#this is a much more complex pattern than I’ve attempted drafting before

[tj-crochets]

Things I should be doing: finishing detective-izing the monkey or doing the ironing for the second quilt for the twins

What I’m doing instead: impulse making a purple bunny

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Witness State & Coup de Grâce | Feeding Habits Update #3

Hey People of Earth!

Before we get into this update, TRIGGER WARNING that this chapter discusses attempted suicide, mental health issues, animal cruelty, toxic relationships, and some nods to starvation, so if these are topics you’re sensitive about, I would skip out on this update!

This chapter was a slight nightmare to draft as it went through many, many iterations due to a real struggle to attain the desired emotional arc, and also because of a few logistical problems. In total, it’s about two and a half months of work as it combines some scenes from the old chapter two while also patching areas I cut with new content. Despite the difficulties, I am so happy I pushed through because the final product is quite strong. Here’s a scene breakdown:

Scene A:

We start at the “beautiful place” AKA the cove Lonan and Eliza frequently visit. The last time we’ve seen Lonan was at the end of chapter two, when he had his mild “public freakout moment” on the steps of a cathedral. 

On the beach, he rests on the shoreline while reflecting on all the things he’s been tormented by since chapter two (wicked children, fathers, parenthood etc).

He sees an illusion of his father who is obviously not there (he’s very dead!) which propels him to converse about him with Eliza (remembering that Eliza and Lonan’s father were once romantically involved).

This conversation goes south as Lonan is able to unpiece some of Eliza’s mistruths until Lonan finally admits he wants to see his father again, insisting he’s still “alive” through the darkroom abandoned in Oregon him and Harrison failed to destroy in ch. 1 of Moth Work.

Scene B:

Lonan watches a moth through the window (that moth motif tho). Here he recounts what occurred at the hospital in ch. 2--the mother and her three kids taking him there, and then eventually being whisked away by Eliza.

Lonan heads to the kitchen to drink an acetaminophen but quickly realizes he’s not alone in the main apartment. His father sits on the couch looking over photo albums, each leaf holding the same photo: the postcard of Eliza that Harrison initially finds in chapter one of Moth Work. This vision obviously does not exist and is prompted by sleep deprivation but he doesn't know that lol.

Seeing this photo and his father prompt him to believe that he can only get away from this feeling of being haunted without Eliza in his life and further bad decisions ensue which I won’t get into!

I explained the meaning of the title HERE.

Excerpts:

Here’s the opening bit which is the most recent addition to the chapter:

The water is never murky, but today it doesn’t sparkle. Like it’s taken a low dose of cyan, it foams pale against the shore, an offering that wets the tips of Lonan’s shoes. He sits under the cove with one hand pressed into the current, each singular wave like a finger tottering over his veins. Today, their beautiful place is only an arched wall of stones and roily ocean.

Eliza is sunbathing. She lies on her back in the centre of the cove, where its mouth opens to a ceiling of sun. On the drive from the hospital, they both remained silent, Eliza’s hands taut like leather around the steering wheel, and Lonan’s head soldered to the cool window. Even when she pulled into the lot of a diner, named after a vague Canadian city or perennial flower, she said nothing, exiting the car to return to it with two crayon-coloured slushies, his red, hers orange. By the time she pulled up to the beach, her drink was half empty, his fully melted, urging against the brim of the cup. He followed her when she exited the car, parked against a row of pebbles, and placed his hand palm-first against the water the moment she lay against the sand and closed her eyes. Now, water puckers over the shoreline and between each of his fingers, a sort of absent massage. The water is a dull, vitamin-like blue. Warmer than he’s expected for the middle of February, pleasantly pruning his fingertips.

This is a direct continuation of that:

The sun has started to set. It flares against the horizon, its orange singeing the water’s blue. Like in front of the church, it fills him, its heat a comfortable grip around his throat. Though it should remind him to keep awake, its warmth lulls him closer to the sand until he rests his head just where the water laps. He knows it says nothing. He knows he has not slept in days. But to him, its rays nurse his skin like the loop of a nursery rhyme, and when he is parallel to the sky, he closes his eyes and welcomes the sun like it’s an infection. As colours pulse underneath his eyelids, water soaks the crown of his head, and it truly is like being buried at sea, just him, the sun, and the water at his perimeter.

The next chapter in this update is chapter four, aka Coup de Grace. This chapter was an absolute joy to write after struggling to get a handle on chapters two and three, and I’d consider writing this chapter to be, by far, the best writing sessions of my life. In this chapter I feel I really figured out the “crux” of Lonan’s character/his darkest secret, and that’s essentially that he believes all children are the wicked stems of adults, a belief he actually doesn't want to have, and actively combats until he sort of becomes absorbed by it. I learned a lot about my boy in this chapter and learning such important details about a character I’ve been writing for five years feels like a gift!

This chapter plays with form/the timeline a bit because we jump around on the timeline, almost like a movie that begins at the end. This was difficult to do in fiction, but I think I pulled it off, and am really happy with the chapter. Bear with me tho as this breakdown may be confusing:

Scene A:

We start with Lonan rapidly making his way to his father’s darkroom which sits in the middle of a forest. He’s brought supplies with him to destroy it.

The first line of this chapter mimics the first line of Moth Work, which you’ll see below.

Scene B:

We jump back in the fictive past to the morning that would’ve occurred right after the end of chapter three. Lonan goes about his morning routine but is disrupted by a loud thud from outside. Anya, the woman he’s befriended from chapter two, has jumped from the roof of the apartment complex. This attempt is unsuccessful.

His first reaction is to run to Anya’s apartment to see if her son, Joey, is okay. 

Scene C:

Less of a scene and more of an internal monologue of Lonan reflecting on Anya’s attempted suicide, and that he feels in some ways, she’s administered her own “death blow”.

Scene D:

Eliza takes Lonan to his father’s cabin to “get him away” from what’s happening at the apartment since he’s really taking the news badly.

Eliza tries to get Lonan to eat something because he hasn’t eaten much since Anya’s news, and they have a conversation about Eliza’s motives in volunteering Lonan to help Anya in the first place.

Scene E:

A flashback where 14-year-old Lonan and his father are at the cabin, about to kill a fish using the ikejime method. His father has informed him the fish is dead, but Lonan knows this is very much a lie.

Scene F:

The fictive present, where Lonan lies on a couch inside the cabin, Eliza tending to a fire. He has a bad feeling (he’s right about that lol)

Scene A2:

We continue the events from scene A as Lonan enters the darkroom, only to find out it’s been cleared out save for three pictures hanging that tell a story and reveals a lot of Eliza’s secrets.

All you need to know about these photos is that it makes their romance feel somewhat like a lie lol.

Eliza finds him at the darkroom despite telling him not to go alone, and Lonan tries to process the new info/secrets revealed.

Scene G:

In the fictive present, Eliza cuts off Lonan’s hair and together they burn each weft. They discuss a few things (his father, the women he’s befriended, future children, mating habits of the praying mantis)

Scene E2:

Back to the flashback where Lonan and his father have killed, cleaned, and eaten the fish. They rinse their hands off in the lake before his father knocks them both into the water.

Excerpts:

This is the opening, ft. the mirroring first line which makes me a lil too giddy:

The darkroom isn’t haunted, but a dead man owns it—and he knows exactly where to find him. Through the woods, Lonan brushes past bushes of gooseberries and wild rhubarb, a gas can sloshing rhythmically in his hands. In his teeth, he holds his flashlight so its beam brightens the pathway. It is not yet dawn.

This is a description of the darkroom that leads to the end of the scene:

He shouldn’t know where he’s going. The forest is so dense and unanimous, a duplication of itself, nothing more than repetitions of the same tree, same flower, same stream. But he doesn’t need to see to know where his feet take him—he doesn’t even need the flashlight. He’s memorized the direction to the darkroom like the pattern of veins on his own arm.

He is not surprised to see it still stands. As if protected from rain, thunderstorms, the fallen trees that crisscross at the walkway; it’s always been a divine place. The air is damp, and particles of mist cling to his throat.

He sets the gas can in front of the steel panelling that makes the door with urgency. He does not need to rush but cannot take his time.

Wildflowers burst from in between the cracks of concrete the shed sits on and he knows each species like they’ve been bred in his blood. Wax flowers, thistles, clusters of asters he’d sometimes gather as a boy and leave as offerings in the heart of the forest’s most prominent clearings, like an offering, or a ransom.

Lonan kneels once the first thread of sunlight leaks between the whisper of trees. He is familiar with this forest, the cabin not too far away, the messages the water speaks to him when he sits at its edge most nights, why the darkroom was his father’s favourite place and why it always will be. So when sunlight hits his eyes, he presses his fingertips against his lips, and looks to the sky for mercy.

Lonan watching his fave TV show that leads into Anya’s jump:

He turned the television onto its usual program while on his last three mandarin segments and looked on as a herd of caribou dotted a waterway. They moved like the current, pattering along the prairie, worriless. He should have heard the part where a wolf caught up to the herd, the same wolf that would later go on to single out a young fawn and silence it with two teeth in its throat like bullet wounds. He should have seen the part where the prey was consumed, its flesh a desperate shade of red. But the thud distracted him. Maybe not even a thud, more like a crash. A sound he felt in his temples, a ringing in his ear, like a chickadee. Lonan set the skin of the mandarin onto the coffee table and stood slowly. It’s his body that moved him, no force of the mind, toward the balcony. In one movement, he unlocked and shoved open the glass sliding door, rucking it forward with his body weight when it stuck. On his lip, he tasted citrus and salt, a mixture of fruit and sweat.

He heard death before he saw it. The way each identical sliding door of the apartment units around him shook open, just like his. What a woman on the sidewalk declared, her tone so shrill, he couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified, something like, “I thought she was a bird—I thought she was a gift from heaven.” The garbled sound of an infant, confused by the sound concrete makes when a human batters it.

We get Lonan’s first response and some Joey and *that stunning motif tho*:

Lonan did not deescalate the stairs to the ground floor to join the growing crowd. He did not call an ambulance or rush to perform CPR. He ran upward, scaling flights of stairs as if airborne, with little effort. Once he reached her unit, it was the tin of madeleines he noticed first, sitting unopened, untouched, dare he thought, neglected on her welcome mat. It’s this that lulled him, freezing him in place for a moment. He recollected nothing of bringing the madeleines to her the evening previous, of leaving them neatly tucked against her straw welcome mat. Innocently idle there, his gift unrecognized.

Joey sat on the couch. The television was on, projecting technicolor polygons onto the boy’s face. Lonan did not register what it was he watched, which animated shapes pounced and danced on screen. Joey did not cry at first. He sat, staring wondrously at the screen like it was a trap door to a different dimension. The socks secured around his miniature feet looked freshly ironed, and his hair smelled like his mother did when Lonan first met her—like coconuts.

The buzzing of onlookers and neighbours sounded like the caribou running. A constant drumming of a snare, a guttural kind of ambience. He thought of Anya the day previous, her desperate excitement to paint over the wall, the way she mixed that orange juice drink, incredulous, experienced. He thought of the sourdough he never picked up, and there on the counter they sat, one torn down the middle like it was ripped bare-handed, the other skewered with a chef’s knife. He thought of Anya’s hospitality, her coy excuses to help them both avoid embarrassment, the way each part of her apartment transformed into gold. He thought of their conversation, Anya’s initial instruction when she left him alone with her son. So when Joey cried, Lonan knew exactly to reach for the remote and tick the volume up until his sobbing quieted, like the last few minutes of a rainstorm, passionately loud, then stunningly silent.

Here we briefly reference 2 Kings 21:6: “And he burned his son as an offering and used fortune-telling and omens and dealt with mediums and with necromancers. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger.”

Anya will never be the mother she once was, in the capacity she longed to be. Joey will grow up without a father and with a mother who cannot mother him in the ways she’d always hoped; he’ll have no one to recreate. That is the real loss—what could have been. Anya burned herself into an offering, administered her own kill shot, provoked her own fate; either life or death, and her fate chose neither.

The following mirrors something Lonan’s sister, Reeve, says in Houses With Teeth about hunger:

The day Anya jumped from her balcony onto the sidewalk below, Eliza took Lonan to his father’s cabin. In a daze, he watched her pack a bag with enough things to tide them over for a month, and in that same daze, they reached the cabin before sunset. That night, Eliza rifled through the cabinets to put together a meal, and her findings assembled as a can of tuna topped with crumbles of saltines—cheap take on a deconstructed pâté.

She served him his dinner on a set of plates he vaguely recognized—terrazzo with a scalloped edge, maybe held a scrambled egg or halved tomato when he was a child. He stared through the French doors, down to the water that padded below. Even when she tried some for herself, putting on her enjoyment in exclamations like “It’s a culinary masterpiece. Refined. Daring. A little spectacular,” she couldn’t convince him to eat. His appetite disappeared when Anya fell from the sky; there would be no hunger as penance.

This is the fish flashback:

Lonan knows the fish is not dead. He is fourteen but not naïve. Sun warms the back of his neck; maggots shimmer over the gummy slick of the water’s surface. Today is what someone would describe as the perfect day. Trees whisper secrets amongst the spines of their leaves. Birds teeter on the neck of birch trees. A butterfly dusts its wings of the shore’s sand and nips at his childish knuckles.

The fish is not dead. This is fact. In his palm, it expands, its gills like the crescent cut of the moon. The fish is not dead. Its mouth kisses the air like it’s a divine thing, each blip of its lips greedy, like the air tastes of gold. The fish is not dead. Its scales grate against Lonan’s palms, shimmering, its prettiness its last defense mechanism. The fish is not dead.

More with this fish memory:

“It’s dead. It does not even know the taste of life. Why save it?”

“I don’t want to save it,” Lonan says. His father’s wedding band digs into his forehead. To an onlooker, it may look like he’s about to dip him forward into the water, not a drowning, but a baptism.

“What do you want to do with it?”

Mourn it, he wants to say. Pity it. Sacrifice it.

The water whistles ahead of them, all the uncaught sunfish gloriously slashing naively in the water. They are unaware of their future demise, and the current demise of their loved ones, bodies all piled into the net as if on display. Lonan’s eyes sting with lake water, a streak of it dripping onto his lip so when his father reaches over him and secures his hand like a marionette around the screwdriver, he tastes salt and doesn’t stop tasting it.

And the end of part A of the fish memory that gets a little gory:

“It dies for us,” his father says, his voice dampened, like the distant blip of the lake. “So we give it mercy in return.”

As the screwdriver’s tip lowers closer to the fish, Lonan licks his top lip and asks, “Why do we need to show it mercy if it’s already dead?”

“Le coup de grâce. A death blow. To end the suffering of the wounded.”

“But it’s already dead.”

“Even the dead still suffer.”

Lonan does not register when the screwdriver impales the fish’s brain. He does not register when his father uses both their hands to slit the fish’s gills with a hunting knife or register the warm spurting of its blood up their knuckles. He stares at the fish’s glasslike eye, and as he and his father gut and scale the fish, puppet and puppeteer, he imagines the way he’ll feel with its head in his mouth.

Here’s a section from the fictive present:

Seven days after Anya jumps off her apartment’s balcony, Lonan lies on a pig’s leather couch his father once towed in from the city, a damp washcloth doused in eucalyptus essential oil pressed to his forehead.

At first, he fears the blinking comes from stars and that the cabin’s roof has been removed. But as he comes to, he smells it, the earthy crack of wood, the wisp of smoke, and he knows the light that pulses is a fire.

Lonan opens his eyes. As he’s thought, he lies on his father’s couch, essenced water dribbling down his temples from the washcloth. Eliza sits hunched on the stone of the fireplace’s ledge, her shoulders ripening under the orange heat. She’s burning something. The scent of scorched film is not unfamiliar to him. Like his mouth, it is dry and acrid, like the lick of a battery.

“You promised,” she says, as if sensing he’s awoken. Lonan does not move, even as the eucalyptus soak drizzles into his eyes.

Eliza no longer wears the parka. She’s stripped to a pearl-coloured camisole, her feet bare and propped flush against the brick. Glossy red lacquer colours her toenails, reflects the light in ovular patterns along its surface.

“A false witness shall be punished, and a liar shall be caught,” she says. “Proverbs.”

Going to leave this tea here casually:

The darkroom was misplaced. This was Lonan’s first thought when he yanked open its steel panel door and entered to reveal its contents. He did not need the glimmer of a flashlight to confirm his instinct. This was not the same darkroom he’d known as a child, or the darkroom he found his sister in, or the darkroom him and Harrison tried to destroy. Everything was slotted away, puzzled back into a configuration so unknown to him, so wrong to him, that the organization felt more like war.

Unlike when he and Harrison had last stepped foot inside of the darkroom, lugging the gas can along with them, not unlike what he did then, the photos that used to string clothespinned in no justifiable order were now taken down. The bricks of photo paper forming a maze around the developing tables, the amber bottles of chemicals—all of it, meticulously put back in places Lonan knew they never had. Under his boots, he did not feel the crunch of glass or slip of forgotten negatives. The darkroom had been swept clean.

Lonan dropped the gas can at the darkroom’s entrance, and removed the flashlight from between his teeth, thumbing it off. He worked his way around the shed like he’d been wounded, staggering, stopping to hold himself upright. Nothing was in its rightful chaos. Expired film lay stacked in a waste bin he’d never seen before. Bad paper cuts had been shredded. The photos he’d been so accustomed to not looking at, all gone, except for three, evenly clipped on the last three lines.

In the distance, an eagle cawed. The stream trilled. Tadpoles cricketed along the embankment.

