal scale, so this is just some notes on what we could say in regards to astrology. It’s not meant to be taken seriously as truth, please remember that! 💕

Regarding the controversy about her leaving the group because of her own ambition, considering how emotionally attached she is to others as her source of strength/support. I don’t think she would’ve even left out of her own will and the only option was legit the company forcing her to do so (by law).

She has a Libra Moon that talks about compromising, being there for others, emotional attachment to those around her. Also considering her Taurus Mercury/Venus -- it would’ve been hard for her emotionally AND mentally to make sudden changes at all/up-root herself by her own ambition, no matter how how ‘creative’ that Aries Sun is.

If you consider how she has her Sun-conjunct-Venus (plus that Libra Moon) -- her social relationships and the things she’s built with other is literally a part of her ego/self-confidence and core self (Sun).

People with this aspects may even sometimes be too nice for their own good, especially with Taurus Venus who already has such a hard time letting go of things that can even be toxic for them. Due to attachment with the stability/memories those experiences brought them (security at the time, to be who they are today).

With how stagnant/fixed her placements are-- It would’ve be really hard pressed for her to choose herself (her Sun) over her emotions/attachment to others (in case someone wants to say ‘oh she’s selfish’--- she really isn’t. It took a huge toll on her more than she lets us see-- Aries has a hard time showing vulnerabilities to others, especially with Taurus in the mix. They’re really really stubborn about making sure everything looks ‘good’ and ‘happy’ -- even to the expense of their own emotional downfall/neglect.)

Here’s a couple more things that points to her being very socially heavy/inclined-- and it probably helped a lot (being around groups of people) with her anxious/nervous energy that the air placements brings.

Aries/Sagittarius first of all, has a lot of expectations/energy towards group/social settings. In particularly learning/teaching within the group environment (Sagittarius/Jupiter)

A lot of energy towards doing something that brings ‘hope’ into the world (Jupiter) and with the blessings of Aries-- they tend to be highly protective towards their friends/family (even more emphasized with Taurus). This is something that concerns the core/principle of the person (Sun).

Thus, even if everything else is going wrong in their life-- they can be prone to look towards their moral obligation/principle regarding their treatment of others (and how stead-fast/self-assured in themselves they are about this subject) as a ‘pick up’ point for wherever they’re in in their life.

If there’s anything they know about themselves, first is their own ability to determinedly make their own goals/future happen (independence/freedom/self-made skills/expressions).

And second is their moral principality that keeps them from being a ‘bad person’ (or what they think/consider to be a ‘bad/morally bad person’).

The second part contributes greatly to building up confidence/defensive shield, especially when people throw accusation at them for it

(If they do hear criticism about them, once they’ve reached this point of conciliation within themselves. They can be so self-assured that they may often just calmly tell others ‘No. This is how I am.’

That’s the level of self-confidence an Aries/Sagittarius has when they learn how to gain strength from their principality.)

However, the thing that may be blocking them from expressing themselves completely is their emotional attachment to others.

In this case, we look at Libra/Taurus.

Emotional attachment coming from Libra/Taurus is not going to be as clear to see from others (as say like, water-signs tend to be.)

Aries hides it’s vulnerabilities, even when it’s self-assured and seems ‘accepting’ of it’s own flaws (humbled) -- they can have a hard time (maybe in their posture/expressions) letting others know that they care and truly coming across as a ‘harmonious’ person.

See, because despite being Venus-influenced greatly in her life (Libra/Taurus-- both Venus-ruled) both of these signs are in placements where unless she spends a lot of time building a strong emotional foundation with others (and even then)

Libra/Taurus emotionality/harmonious energy towards others is often ‘blocked’ from being truly understood by others-- mostly because there’s conditions before they’re expressed.

This ‘truly being understood’ part is important-- because whilst Taurus/Aries builds trust out of their bare-hands/effort, it’s trust made out of respect for personal difference and individuality. Not trust that is based from sharing the same goals/understanding (like say a Pisces) or unconditional trust.

Taurus/Aries trust foundation is one that has to be maintained, well-kept and groomed constantly. The individual may often have to reaffirm, verbally/emotionally, how they feel for others -- to others-- as well as constantly put in effort to make it last as well.

Libra/Taurus may also find it hard to trust others completely with their inner-self. Since they do indicate a rich internal plane of existence (can be prone to ‘testing’ others/being cautious of those they let in)

Regarding this, her Sun-Moon is opposite to each other (Aries-Libra/un-aspected bc the degree is around 5′) -- thus, this might’ve been what caused the divide in the first place.

Others can see her (those who grew up with her/know her best by her core aka the members) through her Aries Sun. Stubborn, quietly determined, sometimes single-minded in her pursuits.

But they often don’t get to see the Libra Moon or Taurus Mercury/Venus (or Gemini Mars) that she has.

To them, Aries/Libra/Taurus indicates comfortability and charming them in order to show her Aries desires later. It’s an indication of her cardinal (self-assertion) mixed with what they assume is mutable (flexibility/adaptability) which can indicate a certain selfishness to her.

This is often a misconception around those who has a strong Aries in their chart, but also an important Libra placements that may be ‘hidden’ or part of their subconscious/emotional control.

Because to others, it is seen as the ‘wishy-washy’ nature of Libra (indecision) and the impatient action-oriented ways of Aries (pioneering energy) manifesting in her energy that made her ‘drop’ her.

To Jessica, it causes internal conflict/emotional betrayal (breaking of trust). Between her internal alignment and the misinterpretation/her trust being broken instead.

Her Libra/Taurus (and Aries, let’s be honest) indicates a strong, almost stubborn principality on loyalty. Libra in particular, tries it’s hardest to be fair/just to others. While Taurus is almost impervious in it’s devotion to others (once they gave their words, it’s unbreakable).

In her own mind (Mercury) her ‘fixed’ position is in the group. Not only do they provide emotional gratification/solace for her (Libra Moon) but she also has space/time to nurture, care, and really sink her ‘roots’ down in the group dynamic (Taurus Mercury/Venus).

The Taurus Venus talks about taking their commitment seriously, especially because the Taurus Venus themselves don’t tend to take their responsibilities lightly themselves.

Honor (Taurus) and the ‘not breaking of each other’s reputation’ in order to not undermine each other’s standing in the world is extremely important to the Taurus/Aries.

If SM really didn’t break it off so completely on their side, Jessica would’ve been in a situation where she would’ve tried to carry the sinking boat regardless.

With that Sun/Venus and Libra Moon, she’ll probably try to do so through her mediative/diplomatic emotional buoyancy as well as trying to assert her energy into making sure everyone gets to connect with her/communicate with her on a personal level-- so they know of her integrity/honor that she won’t betray them like that (’she’s not that kind of person’ is the message through this demonstrative effort on her part).

Her expectations were probably were to continue on the paths of SNSD, having all those years become ‘wasteful’ is the worst feeling for Libra/Aries/Taurus to feel.

She already has emotional connectivity to them, this is just a matter of not being ‘gas-lighted’ into a situation where she’s accused of one or two extremes.

One being ‘you don’t want to be in SNSD anymore’ -- because she probably does. She built up her career with SNSD, she lived with them she worked with them. That kind of trust and bonding she holds dear to her heart.

The other being ‘you want to start your own career’ -- she probably does want to too. But these two conditions (not being in snsd =\= starting her own career) aren’t mutually exclusively to each other.

She might want to explain that, while she does want to start her own career-- it’s possible to do so while still being a member of SNSD.

Unfortunately, with how the circumstances works out, and the short-time period where she had the controversy and then suddenly got cut off (it really was a short time-span of probably only a few weeks) --- it was impossible to negotiate or remedy the situation where she doesn’t have time for her Taurus Mercury/Venus to be there physically. Where she’s mentally unprepared (and arguably a bit slow to make her point across) and thus--- it was a circumstances that was more to do with SM making the decision for her rather than her getting to decide or explain herself better.

Another thing to note is that, the branding/establishment of her fashion line is a crucial time in her life/career.

She’s been in the industry for so long and the actual creative process of finally having something established (as a brand) only had a small window of opportunity for promotion/establishing itself.

If she didn’t get to really associate to her brand then, it would be hard to get the brand out there later on.

The brand would’ve been in the market for some time (while SNSD is doing activities/promotions) and the responses might’ve been much more lackluster if people didn’t know about her association to it as well (which helps with the marketing/lifting the brand to find it’s ‘market’)

Considering everything, she made the best out of the situation and really push herself into finding her full potential.

She’s proved that you can be an entrepreneur and also an artist, that you can do both and still find social circles/societies to fit in as well.

The world is so much larger than just what we know, and the Aries/Sagittarius Sun native can always look to find themselves flourishing best when they discover their own bravery and autonomy in their own life decisions as well.

Krystal Jung (Jung Soojung) | October 24 1994 (San Francisco, California)

That was a lot on Jessica kdsnfjs I’ll do my best to fill this out for Krystal as well ;;

First of all, we love a duo Martian Sun - Air Moon sisters!

Krystal has her Sun in Scorpio [1′] and Moon in Gemini [28′22] which really explains how she’s really the emotionally stable ‘core’ with those around her despite being so active/reactive as well.

Generally, with Scorpio natives (and mutable Moons) they’re a lot more energetic, having to expel their energy elsewhere with those they’re close to (***important distinction)

They may seem much more ‘refreshed/energetic’ to those they’re comfortable with, often indulging in funny little quips/jokes and cheering others up.

Generally a ball of joy to be around, because they really do their best to not be a downer on someone when they care for them.

By themselves, they’re often anxious in energy (subconsciously) may get distracted or do multiple things at once in order to find ‘stimulis’.

At the same time, it’s this mutable ‘restless’ energy that drives them to reflect a lot on themselves or ‘sink’ into their own feelings.

The Scorpio Sun/Venus both talks about having these periods of time when-- if they’re not driven by stimuli, they tend to not want to do anything for a while and just--- sink.

