The Mirror and the Mask

Like when you're angry, and need to discharge something, but doing it in public could be stupid.

On the other hand I suspect I may have a sympathetic audience.

A week ago, my aunt overheard me talking to my boyfriend, trying to coach him through Chinese syntax. (He got it, might I add, which rather impressed me in terms of speed.) But I didn't want him getting ahead of the point I was trying to communicate, so I told him to let me lead and I'd take him where he was trying to go.

"The woman never leads," my aunt commented. "Woman was created to help..."

Small victories are delicious. I chose the retort which she couldn't refute.

"Some of us are evolutionists over here."

Of course, this is why I'm hiding upstairs during the Father's Day preparations - my brother's quite welcome to sleep in, or sit on the sofa playing video games or watching TV while drinking a coke, but as a girl I'd be dragged kicking and screaming to peel vegetables.

I cannot wait to get out of here.

Half full, no matter how negative people seem to think I am.

Before my first night in weeks of fully wonderful nearly mindless self-indulgence (not so much mindless as imaginative rather than solution-oriented) I have one note to make, based on an entirely trivial inspiration.

So, a decade or more ago, there was an episode of "Friends" in which the sardonic Joey and the innocent Phoebe are debating whether there can be a totally selfless act, as any altruism results in joy returned to the originator.

It's true. And isn't that a lovely thought.

"Everything is good."

...the Digger archives are all free, ad-supported. Go and return changed. [Link]

I cannot handle the concentrated cute-stuff that is Shadowchild even at the best of times, let alone when I've had a rough day...

I always experienced a degree of synesthesia as a child, mostly between tactile sensations and colors, but every now and then I get it for words, as an adult.

The word "sacred" has a comparatively smooth, quiet, cool, white feeling to it, rather like unglazed porcelain, or moonlight.

With the murder of George Tiller constantly in the news, I've got religion on the brain again - specifically, what sort of religion could create a contingent of people to whom God is all-powerful and His plan is expressed in an anencephalic child, and yet don't believe that God is powerful enough to intercede if the mother opts for a less dangerous or less (emotionally) painful dilation and extraction abortion than to carry the child to term and bear it lifeless, or utterly nonviable.

What does this have to do with any of the above? What on earth kind of weird and cluster of ideas is that "above," anyway? Well, this isn't a political blog, it's an utterly personal one, and so I'm going to pick my own brain a little bit. This was actually brought on by someone's book review, on a text attempting to explore and give the clarion call for the revival of masculinity.

That's another subject I'd like to touch on, and maybe I'll come back to it when I'm done with this one.

Once upon a time I was about fourteen and listening to NPR around the time of one of the new Star Wars films. And someone got to discussing why Star Trek and Star Wars tend to have very strictly defined fanbases that overlap far less often than you'd expect given that they're both very big, very well-funded, often very well-written sci-fi franchises in an otherwise barren environment. The guy explained that, among other things, Star Trek looks to the future. It's an egalitarian society. It's about democracy and development of new technologies and a world in which each person has their place and role and potential. If the new Star Trek film is in any way representative of the franchise, I'd agree; I have no other experience with the series, really, because I'm in the other camp.

Star Wars, this guy explained, is about the past. It's romantic, nostalgic, it tells the story of an elect few who happen to be born heroes. It's Homeric. It's the struggle of a handful of gifted powerful who study ancient arts in order to go out and do battle with the other handful of gifted powerful on behalf of all the faceless millions, and who will individually slaughter hundreds of faceless pawns on the way to the Evil King, because it's also essentially very hierarchical. It tends to play not only to humans fairly exclusively (and mostly white ones at that) but to the boys.

And while there's a lot of unfortunate backwardness in that, I sympathize with it more. It's not rational; it's purely emotional. People have come up with thousands of expressions for this sort of thing; romanticized notions of chivalric codes and white knights and good vs. evil aren't the half of it. All whilst recognizing the world as very complex and knowing that no thing has ever been simple since we went from primate-individuals to people, I've always been nostalgic for the "old days" - do what you need to do to survive. I sort of wonder if more of us are nostalgic for this sort of animal condition than let on - I somehow think the proliferation of therians and otherkin and furries probably has to do with human existence having become too complicated for human animals themselves. We didn't evolve all this way to fill out paperwork all day for a petty wage deposited into a largely-theoretical bank "account" so that we could go to the grocery store and buy plastic-covered heated cooled chunks of Gallus domesticus (that's chicken) to eat and then return by a long commute in a big chunk of combustion-powered iron to the cubicle the next morning - did we??!?

How horribly depressing.