Lonan approached the remaining photographs like they’d electrocute him. They were displayed one after the other, each on its own line. The first, a picture not unfamiliar to him. Eliza standing in front of a colourful street of vendors. Her loopy signature on the back a jagged indication of where she signed it, most likely wobbling on a train, or in the back of a taxi. He picked it off its clothespin and held it up to a hole in the roof where sun bled through. Nothing had changed from the photo since he’d taken it last year, and he was almost grateful she’d left it fossilized when she took it from his pocket. His gratitude did not last by the time he saw the second photo, so unexpected, he had to glance twice.

His father stood arced slightly behind him, his hands not visible. Lonan knew where they were—one secured around his forehead, the next urging a screwdriver up a stone. Sun scalded the water’s surface, wrinkled it with light. He remembered the song his father whistled as he fried the sunfish on a birch branch, truly less of a song and more of a reminder as he hummed up and down each minor scale, not once stopping to check his work, like he knew better than any instrument.

Lonan plucked the photograph off the line and held it closer. Though he was shaded mostly by his father’s back, he knew they were both in it. He shouldn’t have been surprised when he turned it over to find that same looping signature inked onto the back, smudged, like she’d forgotten to let the ink dry before handling.

It would’ve been easier to think about the second photo’s implications had he not seen the third. He could’ve excused it—a shot taken by a neighbour, though the cabin was remote. A shot that fired itself, the camera discarded on the ground, though it was taken at eye level. A shot signed with familiar initials E.L.K, as if those letters could stand for anything but Eliza Louise Kiang. It would’ve been easier to excuse her presence. To excuse her knowledge of him, to forget she’d ever told him she didn’t know his father had children, that she swore she’d never have been with him had someone informed her. It would’ve been so much easier.

The last photo was not a photo at all, not in the same capacity at least. The ink had gone purplish from the elements but swirled, almost horror-like around the photo’s frame. He could have pretended the white swishes of colour were strands of lace, or the awkward scratch of photo blur. He could’ve pretended to not understand. But there it was. The light funnelling down on the black and white shape so he understood it was not a photograph he looked at, but a child.

I have already shared this line a few times, but it’s my favourite thing I’ve ever written oops!:

When she looked at him, she grinned, and he turned his face to the ceiling where a hole in the roof caved around a branch. The sun’s eye disappeared behind the bullet of the wood, leaving only its outer edges to skirt the sky, a veiling that felt less like an eclipse, and more like evidence of an exit wound. 

Obligatory “I’m the grass” shoutout:

“All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field,” he says without once reading what’s actually written on the page. “Isaiah.”

“Isaiah was onto something, don’t you think? Poor grass, poor flowers—they all die in the end, but they have their God. They have their saviour. Everything dying except for God and his word.”

Eliza cuts another clump of hair. The fire welcomes its feed with haste.

“What does this have to do with children?”

“Do you feel you’re the God of these women, Lonan? Are you their saviour?”

Lonan shakes his head. “I’m the grass.”

And to finish:

After they eat the fish, Lonan and his father rinse their hands in the lake. This is respect. This is self-ordinance. This is a holy act.

His father stoops farther into the stream than he does, water nipping his knees. The sun has disappeared beyond the horizon, the sky now coloured periwinkle, silvering his hair. The taste of sunfish coddles Lonan’s tongue, oiled and briny with saltwater. They share a bar of orange glycerin soap, its scent cloying, like a rotting fruit basket. His father peels the bar between his palms, scrubbing until his fingers disappear under suds.

That’s it for this update! Hope y’all enjoyed! :) I’ll be back soon to update on chapter 5!

--Rachel

[nerianasims]

Billboards #1 1965

Under the cut.

Petula Clark – “Downtown” -- January 23, 1965

I love this song to bits. I don't entirely know why. Petula Clark obviously sings it wonderfully. There's that little bell that sometimes chimes in. There's a pattern to the song that makes it feel like Broadway, which is, of course, downtown. It's a fantasy version of a downtown in a big city. One thing I love about fantasy is a sense of place, and that's what this entire song is dedicated to. It's an unusual subject for pop music, and it's great.

The Righteous Brothers – “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” -- February 6, 1965

How does one even talk about this song? It feels somehow eternal. This is Phil Spector's production at its best. But Bill Medley's singing is the point. This song is one of the greats.

Gary Lewis And The Playboys – “This Diamond Ring” -- February 20, 1965

Gary Lewis is Jerry Lewis' son. Unlike his father, he does not consist entirely of annoyance-producing molecules, but the song's not good either. In it, the guy's fiancee dumped him and he's selling the diamond ring. A boring, bland heartbreak song that belongs three years or so back.

The Temptations – “My Girl” -- March 6, 1965

My mom used to sing this song to me when I was a little kid. I think a lot of parents sing this song to their little girls; it's that kind of love song. Yet it's not irritatingly antiseptic. It's about true love. True love can be a lot of things. This song is every superlative you can think of. Brilliant in every aspect.

The Beatles – “Eight Days A Week” -- March 13, 1965 

It's a good, but not great, Beatles song. Very fun, with a lot of interesting things musically, like the bassline (as usual) and whatever George Harrison does with his guitar.

The Supremes – “Stop! In The Name Of Love” -- March 27, 1965

Finally, Diana Ross actually sounds kinda pissed off. It's also got more of a rock edge. She's still begging, and not threatening to leave the guy's cheating ass. Yet, though there is no explicit threat, I feel like there is an implied ultimatum here.

Freddie And The Dreamers – “I’m Telling You Now” -- April 10, 1965

It sounds like this guy is exaggerating his English accent. Considering the British Invasion, probably. He cackles like a monkey on acid, which is the only interesting thing about the song, which is otherwise a bland love song. Though the cackle is interesting, that doesn't make it good. It's creepy. I don't like this one.

Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders – “The Game Of Love” -- April 24, 1965

"The purpose of a man is to love a woman, and the purpose of a woman is to love a man." Whoo boy. Dated. But the song is 55 years old. Attempting to put that aside, the music is good. The lyrics sound pushy, though. Also it gets terribly repetitive at the end. Meh.

Herman’s Hermits – “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter” -- May 1, 1965

Was it once usual for guys to go to their ex-girlfriends' mothers to talk of their heartbreak after the girlfriend dumped them? This song is painfully "look how English I am! You Americans like to throw money at English pop singers, right?" It wears out its welcome quickly.

The Beatles – “Ticket To Ride” -- May 22, 1965

It's interesting how the Beatles seem to have matured five years in one. I can't imagine this group having performed "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The harmonies and rhythms in "Ticket to Ride" are far more complex, the sounds are more varied, and the lyrics are much more mature. His wife/girlfriend is absolutely determined to leave him, and he seems taken by surprise. Yet there are hints he shouldn't have been: "She would never be free when I was around." He goes on, "My baby don't care." Yet underneath there's the suggestion that she simply hasn't got it in her to care any more, because he's exhausted her. Layers of harmony and layers of meaning. It's an intelligent heartbreak song, and those are rare.

The Beach Boys – “Help Me, Rhonda” -- May 29, 1965

I know Brian Wilson was a musical genius but I usually don't like the Beach Boys. It's the lyrics. The narrator was dumped, now he's begging Rhonda to be his rebound. Lucky Rhonda. Then they sing "Help me Rhonda/ Help, help me Rhonda" about five dozen times. Not for me.

The Supremes – “Back In My Arms Again” -- June 12, 1965

Urgh. Don't listen to the Supremes' #1 hits close together. She's got her man back because she stopped listening to her friends' advice. In isolation, there's nothing wrong with that. After all the songs about rotten cheating assholes whom the narrator is desperate to keep, though, it's super uncomfortable. Also using the names of the two backup singers as the friends who give bad advice is in poor taste. And "Flo, she don't know, cuz the boy she loves is a Romeo"? You solely date Romeos! Taken alone, without the context of the other songs, it's good, though I still don't like the strange insult toward the backup singers. Taken with the rest of the Supremes' hits, though, I'm not happy. Especially considering these were all written by men.

The Four Tops – “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” -- June 19, 1965

The Supremes weren't the only people in Motown singing about being hopelessly in love with someone who treated them badly. That's what this song is about. I like it, though the line "I'm weaker than a man should be" is a bit wince-inducing these days. But it's an honest sentiment about how men often feel they're not allowed to be idiots over love, though that's a near-universal human experience. Anyway, good song.

The Byrds – Mr. Tambourine Man -- June 26, 1965

The original version of this song was by Bob Dylan, but the Byrds didn't like it, so they changed the sound and ditched a bunch of the lyrics. The lyrics they were left with don't matter at all. This is all about the music, especially the guitar. It's mellow without being soporific, groovy without requiring drugs to understand. It's nice.

The Rolling Stones – “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” -- July 10, 1965

The Rolling Stones were almost never nice. They went straight for the gut -- or gonads -- found all the nastiest things that people are afraid to say and embarrassed to feel, and hung them up on the front porch. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" sounds kind of silly today, since it's been played and overplayed so much. But that beginning riff still goes straight to the back-brain.

Two years before, pap like "Hey Paula" was clogging the airwaves. Funnily enough, it's the same subject matter: Goddamn I want to get laid. (The idea that Mick Jagger had trouble getting laid is pretty ridiculous, but anyway.) And then there's the critical bit about hating advertisements. They managed to stick a cultural criticism into a song that's about wanting sex. When you can't get no satisfaction, everything is annoying, and things that were already annoying to begin with start to feel unbearable. The Stones go harder in every way than any #1 before them.

Herman’s Hermits – “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” -- August 7, 1965

And here's the opposite. This song must be meant to be annoying, right? One of my friends and I used to sing it at our parents to drive them nuts, and that was before Ghost. It was their fault for exposing us to it in the first place.

Sonny And Cher – “I Got You Babe” -- August 14, 1965

Cher with Sonny is eternally confusing. Though their marriage didn't last, their love was real, and Cher was heartbroken when Sonny died. But anyway, the song. Sonny saying Cher has a "little hand" is goofy. Actually the whole song is kinda goofy, especially the beat that seems to be made of kazoos. Cher's got this powerful, deep voice, while Sonny has a squeaky little thing, but somehow they mesh. The sentiment is sincere, and a good picture of what it's like to be in a happy relationship. It's good.

The Beatles – “Help!” -- September 4, 1965

John Lennon was only 25 when he sang about being "younger, so much younger than today." But for the Beatles, that could have been two years before. They got so famous so fast and so young, I don't know how any of them lived through it. And that is what this song's about; Lennon called it a "public freak-out." But it's still universal. I love this song, and it helped carry me through some tough times.

Barry McGuire – “Eve Of Destruction” -- September 25, 1965

I remember when I first heard this song on the radio in the car with my mother, I asked her what "Old enough to kill/ But not for voting" meant. That's when I learned people used to not be able to vote until they were 21, though young men could be drafted at 18. I was absolutely stunned, and obviously it stuck with me. When you're a little kid, you tend to think the people in charge are generally fair. Then you find out that's not true at all. That's what this song is about, to me.

The McCoys – “Hang On Sloopy” -- October 2, 1965

Speaking of fair, I'm about to be totally unfair. I hate this fucking song. I had to play it endlessly in middle school band, and then I had to play it AGAIN in high school marching band. And the flute part in the arrangements was the most boring thing that has ever been conceived. I hate this song and I will not be listening to it or thinking about it more than this.

The Beatles – “Yesterday” -- October 9, 1965

Why do people in songs lose their significant others so often because they said something wrong and they don't know what it was? That can't be common. Anyway, this song is beautiful and sad. I'm kind of tired of all the covers of it though.

The Rolling Stones – “Get Off Of My Cloud” -- November 6, 1965

I'm listening to the original mono version of this, and mono sounds very strange these days. I keep wanting to check that my speakers are plugged in. Anyway, thanks to Jagger's marbles-in-mouth singing, I can't understand a word of this song except "Hey! you! get off of my cloud!" and I've never known the lyrics until now. And they're not important. Even the chorus isn't that important. This is all about the beat and the music, neither of which I find interesting for the entire length of the song. Not for me.

The Supremes – “I Hear A Symphony” -- November 20, 1965

A thoroughly happy Supremes song! I think Diana Ross is more suited to happy lovesongs than what she had been singing. She has a lot more emotion in her voice than she has before. The violins are lovely. I love this song.

The Byrds – “Turn! Turn! Turn!” -- December 4, 1965

I have always found this song slightly annoying. The Bible verse set to light pop thing doesn't do it for me. The music isn't anywhere near dramatic enough. This should be operatic, or heavy metal, or something else with serious weight. This is thin.

The Dave Clark Five – “Over And Over” -- December 25, 1965

This song is a bit of a throwback to three or four whole years before. It would have been good then. At this point, it's pretty boring. It's about going to a party he didn't want to go to, hitting on a girl, and getting turned down. The snare drum beat is very repetitive, and so is the melody. A big meh.

BEST OF 1965: "My Girl", with stiff competition.   WORST OF 1965: "I'm Telling You Now"

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

The fallout from the story of Trump calling soldiers “suckers” and “losers” continues. Yesterday, Trump told reporters that military leaders don’t like him because they want to funnel work to defense contractors. “The top people in the Pentagon… want to do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy,” he said. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows tried to spin this as Trump’s attempt to protect soldiers from “the military industrial complex,” a phrase Republican President Dwight Eisenhower used to warn against funneling tax dollars into military contracts. Trump then retweeted posts comparing himself to Eisenhower.

In fact, Trump has made military build-up and selling U.S. weapons abroad key to his foreign policy. His Defense Secretary, Mark T. Esper, is a former top lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon, and last year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared an emergency to push through $8.1 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates after lawmakers of both parties objected to the sale.

Trump’s about-face from boasting how he has built up the military to saying he opposes military build-up seems most likely to be simply another angle of attack against a story that is not dying. Yesterday, in The Atlantic, conservative columnist David Frum published a story titled “Everyone Knows It’s True.” Frum noted that while the First Lady, Cabinet secretaries, and Fox News Channel personalities have all insisted the story is false, the people who worked closely with Trump on military matters have remained resolutely silent.

Frum wrote, “Where are the senior officers of the United States armed forces, serving and retired—the men and women who worked most closely on military affairs with President Trump? Has any one of them stepped forward to say, ‘That’s not the man I know’? How many wounded warriors have stepped forward to attest to Trump’s care and concern for them? How many Gold Star families have stepped forward on Trump’s behalf? How many service families? The silence is resounding.”

Today, Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen released his new book. It, too, spoke of a disconnect between Trump’s public words and his private attitudes. “The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swath of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being,” Cohen wrote. “The truth was that he couldn’t care less.” “Everyone other than the ruling class on earth was like an ant, to his way of thinking, their lives meaningless and always subject to the whims of the true rulers of the world,” he said.

Trump’s apparent tendency to treat women as subject to the whims of others was in the news today as his attempt to get rid of E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit is threatening the rule of law. In 2019, Trump denied he had raped Carroll, a journalist, more than 20 years ago, saying he had never met her and suggesting she was making up the story for publicity to sell a forthcoming book “or carry out a political agenda.” In November 2019, she sued him in New York for defamation.

Trump tried to stall Carroll’s lawsuit, arguing that a president was immune from civil lawsuits in state court, but in August, a federal judge rejected his bid and allowed the case to proceed. Carroll’s lawyers have asked for a DNA sample to match against material on clothing she was wearing when she says he assaulted her.

Today, lawyers from the Department of Justice asked to take over the case, arguing that Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied knowing Carroll and thus should be defended by the DOJ, which is funded by taxpayer dollars. CNN legal analyst Elie Honig called this “a wild stretch by DOJ.... I can’t remotely conceive how DOJ can argue with a straight face that it is somehow within the official duties of the President to deny a claim that he committed sexual assault years before he took office.” He continued: "This is very much consistent with Barr's well-established pattern of distorting fact and law to protect Trump and his allies.”

According to University of Texas Law Professor Steve Vladeck, the argument that Trump was acting “within the scope of his employment” when he defamed E. Jean Carroll is an attempt to get the suit dismissed altogether, because the government itself cannot be sued for defamation. Slate’s legal writer Mark Joseph Stern called the move “shocking and profoundly disgusting… and appalling and irredeemable debasement of the Justice Department, a direct threat to the very legitimacy of an agency that is responsible for enforcing federal law.”

The corruption of the DOJ was in the news in another way today, too, as White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that he has seen “additional” documents from John Durham’s investigation that spell “trouble” for former FBI officials who began the inquiry into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham to investigate the FBI after the agency’s independent inspector general reported that the Russia investigation was begun legitimately (the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee agreed). "Additional documents that I’ve been able to review say that a number of the players, the Peter Strzoks, the Andy McCabes, the James Comeys, and even others in the administration previously are in real trouble because of their willingness to participate in an unlawful act and I use the word unlawful at best, it broke all kinds of protocols and at worst people should go to jail as I mentioned previously," Meadows said.

But observers were quick to note that the White House chief of staff should not have seen any documents in a pending DOJ criminal investigation. Meadows might be making up the story that he has seen such documents. He has been in the news before for a loose relationship with facts: he represented that he earned a four-year college degree when, in fact, he earned a degree equivalent to two years at a community college. Or his comments might mean the DOJ is coordinating with the White House. Neither is good news.

Three drafts of a report from the Department of Homeland Security reviewed by Politico today give some insight into the upcoming election. They warn that Russia is trying to spread disinformation in the U.S., saying that “Moscow’s primary aim is to weaken the United States through discord, division, and distraction in hopes of making America less able to challenge Russia’s strategic objectives. Some influence activity might spill over into the physical world and motivate domestic actors to violence.” The report predicts foreign cyberattacks on the 2020 election, focusing on the personal information of voters, municipal and state networks, and state election officials. It notes that “Russia already is using online influence operations in an attempt to sway US voter perceptions” and to drive down minority participation in the election.