Sink into the stagnancy within themselves, let the waves devour them whole. They let themselves be engulfed in their own expectations of themselves, their principality, their ambition.

Their emotionality becomes more self-connected once they do-- but it can be hard to swim back up from being ‘swallowed’ by the ocean.

Most likely, the more ‘upbeat/lively’ side of the Gemini Moon she has may be few and far between (to see for others).

The first approach for Scorpio/Gemini is criticality, there’s a lot of strength and sharpness in the mind here. And it comes through in expressing their wit and questioning of others.

Scorpio/Gemini may pose things as rhetorical questions to others, it’s a way to make them reflect back on others (Libra Mercury) and for others to see if what they’re thinking/saying truly makes sense or if it’s total bullocks.

The tonality of it, because it’s influenced by Scorpio/Gemini and Libra Mercury is in rx-- may come off as more aggressive than intended.

This line of questioning doesn’t really mean any harm, the sarcasm and snarky humour is just the way Gemini expresses itself under Scorpio Sun sometimes.

The native however, should look that other’s don’t misunderstand them and think that they have a superiority complex somehow.

Because Scorpio/Gemini brings a lot of emphasis on the Mind (mental/communication/thinking) being related to the person’s ego/core-essence/self-confidence. The person may easily give off the impression that they’re ‘judging’ someone based on how they present themselves, the exact wording of their phrases that gives way to their ‘inner intensions’ (that the Scorpio/Gemini is not afraid to point out-- without tact) and because of their shrewdness, they may often scoff at the ‘presentation’ of others when they have different values/approach to the ego then they do (i.e. often commenting on ‘its the inside the matters’ meaning the mind and integrity of the person-- thus if someone’s showy and likes to show off their material wealth, or if someone’s more emphasized on physical beauty of others etc. -- they may feel ‘less than’ immediately because of how blunt the Scorpio/Gemini can be)

The Scorpio/Gemini didn’t mean that in a definitely negative light-- which others may tend to take it (because the Scorpio/Gemini may sometimes lack tact when talking) -- they meant it in a ‘prove me wrong’ kind of way.

Waiting/observing the other person to offer them the communicative stance (mind/personal integrity) they want to see. So that they can ‘connect’ to each other as equals that way (Scorpio Venus rx)

The Scorpio/Gemini person should realize that they can’t force everyone to communicate the way they want to be communicated with all the time (**on a personal level).

Even if they didn’t want to come off as threatening/challenging--- learning how to utilize the flexibility of Gemini to connect to others is a task the Scorpio/Gemini person may need to take a step back and realize.

Connection to others come from taking a moment to realize that they may have put too much emphasis on the inside that they haven’t learn how to compromise with others yet (Libra Mercury rx has to learn how to work itself properly as well)

They may be too stagnant in their own ways (Scorpio Sun-Venus/Leo Mars/Libra - cardinal) and driven to get things done their way that they may not even realize that they have space to grow/learn still.

This mostly stems from the Libra Mercury and Scorpio Venus being in retrograde, which brings the mind and the social relationship of the person to be more self-reflective of themselves (in order to connect to others) -- rather than the usual ‘extroverted’ reaching out to others that they need to actualize.

Mercury in retrograde brings challenges in voicing their thoughts out /communicate their thinking out the way they intended it to be. Truly they are a person who thinks a lot before they speak, often going back and forth between themselves (sometimes indecision) and has a lot on their mind. They may also want to seek fairness and equality when they make a point to someone (Mercury potential).

They may not think they’re quite tactful (considering their Scorpio/Gemini placements) but they do have the ability to utilize tact (inside of their mind) to their speech.

Mercury has the potential to really persuade others, helping Scorpio achieves it’s goals if the energy is aligned healthily.

Because so much of her energy is driven inwards, ‘freeing up’ those spaces inside by externalizing the Libra Mercury outside (through action/active focus on Libra Mercury alone) will help with expelling/tiring out the space and thus

This creates an area where Gemini can slip in and really push that upbeat/up-lifting impact she has on others into manifesting outwardly openly as well.

It doesn’t make her any less cunning or calculating (it doesn’t undermine her capabilities) it just adds onto it.

Sometimes, not everything has to be heavy all the time. The ‘lightness’ of Gemini/Libra being externalized constantly may feel like it’s a useless/hopeless process that’s not leading to anything-- but trust that it is.

It’s helping to stabilize both the external and internal, even if the individual may not see it themselves-- others may take notice of the difference in their demeanor, as well as help with the constant frustration with themselves to resolve itself better through taking action like this.

Considering how she probably has already utilize this to a certain extent (comments from her co-actors in ‘bride of the water god’) -- more focus on this for the purpose of the self (self-development long-term/for the benefit of her own emotional-mental health and it’s longevity) will help combat some of the more depressive episode/emotional inactivity she may feel by herself as well (Pisces Saturn rx)

Venus in retrograde points to challenges connecting/building social relationships that aren’t personal (so impersonal relationships in the case of Scorpio) with a lot of the force being built on trust and other’s emotional understanding/compassion and connectivity to them first (instead of them putting themselves out there more openly)

It can lead the individual to seek emotional understanding and nourishment from others (Water Venus) and offering faithfulness and loyalty in return (stability).

The key thing with Venus rx is that the individual may tend to have extreme ‘cuts’ in their life. Those who they may have shared good memories with once, may find that when the relationship’s ended it could never come back and be what it was before.

Scorpio talks about transformation, and in this case it’s the closure to one relationship without flexibility/benefits to the self (and their own emotional/mental health)

On the other hand, this ‘extremity’ is more to do with the Scorpio themselves wanting to prolong/actively finding ways to ‘work through/devote’ themselves to the relationship as long as possible while it lasts.

Whether the relationship was toxic or not, they already have a hard time cutting themselves away from people in the flexible/adaptable way that others do (and thus coming back to the relationship and nourishing it as something else later).

That’s why when they cut, thats the end of it.

End of everything, but it’s more out of principality/self-protection rather than the realistic flexibility of relationships being something that involves both individual’s development/decisions (like, with regards to the human side of people and learning how to recover-- ‘forgive’ something-- which will benefit both people more.)

A way to help with Venus rx is to put themselves out there and challenge themselves not to have a stagnant ‘principle’ or views on what a relationship should be.

With Scorpio, there’s a lot of expectations for the relationship and what ‘fits’ into the bill of what they’re looking for.

Therefore, learning how to ‘let go’ of that and learning how to just be more involved in the ‘process’ of an ever evolving idea of ‘relationship’ might help them better as well.

This is not to say, they shouldn’t have strong regards/ideas on what’s good/not good for them. It’s just that they could add layers to that, be open to learning/experiencing more things while showing more active compassion for people in a demonstrative way instead of being so stagnant in themselves sometimes.

All of this is do-able, I think it mostly it lies on that Gemini Moon/Libra Mercury rx manifesting itself properly that will help counterbalance the Scorpio in her chart.

In regards to her Leo Mars, with her Scorpio Venus square Leo Mars she may tend to exhibit even more Scorpionic trait than before. Both of these signs are really stubborn, so in a way the enhanced trait tends to be alot of fixed water energy that leads her Leo to take less action than how it wants to be.

Think of Leo as like, being in the wrong camp. It could really benefit from supporting Gemini/Libra (helping to perform/manifest in a playful upbeat manner-- but with calmness and personal satisfaction) but instead it’s often butting head with Scorpio on taking commands/different values on how things should get done.

Venus square Mars may make the person look for challenges, intense desires or passion for something. It looks for ways to prolong the desire/emotions in the moment-- but at the same time, it’s focused so much on the ‘making it last’ part that it often overlooks the ‘in the now, moving together’ moments.

The lack of adaptability or movement in these signs besides the internal (desire, emotions, passion) is what’s holding them back.

By learning how to listen to the Leo Mars more (since it’s not making aspects to anything) the individual can learn how to balance the two by mix-matching Scorpio/Leo and adding other elements from their placements/chart into the mix as well.

It’s just a matter of -- making rooms for movement internally that’s blocking the person from really reaching the fullest potential.

Thus why, the external movement/release of energy through Gemini Moon is important here. By being able to utilize more air into their personal life (and not borrowing it from someone else-- really getting in touch with their own air and learning it’s full capabilities) is what’s going to benefit them best and help them be independent AND sociable the way they want to be.

Conclusion: Jessica - Krystal Jung

In a way, they balance out each other with their sister signs Taurus/Scorpio

Both these individuals have their strengths in similar yet opposite ways

While Krystal may come off as the more confrontational of the two if you just look at them on first impression (*not really getting to know them, because honestly Jessica is the equally-- if not more-- stubborn and more verbally confrontational than Krystal) she may find herself in contrast to her sister- much more adaptable when she’s next to her

(but again this is why we’re pointing out the part about being adaptable/flexible with herself from her internal core--rather than being comparative/learning it from someone else-- she’ll benefit more from truly grasping within and really making her own path on finding out how to bring that Gemini/Libra/Leo out properly together).

Whilst Jessica may seem like she’s tactful in her approach to things (Taurus Venus/Libra Moon -- may appear more ‘harmonious’ in her relation to others in the communication/impersonal aspect) -- she actually might have a harder time letting herself feel things or let go of her feelings/need for others-- which she can truly benefit from learning through Krystal (gaining strength from each other).

I think the point of this is-- once sister signs manifests in Actual Sisters -- it can be hard to figure out how to actualize their own placements away from each other (independently/fully within themselves) -- instead of what they gained/learned from each other.

Think of it like this, you find a perfect ‘counterbalance’ to yourself in another person.

You learn a lot from them because of your connectivity to each other (helping each other push/build and correct each other in their own strengths/weaknesses).

However, because the other person’s strength is what you supplement/support in your own way. You’ll get stuck with the supplementary role when you’re by yourself (without them) and your knowledge of what you’re using to supplement them is somewhat based on that experience with them (instead of seeing it within yourself/it’s full potential within your own context).