We came all this way, clambering up to the top of the food chain, to tool use and domination of our environment (for good or ill), to a time that so ought to be utopian, to a time when those in this culture largely have enough to eat, and can turn their attentions to idle pursuits unrelated to food, shelter, water, and safety, the immediate, the present, to the future and the past, to dream and to remember and create art and music and develop a democracy in the hopes that all might be heard and participate - we came all this way --

so that we could mourn our lost ignorance? So that we could wish that life were simple? So that we could wish that the constant tragedy of choosing between lesser evils at every moment were unknown to us, and we could simply do what was unquestionably, safely right? This has been the era of the antihero - trying desperately to cling to a code of honor in a world where there are always, always negative consequences to every action, where nothing you do won't hurt someone where every step you take is upon the backs of your fellow man and fellow beast and the very earth itself, and where the epitome of Goodness in the long flicker of human history - those who defend their people - do so in grieving guilt and shame. Western society has figured out, at least subconsciously, that great truth that the Buddha taught twenty-five centuries ago: life feeds on life, all existence is at the expense of another, that suffering and the infliction of harm is a simple fact of being.

No wonder. No wonder we also turn to black-and white codes of ethics from times when the world was simple. No wonder there's a surge in religious fundamentalism as communication improves and globalism churns forward and we, the privileged, just as Gautama Buddha in the old story, are forced to see those whose suffering is the ransom of our good lives. And even we suffer, even we feel unrest. The world looks sick, terminal, hopeless to these people; if all good is at the price of ill, where is the good in good? All is as nothing - which the Buddha taught it was - illusory, the snares of the demon Mara.

Buddhism and Christianity both teach that the world is temporary, that we will move beyond it into contact with the divine. In essence, both abandon this world - and often demand sacrifice and asceticism (careful, I get biased here) such as to make this world the hell they insist it is. The big difference is that extreme forms of Christianity don't bother with trying to reduce the suffering of others by their own; instead the suffering is largely for the self - the effort to keep oneself pure. Instead, the attempts to reduce suffering tend to be somewhat paradoxical - kill people to keep them from self-condemnation to Hell (think witches, think Inquisitions), or conquer and subjugate nations (and kill people on the way) to keep them from self-condemnation to Hell (think every aboriginal culture whose lands are now occupied by Europeans). The main difference has been that Buddhists believe that they don't generally have to force people to convert, as there's all the time in the world - literally - for them to perceive the error of their ways, evolve as people, and eventually attain enlightenment. Christians only believe in one life, so if you don't attain salvation in whatever span of years you get, you are bereft of salvation, the love of God, and any hope for eternity and one's immortal soul. Naturally this tends to mean that Christians are a little more militant on the whole, and a lot more ruthless in fundamentalist particular. Some of the same of this goes for Islam. Judaism has enough of the elements of elect salvation - in my very very limited experience - that there's not so much need to proselytize, and is generally less fundamentalist to date to begin with.

Christian fundamentalism, as I've constantly lamented, seems to have taken all of the above and built up a scorched-earth, with-us-or-against-us policy in which there's a need to salvage, or loot, the world and its souls of everything that can possibly be taken in the name of Heaven and the Saved, because the world's going to fall and burn anyway, and what's the use of assuaging the suffering of those who don't join us, anyway? Mine, hack, harvest, consume it all. Use it up. Alienate those who won't be converted, because they've done wrong in their obstinacy and there's no reason to put up with those whom you won't be living with much longer. The Rapture is coming. The world is at its end. The earth was given to us to use and throw away, because that which we are is not of the world and will live beyond it.

And this brings me around to something.

How to combat this sort of fatalistic, destructive, harmful kind of thinking? The same way they're trying to propagate it. Do hate and teach hate and the world will be hateful.

Look for the good in the world, the beauty, that which redeems. We come into the world seeing it. Ari Berk has a marvellous lecture online in which he discusses his young son, who sat poking sticks into the soft earth, playing in the woods one day, and talking aloud. "I am making a beautiful forest," the father wrote down at the end of that day. "Everything is good."

Realism is advisable. I'm not calling for the wild and complete idealism (reborn, pristine, with each cookie or trip to the park) of children; realism lets you cope with the bad and still celebrate the good. It allows you to be happy. And people, when they are happy, are kind, and propagate this happiness to others, or at the very least mitigate their pain.

And to those Christians who, should they read this commentary, take offense or exception: this world is of God; if created by God it is to be revered. Look on those who see the good in the world, and you may see the nature of salvation. What they delight in, in worldly goodness, is at its very essence the love of God. I'm going to do something I've never done before right here: close on a Biblical quotation and reflection. Matthew 7:7 - "...seek, and ye shall find..." You always find what you are looking for; seek then the love of God, and you will discover it certainly in this world and its peoples.

In the usual course of clicking link after link that tends to ensue after reading one of Ursula's posts, I came across this journal entry on the APA's report on the sexualization of girls.