Even more striking, though, under “terrorism,” the first draft of the report says “Lone offenders and small cells of individuals motivated by a diverse array of social, ideological, and personal factors will pose the primary terrorist threat to the United States. Among these groups, we assess that white supremacist extremists—who increasingly are networking with likeminded persons abroad—will post the most persistent and lethal threat” throughout 2021. They will use “simple tactics—such as vehicle ramming, small arms, edged weapons, arson, and rudimentary improvised explosive devices” to encourage violence within the United States.” The report warns that they might well target campaign activities and election events.

According to the first draft report, white supremacists are more dangerous than foreign terrorist groups, which are “constrained.” The next two drafts watered down the words “white supremacist extremists,” calling them “domestic violent extremists.” But all three drafts note that white supremacists have killed 39 of the 48 people judged to have died from terrorism in the U.S. between 2018 and 2019.

None of the three reports refers to any threat from “Antifa,” the loose group of anti-fascist activists the Trump administration often describes as the instigators of recent unrest. Instead, two of the drafts say that rightwing extremists are trying to escalate lawful protests into violence.

The documents were leaked to Ben Wittes, the editor in chief of the national security website Lawfare, a leak that suggests someone at DHS is concerned about the administration’s apparent encouragement of rightwing extremists. (The citation for the first draft of the report is in tonight's notes. It’s worth reading.)

Finally, on Rachel Maddow’s television show tonight, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen confirmed something that many of us have suspected all along. "Trump never thought he was going to win this election, he actually did not want to win this election,” Cohen said. “This was a branding deal. That's all that the presidential campaign started out as, this was a branding opportunity in order to expand worldwide."

Heather Cox Richardson

Notes From An American

[elianabwrites]

100 Days of Posting

Hello Everyone! I know I have been gone for a long time with so many “I’m Back!” posts with no follow through but with this challenge I am going to try to get back into a posting schedule! Now, for my version of the 100 Day challenge I am going to have a few different topics to touch up on since I have so much time in a day to be productive. I will be posting about my writing, and I am still working on the same fantasy series that I have been for years and I’ll talk more about my process with that below! I will also touch upon my hobbies, interests, and interesting topics I am learning about in school. I’m not one to shy away from what other people think are controversial topics and I hope to open up conversations on here! Also, I will be posting about the day before so as to incorporate the entire day into my post and share the most that I can. If you want to do the challenge with me (please do, I would love to hear about what you’re learning/interested in) then please tag your posts with #EB100DaysChallenge and I will do my best to check up on them every day and interact with the community! 

If you don’t feel liking reading the whole thing at least reply with your thoughts/experiences/etc!

What forms of media do you like best? Which ones help you get motivated and why?

For my witches - What called you to your craft and how did you get started? What type of witch are you? and what do you wish the general public knew about witchcraft/Wicca/etc?

If you’re writing a book or series what are some blocks you faced and how did you overcome them?

What is your story about? Brag about it please!

How do you envision your scenes? Do you share any of my ways of imagining and connecting with them?

What are you majoring/minoring/ studying right now? Why did you choose that particular field of study? and what is the most interesting thing you have learned recently and how do you feel about it?

Day 1 of 100 - 04/08/2020

Today was such a low energy day and since my sleeping pattern has been so messed up recently I am up at all hours of the night and sleeping all day. Between public health issues and politics I have been so very distracted and have been having a hard time getting into my school work, writing projects, hobbies, and other interests. 

I’m breaking down this post into these topics:

Miscellaneous & Media

Writing

MISCELLANEOUS & MEDIA

Because of all of this I took most of the day to relax and recharge. I watched Madam Secretary on Netflix (for the 400th time) and listened to some of my favorite albums and songs (Hamilton was definitely in there) and cuddled with my dog. What are some of your favorite forms of media? I love Madam Secretary because it really reflects a lot of what I want to do in my career and I simply love the main character and her family. As for Hamilton, well, not to sound cliche but I really relate to the main character because I feel like I’m always writing (~non-stop~) and I think I have a revolutionary, humanistic way of looking at the world which I believe he had as well. Anyway, I usually try to use these forms of media to get into my school work and personal interests.

I’ve also been getting into learning about witchcraft, not the fantastical version, but rather the spiritual practice. Although not all witches/witchcraft are Wicca it is an example of a belief system that practices it. I am not even a baby witch in my opinion because my journey has only just begun but the thing I find I love most about witchcraft so far is that it is really based on learning. You learn about herbs and the earth, you learn new spells and different forms of magick, there is so much history and diversity to uncover - It is just amazing! Also, the inclusiveness is so refreshing considering as a member of the LGBT community I find it hard to fit in other belief systems.

WRITING

Okay, so, like, I have no excuses. I kind of suck at actually writing this book of mine but it is okay because I have not given up yet (well, I have but I always come back to it!). 

If you don’t know, or don’t remember because let’s be honest its been at least 3000 years, I am writing a series that I have been referring to as Blood Will Run. I have been rather stuck in the plotting and world building stages but I am hoping to finally, FINALLY, move on to drafting it in its entirety soon. 

I would consider myself a rather reflective person and naturally have thought and reflected far too much about why I have been so stagnant in my writing and I came to these conclusions:

I have been so caught up in writing the perfect story, with the perfect characters, writing devices, syntax, plot, etc.

I have been too focused on reading and researching any and all writing advice I can find.

I have lost the feeling of my story and, like many writers have been discovering lately, I think I have been forcing myself into being a plotter when I think I would be far happier as a partial discovery writer, at least for my first draft. 

I want my series to mean something, similar to Fahrenheit 451, Harry Potter, 1984, and Catcher in the Rye to name a few. This is, of course, a tall almost unattainable order which is very discouraging.

So, in an attempt to reclaim my story from my incredibly high standards I am returning to my old way of writing, even though I am deeply embarrassed by it. I am going to imagine my scenes, act them out from my characters different points of view, and write without thinking of how it could be better. Although, because I am trying to write a series I need to do a little more plotting (aahhh I hope I don’t fall into the plotting trap again) so as to understand where each of my books start and end and the pace that they necessitate. I’ll write more details and such about my story in my next post so stay tuned if you’re interested!

Also, if anyone needs help with plotting I love working out plot lines, backstories, and everything related to world building! Send me a message, if there’s enough people maybe we can start a little group!

SCHOOL

I know, I know. School is not everyone’s favorite thing to talk about but I am the biggest nerd and I love it so so SOOO much! I am going into my Junior year of college and am studying criminal justice with a concentration in international and transnational crimes. I absolutely love my major and reading my textbook is as fun as reading Percy Jackson was when I was younger. I chose this major because I hope to one day work for an organization such as UNICEF, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Rescue Committee or anything along those lines. I have always had a need to help people, specifically children and at an international level.

Recently, I have learned that the United States is the only country within the UN member states that has not ratified the UN Convention of the Rights of a Child which is the most comprehensive human rights treaty in the world. Also, in the United States victims of child human trafficking are often those under the governments purview such as foster children as well as children that have slipped through the cracks of society and are homeless and hungry. Although the topics can be rather depressing I love learning about it because it means I am one step closer to, and a little more capable of, and more passionate about helping the world in whatever way I can. I am also very interested in learning about different cultures and how to help them without enforcing my own way of life upon them as a means to further develop their society. Every day I worry about and diligently work against perpetuating the infamous white savior complex and hope that I can avoid it in my future professional pursuits.

I really love talking about schools, majors, minors, and everything related to college so if anyone out there needs any advice or just wants a non-judgmental sounding board for ideas my messages are open to you!

I think I’ll wrap it up here as I’m not too confident with writing posts like this yet. I hope I wasn’t to terribly boring and that at least someone read to this part of the post and if not than I suppose I have 99 more days to entice you to read past my title. I hope you are all happy and healthy and staying inside as much as possible!

[starbudspresents]

DGM 231 - Panthaleia’s Translation Notes

Hello, dear friends and fellow fans! We return to the rubble of Tumblr you with DGM 231, the first chapter of this new year. Thanks for sticking with us!

Please see below the cut for my translation notes and reactions, as per usual. If you have any questions, do feel free to come say hi on Discord at Panthaleia#9705. :3

The Novel I'm Not Writing About DGM & Buddhism

Oooooookay, first things first! The four bubbles across Allen's collar on the cover page say 生々流転 seiseiruten. When spelled 生生流転 (homophonous), it simply means "ever-changing," but when spelled the way it is here (fantastic catch, thank you so much @togaochi​ ♥), it's defined as "all things being in flux through the endless circle of birth, death, and rebirth; the circle of transmigration​."

That concept is much more succinctly described by the Sanskrit term saṃsāra. Now, to preclude confusion: yes, if you look up "samsara" in a Japanese dictionary, you'll get 輪廻 rin'ne rather than this. That said, this term is if anything more specific and descriptive than that one. See also 生死輪廻 seishirin'ne, which has the exact same definition as seiseiruten; think "cell" vs. “cellular phone” vs "mobile telephone." All words for the same thing, with varying degrees of descriptiveness. 

The concept of samsara shows up in several religions (notably Buddhism, Hindu, and Jainism). The one most relevant to DGM by far is Buddhism, and this is far from the first time I've run into it in search of answers.

Crash course on some Buddhist jargon for those of you who aren't familiar:

The word samsara, meaning "continuous flow," describes the beginningless and potentially endless cycle of life and existence, through birth and living and death to re-birth and so on. It could also easily be pictured as a helix, if you'd prefer, and that could in fact make some of DGM a little easier to understand.

(If I may take a moment to get super self-indulgent here: a very related philosophical concept is panta rhei, "everything flows", which is what my "panthaleia" handle is mostly based on. This chapter very nearly literally has my name written on it. IT'S A SIGN. Of.... something. Not sure what, exactly, but IT'S A SIGN.)

Every living thing is trapped within this cycle by its attachments and its ignorance of the truth, which causes great suffering and generates karma, which then affects the shape of one's next life. (Yes, Alma's second name is that for a reason.)

There are a number of branching denominations of Buddhism, much as there are of Christianity, and while they mostly share certain core tenets such as the Eightfold Path, they vary widely in ideals and practice. The influences I see on DGM mostly come from a Japanese variant called Shingon ("True Words") and its predecessors: Shingon is a descendant of Tibetan Vajrayana, which is in turn sometimes considered to be part of the broader East Asian Mahayana umbrella.  

I've talked a little bit about Shingon before, because all the chanted spells used throughout the series follow the pattern of Shingon mantras and Kanda's tattoo is written in Siddhaṃ (theorized to be the predecessor of both modern kana systems, by the way).

Shingon shares its overarching goal with its predecessors: rather than seeking to break the cycle just for one's own self and achieve individual escape from suffering (as in Theravada, for example), one should seek to become an enlightened being — a bodhisattva — and willingly continue to subject oneself to the cycle in order to help those who are struggling and thereby bring the whole world closer to moksha ("liberation") and subsequent/synonymous nirvana one step at a time.

Obviously, reincarnation and transmigration play a massive role in DGM. Let me list just a few of the ways in which this particular concept is a running theme throughout the story:

The Noah fragments being reincarnated into new bodies without also reincarnating the human souls they previously coexisted with;

The Earl's victims having their souls transmigrated in the bodies of their loved ones to rebirth them as Akuma;

The Third Exorcists, also transmigrated into new bodies to bring them back (Helix magic in general, really, including the Atuuda);

Nea's transmigration into Allen (not a rebirth, but an avoidance of death while waiting for a chance at rebirth), as well as Allen's regression to childhood via de-aging and memory loss;

The original Earl (Adam in my theories, fyi, in case I reference that later) deliberately rebirthing himself in smaller pieces for goals as yet unknown;

The Bookmen keeping records of each iteration of the repeating narrative, ever-changing but eternal themselves;

Even fukkin Komlin, lmao, constantly destroyed and improved and remade.

So many others? Soooo many others.

The eureka moment (for me): this chapter is subtitled "Curtain Rise," as in the beginning of a stage play when the curtain goes up. If you'll think all the way back to the very first chapters of the series, you may remember that the Earl's Scenario is meant to bring about curtain fall... on humanity.

Looking at that in the context of samsara, that whole thing suddenly looks very different. Our heroes assumed that the Earl's victory would result in the destruction of the world, the destruction of humanity, but I've never bought that idea from the very start. When the curtains finally close on samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth, humanity will not be "dead" in the tragic sense, but free. Nirvana =/= death. Nirvana is the peace of being one with all, knowing all, loving and being loved by all without the need for suffering. It isn't "heaven" in the Christian sense, but it is an end to suffering, without also being an end to existence.

Tragedy and suffering are the consequences of remaining bound to the cycle. Directly using the energy of them in order to break the cycle creating them, as the Earl claims to be doing with the Akuma, is a very very Vajrayana idea, and fits seamlessly into my existing suppositions as to what the Earl is doing and why. Here, have a relevant quote:

Negative mental factors such as desire, hatred, greed, pride are not rejected as in non-Tantric Buddhism, but are used as part of the path. As noted by French Indologist Madeleine Biardeau, tantric doctrine is "an attempt to place kama, desire, in every meaning of the word, in the service of liberation."

 And another, from the Hevajra tantra:

Those things by which evil men are bound, others turn into means and gain thereby release from the bonds of existence. By passion the world is bound, by passion too it is released.

One more, same source:

One knowing the nature of poison may dispel poison with poison.

Bluntly put, I think the (original) Earl was an enlightened soul — a bodhisattva — who voluntarily returned to the cycle via deliberate rebirth into multiple ignorant beings in order to help heal the struggling world of its suffering via bringing about enlightenment viiiaaaa SUFFERING HARDER. Good Plan™?

Here are a few more related meta posts from a few years ago, just so I can find them again when I inevitably decide to delve deeper into this:

Helix magic will be the key to the plot

It's all happened before

Destroyer of Time

2.) I'm so delighted to see Mana as he was when Allen knew him before, genteel and whimsical and delighted with Allen's existence. It's easy to understand why Allen would become so attached to him.

3.) Raws for the "Therefore I write many of them, as if God can see me doing so. / As if He might find me" lines: こうして神さまに見えるように沢山書くんです　／　見つけてもらえるように  These don’t sit well with me, so I’ll probably change them in the future. The gist is that he’s drawing them in order to draw God’s attention to him.

Raws for "Here I am": 私はここにいる。@togaochi and I concur that he uses watashi here instead of his own preferred boku because he's teaching it to Allen, and means it as a more general "I."

Anyway: hooooo boy, here's some more evidence for the Two Gods theory. And how!

It seems pretty safe to assume he's not calling out to the Order's God, since that god would pretty happily wipe him off the face of the earth. The Noah have called that god "false," though, and expressed their intent and desire to kill it, while still referring to a "God" entity of their own whom they regard as being on their side (or perhaps, they're on its side).

Mana calling out to the Noah god to come find him, without remembering why he wants that, is very interesting. I wonder if and how anyone answered him.

4.) I have a strong hunch that Mana's "secret alphabet" is also related to Siddhaṃ, but that language is written in such a complex way that it's actually impossible for me to be sure without just... learning it. Which! To be clear! I fucking well might. WATCH ME.

5.) This entire scene is so much to me. How furious they both are that the other won't just let themselves be saved/protected. Allen wanted to leave Kanda behind so he and the others would be safe from everything that's hunting him. Kanda wants Allen to stay put so they can save him from what he can't fight alone. All that rage and frustration, because they care.

Quick note: in the first draft we initially posted on Imgur via our Discord server, I had the subject wrong for one of Kanda's lines here, which I caught and fixed. Sorry for any confusion that may have caused!

5.5) ETA: Forgot to mention that I’m fairly sure the beautiful Grecian-style temple they’re hanging out in is referenced from St. Bernard’s Well, again in Edinburgh. Excuse me, “Edinston.”

Thanks to an enterprising anon, we have a much better match for that structure: the Dugald Stewart Monument! 

6.) "maybe I'll go sucker-hunting" CARD SHARK ALLEN LIIIIIVES, where's Tyki when you need him (to lose his shirt again)

7.) fjkldjlkagd the turnaround where Allen finally cracks and is like "fine!! you want in?? IN YOU GET. no take-backsies! happy now???" and Kanda's like "yep, here I am" and neither of them have ANY IDEA how to deal with ANY OF IT. Kanda struggling to pull Allen's story out of him without throwing up his hands and quitting. Allen baffled and twice as guarded as before, put off by Kanda's uncharacteristic interest.

So beautiful, it brings a tear to my eye. (Actually, many tears. So... so many tears.)

8.) That apology, which I never thought I'd get, for Allen having seen what Kanda would never have consented to show him. It wasn't his fault, and they both know that, but the fact still remains that it was a violation, and I've always always wished for that to be addressed somehow and HERE IT IS. RIGHT HERE.

I want to tattoo that look on Kanda's face onto my brain.

9.) And then they're FUCKING INTERRUPTED, AGAIN

But Allen's "ask me again when we're done dealing with this" was such a promise of trust that I can't even be that mad, augh.

Onward to the bitter end, I guess!! Haha!!!! · ͜͜  · - 

Thank you all so much for reading and following along! I’d like to tip my hat to Kougeki Scans, who love this series too and are helping us spoil the fandom rotten. :P  Again, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to either find us on Discord HERE, find me on Discord at Panthaleia#9705, or use the comment box on MangaDex! I’m always happy to geek out with fellow fans. <3

[foolishmeowing]

Introduction to Time and Qualia in a Cruelly Pluralistic Reality

Scattered across a couple years of posting, I've been leaving notes on an interpretation of reality designed to either resolve or clarify a number of outstanding metaphysical problems, especially regarding qualia, time, and causality -- fundamental cosmological issues which at this point tend to invoke defeat, fear, desperation, and dismissal due to the difficulties involved in a topic which upsets the foundations of the language used to discuss it, the amount of effort already spent to reach this point, and the lack of engineering applications which might entice people to study, say, M-theory to any equivalent level of difficulty. Nevertheless, the world, anomalously, exists, and that validates metaphysics as a real line of questioning.