It’s hard to truly realize your own traits as it’s own thing, instead of being associated to your experience/that person all the time.

Kinda like a problem with IC, where you ‘brush off’ your core self to those who grew up with you. At the same time, while communication and stimuli is strong between the two (shared air placements -- Gemini/Libra) reliance on both of each other’s understanding/strengths towards themselves ‘cuts off’ communication/opportunities for it to manifest properly to those they aren’t close to as well.

Thus why, both of their ‘misrepresentation/miscommunication’ with other people problem is something that has more to do with realizing/finding themselves through separate experiences/venues rather than together.

Just...think of it as siblings who are the opposite case. Where both of them have totally different hobbies/personalities from each other.

This relationship may have more fights/bickering and misunderstanding between the two-- but towards others, the self manifest/actualize into it’s ‘full’ potential is because of that experience.

As the individual learn how to manifest their full potential properly, the earlier misunderstanding/miscommunication can be dissolved easier because they’ve faced it before.

Compared to a really strong ‘fixed’ relationship (especially with Taurus/Scorpio) -- the emphasis on sticking together and emotional/personal reliance on each other can be so over-powering they may struggle to see the alternative benefit to growing/progressing independently at all.

This is not in any way saying that what they have is bad, it’s very very good. It’s really fucking amazing to be honest, but their shared ‘fixed’ modality is a problem to both of them that is inherently a part of their subconscious/psyche (growing up/IC/connection to each other) and how they shape themselves after (into development)

Think of it as--- manifesting into the MC, ok? That’s the highest point in the chart, the point where we’re truly ourselves independently from others (and regardless of what others may think of us sometimes).

In order to become that MC, it involves the balancing of IC. To mix and let go of some of the things that held us back before in order to truly see ourselves that way.

This is not implying that they have to let go of each other, I’m talking about figuring out individually that they are more than just what they see right now.

Not being afraid to cut themselves out of their own restriction/boxes and looking at the parts of them that may be less dominant (but the connective thread) when they’re with each other-- and utilizing that to push themselves more.

Usually, when you mix so well with someone you see your own strength (the differences between you) shine through better because of them.

It’s looking at the subtext of that, the thing that’s helping you not pick a fight with them even if you’re different from them (in this case, for Krystal it’s their air sign, and for Jessica it’s the water sign)

It’s manifesting those two things properly, take what they got from the relationship and learning how to fully utilize it within their own independent persons properly

There’s a -- fear that if you get ‘too good’ or ‘too much’ of the same thing as someone you’ll be intruding on each other’s territory--- don’t be afraid of that.

Especially with this pair, they may be afraid of confrontation (full confrontation) or hurting each other emotionally so they always try to swerve/avoid subjects that brings them to that even if it’s bad for them both to do so (have so much more to learn from fighting without objectivity/reason than like, pointlessly avoiding confrontation/being complacent together sometimes)

Another thing that might be blocking them from realizing their own placement is that--- Jessica may seem more ‘emotional’ of the two (or more ‘emotionally sensitive’) while Krystal may seem more ‘earthy/stable’ of the two.

The ‘swapping’ of their counterparts (Krystals being full of water/no earth and Jessica being full of earth/no water) tricks people into thinking they don’t ‘relate’ or have the full capacity to connect to their own water/elemental placements because of this.

Because the other may seem to ‘embody’ the more ‘obvious’ part of what the element entails (earth/water - emotions/self-sufficiency) the person look to embodying the part that is going to ‘help’ the other manifest their own elemental placements (i.e. Krystal being more/seeming more self-sufficient **independent?? in a way, while Jessica being more emotionally connective or communicative/sociable to others)

This -- ‘swapping’ with each other, stops the Scorpio and Taurus from seeing their placements for what it is fully.

The Taurus in particular, may tend to think of themselves as more emotionally inclined while ignoring the problem with their lack of flexibility when they become ‘fixed’ on something (which is what a water-placement would’ve manifested truly in)

While the Scorpio may scoff at the idea of showing vulnerabilities/reaching out to others emotionally first

May think of themselves as being complex, hard to understand, kind of stiff--- when in actuality they are very fluid emotionally and can often adapt better than the ‘stability’ persona they’re putting up.

It creates a --- discordance inside of the persons if they keep this up

Thus why, learning how to realize, actualize and manifest the placements/potential inside of themselves individually will help with anything

Ending Ment

Besides this, the overall relationship is very warm and caring to each other. You can tell that their bond gives the space for Taurus to really grow into itself beautifully--- taking care of others, being nurtured back, appreciated for it’s Venusian traits really fits quite well with the Scorpio’s more martian nature.

At the same time, being in the presence of Taurus makes the Gemini/Libra aspect more active. The playfulness, sensitive and more youthful side shines through (Leo Mars) because of this difference between them (not intruding into each other’s territory)

They help each other better in a way, because they’re not intruding on each other there’s a bond that relies on their different personality working together naturally. They don’t take advices too harshly, often willing to listen to what the others have to say and implement that into their life. It’s a very warm-hearted and fulfilling dynamic! Also a very devoted, loyal and faithfully balancing relationship (towards each other) as well! 💕

Other Solo Posts That Might Be Relevant?:

Amber Liu | Taeyeon

#kpop astrology #jessica jung #krystal jung #krystal #jessica #jung jessica #jung krystal #jung sooyeon #jung soojung #soojung #sooyeon #sooyeon jung #soojung jung #f(x) krystal #f(x) astrology #fx astrology #girlgroup astrology #girl group astrology #soloist astrology

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tellmediaaus · 5 years

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7 SEO Lies

We cherish SEO. What's more, we believe it's immensely significant for prevailing in the cutting edge business world. In any case, we likewise realize that there's a ton of SEO falsehood out there. Once in a while it's great data that is old. At times it's deceptive. Also, now and again it's an out and out lie from a SEO "master."

Furthermore, we believe it's gigantically significant for prevailing in the cutting edge business world.

In any case, there's a great deal of SEO falsehood out there. Once in a while it's great data that is old. Once in a while it's deceptive. What's more, now and again it's a by and large lie from a SEO "master."

These seven SEO falsehoods may get you, however don't be tricked.

1. "I can promise you the No. 1 spot."

This is a major one. Everybody needs to be positioned No. 1. Research has demonstrated that the main connection on an outcomes page can get around 30 percent of the traffic for a given inquiry, and that is enormous. Moving from No. 2 to No. 1 could mean a critical increment in guests. (actually there is a funny video about that on this seo marketing company website)

Additionally, getting onto the main page of Google results can mean a major improvement in how much rush hour gridlock your site gets through hunt. The main page gets more than 90 percent of snaps. Page two gets an inauspicious 5 percent.

So jumping on the principal page is significant. Furthermore, a No. 1 spot is incredibly important.

Notwithstanding...

In their energy to be positioned No. 1, numerous individuals will be taken in by this falsehood. The reason it's a falsehood is basic: on the grounds that nobody can ensure a No. 1 spot. There are a large number of sites out there vieing for billions of watchwords. New sites are established each day. Organizations change their SEO systems. Google changes its hunt calculations.

There are simply such a large number of elements to have the option to ensure the main spot on an outcomes page. Particularly on short-tail catchphrases that have a colossal measure of rivalry. An assurance of improving your rankings? Of course, that is fine.

An assurance of the main page? Perhaps. Be that as it may, on the off chance that somebody promises you the No. 1 spot, you should run the other way.

Quite possibly's they're correct, particularly with long-tail watchwords. But at the same time quite possibly's they'll either be utilizing dark cap procedures that will get you punished or they're overselling their administrations. The two of which you need to maintain a strategic distance from.

2. "Search engine optimization is truly entangled."

You may be shocked this is the second lie on our rundown. For what reason would our organization exist, and for what reason would an expert SEO be such an enormous industry on the off chance that it wasn't profoundly mind boggling? The appropriate response is two-overlap.

To start with, improving your hunt rankings is – at any rate when all is said in done – quite basic. There are sure things that Google puts a great deal of weight on when it's deciding pursuit rankings. Things like value, backlink profile and expert.

Getting those things made sense of and organized isn't in every case simple. It takes a great deal of involvement to see how to approach the procedure proficiently.

However, on the off chance that you center around making your site as valuable, simple to-utilize and definitive as could be expected under the circumstances, you've officially completed a ton of the diligent work.

Second, successful SEO takes a great deal of time. What's more, not right throughout a couple of months or a year. It needs a ton of work over the lifetime of your site. You have to monitor consistent updates, your own substance, specialized enhancements, backlink outreach, your opposition and a large group of different things.

So as you may envision, SEO is hard. It's not very convoluted (in any event until you dive into the incredibly fine subtleties), yet it takes a great deal of work. Furthermore, on the off chance that you don't have the foggiest idea how to best distribute your time and exertion, you'll end up squandering both.

That is the place a decent SEO master comes in. They'll disclose to you where your endeavors will get the most return, since they've done it previously and they keep awake on the most recent patterns.

So, SEO isn't confused. In any case, that doesn't mean it's simple.

3. "Social isn't significant for SEO."

The job of online life in SEO is questioned. In 2014, Matt Cutts expressed that social sign don't factor into Google's rankings. In any case, numerous SEO specialists keep up that those sign do, indeed, influence rankings. There's been a ton of forward and backward.

How about we think about it from two points.

Suppose that social sign, similar to your devotee tally and social expert, don't influence your SEO. In the event that that is the situation, would it be a good idea for you to at present be putting resources into online life showcasing and investing energy associating with individuals on Twitter and Facebook?

Totally.

Why?

Since it's not simply the impact of connections and offers that you're after. It's about individuals and offering your substance to the general population who need it. The more individuals you can assist with the data you give, the better your site will perform. Individuals will share your substance, connection to your pages, return to your site and transform into leads.