And while I wanted to agree with some of what she said - especially that girls and young women are different cases, I can't agree with the idea that young women who dress sexily are consciously making the decision to be seen as sexual objects. It's likely that she just didn't clarify, and meant that SOME who dress this way are doing this, but something in the wording made me buck.

While there are a number of situations in which I don't mind being perceived as sexual, or where I actively encourage it, there aren't a lot of situations in which I'd want to be sexualized in the APA's definition - that is, seen as a sexual object, to the exclusion of the rest of myself as a human being. I generally want my identities to be integrated. There are exceptions - I'm not such a good, forward and fearless person that I don't shy away from presenting that part of myself in a professional or educational setting. I recognize that my sexuality as a woman is seen by a lot of people as a Bad and Scary Thing and that in their eyes anything but a passive and delicate flower is a dirty adulterous whore. I'm not brave enough to live without identity modulation. I do the same when I want to be seen for another aspect of my personality in exclusion of my sexuality: even a person who might not condemn me for being sexual might not pay attention to my brain if there's something else to look at. But when it's possible without damaging societal sanction I do like to have my sexuality as part of my identity.

I don't believe Descartes had it right. He tried hard, and he had good ideas, which were solid and plausible given his available information. But mind is body. Mind is brain, and brain is part of body. And my body and body image are part of who I am. We like to accentuate the best parts of ourselves - whether it's to put emphasis on our kindness, or our intellectual cultivation, or our full mouths or our long legs. And it's unfortunate that people will see the latter two before they see the former - and that often they aren't even looking for the former. It positively sucks that people are shallow and sometimes look only for the positive aspects that are immediately apparent. But within reason demonstrating what you have - both in physical attributes and personal style - is self-expression; it says something about you, and usually what it says is good.

For that same reason, I would become frustrated if the only part of me regarded as important was my artistic skill. Or my knowledge of folklore. Or my experiences in a foreign country. All of these things are regarded as part of who I am, and regarded generally positively, and if someone looked at me as a walking repository of knowledge (I was a dweeby and unpopular middle schooler, so I've got personal experience) I'd be frustrated. Being only that which is readily useful - being an object - is frustrating innately. Being seen as a PERSON with a great deal of knowledge, with the full awareness that this PERSON has a life and friends and pets and other interests, is a different matter entirely - and that's why my early teen years spent online, with only my imagination and intellect on display for caution's sake, were an ESCAPE from school, where my imagination and intellect were the only things people valued in me. Online, the general assumption is that you are a complete person, somewhere, despite the fact that your expressed mind is all they ever see. I wish it worked that way in real life. I wish that we could celebrate beauty without objectifying people. I wish that our standards of beauty weren't so narrow.

I don't want to be made or to pretend to be a sexual object. I don't even want to be sexualized according to the layman's definition, because that renders me passive in the process. I want to be able, as an adult and healthy human being, to be sexual, without stigma, and there is a very big difference. I want to set the terms. I want to decide what that means for me. I want to be able to dress in whatever fashion I choose without anyone perceiving it as in contradiction to my relationship status; I want to be able to wear a low cut top without anyone seeing it as a sexual invitation, and this is something I want in the same way that I want to be able to wear a long skirt and long hair without anyone seeing it as a statement of my religious beliefs. I want people to see me as a person without prejudice, and it will never be completely possible, but I want people to try, to make an attempt to perceive others as complete beings who cannot be summed up on appearances.

I got into a conversation while writing this, as I often do, and have burnt out, but so it goes.

Found this when poking around for an image I used to have. It's interesting to look back on.

( View this. )

...or, more accurately to my situation, when you come home to find shit all over everything already, two weeks dried, and you get through the initial shock of seeing everything so wrong and the denial that you're seeing what you're seeing and then the first wave of agony at what you've lost and the helplessness of it all, there's a lull when you get very self-contemplative for a bit.

I was a voracious reader as a child. My books did more to raising me than my parents did. I don't have them anymore.

This has led me to realize for the upteenth time:
- I'm sick of lying about my whole life.
- I don't like being reeled back into the same dysfunctional situation over and over.
- I would probably be able to grow as a person if I could just get out.
- Having something bad happen to you by accident is preferable to having something bad happen to you when someone with the inside information decides to hurt you - whether or not they'll admit to the intent.