What this post is going to attempt to do is write as clear of an outline as I can of the anomalies I've been covering, given my lack of polished essaying experience. I will try to consolidate my synonyms and place them together naturally, with some bolding. These terms come from a mixture of continental, analytical, and classic sources, as well as natural word-pairings. They may differ from the same phrase used elsewhere; This is normal in philosophy, as it is a sparsely populated field which mutates quickly from point to point, and modern analytical departments only just began the task of indexing known options a couple generations ago. “Horizon” mutates with with every flicker of an ontologist’s coping mechanisms. To limit space and executive function, many present and historical alternatives to the systems as presented will be glossed over. Many (especially formal properties bound within their scope) can be adjusted without breaking core points. Some are incompatible with core points, and may be considered disproven, too narrow to account for evidence, or in need of attention. One reaches a point where there are many valid paths, and the only way forward is to take your torch down a long path. Because this is a slightly reader-friendly outline, arguments won't appear in as full form as they do elsewhere or upon request, so the phrasing is somewhat prescriptive. I hope it's clear enough that it might make sense without a metaphysics background after a few attempts; It’s literally a one-draft infodump.

Ontology is the study of what it means "to be." Its problems are cosmological on a scale which sets the context for causality, and are not limited to the grammatical properties of "being," though that is a primary starting-point for study. Ontology is usually only understood publicly in terms of the behavior of formal properties, which are traits which exist as regions in a world built out of relations between such parts, such that the properties of some parts make the relations defining the other parts necessary restrictions according to the common behavior of the whole pattern. Scientific laws, math, and language when it's being used to behave as if grammatical rules were the primary source of meaning, are examples of theoretical formal properties. There are many different ways of interpreting meanings in these disciplines according to the basic rules we build models on, but they converge in an attempt to describe properties in as purely logical terms as can be done, within human limitations. Theoretical properties, however, are abstractions made by cognition, and cognition is a process which results from the ground of the very causes which we are attempting to study. By being a product of how causality comes to give us physical consistency in general, the many ways of modeling basic formal laws aim to trace over truths about real formal properties.

Chemical and biological properties emerge from physical properties. If you wrinkle some common subatomic particles out of spacetime, the way they fluctuate about tends to pool them into blobs of common stable patterns called atoms, which are shorthand for small and complicated processes which tend to fall into a reliable larger-scale property. Parts of human intuition and scientific methods like to understand the world in a way that makes all properties of any kind that exist in any way be the consequence of a series of more complicated patterns emerging and pushing against each other around a simple universal property, objectivity, as if the fact of the world being logical were a thing in itself, a monad, which is something so elementary that it doesn't contain specific parts, and can't be said to change because it exists in a way that lacks the context for how we understand change, but we still say it does exist by tracing the properties of the physical world as obeying a common logical symmetry which validates the causes and consequences we find. This kind of monad transcends formal reality as a universal. Physical events are instances of objectivity. The difference between an instance and a universal is an ontological difference, which is a difference so fundamental that it refers to different entire kinds of way that something can be said "to be." Because grammar is a formal theory, the way "being" normally behaves in a sentence reflects the way instantiated objective events exist, but grammar is a loose description after a wet and tangled system shaped to endure constant mutation and error, and we can recognize deep differences and point towards anything we can get ourselves to think, even if we're in a world which doesn't restrict itself to formal patterns. We can recognize a different kind of reality for a transcendent property by seeing its effects, in this case the universal fact of any physical event to follow logical causal patterns.

Physical science makes models of physical properties by modeling the logic of causality, the pattern of necessity among formal events according to their unfolding from a core property of symmetry. There exist incompatible theories of logic which nonetheless reveal common patterns of objective behavior, convergently suggesting but not proving truths about how real formal properties work. For the past hundred years, we've worked largely with axiomatic set theory, where a variable handful of basic ideas about how to include or exclude objects from being organized into groups (x = x becomes explicit) simulates a starting point for emergence which doesn't behave like a monad at its core, but achieves a similar process of emergence-relations. Once a set theory is started, you can unfold principles where "the set of all sets containing x, y, and z, where x, y, and z are not each other, is The Number Three" (the way of constructing numbers differs according to the axioms used in a set theory, but nothing alters the nature of formal properties as being a network of logical tension), create a whole mathematical system, and express physical patterns you find in its terms. The relation between objectivity and formal events, or between starting axioms and more complex physical laws, is called ontological priority. In ontological monism, such as materialistic monism (physical monism really, but few people adhere to Aristotelian matter), a universal property is said to come "before," in a special ontological sense outside the context of spacetime, anything which is an instance of it. Many monistic ontologies exist, and they are not always physical or even formal. Many forms of monotheism are often, but not always, ontologically monistic, though it is normal for everyone to have special theological techniques for describing how divinity might escape even the concept of a center of being. There are also approaches to formal properties which do not use the mathematical Platonism of the transcendent monad, though I haven't seen them differentiate themselves very thoroughly, and because I am breaking from monism anyway, and they're designed to result in similar models of physics, they won't affect much here.

On its own, this kind of Platonic monism can make working models of physics, but it doesn't provide a full cosmology. Instantiation describes the relation between events and the universal principle which transcends them, but it doesn't describe why the unchanging and prior symmetry principle would have sufficient reason to be encircled by a complex pattern which can be divided into particulars. It fulfills needs following some observations, but there is nothing to make a secondary reality which obeys it necessary. It also only describes formal properties, and we can observe properties that cannot be formal, which is the source of most of the difficulty concerning consciousness, time, and being. Although the Platonic instantiation model of form can be replaced without disrupting other parts of my ontology, my break into pluralism allows additional support for the leeching a formal realm out of a formal monad.

There are other kinds of ontological difference, and because they come from ways of existing more basic than any purely logical system's range of meaningful effects, every ontological difference must be painfully understood in its own case. Outside of forms of monism, ontological differences push the limit of what might ever be described, as they don't interact according to their different identities unfolding from a common point, nor do they behave like one has ontological priority; They entangle as a secondary effect which must be investigated according to its property of accessing them, which will make more sense when I get to the example which causes this problem (qualia). First, I have to specify the formal aspect of time, which gets spiffy in pluralism. Ontological priority is an example of time distinct from spacetime, and because "time" refers to changes or differences which are distinct according to the direction they are traced or produced, any ontological difference found will play into a fuller interpretation of time. Some aspects escape our being, such as the succession of priorities, but some entangle us in the pluralistic confusion, such as the qualia problem. These lead to confusing questions about a "moving present" when issues that arise over ontological divisions are confused for patterns entirely within formal time, and sometimes become dismissed as linguistic quirks, though they don't behave as arbitrarily as "spandrels" should.

Physical reality has a version of time which behaves like space in that it's an expression of formal properties distinguished only by its particular shape. Formal time is a dimension in spacetime relative to a given entity, also called "entropic time," because "entropy" is the name of the texture which makes following one direction in time appear different from going in the other even though the world tends toward balance. Entropy is the tendency of things jostling around arbitrarily to go from a state we interpret as orderly to disorderly, because we interpret orderliness according to how something fits a shape meant to behave a specific way, and most ways something can change randomly will leave that ideal. Once something decays, the details of its form lose their value; It is more of a general resource to be recycled or disposed of, and this holds true down to the specific thermodynamic definitions of entropy as available energy being dispersed into ambient heat. At our scale we find ourselves in a world where things fall and shatter but don't jump up and bond, and even in biological evolution, where statistical effects are creating lines of tightly organized patterns -- life -- the net entropic effect of the planet absorbing sunlight into temporary structures which decay into scraps and heat keeps the same pattern of decreasing order on the large scale. Time in this sense measures how many events are "computed," so to speak, by reality when you trace a line, and like space essentially measures the increasing mathematical complexity of possible truths as "distance." Why we live in a world where spacetime is warped into this shape instead of something flatter follows the anthropic principle, where local spacetime holding the shape where simple formal properties have an opportunity to shuffle into the cognitive processes of complex organisms assessing their environments. If there are much vaster expanses of more probable shapes of emptiness further from familiar spacetime, they are lacking in processes such as becoming bored of those regions. This kind of awareness, of the proposition of the self and the environment as formal objects in a causal system as understood by a thought process built from that system, is sometimes called "consciousness," as in "being conscious that you're an animal," but propositional consciousness is different from the properties we focus on in phenomenology, which are now popularly known as qualia. This is where things get hard.

The mind-body problem is old as balls, probably older, but it has mutated drastically over history. Before modern psychology, and for that matter modern mathematics and ontology, our professionals had some messy models of causality with the laws of motion separated from "inherent" properties of chemicals and the like, and the phrase "mind-body dualism" still provokes an outdated picture where psychological properties of a person's thought processes were opposed to the physical properties of a body, and an undefined "free will" may have been on the mental side along with qualia. In modern philosophy, psychology is understood as emerging from biology and thus being a specific pattern in formal reality as a whole, along with the physical body. Psychology deals with behavior and cognition, and cognition is thinking in the sense of a chain of formal causes, which in the case of animal brains includes moldable systems which can turn bits of information into proposition-like patterns reflecting outside events according to the limitations of the causes which shape the system. What this means is that propositional consciousness is only formal awareness; The psychological objects in question are, as with anything physical, built out of the necessities of their relation to other objects in an ongoing network of relations, of a whole universe holding its force between its parts according to the symmetry of objectivity.

This is important, because there are "mental" properties which are not formal, and thus aren't psychological, but whose differing nature reveals them despite the strangeness which grows as one investigates. The conundrum they create is not a new one, being clearly specified at the start of modernity, having a longer history of study in Indian philosophy, and sometimes appearing with minimal differentiation in the Western classics. While their presence was never lacking and their incongruities sometimes apparent, though lost in eras when every theory came in floating fragments, their ontological importance is revealed especially by a strong grasp of the formal properties of reality, which must be understood as pervading reality as thoroughly as we do among the common ontology of physical sciences and the behavior of competing theoretical formal systems gaining traction on formal reality. We study the convergence of possible formal theories and estimate the nature of objectivity itself. We see the common structure of parts making necessary and possible facts about other parts. We desire consistency, and hone in on it. Our skill of memory, not only a collection of representations but also the marks made on us in general, relate to the probabilities of facts in the direction of the entropic past, while other parts of our thought bear the mark of patterns more and more likely to predict facts in any direction. Objective reality reveals itself only by its capacity to relate logically-imitable forms, though of course any given instance can provide barriers to available clues or skills.

Qualia are sensations in the sense of their actual, colorful presence. This doesn't just refer to sight, sound, et cetera, but also the sensation of thoughts moving and pressuring one another, or how recognizing a picture as a duck or a rabbit not only comes with pseudo-knowledge of what it is, but shifts the experience in a way that has sensual presence. The key to defining qualia is their immediate presence in live first-person experience, as qualities which are known by the uniqueness of their very presence. Qualia as such cannot be "hallucinations of qualia," because they are the presence of feeling itself, rather than the facts these qualities are interpreted as reflecting about the objective world of networked causes. It is true that qualia will change in line with the formal objects (brain signals in our case) they trace, but their obedience in undergoing the unique changes they embody according to the changes one follows along in formal reality is not a fact which provides any structural basis for a property to be a quality of substantial presence. The embodiment of the unique selfsame quality necessary to complete the meaning its own being as a presence is alien to formal existence; We relate it to the formal causality it traces, but presence-of-color isn't a property of a system of logical forces.

No theoretical formal system can make even a simplified model of this kind of presence, but they can show part of its disobedience without touching its actual ground. In math, the objects you study are relations among logical necessities, facts about how logical consequences in general would behave in a given formal situation, with errors according to how badly core axioms simulate the instantiation of objective events from the objectivity principle. The reality mathematical models trace is the relation of formal instances in general to the universal objectivity principle, and models of physical situations exist as specifics entirely within the range of possible mathematical facts, as is the behavior of emerging instances of a universal, and formal reality is observed to behave in a manner parallel to the essentials endpoints by which theoretical formal systems make or break themselves. Formal things exist by the tension of being a part of a whole, but there existence is made only in the tension itself; Even a complex instance has no substance, only necessity. When you write 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, both sides of the equation refer to the same universal situation (which is the aspect of any formal event in which a property will include the objects {a, b, c, d, e, f} where none are the same), and when you write 1 + x + 3 = 6, you make a necessity for for x = 2, but you could just as well make the same necessity with 1 + y + 3 = 6. It doesn't matter whether you use x or y to = 2, because they're only tracing over the fact in the context of the system of relations. Qualia seems to hold fast to physical events in our brains, but it traces over formal properties arbitrarily, the way x or y does. This is why there are famous philosophical teasers where people say "how do you know my red isn't your blue" or suchlike, because the presence of the uniqueness of quality in our real experience isn't a hollow nexus of the possible necessary states of other regions; They lends us their own kind of existence, and cannot be analyzed as a mechanism, but studying their ontological difference from formal objects, we can better understand other metaphysical problems which are normally stalled by adhering to purely formal ontologies.

This kind of presence, where "present" doesn't mean a location defined in a formal network but rather the glow of present experience, where its unique quality as something real is also the knowledge of its reality to its person, is an example of philosophical immanence; I tend to call qualia immanent qualities, to emphasize their way of transcending formal properties. The study of qualia is called phenomenology, which makes modern usage of "phenomenal properties" another term for qualia. Phenomenological suspension, or phenomenological reduction, or epoche, is any attempt to hone in on phenomenal properties by suspending your beliefs about the world your experience is a part of and observing the qualities which do not necessarily imply what you thought. If this sounds like a Buddhist meditation, that's because it can be; I've heard mention from Hindu and Buddhist students of phenomenology that there is a history of meditations on this topic. The method I explained here consists of identifying the behavior of formal properties in general, in order to better identify a large range of what could constitute a systematic idea of any kind, to bracket away and reveal the unaddressed properties of immanence. Staring off into space paralyzed in terror by the inescapability of the cosmic anomaly shining within your very soul is also a more meditative form of suspension

Phenomenal consciousness is the existence of qualia, the concern over which is popularly called the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and questions about it deal with ontology. It is different from propositional consciousness, which is a psychological awareness of one's position in local formal reality, that is, awareness of one's animal (or robot or whatever) context. Both phenomenal and propositional consciousness are referred to as "subjectivity," which is as problematic as phenomenology's obscurity ever is. "Subjectivity" refers to first-person awareness, which both are in their own way, but it usually carries connotations specific to propositional consciousness, which is that it is a small mind in a big world and can't know things for sure. Objectivity/subjectivity in formal reality is the difference between the unknown truth and our thoughts, but objectivity/subjectivity in ontology is the difference between form and immanence. Calling things "subjective" can invoke this confusion as much as the word "consciousness."

When you make statements about formal properties, you do so using “modeling” in a way which speaks to the ability of the object in question to be broken down into internal and contextual parts; networks of formal relations identical to the same truth. Statements about non-formal properties do not “model” them according to grounding structure, and though “qualia” are still the “object” of linguistic statements, the properties modeled in a discussion are the points at which they transcend formal properties and lead to statements about the general world capable of featuring such phenomena.

Although we only have reports of immanent qualities from other humans with similar patterns of propositional consciousness, other humans are the only pieces of spacetime we can reach a certain depth of communication with, and there's no good indication that any particular feature of propositional consciousness is necessary for a region of formal reality to inform immanent qualities. Immanent qualities find their ontological ground independently from formal properties, so a description of when immanent qualities would be found associated with a region of spacetime (like a flux of brain signals) is not a question of a physical system creating qualia, but rather creating circumstances which don't contradict the means by which formal and immanent qualities meet. Some suggest that such regions are anywhere a width of information in spacetime has an indeterminate interior effect which can change its outcome, as in the case of uncollapsed quantum blahblahblah, but neurologists consider it doubtful that indeterminate quantum effects can localize enough interference to regularly affect brain-scale cognition, and the separation of the information of quantum effects on the micro-scale from the causal chain of information in the human mind is a real separation. It may be that rather simple entanglements of formal properties at any scale could be reflected in immanent qualities, and that propositional consciousness only ever granted the ability to gripe about it.

The difference between phenomenal and formal properties is the modern form of ontological dualism, even when formal properties are divided into universals and instances. Dualism as such is more observation than theory, as the assumed starting point is the formal monism which produces logical language for science and expresses alternative in terms of how they deviate. Qualia appears to be an extra "kind" of thing, and when you give up trying to reconcile the properties you have two piles. It gets worse, though, so much worse. The inability of formal properties to generate immanent ones also means that it can't generate a way to refer to them and give sufficient reason for their unique contact. Likewise, because immanent qualities are not objects formed of tension against an environment of information-states, there is nothing in immanence to cause a complex of tensions, and immanent qualities are absolutely particular to their presence; They are not universals. Because they cannot necessitate each other, they cannot make a meaning which would "request" the impossible other to entangle with. Therefore, there must be properties which are neither formal nor immanent, which can be known by investigating the relation it invokes between immanence and form. This means I'm breaking dualism into a more open pluralism. They can be further studied by observing from phenomenological reduction that formal properties we take for granted often don't apply the way we expect and drawing what inferences can be drawn; Much of the progress in ontology following phenomenology consists of critiques of formal properties such as ontological priority being found less necessary than thought possible for alienated ontological properties.

At this point many lean towards granting ontological priority to immanence over form, which is a monism called called phenomenalism, or taking cue for other non-formal priorities to both in monistic idealism and others. They don't get much further than feeling some kind of monism as necessary and considering some other kind more likely than simple materialism, but a desire for monism has historically been a good motive for philosophical and scientific progress. I prefer facing Ockham's nightmare of necessarily plural elements.