OK, presently how about we take a gander at the other conceivable side of the coin: Let's say that social flag and connections do factor into the Google calculations. All things considered, clearly you ought to invest energy advancing your work on informal organizations.

Connections, remarks, pursues, shares, and each other metric that you for the most part use to quantify your social adequacy will at that point become straightforwardly identified with SEO.

In any case, you win.

4. "Having huge amounts of connections improves your position."

Regardless of whether somebody's discussing inbound or outbound connections, outer or inside, this announcement isn't level out wrong, it's deceptive. The quantity of connections you get to your page is significant (which is the reason Brian Dean says that third party referencing is the most significant ability in SEO).

What's progressively significant, in any case, is where those connections are coming from. A connection from a high-specialist site like Mashable, Moz, AdAge or Wired will be truly important to your SEO endeavors for that specific page.

Thus, connecting from your page to top notch outside sites will demonstrate Google that your page contains great data and help it make sense of precisely what your page is about.

One connection from a high-expert space to your page could give a major lift, while loads of connections from low-quality destinations probably won't do anything. Actually, it could even damage your rankings.

In the event that a SEO firm discloses to you that you need huge amounts of connections, be watchful. They may participate in connection purchasing or different terrible intends to get heaps of connections to your site. Also, that can result in punishments.

Having numerous connections is great. However, just on the off chance that you have the correct sort of connections.

5. "It's about catchphrases."

Before, catchphrases were the principle focal point of SEO. You needed to have the correct watchwords on the correct pages, and that was about it. Be that as it may, web indexes have turned out to be fundamentally progressively complex over the previous decade or something like that.

Google presently considers around 200 components to decide rankings. And keeping in mind that catchphrases are as yet significant, there's much more that goes into it (however Search Engine Journal sets that four of those elements emerge over the rest).

Space age, titles and H1 labels, semantically related catchphrases, page-stacking speed, recency of updates, outbound connections, perusing level, slugs and records and even the way that you have a contact page may influence your rankings.

So while catchphrases will positively be a significant piece of your SEO procedure, there are huge amounts of different variables you have to consider. What's more, a SEO firm or advisor that is exceptional on how SEO functions today will realize that.

Make certain to get some information about the various strategies that your SEO supplier will use to enable you to improve your rankings. On the off chance that they place a solid accentuation on catchphrase thickness, dormant semantic ordering and other watchword related practices, be somewhat attentive.

6. "You need a great deal of substance."

We should make one thing straight immediately: Having a great deal of substance is something to be thankful for. Also, it will totally support your SEO. Be that as it may, it's not by any means the only method to utilize substance to improve your internet searcher rankings.

Brian Dean at Backlinko, for instance, has under 40 blog entries on his webpage. Yet, he's one of the chief SEO specialists on the planet, and his site is madly prominent. How is he ready to get this much perceivability and SEO with what adds up to a bunch of posts?

By composing extremely incredible stuff.

Every one of Dean's posts is a few thousand words in length, contains amazingly valuable exhortation and is brimming with pictures that help make the substance obvious to the peruser. They're centered around subjects that individuals need to find out about, they're exceedingly significant, and they're anything but difficult to peruse. Dignitary likewise writes in a style that makes it practically difficult to quit perusing.

This kind of important substance has gotten Dean countless, visitor posts, social offers, remarks and different things that help his SEO.

There's a key exercise here: Don't compose substance to improve your SEO. Compose content that is going to help individuals. In case you're helping individuals take care of their issues, you're going to rank well.

It's that straightforward.

7. "Our procedure is the best."

This is just a half-lie. Your supplier may trust that their way to deal with SEO is the best that there is. Be that as it may, this should make you somewhat distrustful. Above all else, look calculations are evolving continually, and a standout amongst the best characteristics a SEO supplier can have is that they perused a great deal and adjust rapidly.

Second, the best procedure for SEO to a great extent relies upon your industry. A few businesses are agreeable to Brian-Dean-style 5,000-word posts. Different businesses are progressively inspired by 500-word snappy tips or organization refreshes.

Your own clients may be pretty much keen on a particular kind of substance, and your SEO supplier should be available to that plausibility also.

Also, in light of the fact that there are such a significant number of various pieces of effective SEO, it's conceivable that one organization may concentrate on a certain something – third party referencing, state – while an alternate organization centers around another, similar to watchword streamlining or social.

Each organization has a technique, and most will probably have a marginally extraordinary concentration from others. That doesn't imply that one is superior to another. It just implies that they organize various techniques for SEO.

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suppersanchez · 6 years

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The Buzz on the Clipping Path Business

Clipping path is a term utilized in the realistic business which alludes to the way toward making a framework around a specific picture without adjusting or delete even a solitary pixel of the picture. Clipping path is finished by utilizing Photoshop's compelling pen device. An outline of a territory that fills in as a veil and the main part of the picture that has been cut seems noticeable while the region outside the clipping path at that point winds up straightforward.

The way toward isolating the items from their essential layer or foundation is known as disengaging, and the disconnected parts of the picture are put on another foundation. It tends to be either to make another picture or basically to expel the foundation and changed its shading. Clipping path is extremely valuable for foundation end however isn't just restricted to it. You can do whatever you need since clipping path can be occupied with an assortment of realistic altering methodology.

For what reason is clipping path turning into a specialty in online business?

Most likely, you wouldn't feel that there is such administration about clipping path. The reality of the situation is, there is and it has been a standout amongst the most blasting re-appropriating administrations and is relied upon to become considerably further in the coming years.

clipping path service company administrations are turning into a mainstream re-appropriating specialty in today's' realistic industry basically in light of the fact that it is an approach to cut work cost and spare time. For you to know, there are a great deal of organizations that makes utilization of any type of advanced imaging that fundamentally needs the clipping path benefit. Such organizations are promoting offices, magazine editors, list, notices, handouts, sites, picture takers, plan studios or other type of print and configuration organization. They have been the enthusiastic clients for some clipping path suppliers since clipping pictures is a standout amongst the most critical base in visual depiction.

youtube

The greater part of the organizations make utilization of this re-appropriating realistic arrangements principally on the grounds that it is dull, work concentrated and there is no space for inventiveness which makes it unpart of the realistic center process. For some, index organizations, clipping path is a need since voluminous pictures are normally managed.

Nature of clipping path organizations

Many clipping path suppliers everywhere throughout the world are popping like daisies when this specialty business opportunity wound up well known. For you to discover please go to one your most loved web crawler and after that type the word " clipping path" as your watchword. You may be astonished what number of organizations are putting forth such administration.

Clipping path organizations assurance to convey the administration inside 24 hours or less however they don't have similar costs yet a large portion of which offers a free preliminary to test the nature of their work. In which the essential objective is to give the most ideal clipping paths suited for a business' needs. The costs run from $0.95 up to $3.89 per picture which really relies upon the sort of clipping path your picture needs. You can exchange your pictures to your seaward accomplice by means of FTP since this is a well known approach to exchange records over the net. Most organizations have a Transfer/download work on their locales which certainly include accommodation for some customers. A few organizations utilize online record exchange administrations, for example, yousendit.com, filefactory, and among others.

After customers got the administrations in a timeframe they will be given the receipt which contains all the fundamental data to settle their bills. Installment strategy is normally by means of paypal, bank exchange, charge card and different mediums that are accessible on the net.

Beside clipping path, the majority of these organizations likewise offers different administrations, for example, picture covering, photograph rebuilding, picture control, photograph correcting and different sorts of realistic re-appropriating administrations.

How hardened is the clipping path rivalry?

The prominence of the Adobe's Photoshop programming opened up a market specialty for business visionaries seeking to become showbiz royalty re-appropriating. There are a significant number of organizations working inside the realistic re-appropriating industry, particularly those offering clipping path administrations. Clipping path, as I would like to think, is the best realistic related administration to redistribute since (an) it's a normal occupation, (b) its exact and there is no space for inventiveness, and, (c) numerous innovative visual craftsmen abhor clipping path particularly when a voluminous number of pictures are included. The solid rivalry is realized by numerous little to medium measured organizations in creating nations with accomplices set up in Europe or USA. The expanding number of contenders, gets more decisions for buyers to pick those suppliers who offer the exceptionally reasonable and standard quality administration.

Having an online business isn't as simple as you think, there are interesting points particularly when online rivalry is truly hardened. With the end goal to beat your rivals you need to endeavor in advertising yourselves on the web. Most specialist organizations think about Website optimization (site improvement) as a beneficial web promoting technique for their online business. The basic standard of site improvement is that you should streamline your site to be web crawler well disposed with the goal that you will dominatingly outrank your opposition for "clipping path" and such. There are numerous kinds of Web optimization systems however the principle objective of Site design improvement is for your site to offer something significant and critical to both the site client and web search tools.

Organizations giving clipping path benefit do a wide range of internet promoting methodologies from fundamental to complex just to beat their rivals. Some would depend on a couple of "insidious systems" and outright dark cap Search engine optimization which over the long haul may harm your site. Others would utilize "customer goading" procedures wherein a specific business possess numerous sites, each reserved with a considerable measure of watchwords however offering similar administrations. The principle purpose of these systems are to make a catch bowl for customers without demolishing the duplicate of your fundamental site all since you are attempting to outrank your opposition on the SERPs.

The close end of the clipping path business?

The clipping path advertise is immersed, it is in its pinnacle and it's close decay. The likelihood of closure the clipping path business is unverifiable. In any case, we could never comprehend what might occur later on. Innovation is quick advancing and there are various types of programming accessible that can make our work a lot simpler. Redistributing as it's been said is an insignificant publicity. Scarcely any years from now, innovation will at some point or another figure out how to deal with procedures that are as of now re-appropriated to many creating nations. At this moment, there's a turbo veil photoshop module which gives programmed apparatuses to accelerate composite picture creation and different undertakings that require covering. The product is called Paravue Turbo Veil which cost $249, Brilliant Cover for $120, Foundation Remover $49.00 thus considerably more. Others trusted that this toolset is far reaching enough to deal with picture altering necessities. Be that as it may, does it truly? Truly, it might make your work quicker yet then again, it has less devices to finish confused designs changes. "No product is prepared to do impeccably exact outcomes", as one programming organization said.