It has also led me to a few new epiphanies:
- I so dislike lying about my whole life that I'm sick of censoring such vague particulars. My whole life has been struggle and tragedy so far. I don't like that I've been told for the last 22 years to keep my mouth shut about that. And I'm not going to do it anymore unless it's on my terms.
- I so dislike being reeled back into the same dysfunctional situation that I'm finally willing to say something I can't take back, think thoughts I can't forget, and be okay with the fact that I've burned the bridge I took out of hell.
- Though I would probably grow as a person if I were in a normal and healthy situation, I've grown rather more as a person than most of the rest of the people in said situation. I think that the willingness to see something change has meant I've escaped a fair bit of what mires them down.
- I've realized why I've chosen mercury metaphors for myself since I turned fifteen and why my favorite and arguably best artwork depicts something rising from a nasty, blinded, viscous Below into a sleek and starlit Above. And why she looks fierce about it.*
- I've realized that going to Taiwan is going to be a very good thing for me, between the getting away and the last memorable action of a dependent child. I want to come back to the States with a good grasp of language, find a good job, and never be dependent again.

*Prior to fifteen I tended to choose dryad themes, hence this journal's username. I still have a very soft spot for all my woody creatures and I still create more of them than anything else. They remind me of my grandfather.

The last thing is just something I've been thinking about lately, and relates to my grandfather.

My last chance to see him was going away for the semester, leaving in midmorning for my college directly out from my grandparents' house. He was feeling ill and couldn't see me. Several individuals told me I needed to get a move on, get on the road, I had no time to wait even another fifteen minutes. I didn't listen and I'm so glad. I hope that sets an example for the rest of my future; I've always been told how to do things, and I have so many regrets when I took another's advice instead of trusting my gut feelings. I've become even more headstrong, something my family as a whole has very much disliked in me and fought hard to beat out of me. Inwardly I'm a very indecisive and hesitant person, but I tend to trust my gut, and once I've decided I really do have leanings I tend to cling to them like a drowning person.

I'm so glad. I did see him that morning. I got to hug him goodbye and he stood there when I drove off. And I'm so glad.

But I have a potentially life-changing plane reservation on hold to Taiwan for under $1000. The money I save on the ticket alone is enough to let me stay in a loner hostel room the whole time if I wanted.


...I really didn't think this was going to work out.

And as we all know, that means I'm having ideas.

So last Halloween I spent a few hours working on a set of massive ram's horns for a demon costume. I didn't get it done, of course, and went as a vague gypsy thing instead. But I still like the idea a lot.

Reid being Reid, I practically have to bind and gag him before he'll listen to me on costumes, let alone wear one. But Halloween means a lot to me, and I have the sneaking suspicion that it'll be like Faire, where he hates the idea and only goes along with it at my request until he's there, he's being photographed, he's the bloody center of attention, just the way he wants it, and he's having a great time aside from being all hot and sweaty. At least this is what I'd like to THINK it'll turn out like if I can convince him on the Halloween issue.

In any case, Reid's main costuming interest is probably steampunkesque. Lots of brass, lots of pneumatics, lots of Victoriana. I personally lean quite heavily toward clockwork myself, but we all know that my resolve lasts for just as long as I don't have a corset I want to wear.

So, based on some historical truth, some literary history, and some personal taste, I was thinking that maybe there's a world where they've got things running on steam and clock-springs and electricity is possible but inconvenient, messy and inefficient. Chemical batteries have been discovered but are expensive to build and terrible for travel. So we're looking into a new form of fuel, and this is when the Victorian steampunk world starts colliding with Victorian occult.

"What about life force? We tried galvanism and it didn't work out so well for Victor's pet Prometheus; not so much as a twitch from his life's work before it all went up in cinders, according to the papers. He never came forth with any findings whatsoever. Pity, that. But light! Now that the new platinum-filament incandescent lamps are becoming feasible for laboratory usage, I'm sure there's something to be gained from time spent with that. Or magnetism - we were having the strangest reactions with coils of electrified wire. Life is the mother of energy, I'm sure of it! Think of the perpetual ability of living things to continue to move! It has to go somewhere on the point of death! We've only to harness it!"

So in short, you have a culture in which Man is On Top of the World - Western civilization has only been building bigger and bigger and nothing's fallen down yet. The Titanic hasn't yet been built to sink. Complete trust can be placed in technology - for nothing can't be saved by Man's boundless ingenuity, and nothing can't be controlled by the fruits of that ingenuity. Throw on overtones of cultural and racial superiority, a dash of personal repression, you've got yourself a culture ready to go and seriously fuck up the natural order.
We go to researching all this business, hear some deluding stories about the great power of infernal creatures, go digging up a few ancient relics, beg, borrow or steal a handful of old books, finally reach the prized artifact of a London personal collection - a grimy old collar. We build ourselves a laboratory, cavalierly working into the most extreme of experiments, reaching into the most dangerous of equipment, building some new machinery. And then one day we decide we're going to try out the "acquisition" process on the life force of some poor hapless animal. Probably a goat, 'cause they always get these jobs.

And what we don't know is that we've just baited a tiger trap.

Thoughts?

Had an up and down day. Spent a lot of time outdoors, which lent much to that.