Ontological plurality may help with a question leftover from the monistic version of the universal/instance relation, where instances seemed to obey the priority of the universal, but didn't have sufficient cause for there to be an unfolded level of formal reality at all. If being a part of a whole completed the reality of qualia, qualia would not be of the closed tunnel of a human experience; The fact of having a quality to shine demands its distance from the very idea of a whole, whose part have their meaning in terms of complicating from a common origin, full of need and empty of presence. It may be that the seemingly arbitrary existence of instantiated objective reality, separate from objectivity as a universal, finds its cause in the coexistence of immanence and the monad itself. The monad need not change or recognize the ontological alien as real; Collisions across ontological divisions do not need to be reciprocated, as symmetry of tension is a formal pattern. The effect which touches both immanence and objectivity may join objectivity as a paired ontological priority to instantiated objectivity, leeching the need for instantiation under its ability to access the immediacy of immanence, while the unchanged objective monad remains the central reference of objective causality and, to itself, still truly being in a state of not having done or coexisted with anything at all.

Because there are unique immanent realities found alongside the tracing of entropic time which cannot be reduced to its formal nature, phenomenal time is an ontologically distinct element of the time-complex. It is suggestive of the idea of "presentism" in time, where some kind of moving present moment is real, and which is opposed to eternalism, which is the idea that all possible times exist at once as a stable array of facts. Eternalism hews to the simple and symmetrical behavior of formal reality, while presentism is usually framed in a formal context which makes it flounder even as people rub their chins at the phenomenological issue that haven't yet grasped. Phenomenal time is rarely represented comprehensively in discussions of presentism/eternalism or A-series/B-series time, which draws confusion through purely formal assumptions.

Although qualia are informed by a common objective reality, they are not made from instantiation. This means that immanent qualities do not relate to each other the way formal objects do, along a continuum of one whole spacetime would compose them. They are, rather, accessed in a common encounter with the objective world, and just as their grounding principle is their own unique presence, they have an ontological difference between each other; Immanent qualities don't contain a negative tension of that which is not present, the way formal entities share the tension of a formal continuum, because that is a property which emerges in the separation of a whole. As immanence is beyond the context of form, so too are they beyond each other, yet inevitable by their common binding to an objectivity by a process they have no means to contradict. It might be more accurate to say the apparent common nature of qualia is a product of a filtering for access to one particular way to non-contradictorily exceed the properties of form, according to the behavior of horizonal properties.

It is valid to say there is qualia for the feeling of moving through time, unique to the interflowing context of ongoing experience, but rather than the present motion, there is also the horizon, which is the reality of the fact that these ontologically alienated properties have a reality beyond one's own deepest grounding. Horizonal properties are not inherent in alienated entities; That would suggest the behavior of a formal ontological priority being sufficient to build immanent qualities. Rather, just as alienated immanent and formal properties lack the context to create each other, so too do they lack the context to meaningfully contradict a property which does not contradict their necessities but rather produces an ontologically unique situation which must be studied according to the anomalies we find rather than possible constructs of pure reason. What we observe is the capacity of a non-immanent, non-formal property to access that which is alien to it and each other. It breaks from the behavior of formal properties in its refusal of priority, but so do immanent qualities. It breaks from qualia's substantiating presence, but so do formal qualities. Its exotic behavior may be less impossible than imagined, but phenomenology takes some getting used to in the first place, and this is the bleeding edge for me. The ontological difference between experience and the horizon is another example of an asymmetrical "relation" not formed by common tension on common ground. The horizon imposes distance upon immanence despite itself and questions the self-sameness of its reality without contradicting it. This transcendence is different from the transcendence of a universal from an instance because it isn't the transcendence of a prior; It is a vulnerability to the beyond, and it is this opening from the utterly external which provides another aspect of the time-complex as the horizon: ekstasis.

"Horizonal properties" isn't a phrase that's floating around, but "horizon" is. It's a slippery word, but it ends up as the best label I have for the non-formal, non-phenomenal property of the vulnerability to being drawn into a relationship with things they have no ontological origin with. Husserl and Heidegger both wove the concept of horizon into ontologies which habitually tended toward some manner of monism -- attempting to unite phenomenal and formal properties under a common ground they all manifest, even if it wasn’t their ultimate conclusion. Husserl was very speculative about ontological statements following from his focus on phenomenological methodology, but he steered toward building formal properties out of the behavior of phenomenal reality, while Heidegger’s unity was more teleological, looking at the synthetsized results of the alienated modes (in other words, human reality as we are, with entanglements across ontological boundaries) as if it justified them in a convergent function in disclosure, which I find still carries too much symmetry in relations across ontological differences. In both of them, their concept of horizon blend aspects I have separated between formal and horizonal ��(Husserl's protention/retention and Heidegger's thrownness/ecstasies), and they developed proto-formal versions of past-likeness, future-likeness, or parallel-likeness around the nest of immanent properties. I take cues from Levinas and clear things into an open pluralism moreso than most phenomenologists, and my emphasis goes to showing properties neither formal nor phenomenal nor of common ground with them, with a focus on asymmetrical intersubjectivity.

There is another anomaly which calls to effects neither formal nor immanent. Although it can become inescapably apparent that immanent qualities demand explanation, and would be difficult to return to the denial of, the immanence itself shouldn't be sufficient cause for us to notice it and discuss it as target of propositional awareness. We can see our awareness of it as its presence, but as discussed, that isn't a property which should affect any arrangement of formal necessities. This helps push some towards idealistic monism, trusting the secondary position assumed for formal properties to be concealing the truth of immanence creating external necessities, but gives little opportunity for further development and often keeps re-entangling supposedly derived formal properties into the nature of "monism" itself. Our ability to bring phenomenology into our actions gives the image of a teleological cause, a need for a reason for the possible paths of physical causality to converge into one as unlikely as a sustained and coherent field of study around a phenomenon which shouldn't partake in the causality people speak from. For the forcing of this understanding of immanence into our discourse, this gnosis, we have the appearance of a hand of fate, which means a topic which needs to be unpacked and scrutinized. Simple tricks of overlapping necessities can create teleological illusions, as in the anthropic principle’s world of seemingly improbable life-sustainability being outlined by the lack of experienced consequence for expanses which don't produce life. This should go hand in hand with the study of horizonal properties and how vulnerabilities to exotic effects can be filled or restricted. Note that any anomaly in the causality of our discourse’s context in animal causality, such as the ability of this non-formal but inescapable qualia situation to become a topic which can be honed in on by human study, means the potential contents of our reasoning differ in a certain drastic way from anything we understand about the limits of potential linguistic analysis, and we cannot declare any particular metaphysical question as forever beyond us.

Because we find ourselves in a world where apparently fundamentally alienated properties are aligned in non-contradiction, our existence as living souls is not only our common drive of animal objectivity, or the substantial light of our present experience, but the capacity of the horizon to call on that which is not of our deepest core or the height of possible wisdom. Between us is not only the common ground of our animal motives, or even only the ethical weight of substantial experience which descriptions of biological pain-signaling are hollow of, but our reaching each other across and as a separation as utter as the separation of the mortal from the eternal.

[frangipanidownunder]

#20 from the angst prompts?

Paradox: fic

20: “Notwith the person from the past in tow.” 

Sorry it took a while to get to this. It’s a bit angsty, a little tiny bit NSFW but not too much and a little bit fluffy? Tagging @today-in-fic

It’s a paradox. That she’s more in love with him now thanshe has ever been. Than she should be. There’s a thesis there somewhere, shethinks, as she’s driving to the restaurant. Something about time dilation andvelocity. How he has propelled her forward and held her back. How he has beenboth a burden and a blessed relief.

She parks and wonders if this is the right move. Or if it’sjust an ill-considered attempt to recapture something from the past, like theX-Files. It’s not the same. It was never going to be the same. It should neverbe the same. Life’s journeys should look and feel different, even if they aretaken on the same path. You’re supposed to learn. Learn something.

It’s a paradox. She knows so much about him, but he’s alwaysa surprise. He’s holding a book in his hands, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief Historyof Time. It’s got a gaudy yellow bow tied around it. And under the ribbon istucked a slip of paper.

“You are now a paid-up member of the Book League ofBethesda. Two years, no less.”

“You bought me a membership to a club I don’t want to belongto.” His arrogance is not even arrogance, it’s just the way he is. His is aspecial brand that has no apt descriptor. Though she does imagine the Germanswould have a word for it.

He holds the door open as though his generosity counters hisego. It’s a paradox.

“You sound like Groucho Marx.” He is grinning. It softensher edges. Every damned time.

She slips past him and the Maitre’D leads the way. The book doesn’tfit on the beautifully-dressed table. She puts it on her lap.

“Their next reading book is Go Set a Watchman.” He is still grinning.She is still softening.

“Mulder, what sort of reading club leaps from an explorationof the structure of the universe to a novel of dubious provenance that isprobably just an early draft of the magnum opus of the author?”

“I don’t know, Scully, but I bought you a copy of A BriefHistory of Time because the one you left at our house got ripped to piecesduring the altercation with those Russians. It’s not on the Book League ofBethesda’s reading list.” He sips water. “Well, not for the next six months.See,” he says, stabbing the paper, “there are the coming titles.”

Our house. Ours. She orders sweet and sour salmon. Hechooses grass-fed beef. As they wait, she watches the orange flame of theelegant crimson candle on the table, wave and snap. Wave and snap. Slow, fast.Slow, fast.

“Something plain, Scully. Sometimes life is so complicatedthat food should just be simple.” He’s back to grinning.

The wine leaves a purple film around the glass. It slidesdown the curved sides and she watches, fascinated by the pattern.

“Wine legs,” he says.

“I’ve only had one glass, Mulder.”

“Or wine fingers, or curtains or even church windows. It’sbecause the alcohol has a lower surface tension than water. Capillary actionmakes the liquid climb the sides of the glass and both the alcohol and thewater evaporate.”

“But the alcohol evaporates faster,” she says. “I know,Mulder. But it’s still a wonder, isn’t it?”

He’s not grinning anymore. He’s serious and her stomachcoils. “Do you ever think about twins, Scully?”

Her mind flashes back to the St Rachel Motel. She fuckedMulder. At the time, it felt so good and it just a bit a wrong. It felt soself-loving and just a bit selfish. Then the bizarre events of Mulder punchingthe daylights out of his other self and her giving her own doppelganger a peptalk about psychic manifestations and latent hostilities. The whole case hadleft her flying on a high and weighted down by guilt.

               “I can’tsay I do,” she tells him, swallowing the flame of shiraz and her lie. She wasfire under his touch that night. That morning.

               His footis tapping the floor. “If twins are separated at birth what makes them seek outlives that are so similar, marry people with the same names, feel the pain of injuriesof the other?”

              “Sometimesthey don’t, Mulder. There have been studies that show…”

              His facesets. His foot stills. She stops talking. An image of him under her, face openfor the reading, lips reddened by hers, hips bucking up so she was filled withhim. She dips her chin to her chest and tries to suck in air without it seemingdesperate.

              “Arethose two people themselves or are they individuals?”

              “Andhere I was thinking you’d asked me out to wine and dine me.” She can stilltaste the salt-tang of his and her own arousal, coating her lips and her throatas she took him in her mouth. Joining.

              “What ifwe have two selves and each grows at a different rate?”

              “Twoselves?” She sips more wine and snaps back to the now. “Is this a pop psychologyquiz?”

              “What ifthe person I was before is not the person I am now but I am still just one?Where does the other self go?”

              “Isn’tthat just experiential learning, Mulder? We all change as we go through life.You can’t separate what you’ve lived from where you are heading.”

              “Andwhat if your future is joined with another?” His hand slides across the tableto take hers. His fingers are always softer than she expects. It’s a paradox,that for all his suffering and pain, Mulder’s touch is so gentle. “What if youwant to shuck off your old self completely so that this other person can seethe new version of you. The one that is better, more fully rendered; the onewho is ready.”

              His eyesclose a moment, flicker shut like he’s waiting, defensive, for the blow. Thearrogant self has disappeared, she thinks. He’s a paradox, this Mulder, thisman she loves too much and not enough. How would she ask him to ever not be hisconfusing, bewildering, multi-faceted self.

              “Then Iwould say that the future looks bright,” she says, drawing herself closer tohim. Wax, transparent from heat, tipples down the side of the candle and theflame flickers. The wax settles at the base like petals. “For this otherperson. And your freshly-shucked self.”

              “Ithink,” he says, “that you are ready, Scully. I know I’m ready. I think it’stime. Come back.”

              She leansback, letting his words sink in. The bow catches her eye and she glances at thebook, solid on the floor. “There’s a section in A Brief History of Time thatdiscusses Feynman’s theory of sum over histories. Where each particle has many histories.”Come back. Come back. To go forward means to go back. It’s a paradox. She feelsa sting of tears and shivers. “If we have many histories, does it not go thatwe have many futures too, Mulder?

              He’salmost back to grinning. Framing the narrative of their relationship in thesafe haven of supposition and theory. “And that we need to start down one pathto see where it goes. But that any number of forces or influences or chanceoccurrences can disrupt that journey?”

              Shenods. “We’ve had a similar conversation before,” she says and thinks againabout bodies joining, about curves and contours and planes and angles. “Aboutfate, about destiny.” He remembers. She can see it in the slight dip of hisforehead, the way his eyes darken a shade in the glow of the candlelight. “Hawkingposits that there are arrows of time. The first is thermodynamic, where theoverall disorderliness in the world increases over time, so despite our bestefforts to create order, the energy used has created more disorder.”

              “Soundslike my life, Scully,” he says, chuckling.

              “But thesecond arrow is psychological, where our sense of time flows in one directiononly – that’s why we only remember the past.”

              “So, that’syour complicated way of saying that we can only go forward if we learn from thepast?”

              “It is,Mulder. Life in the past is complex, but the future is simple. Because we can’tsee it yet.”

              “We cango forward but not with the person from the past in tow?”

              “I trulybelieve that we can go forward safe in the knowledge that wherever that personis, that other self, from the past, they stay behind us. They follow, but they’llnever overtake us.”

              He isgrinning again. Full on wide smile, teeth on show, dimples striped across hischeeks. “I like the thought of you always being on my tail, Scully. Whip inhand, ready to get me up to speed.”

              Shelaughs then. “What would Freud make of us, Mulder?”

              “I’m notsure I’m that ready, Scully.”

She walks up the stairs and checks out the covers of thebooks wedged against the banister. It’s only when she gets to the fourth stepthat she sees they are all the same – different covers, but the same novel. MobyDick. The story of two men: one obsessed with the hunt, the other desperate tounderstand what to make of the prey and the predator.

              “Youknow, Mulder. There are some theories that Moby Dick is much like physics. Ahab’snarrative is linear, his velocity is on a straight, immoveable line and Ishmaelis a force of digression, a disturbance.”

              “And yetit’s a book of everything that makes us human,” he says.

              “It’s aparadox,” she whispers.

              Hesnakes his arm around her waist and kisses her head. “Welcome home, Scully.”

[neednothavehappenedtobetrue]

got some positive response so I’m doing Fic Amnesty and posting all the things in my drafts that won’t get properly finished probably ever. 

this was my attempt at a one-shot. content warnings for ghosts and violence. it’s a little long. 

Cassie was sketching idly when the man in the hospital gown walked into her office. When the living walk into Cassie's office, they wince or cough, assaulted by the smells of sandalwood, anise, wormwood, and lavender. For ghosts, who can't ask directions in the maze of the police station, the smell is a signpost. Also, he's wandering around barefoot in a hospital gown, which would have gotten him flagged on the way in here if anyone else could see him.

"Hey, mister sir, how are you doing today?" Cassie asks. The man gives her a despairing look and makes a weak gesture with one of his arms. 

"Not so great. Okay, well, why don't you have a seat, I'll fix you up something warm to drink, and we can talk when you're ready to talk."

The ghost slumps into one of Cassie's chairs. Cassie pours him a saucer of milk, heats it on the hot plate, and stabs herself in the finger with her pocket knife. She lets a generous few drops of blood land on the milk and sets it on the little table beside Mr. Ghost's chair. He lets his hand fall into the dish and a little color starts to come back to his skin. 

"You just say hey when you're ready to talk," Cassie says. The ghost nods a fraction. He must be really and properly tired out, Cassie thinks. At least a few days dead.

"We got one for you, Lieutenant," says Charlie, standing awkwardly in the door of her office, handkerchief over his face. The rest of Tau Ceti's police department treats the resident ghost talker with unnerved respect to her face and it doesn't matter what behind her back. 

"He beat you here," Cassie says.

"He? No, we found a woman's body, still warm. Red dress, dark hair. Strangled. Pretty sure it was the boyfriend. Captain said to call you in, just in case."

"All right," Cassie says. "Mister sir, you stay right where you are please, and I'll come back and get you as soon as I can. I can't help you if you wander off." She squeezes a little more blood into the saucer and Charlie looks away. 

The ghost shrugs minutely, holds one palm slightly up. Where else would he go? She leaves him, follows Charlie back to the crime scene.

The ghost of Lena Pavel is vibrant and kicking. "Hey! Those are my computers, don't you touch them. I didn't give nobody permission to cart off all my stuff. What is this?"

"Hi there, lady ma'am. My name is Cassie and I'm a witness liaison. Can you tell me what's happening here?" Cassie asks. The trick is not to let them know they're dead until you've got as much as you can out of them. 

"I woke up on the ground with cops crawling all over my apartment. Cops who don't listen!"

"They're astonishingly bad listeners," Cassie agrees, ignoring the snorts in response. "My job is to listen. Can you tell me what happened before you wound up on the floor?"

"Some guy was mad as hell. I know him. I know his face, but I can't remember his name. Must have clocked my head. Maybe I ought to go to the hospital.I knew exactly who he was. I said, hey, it's not your business what I do for a living."