Anyway, in the event that you need no cash include, you can likewise think about online editorial manager. It doesn't have same devices as what Photoshop gives yet it can likewise do straightforward clipping path however. In any case, actually I trust that in the event that there are still organizations requiring the clipping path benefit, there would dependably be clipping path business. There is no preferable route over having it finished with an accomplished proficient than with just programming alone.

There are hard substances associated with the consistently changing economy driven by rivalry and globalization. Organizations may need to shut down and a few people do lose their activity. Be that as it may, on the more splendid side, there will dependably be a fresh start in each consummation and visa versa.

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myfriendpokey · 6 years

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promissory notes

Complete satisfaction OR your money back!!! - is something I don't think anyone in videogames has ever willingly said,so maybe it doesn't make sense to talk of anything as stable as a "guarantee". Maybe it's more like a system of overlapping promises, designed to contain the idea that a videogame exists in at least some kind of provisional relationship to human happiness, even if the rate at which the two could be converted is never quite nailed down. We have the promise the game will work on a given system or set of minimum requirements, the hazier assurance it might at least resemble the screenshots on the box, the genre assurance that it formally and hence experientially resembles some other game you like. The assurance, in press leading up to release, of passion and artistic intent rattling around in there somewhere as well, the assurance that the game will have x y and z new features and scope. Press and external reviewers can so to speak cosign a guarantee or write their own more ambivalent one on the basis of their reputation. Storefronts as well can tacitly endorse some promise - that this thing exists, functions, falls into the category of "entertainment" - when they put it on their shelves, virtual or otherwise. There's the promise of personal reputation, that the people involved wouldn't want to associate themselves with a bogus product, and the promise of monetary interest - this game obviously had a fair bit of money put into it, they're expecting to make that back, therefore we can expect some moderate fidelity to customer expectation and the sort of general polished feel that comes with being able to hire lots of people to create bark textures.

Most of these institutions aren't specific to videogames, but I do think they have a greater prominence there, owing both to the higher amount of fussy technical variation in the format (it's hard to imagine a book, say, refusing to boot or secretly installing a bitcoin miner in your head) and also to its historical novelty. The idea that something called a "videogame" exists, is an entertainment format, is linked to some kind of prospective emotional value - all these have to be rhetorically insisted upon, particularly as the format moved from spaces with immediately visible analogues (pinball tables, mechanical amusements) to a more diffuse place alongside the family television or home computer. They had to insinuate, and to an extent still have to insinuate, the exact role they played in everyday life. And the shift from being a sort of weird, garish, once-off toy into an ongoing home-improvement project, with new games and consoles to choose between and new add-ins to improve your machine, had to be accompanied by the emergence of institutions that could offer some reassurance this ongoing investment wouldn't be a waste.

So you can maybe glibly think of videogames as a form of currency, built on the premise that they can be "exchanged" at any time for some measure of enjoyment, where this exchange rate is underwritten and co-signed by various institutions. And as having something of the abstraction of currency, as well. If one videogame is a moment of enjoyment then 6000 videogames are in principle 6000 moments of enjoyment - never mind that you may never have a chance to play all those discounted games in your Steam library within one lifetime. Think of it as saving them up for a rainy day. And I suspect that as this relationship between possession and affect grows more abstracted and tenuous, institutions take on a correspondingly more important role in confirming that the central exchange relationship still holds true. A bit like debt rating agencies - it's not so much about actually untangling the complicated sale of good, bad and nonexistent debt packages from one financial institution to another, it's more the promise that at some point this untangling COULD occur, that all this imaginary money still bears some kind of distant relationship to actual human needs.

I wonder if the paranoid style in videogames culture stems partly from this sense of underlying contingency. It's not that games are just experiences, which can't be taken away - they're more like deposits on hypothetical experience, and those deposits can indeed depreciate in value if not turn out to be worthless from the start. Bad reviews, spoilers, the general reputation of a game can all cause it to drop in expected value. The fuss that happens every time a new GTA game gets below 9.5 on IGN or wherever is not so much that the game might really have problems so much that having those problems flagged from the start can marr the sense of occasion, the I-was-there-ness and anticipated retrospective value that's part of the package being sold. And of course the consistent anxiety around corrupt reviewers, incorrect press releases, "fake games", all those other things that could adulterate the currency...

And maybe we could consider the current anxiety around "asset flips" on Steam in the same light. After all, who's really playing these things - besides Youtubers doing so ironically? They're easy to spot and easily refunded and even if some kid really does buy "Cuphat" or "Battleglounds" by accident, well, the worst that could happen is that they develop the same misplaced affection for exploitative consumer garbage as everybody else who grew up playing videogames. And indeed the fact that nobody really buys them is part of the critique - what's unsettling is the fact that they seem more connected to the shadow economies of cheap bundles and trading-card-store manipulation (which is so easy and widespread that PC Gamer could publish a how-to guide with no apparent pushback from anyone). You can easily unpick the specific arguments about what constitutes an asset flip versus a game that just uses premade assets, or how to tell a "scam" from just a regular bad videogame - demonstrative sincerity?? Producing cynical knockoffs with premade asset packs is not necessarily the act of poorly-funded fly-by-nights, as witness the recent news about Voodoo recieving $200 million from Goldman Sachs. But of course they're the chief source of anxiety around the issue, and the ways in which that anxiety manifests is often weirdly racialised - the automatic bad faith extended to the Global South, the fear of nameless hordes overrunning our valuable, exclusive institutions, even a sort of weird variant on the “welfare mother” imagery - the asset flipper with 100 interchangeable games, driving a cadillac... Leaching off the accumulated value stockpiled by the Steam brand, devaluing our libraries and the institutions that have been telling us they're worth something...

I don't really have a lot of sympathy with the asset-flip discourse, both because exactly the same anxiety has been rolled out in the past to Unity, walking simulators, visual novels, Game Maker, Twine, and basically anything else that lowers the barriers to entry around making videogames; and also because I love many games I think those anxieties would try to exclude ("The Zoo Race", GoreBagg games, the Johnny series, even Limbo Of The Lost is as close as Oblivion ever came to being creatively exciting), and I think the calls for hard work and sincerity and so forth function as just so much evasive kitsch. We already HAVE a ton of games like that; and that's maybe the real problem. Why is there so much anxiety about discovering good games when, say, people are complaining about having to choose between the two different, polished, labour-of-love, years-in -the-making narrative platform games being released the same week? Doesn't this just mean the "enjoyment standard" of the videogame promissory note is just by now so abstract and intangible that it's basically just an empty convention, useful for nothing but perpetuating itself - perpetuating the idea of an unadulterated good-game-ness, stretching aimlessly into space like a 1950s radio broadcast. It's a convention which is basically exclusive, which works by trying to put a cordon around the vast swathes of human culture it thinks it's safe to ignore.

Which is maybe fine - nobody can pay attention to anything, and some "rating institutions" are presumably less pernicious than others (the advice of a friend? a critic you enjoy? your own intuition?). There are obviously a lot of critiques that can be levelled at the existing one for videogames, including in particular the assumption that anything that cost a lot of money is worth at least checking out. But there's also something more generally sad about this kind of enforced, perpetual scarcity in a time of abundance, about a model that just pines for less shit so that it can start to feel relevant again, about one that can think of nothing to do with the sheer volume of things being made and rabbit holes being burrowed than wish they didn't exist and try to shut them out entirely.

More people being able to make things is good, and hard to get to; it can also be unnerving and disorienting and also push against some of the happier ideas we might have had about the democratization of art-production (for example, that this wouldn't co-exist with monopolies of arbitrary unaccountable control of the kind exercised by Youtube, Steam, the App store, Google, etc...), it can be a space to view some of the weirder machinations of capital as they leave traces through the culture (money-laundering $9000 books on Amazon and viral Pregnant Spiderman youtube vids). I don't think continuing to defend the value of the medium will help think about these, or become anything but more and more paranoid and quixotic over time.

#lou #vgames #money

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moiraineswife · 7 years

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Autistic!Jasnah: Masterpost

Okaaay, so, as you might have guessed from the title, this post is a long list of reasons Jasnah Kholin is autistic af.

The short version: Jasnah is autistic because I, a Known Autism, say so. Have a nice day.

The long version (format): A long series of chronological quotes that all follow this pattern: Quote. *Insert ramble about why this is an Autistic Thing* *Possible and probable further ramble about why I’m emotional about that.

That’s literally it, people. Buckle up, I’ve picked through all three books (yes all three) to compose this post for y’all. It’s not going to be short.

To business:

The Way of Kings:

Jasnah glanced at Shallan, noting her, then returned to her conversation.

Introducing Jasnah ‘I don’t have time for social niceties I’m busy’ Kholin. From the first interaction she’s...Bad at interacting. Iconic.

“Then we shall do an evaluation. Answer truthfully and do not exaggerate, as I will soon discover your lies. Feign no false modesty, either. I haven’t the patience for a simperer.”

Jasnah is both blunt, direct, and honest in her speech as she is in her expectations from others. She doesn’t have the energy to deal with manipulation/lying/tarting up the truth to make it more socially acceptable bc she is a busy autistic lady with shit to do. (really, though, what she’s literally demanding here is the first rule of the autistic’s guide to easy conversation. Clear. Simple. To the point. To frills, no fuss.)

Jasnah didn’t argue further, and Shallan could see from her eyes that it was of no consequence to her if the king risked his life. The same apparently went for Shallan, for Jasnah didn’t order her away.

People do what people want to do and Jasnah doesn’t waste any time pretending she cares/that it matters to her for the sake of appearances. Again, this woman has a vendetta against typical social niceties and I love it.