The bits worth talking about: I took my last final, though I've still got a bit of makeup work to do. I took a very, very long four-hour walk all over campus and the surrounding neighborhood (the second in as many days.) I also had wildlife run-ins.

Recently, a few mallards took up residence in the school fountains. Only one drake and the hen have stayed on, but they're very personable; every time I sit down they wander right over. Tonight on my way back I sat with them as they fell asleep at the fountain's side; when I finally left, wishing I'd been able to feed them, I found a freshly-dropped chunk of someone's sourdough baguette on my way home, then promptly turned around and went back. They'd been disturbed from their other perch and meandered down the fountain, but were quite happy to see me, even if the drake never touched the food (not that he had much chance; the hen hoovered everything up immediately, then promptly left a mess all over the stone.)

When I left again I nearly stepped on a two-inch-long, hugely fat white grub outside my building. This thing was crawling on its back - I have no idea why, but it didn't seem to be able to use its legs. It was fairly disgusting-looking, but I felt sorry for it exposed on the concrete like that, and was finally able to flick it into the flowerbed with a twig. I hope it turns into something pretty eventually; else I've saved a really ugly pest. It was utterly pallid but for its pulsating back end, where the flesh under the skin turned dark in a few patches. It might've had a parasite for all I know. I was just shocked at how HUGE it was, especially as I'd seen another caterpillar up at the fountain with the ducks that was the same length, but brown and sleek and... normal-looking.

In other news, my Zelda fanfilm makes its premiere on the 6th of next month. According to the composer the film will be released from the website shortly after. Hopefully he's right. I've also updated my deviantArt page, if only with a simple and mediocre photo of my Bacchante mask now it's been painted. I suppose I ought to do the same with some of my other work - I still have yet to post the Labyrinth of Jareth bodice. Oh well.

I'd badly like to actually MAKE something, as well, now that I've got a little free time - but I was too exhausted to do much of the geometric eyeballing and mental gymnastics it takes to design a mask when I set out to work at the Jackal today. Done a little towards my hooves, but those too are at the sidelines. I'm finally coming to the realization that I need more time than it actually takes me to make the art - I need enough time to rest and work up the energy to actually work at it, not to mention dig out all the supplies and set up a space to do that work. Ah, well, life after college has to have an upside SOMEWHERE - it's sure not to be money or freedom.

So for some reason, despite sleeping 10-6 last night, I felt the need to crater at three today and wake up at ten. On my only day off all week. ...

Well, I woke up, eventually, as I'd been drifting when my roommate's boyfriend dropped by with her key to pick up a textbook she needed. (The utter irony of this is you CAN'T WAKE ME when I'm out, but sneaking around so as not to wake me when you're unexpected is more likely to set off danger triggers and actually get through to me.)

But these dreams. I'm having the dreams again. We got my family's first dog when I was nine - she lived ten and a half years with us, so she hasn't been gone for all that long. I started having notable dreams about her a couple of years ago, maybe a year after she died, and every now and then since. They're always sort of remarkable in that they follow a distinct pattern, ...

...and I return eight hours later after being virtually attacked by a two-and-a-half-inch long gravid female cockroach that I'm fairly sure was trying to lay eggs in my bed.

She emerged from my roommate's desk area, making little skritchy sounds until I suppose she freed herself from whatever it was then took flight toward me, then looped around to watch me from the top of my roommate's desk chair for a while. I turned on all the lights and the AC, hoping she'd dislike either the brightness or the cold. She retreated into my roommate's belongings. I shuddered and curled up on a chair for an hour or two, with a single arm unsupported operating my computer, until I couldn't handle the stress and went back to bed again. At 5 AM, with all the lights on and shivering like a maniac, I wake to see the cockroach making her way directly toward my top-bunk bed again, skittering across the wall. I make the most inelegant dismount imaginable and hike up my skirt so at least I can see where my feet are and aren't. The little monster suddenly flies straight at me off the wall, loops around, plops on my pillow, investigates my bedding for a while, then finally crawls onto my father's copy of Terra Incognita.

That thing is on my BOOK.

My mother's overzealous concern in my early life taught me a version of germ theory that borders on obsessive-compulsive disordered notions of contamination. Let alone that it has a cockroach fully the length of my little finger on it. My BOOK is now nigh untouchable. After a few failed attempts to goad the roach away from my precious volume, by throwing various cups and such onto the bed near-missing the bug itself, I finally decide to slide the book onto the largest nearby flat object - my roommate's lapdesk - and lay it outside, then spook the roach off of it.

This, somehow, worked. Well, sort of. I managed to startle the roach sufficiently with a rush of air that she leapt from the book, which I then snatched away, but then hid under the lapdesk. My attempt to rescue the lapdesk was less successful. I'd done all this with one hand on the doorknob - and that paid off when, after tapping the lapdesk, she made a break for the five inches of warmer air inside.