Names are the first thing ghosts lose, their own, other's. Faces last longer. "Could you sit with me and help me get a sketch of the man's face?" Cassie asks.

"I can do you better. The webcam was on, three-sixty degrees. He'll be on there. If you can get that sweaty cop away from my expensive camera set, I can show you;"

"What's your password?" Cassie asks, a second before Lena Pavel reaches for her laptop and her hand moves through the screen. 

She stares."I'm not... " she says.

"You're very recently deceased, which means you're going to have some trouble with your motor skills for a little while until we can get that taken care of." Cassie says. "I can input your password for you, you just have to give it to me." The trick is to talk faster than your ghost can think, when they're teetering on the edge of realization. Don't lie, just keep it moving. 

"M0xie?719?" says Lena. She spells it out. Cassie types it in. The camera has been running all this time. By the time the tech has rewound the video, done facial recognition and announced that, in fact, the murderer was not the boyfriend, but the victim's uncle, irate to have found his niece on a camming site, Cassie is sitting with Lena and a cup of bloody tea, because there's no milk in the apartment. Lena bends down to sip thirstily from the edge of the glass as Cassie walks her through Sorry You're Deceased 101. No, there's no coming back. No, Cassie doesn't know what happens once you pass. Yes, Cassie can call someone of Lena's choice to handle the funeral arrangements. Yes, Cassie will attend Lena's funeral. Cassie attends a lot of funerals. 

Lena winks into nothing as soon as Cassie helps her write a letter to her mom. Some cases are simple like that. Get the nice lady to solve her own murder and that pretty much takes care of unfinished business. 

Cassie heads back to her office to deal with Mister Ghost.He's still there. The milk has turned a kind of greyish color and she dumps it down the drain, refills it, pricks her finger again. She does not bother asking the ghost his name, or how long he's been dead. It just upsets them when they can't remember.

"Did you come from City Hospital?" she asks. The hospital has its own ghost-talker who should have caught him then, but stranger things have happened. He shakes his head.

"Do you feel up to talking?"He opens and closes his mouth mutely."All right then. I'm gonna do some paperwork and make some calls.".

She watches him out of the corner of her eye while she files the Lena Pavel paperwork and logs his arrival, a form mostly full of question marks underneath a drawing of him. Bare feet, thin face, underweight, hospital gown with a pattern of blue stripes. He glances around occasionally, but doesn’t move much. She calls Mina on her personal phone.

“Hey, babe, I’m going to have to sleep here tonight, I’ve got a guest. No, not that girl who got murdered on the news, she passed on. We’ve got to do a night interview.”

Mina sighs. She doesn’t rehash the old argument, but she lets the sigh do it for her. “If you’ve got to,” she says. Mina runs an apothecary and keeps strict nine-to-fives. Sure, there’s work for the civic-minded witch that doesn’t require regular overnights, but Cassie’s always been good with ghosts.

“All my love,” Cassie says.

“Love,” Mina says, and hangs up.

All right. Cassie tugs her cot out of her closet and puts do-not-disturb on her door. She makes herself a little dinner on the hot plate and watches a grainy holoprogram until she feels sleepy. She pops a pill to make sleep stick and then conks out on the cot. 

She wakes up in her dreamscape, an eclectic museum. A few standard exhibits, some dinosaur bones and old tech. Paintings of everyone she’s invited here. Miscellaneous scenes behind glass. She finds Mr. Ghost staring at the lake in its exhibit case. 

“Hey there,” she says. No need for the fast talk. This is a man who knows he’s dead.

He gestures at the lake. “How does this work?” he asks. “It doesn’t look like a scale model. The perspective’s wrong.”

It’s a small lake, a muddy pathway around it, two rickety docks, an adrift canoe. Grampa left it here when he came to say goodbye. Cassie has never actually seen a lake. She’s never been out of Pollux, Tau Ceti’s big, hot, dry city. 

‘We’re in a dream, sir. Things don’t have to work quite right.” 

“I don’t like magic. Bunch of egos swanning around taking shortcuts,” he says.

For a living normal, Cassie would have a rebuttal to that. Cassie does not bother with the dead.

“Well, here you are, sir,” she says instead. “Now what can I do for you?”

“I came to report a crime. I came to the police station to report a crime,” he says.

“What crime, sir?”

“Unlawful working conditions leading to my death.” He says.

“Where do you work?”

“I was a driver. I drove a... big bus. But that’s not how I died. I came to report a crime.”

“All right, sir. Let’s see if we can establish some identity. Were you married, or did you have kiddos?” She does not ask him his name.

“I had a daughter. She had leukemia. Her name was. Fuck.”

“It’s normal, sir.”

“She had brown hair. She had leukemia. She was... she loved pickles. She loved lemon pickles. Her mother named her after her grandmother. I don’t. She could read early for her age. Why can’t I remember her name?”

“It’s very normal sir, you’re doing great. Look at the clothes you’re wearing, please.”

He looks down. “I wasn’t in the hospital. They had a private hospital under the complex. I was there. They treated my burns there but I must have died. There was a bad lab accident. A chemical spill. There are regulations. We didn’t have protective gear. I thought if I lived I was going to report it. And then I was up and moving around again, so I thought I’d report it. I figured out I was dead when I had to deal with the elevators, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do so I came to report it. It’s against the law not to provide employees with adequate protective gear, isn’t it?”

Damn. “It usually is, sir. I’ll look into it, all right? Do I have permission to contact your family?”

“Sure. Yes.”

She walks him down to the museum cafe, sets him up with a chicken sandwich and some pickle chips. He looks just like a man here, underweight, barely dressed, but as solid as she is. 

“Any questions?” she asks.

“When do I go somewhere else?”

“I don’t know, sir. You did a very good thing, reporting the crime. You did all you can do for now. If there’s anything else, I’ll let you know, but you did plenty. It’s commendable what you did, sir.”

“Do some of them leave when you tell them that?”

“More than a few. Look, sir, I can transfer you to a postmortem therapist if you want, or you can stay here while I pursue your case.”

“Here,” he says, and eats a pickle chip. Damn. She doesn’t mind when they stay, but Mina does. She’s starting to mind that Mina minds so much. It’s not like they bother, or snoop, or peep. They stay inside Cassie’s dreams when she’s not in the station. 

She wakes up. The candle tree has gone out. She walks over, lights them, washes up in a just-cleaned public restroom, swallows a plate of canteen scrambled eggs, and goes back to her office. There’s a note on her door about a body in the morgue making paper clips twitch, so she meanders down there and finds the ghost of a teenage boy loitering by his own corpse, trying to flick scraps of paper at the coroner. As Cassie approaches the boy manages a slightly more robust throw and a shred of yellow paper hits Dr. Lai square in the nose.  

“Ugh. I told them we had a lively one down here. What took you so long?”

“Witness interview. You got a name for our friend here?”

“You were sleeping.” Dr Lai hands over a file. 

“Yeah, witness interview. Hey, Harry. How’s it going tonight?”

“I’m fucking dead,” the kid grumbles. 

“That’s right. Did you see the car that hit you?”

”I don’t want to talk to the fucking police. Do I get a lawyer?”

“You’re not in any trouble with us, Harry.”

“I ought to get a lawyer. I’ve still got rights.”

“You were hit by a car, Harry. You’re not being accused of anything. I can help take a message to your mom or your girlfriend if you need.”

Harry tells her to fuck herself so she leaves him down there. He’ll come up when he wants to talk. He’ll follow the smell. Meanwhile, she has an interview to document and log. 

She searches the last week’s obits for men with young daughters, searches the daughters for current and former cancer patients, finds John Snyder, survived by his daughter Emily, age eleven, who beat leukemia last year, with a little help from, damn, a NemoCorps employment-collateral loan. 

Four years ago, NemoCorps moved their headquarters to Tau Ceti, chased out of New York by the lawsuits. They’re a pharmaceutical company and most of their employees are also their debtors. If you owe them enough money they’ll hire you on the spot and take it out of your wages every month. Snyder died nonspecifically of “an illness.” She combs through the past month and finds four more people in their thirties and forties who died of “an illness” with outstanding medical debt.  Everyone knows about the fierce pneumonias that sweep through the Nemo employee dorms every few months. People who get out come home with skin conditions and wracking coughs, chronic fatigue, vision and hearing loss, cancer. John Snyder came to her to report a familiar crime. But Nemo is a multi-trillion dollar company, providing jobs out here in the boondocks, Nemo is a generous pillar of the community. Nemo is a machine guarded by its own vast output.

“I’ve got to talk to your family. You coming?” she asks. Snyder shakes his head. She doesn’t understand that, ghosts who don’t say goodbye. Still, she goes out without him to visit Mrs. Snyder, who is polite but terse. No, she doesn’t think a crime was committed here. His body was donated to science, with her permission, so no autopsy can be performed. She is transparently afraid and Cassie cannot bring herself to press the issue. 

“Give him our love,” she says. People are like that with ghosts sometimes, distant, like the ghost isn’t family. Once they’ve been buried or cremated or donated or “donated,” whatever’s left is maybe an acquaintance, if that. People who can’t speak directly to ghosts are sometimes desperately keen to talk to a ghost-talker and sometimes... not.  

Cassie goes back to the precinct. She calls up Nemo. A ghost’s testimony, legally, is supplemental, not enough on its own to warrant an investigation. People say ghosts get confused, and that’s true, but misleading. Cassie has never known a ghost to lie. They’re too disoriented to make anything up. What they bring to you is true as rocks. She gets a copy of his medical records, from the on-site medical bay where he was treated and died. Pneumonia. Yeah. The debts will be transferred back onto Mrs. Snyder, who has six weeks to demonstrate ability to pay or show up at NemoCorps for her brand new job. 

Cassie comes home at the end of the day and Mina makes her sleep in the guest room  because the ghost occupying the inside of her head is a man. In dreamtime, she sits in the grim little museum cafe and explains to Snyder that there’s not a whole lot she can do, at this point.

“You expect me to go now?” he asks.

“You’ve done all you can do. If there’s anything else I can do, let me know.”

“I came to report a crime!”

“And I logged it, sir, and if a living survivor ever comes by and sues, they’ll be able to use it as supplemental evidence, but there’s not a whole lot you can do on your own. I recommend you let me refer you to a postmortem counselor.” 

“No. There’s someone else I want to talk to. Bobby Stokes. You said a living survivor. Well I’ve got one.”

It rarely ends well when the dead crusade, but she has an obligation to try. 

The next morning, Harry has gotten bored of the morgue and saunters up to her office to describe an orange Ford Gravity, license plate number he didn’t fucking see it, he was too busy dying and all. She passes this tidbit onto Traffic and carts two ghosts with her out to see Bobby Stokes, a wheezing man who wears heavy gloves. 

[gapimnydiaries]

Diary Entry #21: White Gays are better Filmmakers: What I learned about inclusivity from being a Gaysian filmmaker

Dear Diary,

“The Less I know the Better” by Tame Impala was playing on Apple Music as a good friend consoled me. I was in a space no larger than a handicapped single-stalled restroom. There was just one tiny single bed, a small TV and what you’d call a closet (but wasn’t really). There weren’t any windows and the only source of light I had was a mood lamp I bought at Ace Hardware™ in a mall called Grand Indonesia in Jakarta. I remembered I was trying to play it cool when, in truth, I was crumbling on the inside.

Earlier in the day, I had a Skype call with television development executives from Los Angeles who initially hired us to write a “diverse and progressive” series. But after a series of drafts, we found out that, like most people in a place of privilege, they weren’t as woke as they thought they were. After whitewashing and slashing the storylines that explored the complexities of being a person of color in America, they wanted us to reduce the women characters to serve the interests of the straight, male protagonist. “It’s a post-racial Millennial world” they explained. To make matters worse, the entire call was filled with attempts to other-ize me, from asking what it’s like to live in a rural village in Singapore to pointing out that my iPhone text-tone -- “ding!” -- was some kind of Asian praying bell.

Afterwards, I really wanted to email them and write: this type of behavior is ignorant and unacceptable. But, considering that I really needed the job and I had a writing partner who told me to let it go because we didn’t want to be rude, I remained silent. The silence of course, was really painful because obviously, this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. In fact, it happens all the time. When people like me speak up about micro-aggressions or feeling left out, the people in power get angry and then I have to take care of their fragile feelings instead of validating my own. I’m always left feeling silenced, powerless and usually attacked for being “oversensitive.” The only thing I could do at the time was to call my friend and be temporarily consoled while listening to Tame Impala (Yes, I should’ve picked a better band for the occasion).

By this time, I had been alone in Indonesia (not Singapore) for 5 months. I was deep in pre-production on a short film called, Pria. During this time, I’d traveled across Java for months and interviewed countless gay Indonesians who either lived or had lived in rural areas. The film ended up being an amalgamation of their experiences told from their perspective, the perspective of the minority. So, within this context, the experience of that not-so-woke-ignorant phone call felt like such a step backwards, especially after being in Indonesia and realizing how ignorance of minority experiences can have such negative consequences. With these LA Execs, I met privileged people who wanted to promote and capitalize on the “global and diverse” world that “we live in right now,” but were so out of touch with the reality of what diversity really means that they ended up, perhaps unknowingly, becoming part of the problem.

◆◆◆

The author directs a scene on the set of Pria

Curious villagers watching the playback monitor during filming

The author and crew filming a scene in the morning

The author and producers stroll through the village “set”

◆◆◆

Out of all my intersectional identities, my “Asian-American-ness” has always been the hardest to fully embrace. I was born in Indonesia and moved to the US in elementary school. In Indonesia, I’m a minority because I don’t look Indonesian and I’m not Muslim. I’m mostly ethnically Chinese but none of my family members know any Chinese or anything about China. When I returned to Indonesia to do Pria, the locals there thought that I was from anywhere BUT Indonesia. When I came to the US for the first time, people were confused AF. They’d mock my accent and would always yell out “Ni Hau!” I’d try to correct them and tell them that I’m not Chinese, but that only confused the shit out of them. They would counter with the only two other Asian countries they’d heard of: Japan and Thailand (I mean really, if you wanna mock someone, get educated, people). There were definitely other FOB children at school, but most, if not all of them, were actually Chinese or Korean so they’d form their own communities out of their shared culture and language. Plus, the word FOB never felt like it applied to me; I came here on a plane, not a boat.

◆◆◆

(Far Right) The author with his siblings at a mall in 1996

◆◆◆

While I had such a confusing time trying to fit within the definition of Asian American, Gay was something that was always clear. That’s not to say that I didn’t have a hard time; like most queers, it was a process. But I always knew that I was gay and there was no question where I fit within that definition. So, when I started making “professional” short, queer films in 2011, I felt like I finally found a community that embraced me for me, for my work, and not the way I looked, or sounded, or how I presented myself. The LGBTQ film community has always supported me. Since I started, my shorts have been accepted to most LGBTQ film festivals domestically and internationally. But a troubling pattern began to emerge as I attended these festivals year after year. The majority of the films I saw were not diverse and mostly affirmed and celebrated the str8 white male ideal. There was always a lack of diversity, not only in the films, but also the filmmakers and organizers. I would always be one of the few (if not the only) minority filmmakers on the Q & A stage.

◆◆◆

The author attends a photocall at Frameline39: San Francisco LGBT Film Festival in 2015

The author at the Q&A for his short film, “Pipe Dream” at the Castro Theater, San Francisco (June 2015)

◆◆◆

This didn’t bother me at first, but after continually facing micro-aggressions at these LGBTQ festivals, in clubs, apps, and other Queer spaces, it started to really impact the way I saw myself and how I fit within the community. It already sucked enough having to deal with ignorant str8 people, but it’s much more hurtful when it comes from the community that you thought you were a part of. A community that promotes itself as being inclusive, a community that knows what invalidation feels like, and a community of film festivals run by, well, mostly people who identify as LGBTQ.

When I arrived at the centerpiece party for the 2017 Frameline: San Francisco LGBT Film Festival, the majority of the attendees were Gay White Men. I felt like I had just stumbled into an exclusive Mean Girls clique. It honestly felt like I was in a Gay club trying to scan for anyone with an interest in talking to an Asian. The way that everyone looked at me, just looking right through me, made me feel like I didn’t exist. When I told them about my short film from Indonesia, I was met with all sorts of assumptions. One sleazy, white producer from New York (who was trying to fuck an Australian actor all night) told me, “I’ve always wanted to go to Indonesia, it’s so exotic!” He then patted me on the back, “It must be so tough for the ladyboys there.” I guess even in a creative, inclusive, “safe” space like a Queer festival party, it’s as hierarchical as it would be in any other social Gay space, with whites taking the top spot. I wanted to think that this was an isolated incident because I’d been to this same exact party twice before and had a fantastic time. But, I slowly remembered, those other two times, I went with my white friends. There were, in fact, other incidents that occurred throughout the week including (but not limited to): being mistaken for another Asian on 3 different occasions and being grabbed in the ass by someone as I was leaving my Q & A (the latter could just be straight up sexual harassment and has nothing to do with race… but, in my experience, just looking like an “Asian Twink” in a Gay space usually gives other men the permission to violate our bodies...plus the Australians and Norwegian there didn’t get their asses grabbed).

◆◆◆

The author attends a photocall for the shorts program, “Worldly Affairs” at Frameline41: San Francisco LGBT Film Festival

The author during the Q&A session for “Pria” at the Castro Theater, San Francisco (June 2017)

◆◆◆

Of course, how can these white people understand wtf is going on with us “ethnic folk” if most of the films in these programs just affirm their str8-white privileged personhood ideal? There’s already a lack of Gaysians in the mainstream media and when we are ~lucky~ enough to make it on screen, we are only reduced to exotic stereotypical objects of desire or sexless, unattractive background players. If these are the only images shoved down everyone’s throat, it’s no wonder we’re always considered an Other…

Because these LGBTQ film festivals promote themselves as an inclusive safe space, this time, I decided to speak up. Surely, they would somehow understand. These organizers would know what it's like to grow up and not see (LGBTQ) characters like themselves on screen, or at least ones who weren’t child molesters, rapists, villains, creepy psychopathic old men or “sissies” serving as the butt of the joke that reduces their personhood to a minstrel show. They would understand what it would feel like to be erased, othered and/or misrepresented.