“Now?” the king said, cradling his granddaughter. “But we are going to have a feast—”

“I appreciate the offer,” Jasnah said, “but I find myself with an abundance of everything but time.”

Do I need to point out the lack of social niceties again or are y’all sensing a pattern at this point? *King lovingly embraces his darling granddaughter that Jasnah just saved and orders a feast prepared in her honour* Jasnah: ‘Thanks but no I’m too busy to socialise.’

Jasnah was also a rationalist, a woman with the audacity to deny the existence of the Almighty himself based on her own reasoning. Jasnah would appreciate strength, but only if it was shaped by logic.

Jasnah feelings>>>>>>logic. This is a fairly common theme, of Jasnah being ruled less by emotions/sentiment/societal pressures/expectations and much more by logic/her own reasoning. She has her own way of looking at the world, her own rules for how it works, and she won’t be swayed by anyone else’s opinions on how she should feel/behave.

Jasnah turned to look out of the balcony into the dark space of the Veil. “I know what people say of me. I should hope that I am not as harsh as some say, though a woman could have far worse than a reputation for sternness. It can serve one well.”

Jasnah not being very self-aware in how people actually perceive her is also an autistic thing. Shallan notes several times that Jasnah is actually nowhere near as harsh/stern as she’s reputed to me, and, more importantly, she’s nowhere near as harsh/stern as she perceives herself to be. She also fails to note that Shallan actually enjoys the work/the challenge. This also implies that she takes what people say about her at face value and doesn’t have the necessary social skills to refute them.

Shallan tried to judge Jasnah’s mood, but the older woman’s emotions were impossible to read.

Again, this is a fairly common autistic trait. We struggle to read other people’s body language, but they often struggle to read ours as well. A part of this is probably Jasnah deliberately cultivating this kind of persona, but even so, she’s too unsure of how she comes across to have completely mastered this.

Jasnah carefully removed its contents, neatly lining up the brushes, pencils, pens, jar of lacquer, ink, and solvent. She placed the stacks of paper, the notebooks, and the finished pictures in a line.

Oh look, it’s one of the world’s biggest Autism Stereotypes (which I’m totally guilty of too): lining all the things up neatly, and making them Orderly.

At least with Jasnah one knew where one stood.

Jasnah of the straightforward, blunt honesty and ‘what you see is what you get’ strikes again.

When Jasnah was deeply immersed in one of her projects, she often ignored all else.

And here we see the Autistic Jasnah in her natural habitat: hyperfixating on her special interest.

The rest is under the cut for length!

Jasnah had elegant handwriting, of course—Jasnah rarely did anything without taking the time to perfect it.

Jasnah not doing anything unless it’s done Properly and Right according to her? Also Jasnah being indifferent towards things she hasn’t put any time into perfecting (such as drawing).

“I always forgive curiosity, Your Majesty,” Jasnah said. “It strikes me as one of the most genuine of emotions.”

Again, Jasnah encouraging/reacting positively to genuine/honest emotions because she doesn’t Understand the whole guile/lying/not being honest thing because honestly what is the point?

“Must someone, some unseen thing, declare what is right for it to be right? I believe that my own morality—which answers only to my heart—is more sure and true than the morality of those who do right only because they fear retribution.”

Honestly, just, this whole thing. For a start it’s a massive transgression of the Vorin social norms/expectations, especially for Jasnah as a prominent public figure as the sister to the king. For another it’s that internal rules thing again. Jasnah’s world operates according to Jasnah’s principles and Jasnah’s understanding of it, no-one else’s.

But Shallan had caught a handful of occasions, mostly when Jasnah had been distracted, and had apparently forgotten she wasn’t alone.

*Jasnah ignores social expectations so hard she literally forgets other people exist in the world* Also, again, the hyperfixation on special interest.

“And yet, those men are off the street. The people of this city are that much safer. The issue that Taravangian has been so worried about has been solved, and no more theatergoers will fall to those thugs. How many lives did I just save?”

“I know how many you just took,” Shallan said.

Jasnah has a habit of doing this, this very cold, calculated, logical and pragmatic way of seeing the world as well as morality. Shallan considers the lives taken, the emotional aspect of the moral dilemma, the horror of murder. Jasnah just sees it almost as statistics, as four lives taken to save many more. Shallan also focuses on the cold hard facts of ‘I know how many people you just killed’ while Jasnah is engaged in weighing up the probability of how many she just saved. (In theory, the thugs might never have attacked anyone again, so Jasnah might not have saved anyone by her actions, which I think is what Shallan is getting at here. But that’s just...A moot point as far as Jasnah is concerned)

This is also an example of her black and white thinking. There’s more net good in what she did than there is net bad. That’s where her questioning/reasoning stops because it makes sense to her. Shallan exists in the grey area, but I don’t think Jasnah even sees it in cases like this.

But it wasn’t the act itself so much as the cold callousness of it that bothered her.

This is an interesting one, and something I’ll talk about more a bit later, probably, but the way Jasnah comes across vs how she actually is. I totally get why Shallan views what she did as cold and callous, and in a way I suppose it was. It was fully planned and fully intentional. But I think for her it’s this kind of...separation between logic and sentiment. I think Jasnah feels very strongly and very deeply, but she doesn’t often display that to other people, and I also think she believes there’s a time and a place for that. Also, black and white thinking again. It comes off as cold to Shallan, but for Jasnah I think it feels more like common sense.

“You only needed to kill one of them.”

“No, I didn’t,” Jasnah said.

“Why? They would have been too frightened to do something like that again.”

“You don’t know that. I sincerely wanted those men gone. A careless barmaid walking home the wrong way cannot protect herself, but I can. And I will.”

Again, black and white thinking. (I’m also surprised this moment doesn’t generate more Discourse...Or maybe it does, I’ve just avoided it, either way) This is both a case for Jasnah not being able to predict people’s responses/behaviours, and also black and white thinking/internal rules at play. As far as she’s concerned those men are criminals. She has no assurances that they won’t hurt anyone else again. They’re already criminals, and there’s no chance for redemption or leeway, here. She’s made up her mind. They’re all criminals. They’re all dangerous. They all die.

Jasnah closed her eyes again, handing the brush toward Shallan. “Fifty strokes tonight, Shallan. It has been a fatiguing day.”

A)- routines the ‘tonight’ and the familiarity of this implies it’s something that happens every night. And the ‘fifty strokes’ is either another routine related thing, or an internal rule thing. Either way. Also this is probably a stim thing, since she’s using it to relax/de-stress.

Jasnah tapped her desktop with a fingernail.

Stimming.

“Brightness Jasnah does NOT like people entering her room. The maids have been told not to clean in there.” The king had promised that his maids were very carefully chosen, and there had never been issues of theft, but Jasnah still insisted that none enter her bedchamber.

Definitely, definitely, definitely an autistic thing. Issues with people entering Your Spaces or touching Your Things is a big autistic thing. (especially because the assurances about thieving don’t change her mind) Also the emphasis on not as in ‘this is a thing one absolutely does not do unless one wishes to die’.

“She’d believe me,” Shallan said. “She thinks she’s far more demanding than she is. Or…well, she is demanding. I just don’t mind as much as she thinks I do.”

Again, Jasnah taking what people say of her/how they say they perceive her at face value, and also lack of self-awareness in how people actually respond to her.

Jasnah regarded Shallan, face stiff, impassive. “I have been told that my tutelage is demanding, perhaps harsh. This is one reason why I often refuse to take wards.”

“I apologize for my weakness, Brightness,” Shallan said, looking down.

Jasnah seemed displeased. “I did not mean to suggest fault in you, child. I was attempting the opposite. Unfortunately I’m…unaccustomed to such behavior.”

Two things here: one, I’m like, 99% certain that Jasnah, who has been camped out at the hospital all this time waiting for Shallan to wake up is feeling anything but ‘impassive’ at this moment, in which case this is an example of her body language/facial expressions not matching up properly to her actual internal feelings, which is fairly common. And two: Jasnah’s apology being taken for a rebuttal and her obvious displeasure at it coming across that way when she literally intended the opposite (been there).

Also her general air of uncertainty/discomfort in this setting, which is one that’s obviously social/emotional. Also the fact that she pins her poor apology on lack of practice/familiarity with these kinds of interactions when, in theory, these kinds of things should come naturally to people. So like, lil bit of hinting/implication of scripting social things her, which I think her initial words reek of as well, as she’s said similar things before.

“You make it sound as if you were waiting out there.”

Jasnah didn’t reply.

“But your research!”

“Can be done in the hospital waiting chamber.” She hesitated. “It has been somewhat difficult for me to focus these last few days.”

“Jasnah! That’s quite nearly HUMAN of you!”

Again, a few things here, firstly that Jasnah is othered in a way by Shallan (and this isn’t the only time this happens, either) because of her lack of emotional response/social stuff. Secondly the fact that she’s clearly uncomfortable/struggles with this kind of conversation – the hesitation, the lack of responses are very much at odds with her usual composure and the way she has an answer for literally everything.

Words of Radiance:

She was all too glad to be leaving the stuffy room, which stank of too many perfumes mingling.

Prologue and we’ve already got Jasnah experiencing sensory issues in a crowded room with lots of perfume. What a way to kick things off.

“Many people consider that sort of thing enjoyable.”

“Many people, unfortunately, are idiots.”

Her father smiled. “Is it terribly difficult for you?” he asked softly. “Living with the rest of us, suffering our average wits and simple thoughts? Is it lonely to be so singular in your brilliance, Jasnah?”

A)- Jasnah obviously not enjoying social events/parties (she literally spends all of this one...contemplating the assassination she’s plotting. Like. Mood.)

B)- Gavilar’s comment is...Strangely sad, I think?? And perhaps a bit too on point. (This is very much just my reading of things but)...I don’t know. I see Jasnah trying to make a little quip/a joke here and it being misinterpreted because of her tone. And then, again, there’s that idea of othering that came up at the end of TWOK.