Which explains why my roommate's lapdesk is on the balcony. I'm vaguely afraid to go out and get it even now.

I hate those things.

This is NOT HAPPENING.

I've skipped class twice in as many weeks. Granted, neither time did I intend to stay home, but both times I was vaguely conscious, five or ten minutes late for class, that I was late, and should probably get up and leave. The first of these times seemed excusable on the basis of the fact that there was nothing happening in class that day which I felt would be an irreplaceable experience, and I'd spent the last five days straight eating, sleeping and breathing a very stressful research paper. But this week, there was no real explanation; I got up late, took a shower, went up to the library to acquire some books for part III of aforementioned research project, ran into one of the professors with whom I'd missed class, had a talk with them and a briefing on an assignment due Monday (let it never be said that I haven't loved my Chinese language professors), and went off to get a frozen yogurt at the snack bar. I sat in the lawn, in the shade, quite happily, with my treat and my books, until a couple friends walked by, and I walked with them to eventually have a long conversation with four people in front of the dining hall, where I suddenly became dizzy, felt faint and went to collapse on a chair inside in the air conditioning.

The point of all this backstory is that I was tired, and planned to go out and return fairly immediately after eating, but kept being roped into social activity. I knew on some level that I needed rest. Fast forward to today, and I'm out and about doing much the same kind of thing, on the phone with my boyfriend and eating - yeah, yeah, I know, health and all, whatever - another frozen yogurt, and then stopped off at the dining hall for some drinks to take back to the room, got roped into another conversation with one of the women working there, then twenty or so minutes on felt faint and had to sit down, only to wind up accompanied by a cluster of friends who then came back to my room, watched Bones with my roommate, and played Link's Crossbow Training with me. (And then we all went out for a ridiculous amount of food at the Pig Stand, but this is not the point.)

I nearly fainted twice in two days. I became badly dizzy, my vision blacking out, my hearing fading to a roar and a whine, and I cannot come up with any explanation. I've been sleeping fine, if overmuch; I'm hydrated, and the weather's been downright temperate when it hasn't been UTTERLY gorgeous, topping out in the low 80s today.

It wouldn't be my first case of nigh-inexplicable near loss of consciousness; one of my most remarkable experiences was essentially an exacerbation of this sort of thing. But I have no idea what's lying behind it and it's a risky issue, especially when I'm likely to have to drive this weekend just to eat reasonable food, as the dining halls are closing down for Easter (though, to be fair, I somehow don't think I'd have this sort of problem sitting down; it seems to be linked to pulse.)

I doubt it's linked to the dining hall, though it may be worth noting it's where it happened both times; there may be some strange link to my eating habits, but it just seems odd. I'm suddenly quite tired, so I think I'm going to go lay down even though I wanted to record more of this for future reference, but I really hope this resolves soon....

...she'll desperately want to go out to the Salvation Army shop, buy a sheet and make a peplos, 'cause there's a Dionysus festival and dammit, that means costumes are okay.

And then it'll rain all day, further distracting her from the paper she really did try to work on.

This is problematic. My mind's been all escapism since hearing some distinctly bad news Thursday; my biggest commitment is associated with this and I've thus not wanted to face said assignment, 20% of my grade or no. It's got me terribly stressed out - I have a habit of gnawing at my cheek, which is now entirely raw, and I've been eating total crap. This is not a culture well-cut out for dealing with bereavement and we tend to do a particularly bad job of it in any sort of obligations environment, because we're expected to place commitments to work or whatever above our personal lives.

I don't know. I haven't really processed it yet, and I've been doing my damnedest to put that off, because I've got far too much on my plate already.

I've realized that somehow, I never wrote anything about having seen this film.

Last winter, my dad - who has a habit of buying foreign films online, mostly from China, which turned out to be lucky for me once I started studying Mandarin - handed me a DVD he thought I might like. Actually, he handed me several, and this was surprisingly the one that I never got around to, until this January.

The subject matter sounded interesting - a wuxia take on the Kalevala - but there was something about the cover art that made me think it'd be slow, low-budget, probably not very well-written. The disc was the Thai import version, and if you look at the back cover, among images from the film somebody superimposed the most common image of Altair from the recent Assassin's Creed. The (admittedly appealing) front cover also features some meh photoshop, bad crop job. Furthermore, when you get to seeing as many imports from China as I have, you begin to get picky about what you're going to spend your time on, as most Chinese films run rather longer than the U.S. standard. So it was a justified bit of prejudice.

Fortunately I was sorely mistaken.