I sent out a mass email, Bcc-ing every LGBTQ festival that I’d been accepted to this year (and ones I was rejected from). In the email, I detailed how, when attending these Western festivals, I was always seen and treated as “other” because of my race. I told them how much their programming affects how LGBTQ POC are seen and treated within the general community. I tried to explain that by not including films like Pria, films from the other half of the world, in their LGBTQ Film Festivals, they are effectively erasing our stories and shutting us out. If there are minority films, we’re almost always grouped by race or by issue (why do white people only like us when we’re a cause to fight for? Even then, they want us to be a cause with hope). Are we not good enough to be part of the regular gay white programming? In times like these, programmers, the gatekeepers and privileged people in power have the responsibility to really examine what diversity means to them. Honest and complex representations of minorities are important (as well as minorities behind the scenes). This also means being strategic in programming these types of films. Not only do they determine how other people in the majority see and treat us, but they also shape the way we think and feel about ourselves.

The responses to the email were varied. “Seriously. Well-put,” said one LGBTQ festival. The rest refused to consider my point of view and instead resorted to belittling me and accusing me of being bitter for not having gained a spot in their program (like, honey, please. I sent the email to festivals that I DID get into too). But, to be honest, I am fucking bitter. These invalidating responses automatically reminded me of what happened in Indonesia a year before: that Skype call with the executives, and the many other times where I was either whitesplained and/or mansplained.

So yes. I’m absolutely bitter and I’m fucking angry.

How can I not be when I see these LGBTQ programmers complain about Donald Trump or say that they’re promoting diversity when their actions (or inaction) speak otherwise? Diversity isn’t just literally black and white, it’s something more complex; it occupies the gray area in the middle. Many people seem to think that just because you put a handful of Black people on screen (there are OTHER races too, you know?) and showcase minority “issue” films (on Gay refugees, Gays in the Middle-East, etc.), they can solve racism and inequality.

In truth, however, the work is far from being done. It doesn’t matter how many POCs are on screen if we are only reduced to stereotypes or, in the opposite case, neutered to the point where our complex experiences are distilled to white-people-cause-of-the-moment or worse, erased altogether. I just want to see my goddamn experiences represented accurately and truthfully.

I know that the work is hard. We have to dismantle a system of oppression that has been in place for hundreds of years that’s still an ongoing problem not just within the LGBTQ community but society at large. But, still, I expected better from our own community. How can a community that is fighting for equality perpetuate a system that promotes the invalidation of members within their own community?

It’s a system that allows for my bosses in LA to ignorantly make insensitive comments about my race via Skype.

It’s a system that enables a white, friend-of-a-friend at a Thanksgiving party to confidently assume, because of where I met the host, my appearance, and my non-English name, that it was my first Thanksgiving.

It’s a system that excuses gays when they put “No Asians” on their Grindr profiles and justify it as just “preference.”

It’s a system that allows an African American drag queen in New York to call me up on stage and mock my race and question my Americanness, while excusing such behavior as jest.

It’s a system where, when I was 17, a white, visiting professor took me to his home and raped me, assuming that I wanted it because I’m a “submissive Asian Bottom” who should’ve “relaxed more so that it would’ve felt better.”

It’s a system where, if I do speak up against the people in power who are supposedly on my side, I’d be dismissed and made to feel that I was the problem, that I was the one who was being overly sensitive and needed to check my feelings.

But, the thing is, I’ve been checking my feelings. I’ve been checking my damn feelings every day of my life. And you know what? I’m tired. I’m tired of them saying, “I can’t be racist or ignorant, I have black friends...” or “You obviously haven’t seen our program, we have an eye for colored people!” or whatever dumb-fuck excuse they use to deflect from the actual problem and validate their inaction/behavior/ignorance. It’s time for them to check their own damn feelings and realize that for real change to happen, they need to shut the hell up and listen. I’m sure they’re all well-meaning, but in the end, good intentions won’t matter much when the results are tone-deaf and continue to facilitate segregation and inequality.

I think that as we gain more acceptance within the mainstream, those who are now in a place of privilege tend to forget what it felt like to be in the minority. They forget those in the past who helped fight for our rights, they forget other members of their own communities who are still suffering, they forget what it felt like to be degraded for who they truly are, they forget what the real MO of the LGBTQ community is: Equality. There isn’t just one answer that will fix this Racism problem. The work needs to be highly personal and it starts with examining our own selves. It starts with listening to other members of the community without preconceived judgments and really examining the whys and hows of this system (of privilege) operating within our own lives. And look, I really get it. It’s hard to ask yourself why you’re not attracted to Asians, or why you’re still repulsed by femininity, or why this minority still feels left out when you went out of your way to create a safe space for them. We all want to believe that we’re fighting and living for the right things. And I think it’s now time to stop believing and start doing the real work.

As the Tame Impala song came to a close, I stared intently at my Ace Hardware™ Lamp. It was my only source of (literal and somewhat figurative) light, so after being in this dark room holding in my feelings, the warm glow of the light was oddly comforting. I started sobbing and my friend said, “Don’t worry they’re just hypocritical wannabe-liberal white execs… What else can you do?”

“But..,” I responded. “One of them is black.”

With much love, forever and always, Yudho Vanderhof Aditya

--

Yudho is a recipient of the 2016 Director’s Guild of America Best Asian American Student Director Award. He’s working on a feature film about gaysian Americans, if you’d like to share your experiences with him (which he will repay via coffee or tea at most NYC cafés), contact him: 📧: Yudho.aditya@columbia.edu IG: youdough

[inkingaboutwords-blog]

Lesson 2: Editing

1) Foreword

Hey there crew! A couple changes this month: I reordered devices before forms, because it makes more sense that way. I won’t be taking submissions to workshop from here on out, because I just don’t have time to (this platform also isn’t great for interactivity, and that’s really showing, but I’m going to continue to press on with this approach to get the content done so that I can transfer it to something better next year and hopefully that experience will be more interactive and more digestible for people.)

This lesson is pretty heavy (will probably be the heaviest one) because it’s focused on identifying different formats, and there’s a LOT of technical terms to cover regarding that. Two things I want to make clear in regard to that:

I use the words ‘form’ and ‘format’ interchangeably. Just want to make sure that doesn’t confuse anyone. Form is the more correct term, if you’re wondering.

You really, really don’t have to perfectly memorize the correct term for everything to be a poet (this applies to devices as well). It will help you a lot when discussing poetry, and a little when analyzing poetry, but what’s really important is just that you understand the concepts even if you can’t put a name to them. I’m not doing this to make your work more academic, just to give you tools to improve the way you want to.

Anyway, that’s me for the month. Hope you enjoy the lesson.

Mostly sincerely, Vex

---

2) Index

1. Foreword

2. Index

3. Lore

  3.1 Syllables

  3.2 Words

  3.3 Rhyme

  3.4 Stress

  3.5 Foot

  3.6 Meter

  3.7 Stanza

4. Devices

  4.1 Substitution

  4.2 Triple construction

5. Forms

  5.1  Kelly Lune

  5.2 Collom Lune

  5.3 Gwawdodyn

  5.4 Rispetto

  5.5 Descort

6. Skills

 6.1 Editing

7. Suggestions

 7.1 DIY

 7.2 Edit Some Poems

 7.3 Edit Backwards

 7.4 Write Scansion

 7.5 Try New Formats

---

3) Lore

3.1) Syllables

In English, a syllable is a set of letters that form a single sound in a word. Meter uses syllables to measure the rhythm of a line. A few poetic forms, such as the Kelly Lune, constrain the number of syllables on each line, and though poetry sites tend to explain forms in terms of syllables, it's rare that this is the intent of the form (if a site gives you a range ie "this line should be 10-13 syllables", then this is a misreading/misexplaining of the form's meter)

It's worth noting that you've probably been taught that a haiku counts syllables per line, but that's incorrect. More on that when we cover haiku.

Rarely, a word may vary in how many syllables you pronounce it with due to divergence between how it was originally said, and how it's commonly said. This is true for words such as "". Technically, this is only really true if you're pronouncing words wrong, but do what you want cause a pirate is free. (Also get used to breaking rules! You need to be comfortable with this to be a poet)

3.2) Words

Similarly, some forms may describe the number of words on a line. The Collum Line is one such example. Many of the forms not measured in meter are designed to be accessible to new poets.

3.3) Rhyme

Rhyme is a repetition of sounds. There are many types of rhyme that we will cover in a later lesson. The most basic form, where two lines end with the same sound, is used to define many formats. We're covering this now because this lesson is about being able to understand formats.

3.4) Stress

Stress is a measure of which sounds in a word are more emphasized. Stress is important because we use it to build rhythm in our works, which affect their flow when performed or read. To denote the stress of a line, people commonly use a notation called scansion. In the simplest form, a stressed syllable is marked as ‘x’ and an unstressed syllable is marked as ‘/’.

e.g.   x    /   / Syl la ble

Further reading: The wikipedia page covers more complex versions.

3.5) Foot

A metric foot is a single measure of a pattern of stresses in a line. Sometimes scansion will have lines broken into feet using ‘|’ (this can also denote a pause in the reading if two are used ‘||’)

e.g.

  x   /     /        x      /         /            x     /       /         x         /       x     / Syl la bles | and such sounds, || Will not know | what rhyme | a bounds.

The first three feet in this line are known as dactyls, while the last two are trochees. Here’s a list of what feet are named: Trochee:       stressed - unstressed Iamb:             unstressed - stressed Spondee:      stressed - stressed Pyrrhic:         unstressed - unstressed Dactyl:          stressed - unstressed - unstressed Anapest:       unstressed - unstressed - stressed Amphibrach: unstressed - stressed - unstressed To determine the name of a meter using these feet, just add ‘ic’ to the end. (trochaic, iambic, spondaic, pyrrhic, dactylic, anapestic, amphibrachic)

3.4) Meter (or Metre)

Meter is a way to describe the flow of a line being spoken, written, or read, and create an intentionally concordant (or rarely, discordant) rhythm in how it is delivered. A “base meter” describes the most common meter in the line, verse, or poem you’re talking about. A “mixed meter”, like in the example above, contains different feet in the same line - these are often used at the end of a stanza to break an established pattern for impact. Sometimes a mixed meter line is simply the result of a poet needing to use a particular word (meter is less often the most important factor in word choice). When a metrical foot repeats in a line, a prefix is used to signify how many times the foot has repeated. 1 = meter 2 = dimeter 3 = trimeter 4 = tetrameter 5 = pentameter 6 = hexameter etc. (It's not common to go over 6, since that's a loooong line, but if you feel like fucking shit up, go ahead)

3.7) Stanza

A stanza is a grouping of lines. Stanzas are further categorized according to how many lines are in them. 2 = couplet 3 = tercet 4 = quatrain 5 = quintain 6 = sestet 7 = septet 8 = octave

Most formats group lines for rhythmic structure, but stanzas often are written in a way that gives the stanza structure in other senses. This is an emergent property of the format. Consider a narrative poem in a format with four quatrains followed by a couplet. It would be unusual to split the sections of the narrative in a way that didn't relate to the stanzas of the format. It makes sense to use the first stanza as a setting, the middle two as the conflict, the last quatrain as a climax, and the couplet as an anticlimax. Thus the rhythmic structure informs the narrative structure.

---

4) Devices 4.1) Substitution (or Inversion)

Substitution is where an unusual foot appears within an otherwise normal meter. This is described above as ‘mixed meter’ in the section about meter. (When speaking of the device, it would be proper to call it substitution, but in describing the meter of a line ‘mixed meter’ makes more sense.)

A great example comes from a Shakespeare line you’re probably familiar with:

x    /      x    /     x   /         x    /     /       x        / To be, | or not | to be, || that is | the ques | tion

In this we see ‘the ques’ is an iambic foot within a trochaic meter.

4.2) Triple construction

Now commonly known as ‘The rule of three’, triple construction involves using three of something. It doesn’t sound like much of a literary device, but it has a big impact in writing. Supposedly this is because three is the smallest number of things required to form an identifiable pattern, making it easy for readers to recognize, and allowing the most people to get the pleasant feeling of seeing where an intentional poetic device was used.

Examples of triple construction that we’ve already discussed today include tercets, dactyls, anapests, amphibrachs, and trimeter. It also occurs very often in parallelism, which we covered in the last lesson (in fact, the example I used, “I came, I saw, I conquered”, is probably the most famous instance of triple construction ever). ---

5) Forms

5.1)  Kelly Lune

The Kelly lune is a format created by Robert Kelly in an attempt to make an English version of the haiku that was more conceptually consistent with the original form of haiku than the commonly accepted 5-7-5 format. The form still lacks some of the constraint of an original haiku. The Kelly lune is defined as a tercet of 5-3-5 syllables. It has no other restrictions.

5.2) Collom Lune

A variant of the Kelly lune reportedly created through a misremembering of the constraints defines the format by words instead of syllables. It’s still a tercet, but the Collom lune has 3-5-3 words.

5.3) Gwawdodyn

This form is an example of formats described by rhyme. The area where the Gwawdodyn originated has many quatrain-based formats, and you’ll note the similarity they have to the Limerick. It involves a quatrain that has three 9 syllable lines (the 1st, 2nd, and 4th) that all rhyme, and a 3rd line of 10 syllables with an internal rhyme that either rhymes with the end of the 3rd line, or the middle of the 4th.

So either --------A --------A ----B----B --------A or --------A --------A ----B----C ----B---A (worth noting C could also rhyme with A)

5.4) Rispetto

A rispetto is a form that is defined primarily by its meter. It involves two quatrains of iambic tetrameter. It also has a rhyme scheme of abab ccdd.

5.5) Descort

This is both the strangest and hardest of the forms we’ll cover this lesson. It is not defined by its meter, syllables, words, or rhyme, but rather by its inconsistency in all those things. In a descort, each stanza must have a different number of lines, and each line must have a different number of syllables. A rhyme must not occur in multiple stanzas. Some sources I’ve seen report that each line also must have a different meter from each other line. I’m not sure this is following the original definition, but it certainly is in the spirit of the format. One poet from the time and place the format was created is known to have written descort poems where each stanza is in a different language. ---

6) Skills

6.1) Editing

Following up on last month’s lesson in drafting and analysis, now we’re going to get into the hard work. For my 2nd draft, I like to start by ensuring every stanza is in the correct order. Usually a beginning and an ending stand out evidently (though I find I often have multiple suitable endings and have to choose one - the others will be later reworked to suit another space in the narrative). If you don’t have obvious contenders for the beginning or ending, or if you feel what you do have isn’t strong enough, make a note to come up with something better.

The ending is typically the most evocative or contemplative line. If you plan on performing the piece, it’s a good idea to ensure an audience will recognize it as an ending or you’ll get scattered applause (more about this later when we cover performing). Usually the reason an audience might not recognize an ending is because the piece doesn’t contain a strong narrative for it to conclude, so they are unsure if more is coming. We could go deeper into this, but for brevity, let’s just say if you have this problem just test the piece with friends until you get it right.

The beginning is more versatile, so whatever suits the piece or your preference is likely fine. Strong beginnings tend to set up a context for the narrative, or an unusual perspective on a well-known topic.

Once you have two locations, the rest of the poem can be constructed as a journey from one to the other. Start by placing the best work in your draft between the beginning and ending in whatever order suits it, then go through and mark spots where it is difficult for a reader to jump from one thought to another. These will most often be between stanzas, but consider carefully where this also might occur between lines. Once the gaps are identified, you can fill them in with things that will make that transition easier (in a later lesson, we’ll look at how this relates to memorizing). Throughout this process, you’ll likely find lines that sound janky, or ones that speak about things a bit removed from the overarching narrative. I mark all of these lines, and occasionally stanzas, to be deleted (though not all of them will be, some will just be improved).

The sad truth is that to allow your poem to reach its potential, you often have to cut out something you really want to say about the topic because it doesn’t fit the narrative well enough. Don’t be scared to cut those - the narrative will deliver your message so don’t cheapen it with clutter. Cutting lines isn’t forfeiting your right to say them, you can still put those thoughts into a draft for a separate poem.

Once you have a poem with a solid narrative, you can start digging into the finer details to polish them up:

Check your syllable counts and stanza sizes. Even when writing open verse, consistency benefits a piece by introducing intentional repetition to the rhythm. It will also set you up for the next step.

Work out the meter of each line, and use that to decide where the impact will be. Meter is a mechanic you can use to emphasize anything you wish. The more consistent an existing pattern (in this case, the base meter of your work and how often you apply it to a line) is, the more powerful it is to break it using mixed meter or an unexpected change.

Consider adding more devices. Your first draft will have devices you came up with and thought were clever, but it will also have lines you wrote just to support those devices. Often these lines can be adjusted to contain more devices. For emphasis, it pays to pick the devices already used in the best lines of the poem, and try to use those particular devices elsewhere.

Consider removing devices. Sometimes they can be too heavy-handed in one area (I see this most often with assonance), or they overshadow or obscure the actual messages in the words (and this with metaphor). If you feel you have those problems, try to distribute the devices more evenly throughout the piece (it’s worth noting that this may not necessarily mean removing devices. It’s possible to achieve the same effect by spreading that heavy-handed use of devices throughout the whole work. If you can manage this, it will REALLY pay off.)