But I think the ‘is it lonely to be so singular in your brilliance?’ I think that....A huge part of that ‘brilliance’ comes from a mixture of Jasnah’s autistic traits: her special interest/her focus in them/her dedication to pursuing them...but also that sense of being other. Of not fitting in. The rest of “us” she doesn’t belong, she doesn’t fit.

And I think this idea of their ‘simple thoughts’ as opposed to Jasnah’s brilliant ones is a little like what we see with Renarin in Oathbringer, where Adolin explains that he isn’t trying to be lofty and brilliant, people sometimes just have difficulty following him. And I think this is what’s happening with Jasnah here (and in other places, she frequently talks about the difficulty she has in teaching, and how her methods are too intense and involved)

And also I think that....The saddest bit about this is that I think she was....Trying to joke here? Trying to fit in with those ordinary people, ‘the rest of us’, and just making a sarcastic joke on the back of her father’s comment about most people enjoying parties and she just sort of ‘well, most people are idiots aren’t they?’ And that’s what prompts this little moment here. So even when she’s trying to fit, and trying to belong, she’s still cast as the outcast, and misunderstood, and othered and it Hurts Me.

I, she thought, need to write this experience down.

She would do so, then analyze and consider. Later.

She literally topples into another world, effectively, and is just like ‘hm, I should make some notes on this and analyse them’. And. Yep. This is how she processes the world. By making sense of it, by treating everything according to Jasnah’s rules: it gets written down. It gets analysed. It gets understood. Bam.

Jasnah ignored the eyes of the sailors. It wasn’t that she didn’t notice men. Jasnah noticed everything and everyone. She simply didn’t seem to care, one way or another, how men perceived her.

Jasnah ‘I don’t have time for social expectations’ Kholin strikes again. Jasnah also just doesn’t care how anyone perceives her, social norms and expectations can go fuck themselves .

Jasnah grimaced at the thought. Shallan was always surprised to see visible emotion from her. Emotion was something relatable, something human—and Shallan’s mental image of Jasnah Kholin was of someone almost divine.

Again, the othering idea, as well as visible emotion being startling, as she’s typically so withdrawn/closed off/difficult to read. Yes friend, u guessed it, this is Peak Autism. Also the specific word in it being ‘relatable’ again marks that difference between Jasnah and...Everyone else. Again she’s different, again she doesn’t quite fit.

Jasnah relaxed visibly. “Yes, well, it did seem a workable solution. I had wondered, however, if you’d be offended.”

“Why on the winds would I be offended?”

“Because of the restriction of freedom implicit in a marriage,” Jasnah said.

Again, Jasnah misreading things/not being able to anticipate how people are going to react to different things. Also her view of marriage as ‘restricting’ says a lot about how she sees it/probably relationships in general.

Power is an illusion of perception.”

Shallan frowned.

“Don’t mistake me,” Jasnah continued. “Some kinds of power are real—power to command armies, power to Soulcast. These come into play far less often than you would think. On an individual basis, in most interactions, this thing we call power—authority—exists only as it is perceived.

“You say I have wealth. This is true, but you have also seen that I do not often use it. You say I have authority as the sister of a king. I do. And yet, the men of this ship would treat me exactly the same way if I were a beggar who had convinced them I was the sister to a king. In that case, my authority is not a real thing. It is mere vapors—an illusion. I can create that illusion for them, as can you.”

This right here is Jasnah explaining passing, without ever using the word ‘passing’. This is how Jasnah sees social interactions. They’re all illusions, they’re all, effectively, lies. They aren’t real to her. How people perceive others isn’t something that she can fit into her box of neat facts and logic. It’s this ever changing, insubstantial thing, ‘mere vapours’. And though she’s talking here about power and authority, the basic principle applies to literally every single social interaction ever. Aka: the secret behind how Jasnah Kholin (somehow) managed to convince ppl she’s allistic.

The orders of knights were a construct, just as all society is a construct, used by men to define and explain. Not every man who wields a spear is a soldier, and not every woman who makes bread is a baker. And yet weapons, or baking, become the hallmarks of certain professions.”

Actual footage of Jasnah Kholin going to war against social constructs and their flimsiness.

It was a picture of Jasnah, drawn by Shallan herself. Shallan had given it to the woman after being accepted as her ward. She’d assumed Jasnah had thrown it away—the woman had little fondness for visual arts, which she considered a frivolity.

Instead, she’d kept it here with her most precious things.

This is one of my favourite Underrated Jasnah Moments tbh because it says so much about her with such a simple gesture. We’ve established from the past book and a half that Jasnah is pretty bad when it comes to social interactions, and she’s even worse when it comes to displaying her emotions. But she’s not emotionless. She, personally, doesn’t see the value in visual arts, and hasn’t dedicated any time to it herself. Yet she keeps the gift that Shallan gives her. She understands how important this is to Shallan, and she quite literally treasures the art that Shallan gives her, and keeps it with her precious research/notes (and, like, Symbolism with her keeping her sentimental gifts and logic fuelled research in the same place/with the same level of importance/value, except one is hidden, and one is displayed)

And, like, Shall literally assumes Jasnah had just thrown away the picture?? And instead she’s got it kept safe with her most treasured possessions? Like??? The TL;DR version of this point is that Jasnah is horrendous at displaying her emotions/showing people how she feels about them/what they mean to her, but she feels things, goddammit. And now so am I.

What of this Sadeas? she thought, flipping to a page in the notebook. It listed him as conniving and dangerous, but noted that both he and his wife were sharp of wit. A man of intelligence might listen to Shallan’s arguments and understand them.

Aladar was listed as another highprince that Jasnah respected. Powerful, known for his brilliant political maneuvers. He was also fond of games of chance. Perhaps he would risk an expedition to find Urithiru, if Shallan highlighted the potential riches to be found.

Hatham was listed as a man of delicate politics and careful planning. Another potential ally. Jasnah didn’t think much of Thanadal, Bethab, or Sebarial. The first she called oily, the second a dullard, and the third outrageously rude.

She studied them and their motivations for some time.

Right. Now. Correct my autistic ass if I’m wrong, here, but I’m like 89% certain that ‘taking notes on the basic personalities/literally studying the people around you and making notes on the way they behave so you can actually understand them’ is not a typical allistic thing to do.

Shallan turned back toward him. That pride in his voice didn’t at all match what Jasnah had written of the man.

Jasnah can literally predict the oncoming apocalypse by the power of research, can she pin down some basic Facts about the people she’s observing around her? Nope. I wonder why.

“She wouldn’t let me be a mother to her, Dalinar,” Navani said, staring into the distance. “Do you know that? It was almost like . . . like once Jasnah climbed into adolescence, she no longer needed a mother. I would try to get close to her, and there was this coldness, like even being near me reminded her that she had once been a child. What happened to my little girl, so full of questions?”

Two things: one, this is probably (agonisingly) relating to whatever trauma Jasnah experienced as a child and I’ve got Painful Emotions about it. Secondly, Jasnah being very mature for her age/shucking Navani’s influence because it wasn’t what she thought she needed/wanted is, like, not exactly the most tactful/self-aware/socially conscious thing in the entire universe.

“You’re still human,” Shallan said, reaching across, putting her hand on Navani’s knee. “We can’t all be emotionless chunks of rock like Jasnah.”

Navani smiled. “She sometimes had the empathy of a corpse, didn’t she?”

Oh look, it’s canon low!empathy Jasnah: from the words of her own mother no less.

(Also, small note here, as a low!empathy autistic myself: I really love the way Jasnah is written because it complements my own understanding of empathy which is...Fairly complicated. Jasnah isn’t just like none and done here. It’s not that she just doesn’t feel empathy so she doesn’t care? She isn’t characterised as this brutal, unfeeling, robotic ice queen. There are a lot of nuances and complexities here as to how she relates to those around her and I love it.

She obviously loves her family very deeply, and is driven to protect and help them (in a very practical, logical way I might add. Which is typically how I relate to care/love as well. You want a shoulder to cry on? I’m going to sit there awkwardly, pat you on the head, and hope you stop soon. There’s a practical solution to your current problem? Heaven and earth will be moved to achieve it.) She keeps Shallan’s drawing, even treasures it. And I think that she obviously....Feels her lack of feeling (if that makes sense)

See: the hospital scene with Shallan where she attempts to apologise. She’s...Uncomfortable with the emotional aspect of things, and she’s completely wrong about Shallan’s intentions, and actually her actions as well. There’s a block there with the empathy...But that’s obviously something that doesn’t exactly...Sit right with her? She’s quite self-depreciating in that scene, actually, and it’s clear (to me, anyway) that there’s the sense of her being aware that there’s something...Missing. Something that...Doesn’t quite line up. Something that makes her different and stops her relating to people perhaps in the way that she wants to.

Anyway: don’t equate lack of empathy with lack of love: a novel by Brandon Sanderson. God bless. Intentional or not, this is one of the most relatable low!empathy characters I��ve ever read and I’m here for it.

“Chana knows, I wondered sometimes how I raised that child without strangling her. By age six, she was pointing out my logical fallacies as I tried to get her to go to bed on time.”

Shallan grinned. “I always just assumed she was born in her thirties.”

“Oh, she was. It just took thirty-some years for her body to catch up.” Navani smiled. “I won’t take this from you, but neither should I allow you to attempt a project so important on your own. I would be part. Figuring out the puzzles that captivated her . . . it will be like having her again. My little Jasnah, insufferable and wonderful.”

Again, a few things here: this concept of autistic children being far more mature/behaving like ‘little adults’ is actually pretty common. Also the puzzle-solving thing is just. Relatable.

Oathbringer

“Brightness?” Shallan said. “But … Shardblades aren’t fabrials. They’re spren, transformed by the bond.”

“As are fabrials, after a manner of speaking,” Jasnah said. “You do know how they’re made, don’t you?”

“Only vaguely,” Shallan said. This was how their reunion went? A lecture? Fitting.