So I had a lonely first week of this semester - between Reid and all my older friends having graduated, most of my peers living off-campus, and most of the juniors (my largest group of friends, as I got into the Chinese program late) having gone abroad this semester, I felt pretty isolated. I have something of an odd schedule this time around, with no classes Thursdays, so my first Wednesday night I stayed up to watch a movie. And I had the Jade Warrior disk with me, a movie I hadn't seen and didn't have to go out to rent.

Well, for one thing, it was a lot prettier than I expected. Cinematography's absolutely lovely - they make elegant images of things I didn't know could look appealing. The CG looks a little dated but is of high quality, and for the most part is unusually subtle. Chinese film and U.S. film share one thing in common, that being a love of the grandiose - that's not quite so pronounced here, and though it sneaks traces in it is not of a martial arts genre. The film is actually rather quiet - subtlety actually describes a great deal of the design, especially as regards the writing. The film bounces between Mandarin Chinese and Finnish so rapidly at times that I sometimes wouldn't notice it shift into a language I could comprehend for several seconds afterward. The acting is elegant and sympathetic; the actors themselves are often so very beautiful that they stand strongly as the figures in myth they represent. Layer over this a wrenching soundtrack that plays at the wonder and the desperation of so much of the story, which is itself a fine meshing of mythology with modern, human-driven storytelling, and it's pretty much everything I could ever want in a film.

It's flawed, I wouldn't want to suggest otherwise - but it's an exquisite bit of art and culture that only gets deeper the more you know about it, unlike most of the flimsy celluloid dreams fabricated from an illusion of depth. This is probably a result of its grounding in myth - generally speaking, for me that will mean they're speaking my own language of the world beautifully - but it gives myth a human face, something that often fails so miserably. It succeeds brilliantly where I feel that another recent film I had hopes for, the 2007 Beowulf, failed - the story is tighter and there's no getting bogged down in superficiality. (I liked Beowulf because it took a solid, enduring myth and converted it into a human story without depriving it of the semisacrality of myth - at least I feel the story did well; the film on the whole I feel did not do its plot justice.) Naturally, though, any film with its foundations so firmly in myth require both some knowledge and some acceptance of weight on part of the viewer; I can certainly see the uninformed, or simply those with no interest in mythology's tone, being put off by the ponderous and melancholic atmosphere.

(I think I can't keep the spoilers out any longer, so discontinue your reading now if you have any interest at all in seeing the film. It IS a film you should avoid spoilers for, it DOES have twists of plot, it is NOT of the predictable sort, so DO NOT READ any further if you have not seen the film and think that you ever might. There will also be tangents, including one into existential values and the nature of reality through two mythologies of the Old World, Christianity and the Norse mythos, which I've later edited to be excluded from the cut. You have been warned.)

( Continue Reading ) If you've skipped the cut material, we're about to go off on a brand new topic. Don't expect this to flow from what I was saying earlier.

When he was young, in 1935 he wrote a lecture that would eventually make Beowulf a classroom standard in courses on English; The Monsters and the Critics is a brilliant, passionate, marvellous bit of his mind before he created Middle-Earth and took on a quieter tone in his later years. It also borders on sacrality of tone, in places, because he saw a fierce and terrible beauty in the tone of northern-European mythology. It tends, to put it lightly, to be fatalistic. Despite his devout Catholicism, he feels the resonance of the message of the myths - that "man, and all his works, shall die," and thus he sympathizes greatly with the Beowulf poet when the latter seems to express a muted, half-concealed yearning for this mythos.

Though he'd probably find it upsetting to no slight degree, possibly even because he'd agree, this all touches on something I might argue that Christianity as a myth lacks. As Tolkien put it: "As the poet looks back into the past ... he sees that all glory (or as we might say 'culture' or 'civilization') ends in night." Christianity's promise of eternal life is in essence the assurance that nothing is lost forever; yet this does not reflect our experiences of life. To look at Christianity as a myth, and to consider it from the angle that it exists to the service of humanity, its solution to the experience of loss is to promise that we can reunite with that we grieve. The northern mythologies took a very different approach - they guaranteed that everything would at some point be lost. To be raised in Christian ideology tends to lead to the belief that that would be the ultimate horror, that life would become meaningless; by contrast, the ideal in this pre-Christian theology was to strive in the face of that knowledge, to take up the attitude that if this is all that will ever be, we had best give ourselves into it utterly. And I would argue it is because of this that this pagan perspective on the nature of mortality had any draw for a Catholic like the professor.

In his words, "The worth of defeated valour in this world is deeply felt." In the Christian theology there is no reason for this. I think that in Christianity there is a fundamental, and death-denying, belief that flies in the face of what we actually experience. Nothing ever really goes away. Nothing is ever lost or gone. Because Christianity cannot change the power of earthly loss, nor of physical death, the pagan drama of mortality is still vital, and resonant in our culture. Instead of denying death, it affirms it; instead of promising escape, it assures destruction.