Further watching: Paper People by Harry Baker for an example of said pay off for using assonance heavily but consistently.

---

7) Suggestions

7.1) DIY

Have a try at making your own format. Remember that the rules around meter, syllable, and rhyme are only the mechanical side of a format. Most poetic forms were created in a particular context with a particular purpose, such as to entertain, to tell oral history, to court, etc. The context you write your form for may give it narrative or syntactic rules as well.

7.2) Edit Some Drafts

Take something you wrote for lesson one and try the editing steps above. Make a checklist to ensure you try each step. Note down additional steps your own process requires.

7.3) Edit Backwards

Take the same first draft and swap the beginning with the ending, and see how this changes the end result and also the editing process.

7.4) Write Scansion

Find a poem you like and determine the meter of each of its lines. Identify the base meter, and name all of its stanzas and meters. Write down the rhyme scheme if it has one. It’s much easier to read meta-information about poems if you practice identifying it in existing pieces. Don’t just do this for a classic poem, try some songs you like too.

7.5) Try New Formats

Try out the formats we covered today. They’re all pretty easy and interesting forms to write.

[heartbreakhotelscience-blog]

January 3rd 2018

medication: 

Took 30 mg duloxitine, 20 mg omeperazole, Nature made B-complex with 400 mcg L-methylfolate, 2000 IU vitamin D, 1200 mg omega 3 fish oil, and 650 mg acetominophen in the AM, 0.5 g Glucosamine Hydrocholoride, 0.5 g methylsulfonylmethane, 66.67 mg Chondrotin Sulfate, 1.1 mg Hyaluronic acid, 66.67 mg Chondrotin Sulfate, and 1.1 mg Hyaluronic acid @ 8:12.

In the evening, 150 mg Quetiapine, 750 mg Depakote, 7.5 mg mirtazapine, and 10 mg simvastatin.

Sleep: 

Improving. 10 hours last night from 10:30 PM to 8:30 AM

emotions:

Cold calculation mixed with intense sorrow. I went to the hospital that failed to recognize my need for urgent psychiatric counseling and medication management and got the records. This errand was an afterthought when I got to the Jewelry store and they were still closed. I remembered how my love once said that getting the records was the most important part of a hospital visit and decided to go get them. Apparently in addition to being psychotically afraid that people were going to kill me I also was demanding a Chaplin to marry my love on the spot. I remember asking for a Chaplin, but I did not remember that my intent was to have a marriage ceremony on the spot. I’m sad that my love could not express or reassure me that there was no urgency necessary to formalize out engagement and even sadder that she does not want to marry me. It may not have been possible to convince me there was no urgency necessary for us to get married.

Had to limit my expression of my continuing emotional investment in my relationship with the woman I love who does not want me to be a part of my life. That makes me feel heartless and empty; which is also how I feel when I think about how sad I am that she does not want the relationship anymore. I feel like the shredded heart that is in her hands is now turning cold and locked away in a freezer, dripping with the sorrow that runs from my heart like blood in the form of art. I felt intense sorrow cleaning up spilled pomegranate juice from refrigerator. I had to get down on my knee’s right were I proposed and clean up this bloody looking juice that had dripped out of the bottle and made a mess that touched everything in the refrigerator. It looked like how I feel. Like my heart was put in a box and blown to pieces leaving a splatter pattern it would take an expert to sort out. 

Feeling desire to play guitar again. Not sure what emotion is there. Expressive I guess. Maybe the need to connect with others through music. I guess that’s loneliness, but this feels a little different than loneliness. Longing, yes that’s it. I’m longing to communicate with others musically. Loneliness too, because I miss my best friend (i.e. my love).

thoughts: 

Meeting was not all that helpful. Quote was for 500$ retainer with potential for refund if the billable hours did not total to that amount. Which means it will cost 500$. Instructed to not send the following response. I may still work on the three love letters that I am writing with the subject lines you, me, and us that I want to send from an anonymous account; but I don’t think I can bring myself to send those. I’ve had to edit it a little to remove identifying information, but here is pretty much what I’ve had to discard from my drafts folder that I composed in response to my finance's heart-renching call off our engagement email (see first post).

[My Love], Thank you for contacting me; I hope you do not see this reply as a bother. I do not have a lawyer at this time and am making one more attempt to manage our legal commitments without the courts. Please sign and return the attached release of interest in the [vehicle]. I will have the form notarized if you can not find the time. I have completed the residency vacancy notice and have attached it in good faith that you will not require me to take court action to retain ownership of the [vehicle]. Please prepare a list of any items you would like to retain possession of from [our home]. I will share my work schedule with you if you would like a time to gather these items when I am not at [our home]. I will notify you when I have vacated [our home] leaving behind your possessions if I don't receive this list before the end of the lease. My personal files, including the title to my motorcycle, [vehicle] registration, and retirement portfolio, need to be returned (green accordion file that I understand [mediator] is in possession of). I also expect the keys to our [home] and [vehicle] be returned (again I understand [mediator] is in possession of these items). You have misunderstood me, my intentions, and my actions. I love you and only wanted to express that to you during the holidays and during what I perceived as a difficult time in our committed relationship. Of course you always had the choice to end our engagement, relationship, and interactions; but to do so when you did after what we shared and in the way you did hurts me more deeply than any pain I've ever felt. I can't and don't expect you to take the time to understand now because you have moved on before you even cared enough to understand me. Maybe you never really did and you certainly were not honest with me or yourself in the way you presented your feelings to me during our relationship. I believe more deeply than I ever have before that you were different than my previous partners and those relationships that ended after 3-5 months of intimacy. I wish and hope someday you will see that I've never stopped loving or wanting to be with you and will find it in yourself to explore those feelings with me again. Nothing can change that at one time in your life you had a relationship with me and wanted to marry me. As scared as you are of my behavior, my mental condition, and the commitment of marriage, I assure you I am more frightened of what suffering from my mental condition and the damage done to our relationship means for my future. I know now that I scared you and can not change the consequences of that fear, but you have misunderstood what led me to leave you with that impression. In time, if/when you see that in all that fear there is still love, I will be here for you. I will always be here for you. While I am not welcome in your life right now, you will always be welcome in mine. I am not obsessed with you and think that the evolution of our relationship past the initial intoxicating love we felt for each other is something we can learn from and apply no matter how we choose to plan our futures. I still want to marry you and will find a better way to ask you if you give us a second chance. Best wishes in your future, career, relationships, and life. Love, [me] 

I think that the impression everyone gets except for me is that this will fall on deaf ears and lead to a harassment restraining order. So I guess I’ll put it here and delete it. Nowhere else for it to go but anonymously up on the e-wall.

Today I started thinking a lot about all the opinions of other people that have been swirling around this situation I find myself in. I’ve been thinking a lot about what my opinion is today. I think I deserve an explanation. I may never get more than the email that was sent that devastated my heart, but the uncertainty that I have now is really tearing me apart. I know I would never hurt my love, but something happened. Something scared her and gave her enough personal reasons that she basically tried to leave me without explanation in the hope I would simply disappear from the city. I know her mind can be complicated and nuanced in a way that is difficult to understand. I know that I don’t get to ask for this explanation. I think that the only way I’m going to get one is if she loves me enough to take the time to give it. Time that reminds me of how I’ve become a dead leaf on the ground surrounding her tree of life. That is how she described a friend that she cut off contact with after realizing the friend was using her as a measuring stick for her own success. That these people had to be trimmed from her life for her to have a healthy beautify and flourishing tree of life. I worry she is cutting me off without realizing I’m a healthy branch on her tree of life. Even if she never provides this explanation I think I deserve, I take solace in the circle of life. Dead leaves decay, nourish bugs that hide in dark safe places that in turn support soil, the soil supports the tree, and the cycle supports the forest. Occasionally a fruit falls and all the environment, in part created by the dead leaves, supports a new tree. I can’t stop thinking about the names we picked out for the possibility of having a son or daughter. 

I think giving up a creative outlet I was using pretty regularly was a good decision. Still, it was hard to see all that energy that was part of the month of healing that typically follows a manifestation of pschizoaffective disorder come to some sort of conclusion. There also was the knowledge that I will go back to it time and again to read the things that my love wrote there. I fear she will go in and edit them, she still has the password. I locked her out for a while, but opened it back up to her after realizing I was cutting of a means of communication she might feel safest with.  

Hope described in social life section. Considering possibility that my love is limiting her detailed presentation of her thoughts after reading over old blog posts. I enjoyed getting lost in the writing that helped us fall in love. Twinge of sorrow there too because I did not recognize that this was a part of our relationship I stopped nurturing as life and my illness sneaked up on us and we both got busy with the business of life and living together. 

Took apart my loves desk and standing closet furniture in the bedroom so I would stop feeling like (and actually most of the time) crying when I see them every morning and evening. Still have hope from reality that a lot of her possessions are still here. A person in my life mentioned that her stuff being here is an indication she will come back. If she does, I hope she understands that I took them apart and placed them out of sight because it was just to hard for me. I’ll put them back together and happily get her whatever else she needs if she comes back. For now I just have to get them out of sight for myself. 

schedule:

Unproductive meeting where I got quote. Did not retain lawyer as I had planned. No unexpected developments. Errands run and home around 2:30.

work:

 No contact. Hooray, finally a day off. 

social life:

Joined a new meetup group. Played guitar for a bit in private. Followed up with family. Family triggered need to cope and used guitar to cope. Family also supportive because they made me remember how I thought about the irony of my love and I’s ethnicity as it related to my dream job. Our relationship being a perfect expression of why it would be valuable to combine data on individuals from our respective ethnic backgrounds. Still find hope in natural progression of that thought; that my love and I will reconnect through our dreams someday, but I hesitate and worry that with the communication restrictions I’m under that really is a false hope. False hope is still hope I guess. 

Initial post at 3:58 PM final edit completed at 11:35 PM

[mredwinsmith]

Hand Drawing Made Simple: Key Techniques for Confident Results

Drawing hands is one of the most popular topics learning artists ask about. That’s because knowing how to draw hands is essential if you are drawing the figure. But it can also be intimidating. That’s why I want to share with you this article on hand drawing made simple from one of our favorite instructors, Brent Eviston.

The tutorial breaks down the essential steps without overwhelming you! If you have an “ah-ha!” moment, that’s to be expected! And if you want more of them, definitely consider Brent’s Figure Drawing Essentials Kit (also available as a Digital Kit) where he covers anatomy, gesture, shape and more. All the essentials an artist needs, delivered in a way that is simple and straightforward.

Enjoy!

Courtney

  My Approach to Hand Drawings

Drawing the human hand takes almost as much knowledge, skill and experience as drawing the entire rest of the figure. However, when drawing the hand, you can adapt many of the same tools and techniques you’re already using to draw the rest of the figure.

In this article, I will walk you through a few key ways to approach hand drawing so you can enhance your skill set and create more confident drawings.

Gesture Drawings of the Hand

Gesture drawing is a foundational figure drawing skill. Although you can approach gesture drawings in many ways, most strategies involve doing quick drawings (anywhere from 10 seconds to five minutes) that simplify the subject into as few strokes as possible, as well as favor dynamism over accuracy and large, general forms over small details.

When doing gesture drawings of the full figure, axis lines are used to capture the angle between a pair of landmarks on the body, most often of the hips or shoulders.

In the drawing below you’ll see how you can use a combination of dynamic directional marks and axis lines to capture the angle of the wrist as well as the line of the knuckles. This is an excellent way to quickly capture the most prominent forms and proportions of the hand. Remember, your gesture drawing will lay a light foundation upon which you’ll build the rest of your drawing, so start off as lightly as you can.

Fig. 1: Demonstration on drawing hands, directional marks and axis lines, Brent Eviston

The Radius Line

When beginning a gesture drawing, start with the radius side of the wrist (the side with the thumb). In the drawing on the left (fig. 1), a line moves from the radial side of the wrist all the way up to to the tip of the pointer finger, ignoring the thumb. If the radial side of the wrist and the pointer finger aren’t easily visible, you can switch to drawing the ulnar side of the wrist to the pinky finger. Pay particular attention to where this line changes direction.

Axis Lines

When gesturing the hands, axis lines can be used in two different ways. The first point is at the wrist. In the middle drawing (fig. 1), I’ve drawn a line from the ulna to the radius. With this angle in place, you can then “square up” the wrist, communicating to the viewer the spatial orientation of the box of the wrist.

Next, just how as you would use an axis line to capture the angle between pairs of skeletal landmarks of the body, you can draw a single line to capture the position of all four knuckles of the fingers. Ask yourself if the knuckle line appears closer to the tip of the pointer finger or closer to the wrist. I recommend taking a proportional measurement and then comparing the distances while placing the knuckle line.

Active vs. Passive

Finally, in the drawing on the right (fig. 1), I’ve gestured each of the fingers and thumb. In this early gestural stage, instead of drawing both sides of the contour of each finger, focus solely on the active side (the outside of the bend) rather than the passive side where the flesh collapses to accommodate the bend when drawing.

Pay particular attention to where on the knuckle line each finger projects from. Also, consider the length of each finger in relationship to the rest of the hand, as well as to the other fingers and thumb.

Keep it Simple

Gesture drawing allows you to capture the most prominent directions, forms and relationships of the hand without getting prematurely mired in details. It’s important to remember: In drawing there are no silver bullets.

Drawing the hand is a challenge, and you should expect to make several attempts and revisions. If done with care, this technique allows you to capture the basic forms of the hand in proper proportion and will provide you with a solid foundation so you can build the rest of your drawing before moving forward with more detail.

Here are a few three-minute hand gestures (fig. 2) relying heavily on the method just described. Remember, there’s not only one right way to do a gesture drawing, so experiment to find a process that works for you.

Fig. 2: Demonstration of three-minute drawings, hand gestures, Brent Eviston

The Basic Volumes of the Hand

Another fundamental strategy of figure drawing is to simplify the body into its most basic volumes. Although there is no single way to do this (and it changes depending on the body of the model, the pose and the conception of the artist), it is usually a combination of boxes, spheres and cylinders.

Work Largest to Smallest

When drawing, you should always try and start with the largest forms first and work your way down to smaller forms. The largest volume of the hand is the box-like form that the fingers and thumb connect to. You can think of this box as beginning at the wrist and ending at the knuckle line (once again, ignoring the thumb).

Finding the placement, proportions and spatial orientation of this box is one of the most powerful ways to begin a hand drawing.

Establish Cylindrical Segments

The fingers and thumb can be simplified into a series of cylinders with the finger tips being rounded off at the ends. Each finger has three cylindrical segments while the thumb only has two.

In the drawings below (fig. 3 & 4), I began with the gesture process described above before first drawing the large box of the hand and then drawing the fingers and thumb as a series of cylindrical segments. I’ve paid particularly close attention to the ellipses of each cylinder because ellipses are what show the spatial orientation of the form.

Fig. 3: Demonstration on drawing hands, using boxes and a series of cylinders, Brent Eviston

Fig. 4: Demonstration on drawing hands detail of boxes and cylindrical forms (notice the prominent ellipses which help show the form’s spatial orientation), Brent Eviston

It’s important to note that the box of the hand may change shape, particularly when viewed from the palm side where the bending of the fingers may appear to alter the knuckle line.

Once the size and placement of the various cylindrical segments are drawn you can gesture in any remaining details, such as the connection of thumb to the box of the hand.

Light Logic

Simplifying the forms of the hand down to their foundational volumes not only helps you orient them effectively in space, but it also helps you understand the overall lighting scheme. Light interacts with basic volumes in a predictable and logical way. Once you understand the basic volumes of a subject, you understand how light falls over them.

Capture Light and Shadow

It’s important to remember that as you add details, and the light and shadow patterns become more complex, you keep the overall lighting scheme intact. For example, if you look at the tendons of the fingers, you can see that although they break up the large flat expanse of tieback of the hand, the larger lighting scheme is still dominant.

Fig. 5: Demonstration on drawing hands, applying lighting scheme, Brent Eviston

In the drawing on the left (fig. 5), the basic volumes of the hand are drawn using the strategies shared in this article. I’ve also drawn in the basic lighting scheme of these volumes. The large, flat plane of the box of the hand is getting a lot of light with the side plane going into shadow, which casts a shadow over the volumes of the thumb. Each of the finger’s cylinders has light on its left side and goes into shadow on the right.

Take some time to compare these two drawings. Hopefully, you can see that even though the more finished drawing on the right contains far more detail, it still retains the same overall lighting scheme shown in the drawing on the left.

Keep Learning New Hand Drawing Techniques

Although studying the musculoskeletal anatomy of the hand is essential for successful hand drawing, the techniques you’ve just learned will get you started and ensure that, when you do add anatomical details later on, they’ll be organized with a believable framework.

With numerous ways to approach hand drawing, I encourage you to learn as many as you can. I tell my students that, whenever possible, it’s best to simplify their drawing process and master the foundational skills, which include gesture drawing, volumetric drawing and light logic. Learning to adapt these familiar strategies to new drawing challenges is an excellent way to streamline your drawing process and distil complex subjects down to accessible and drawable forms.

Meet Brent Eviston

For Brent, drawing has always been his passion and primary medium of expression. After attending Otis College of Art and Design, he has continued to study many forms of drawing, including traditional master draftsmanship, architectural drafting and illustration, anatomical drawing and conceptual drawing.

Brent, who founded Evolution Academy for the Arts in October 2015, has taught and held exhibitions for traditional and contemporary drawing through arts institutions and organizations across the state. He also is an Artists Network Universty instructor for the popular course, Figure Drawing Essentials, which “lays the foundation for masterful figure drawing by introducing multiple methods for approaching the subject and how to improvise with these tools for maximum effect.”

Click here to enroll in this course and start enhancing your figure drawing skill set today. You can also learn more about Brent by visiting his website, BrentEviston.com.

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