Jasnah is believed dead for months on end, reunites with Shallan after who knows how long: immediately starts infodumping to her. Shallan:.......’Figured.’

People were always surprised to see emotion from Jasnah, but Dalinar considered that unfair. She did smile—she merely reserved the expression for when it was most genuine.

Jasnah back at it with the only bothering with emotions when they’re genuine. (Also Dalinar getting all indignant about people not understanding Jasnah/mischaracterising her is my favourite)

“They will try,” Jasnah said, “to define you by something you are not. Don’t let them. I can be a scholar, a woman, a historian, a Radiant. People will still try to classify me by the thing that makes me an outsider. They want, ironically, the thing I don’t do or believe to be the prime marker of my identity. I have always rejected that, and will continue to do so.”

Obviously she’s talking about her heresy here, but with a tiny smidge of tweaking it works well for her being autistic, too. She will always be a little bit different, always not fit, always be defined by being an outsider.

“In the face of such an atrocity, I would consider the sacrifice of one or more Heralds to be a small price.”

“Storms!” Kaladin said, standing up straight. “Have you no sympathy?”

“I have plenty, bridgeman. Fortunately, I temper it with logic. Perhaps you should consider acquiring some at a future date.”

Again on the feelings tempered by logic, thing. (Also Kaladin/Jasnah is interesting because they’re basically....polar opposites, and I enjoy the dynamic. But that’s for another day.)

“If you wish, Captain,” Jasnah snapped, “I can get you some mink kits to cuddle while the adults plan. None of us want to talk about this, but that does not make it any less inevitable.”

“I’d love that,” Kaladin responded. “In turn, I’ll get you some eels to cuddle. You’ll feel right at home.”

Jasnah, curiously, smiled.

Jasnah: approves of frank, honest comments. Even if they’re mildly insulting. As long as they’re genuine.

They didn’t talk tactics too specifically; that was a masculine art, and Dalinar would want his highprinces and generals to discuss the battlefields. Still, Shallan didn’t fail to notice the tactical terms Jasnah used now and then.

In things like this, Shallan had difficulty understanding the woman. In some ways, Jasnah seemed fiercely masculine. She studied whatever she pleased, and she talked tactics as easily as she talked poetry. She could be aggressive, even cold—Shallan had seen her straight-up execute thieves who had tried to rob her. Beyond that … well, it probably was best not to speculate on things with no meaning, but people did talk. Jasnah had turned down every suitor for her hand, including some very attractive and influential men. People wondered. Was she perhaps simply not interested?

All of this should have resulted in a person who was decidedly unfeminine. Yet Jasnah wore the finest makeup, and wore it well, with shadowed eyes and bright red lips. She kept her safehand covered, and preferred intricate and fetching styles of braids from her hairdresser. Her writings and her mind made her the very model of Vorin femininity.

Jasnah just not caring about social/cultural gender norms. Jasnah does what Jasnah wants. But also, gender roles, and tbh the entire concept of gender, is a social construct, it’s something a lot of autistic folks struggle with. (Also non-binary/agender!Jasnah just, as a fun little aside)

“Surely,” she said softly, “if Jasnah had known that I’d just confronted a deep insecurity of mine, she’d have shown some empathy. Right?”

“Jasnah?” Pattern asked. “I do not think you are paying attention, Shallan. She is not very empathetic.”

A)- Jasnah probably didn’t notice and B)- low!empathy Jasnah again.

Jasnah rubbed her temples. “Storms. This is why I never take wards.”

“Because they give you so much trouble.”

“Because I’m bad at it. I have scientific evidence of that fact, and you are but the latest experiment.” Jasnah shooed her away, rubbing her temples.

‘I have scientific evidence of the fact I’m not good at mentoring/teaching/with people in general’ actual quote from Jasnah herself. Also, just, the language here? The mentoring/taking of wards is an intimate social relationship in Vorin culture, but the way Jasnah speaks of it she uses words like ‘scientific evidence’ and ‘experiment’ which says a lot about how she views relationships in general tbh.

Also, I think her self-consciousness is something that’s interesting to note. This isn’t the first time she questions her teaching abilities/methods, in fact it’s one of her biggest and most obvious insecurities, it’s something that she’s very aware of. She knows she’s bad at this, and it bothers her.

“Ivory, you think all humans are unstable.”

“Not you,” he said, lifting his chin. “You are like a spren. You think by facts. You change not on simple whims. You are as you are.”

She gave him a flat stare.

“Mostly,” he added. “Mostly. But it is, Jasnah. Compared to other humans, you are practically a stone!”

[…]

“Jasnah?” Ivory asked. “Am I … in error?”

“I am not so much a stone as you think, Ivory. Sometimes I wish I were.”

And again with Jasnah being factual-based when it comes to her decisions ,and emotions based when it comes to her motivations. Jasnah Kholin feels things so deeply I will physically fight you over this matter. Also, given what we’ve seen, it definitely seems as though Ivory/Inkspren/Jasnah’s ideals are concerned with logic/reason/rightness, and that being a defining aspect of her/her order is interesting in the context of her being autistic.

Renarin still lurked at the far side of the room, mumbling to himself. Or perhaps to his spren? She absently read his lips.

Since, as far as we know, Jasnah isn’t deaf/hoh, the lip reading is something she acquired for other purposes. Probably as part of her paranoia/wish to protect her family, but it’d also probably help with auditory processing disorder. Which is basically where your ears hear words fine, but your brain scrambles them up and fails to make sense of them. Also a lot of autistic folks (self included) tend to watch people’s mouths instead of their eyes (bc eye contact Sucks) and I’m not saying I can lip-read, but if I could it’d definitely make life easier.

But when, before this, had she last heard him laugh?

“Maybe,” Navani said, “we should encourage him to take a break and go out with the bridgemen for the evening.”

“I’d rather keep him here,” Jasnah said, flipping through her pages. “His powers need additional study.”

Navani would talk to Renarin anyway and encourage him to go out more with the men. There was no arguing with Jasnah, any more than there was arguing with a boulder. You just stepped to the side and went around.

Jasnah being completely and utterly oblivious to the hidden agenda/undercurrent to Navani’s thoughts which is ‘Renarin is comfortable with the men/is enjoying himself with them, maybe we should encourage that?’ and just responds to her mother’s words and nothing else. The boulder analogy makes me laugh (but also recalls what Ivory said about her being ‘stone’ which is, again, a kind of othering, a setting apart of the ‘normal’ humans, based on how she emotes/deals with things/processes fact.

I’m sorry, Mother. I’ve been dealing with a lot of lesser ardents today. My didactic side might have inflated.”

“You have a didactic side? Dear, you hate teaching.”

“Which explains my mood, I should think. I—”

A lot of autistic folk find it difficult to teach people, largely because, if they explain something in a certain way, away in which they understand, they have trouble rephrasing it/altering it to make other people understand it as well. Can definitely, definitely see Jasnah struggling with this.

Jasnah preferred to work alone, which was odd, considering how good she was at getting people to do what she wanted.

This shocks me to my very core so it does.

Next to her, Jasnah stood with arms wrapped around herself, eyes red. Navani reached toward her, but Jasnah pulled away from the others and stalked off toward the palace proper.

Oh look, it’s touch!averse Jasnah. (she’s really not very touchy feely at all) Also Jasnah not knowing how to deal with her emotions/grief and withdrawing from people around her. Also I’m calling the arms wrapped around herself as a pressure stim. Fight me.

Jasnah met his eyes, chewing her lip as she’d always done as a child.

Jasnah having anxious!stims (that she probably forced herself to unlearn)

“Forget I asked,” Dalinar said, sharing a look with Navani and Jasnah. Navani smiled fondly at what was probably a huge social misstep, but he suspected Jasnah agreed with him. She’d probably have seized the banks and used them to fund the war.

Jasnah ‘fuck your social niceties, I have a war to win’ Kholin.

Suddenly they were young again. He was a trembling child, weeping on her shoulder for a father who didn’t seem to be able to feel love. Little Renarin, always so solemn. Always misunderstood, laughed at and condemned by people who said similar things about Jasnah behind her back.

Mm, who else was ‘solemn’ as a child? Maybe ‘correcting logical fallacies at age six’ ‘no longer needed a mother when she reached adolescence’ Jasnah. And, like, ‘people mock Renarin for his autistic traits...Jasnah is also mocked for having these exact same traits.’ It’s basically canon, people.

Jasnah fell to her knees, then pulled Renarin into an embrace. He broke down crying, like he had as a boy, burying his head in her shoulder.

Also, the fact that Renarin instinctively went to Jasnah for comfort, not Navani, who eagerly mothers literally everyone around her, or anyone else, he went to Jasnah ‘empathy of a corpse, made of literal stone’ Kholin for comfort and support tells me something. It tells me that these two had an understanding. That Jasnah understood Renarin, and that Renarin understood Jasnah, and that there perhaps a reason for that that has to do with their shared brain weirdness.

This is also the first time, as I recall, that Jasnah responds with physical affection. (And this doesn’t undermine what I said about her being touch!averse, she is, but a)- she initiates this contact and b)- it’s with someone she’s clearly comfortable with this level of contact)

Jasnah glanced over her shoulder at the gathering army. “And perhaps … this is one time when a lecture isn’t advisable. With all my complaints about not wanting wards, you’d think I would be able to resist instructing people at inopportune times. Keep moving.”

I have said it before and I will say it again, Jasnah infodumping to an exhausted Shallan in the middle of a fucking battlefield is the most autistic thing I have ever witnessed in my entire life.

These had always been right. Until today—until they had proclaimed that Jasnah Kholin’s love would fail.

And, to summarise it all neatly, Jasnah Kholin, empathy of a corpse, heart of a boulder, whose love in the end never failed her. *wipes tear* my beautiful autistic queen is good and full of love and feeling but just being really bad at showing it to people. We do not deserve her.

TL;DR: Jasnah is autistic af. It’s basically canon. Fight me.

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