It tells what might be said to be the truth about the world, and honestly, and expects that you should deal with it.

We know that the flowers we cut for the table will last us the day and wilt; we seek the pleasure of them, and love their beauty, anyway. Why should it be any different with our own mortality? With that of the world itself? Why should impermanence decrease the value of life - I cannot see that it should not simply make it more dear, for the passion and the beauty and the love in the world that has been was true while it lived.

I'd seen part of this documentary before but was interrupted in my viewing - most of what I saw, however, was horrifying: a Presbyterian children's minister talks about how "the enemies" of the church are training children to use weapons and to be willing to die for Islam, and how she dearly wished that Christian children would do the same.

I wonder sometimes if this is what tears apart the great civilizations. People get wealthy and complacent as to daily life and they form fringe groups based on lofty ideals, whatever those are. You get PETA and you get fundamentalist religion and you get dogmatic social solutions of all kinds. The result is people forget the necessities of life, the everyday needs of people, and instead apply the people to the service of the ideology. They lose their selfhood - not their individualism, as I would protest that's a sorely Western ideal - but their ability to have culture outside the ideology; the ideology replaces culture. Replacement of culture makes for a break in the continuity of society; the people's unhappiness increases as they increasingly perceive the mainstream culture as the out-group.

I'm not as coherent here as I'd like to be, but that's why I keep this journal - I'd like to revisit this when I'm not as blankly horrified. I suppose until then, I can mention something else:

Apparently, PETA wants to make human-flavored tofu. Meat-flavored tofu products freak me out a little - if you want the taste of meat, if it is natural to crave the taste of meat, and you approve of nature, I cannot understand how you could regard human carnivorous habits as immoral (industrial meat's another matter entirely.) But HUMAN-FLAVORED tofu-based fake meat, that's making a new kind of pun out of soylent green. If it's wrong to eat animals, it ought to be at least equivalently wrong to eat people, right? My feelings on endocannibalism, and meat-eating generally, aside... it'd be too weird to believe. Well, except that "PETA" was in the headline.

I can't sleep, which is utterly perverse because I declined social activity in order that I might sleep, and I needed a midnight snack.

I had a pound of strawberries in my fridge. I'd been shopping with my roommate at a Whole Foods and they were the same price as at HEB a few days prior - and all things being equal, I'd rather buy organic for the sake of the financial vote it puts in.

I really want to believe in organic produce. I realize that this is a natural by-product of the ridiculously long supply chain between grower and consumer. It probably won't affect my future purchasing choices.

But finding a large quantity of gray fluffy mold and little green worms waking from a fridge-induced torpor really puts you off your appetite, y'know? I have two not-yet-peaked plums and a number of unripe clementines left, and if I want fruit, it's either waste the expensive fruit by eating before its time, or pick through the moldy worm berries.

In the interests of accuracy, I did WASH some of the berries, even after the discovery of both mold and worms, but I'm still debating whether I actually want to eat them or not. I'm kind of afraid to touch them lest I find something I really didn't want to.

So I've talked about this before - I've come up with ideas all my life that I held dear and was proud of only to discover, to mixed disappointment and great joy, that I later find somebody else came up with elsewhere, and usually wrote a book on. The ideas I had when I was a very young child - the world as a vast interconnected web, all things enmeshed such that even the smallest of differences might weak the greatest change, was put forth a few thousand years ago in the Dao De Jing: "The path of a bird in the sky can change the world." The delicate principles of modality and certain moral theorizing done around my first full decade of life, later to be rediscovered in a philosophy class in college. Thoughts on the nature of myth at twelve which I would hear from the mouth of Joseph Campbell at twenty. This is not new.

I an idea that I landed on a couple years back that I finally got into discussing actively about a year and a half ago. This was that gods (and their surrounding religions) were much like organisms; they would develop, mutate, and change over time according to what of their features best suited their environment (the human psyche.) Gods, or religions, might be discussed - among those who could forgive the imagery - as something like parasites of the mind, needing us that they might exist, adapting to our changing states, our own adaptations of culture and society to suit our own environment. Apparently, when I came up with this one, I was only doing it 15 years after Dawkins published his essay on the subject. I'm catching up.

Maybe by the time I'm thirty, I'll hit new territory, and have a toy to give the world.

P.S. - I have no idea if this is a good book, but I'm so depressed I missed their Create-a-Religion contest.

For explanation, click here.

Mine was ContemptuousCoho, and it said "I heard your mother has the AIDS, and I just wanted to give you my condolences. I didn't know I was infected." The person played a long for a minute or two, as the first message I sent back was an explanation of what was going on.

Cool idea. I don't think I'll opt out for a while.