Random bits
Nov. 30th, 2003 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatPondered tonight the whole idea of live journal entries and the effect that posting online may have had on my creative out-put. Has it inadvertently created a creative block? Or are other factors involved? I know when I write in the online posting boxes either for live journal or for voy forums, I sometimes am aware of 5 million invisible minds and eyes focused on every error or misstep I might make, waiting just waiting to POUNCE! like a warm fluffy cat or a fangy spider depending on the post. At the same time, I'm anxiously wondering will they like it? Will they hate it? Will they come back with something that makes me rethink it? Every time I send something out there - the possibility of being rejected hangs over me. Which I no doubt deserve, since I've probably sent out rejection vibes myself from time to time.
So subconsciously when I write anything in live journal or on a voy board or as an email (although that's very different)...I feel this little voice inside my head second-guessing my every move, wondering if I'd be better off keeping these thoughts safely locked in my hard drive or in a dusty binder hidden from others eyes. Yet, a part of me feels compelled for reasons I don't quite comprehend to post it anyway, even when the responses I recieve may seem to be more negative than positive. Is this masochism on my part? I don't know. My writing style isn't very structured I'm afraid...and is quite ripe with errors in grammar, formatting, spelling, and syntax - which no matter how many times I attempt to edit, it still seems to contain. Very frustrating. Oh I concede it has structure to it (especially when I get around to editing it, which isn't very often, lazy nit that I am), but it is also quite unstructured with a sort of stream-of-consciousness free-flowing style. (Which I'm sure drives some readers to distraction). I jump tracks, go off on tangents, yet it is more controlled than my thought process - since I can edit. I do hope that people don't judge me purely on what I write...as my friend cjl has told me on many an occassion, I'm nothing like what I write...so much of me is edited out of the words that appear onscreen, so much is filtered out through the inability to find the proper syntax or word or grammatical phrase to express a feeling or thought. I also have a tendency to delete stuff...especially lately, because I've been moodier than usual. Emotionally volatile in fact. Has to do with treading water for five years, four at the evil company, and one out of it. I'm afraid I'm starting to sink and land is barely within sight.
Today after taking a long walk with a friend through the back streets of our neighborhood, I came home to discover that my landlord had responded to my pleas and the heat was on. Yay. Now, for the first time in days I'm warm and cosy listening to the hiss and crackle of the radiators. I'd begun to have fantasies of sitting on tropical beaches or sitting in front of a roaring fire. (I didn't have heat the last two weeks in my apartment and it was in the 40's and 30's, at night, 50s and 40s during the day.) Very happy to be able to type without my fingers feeling frost-bitten. It was a brisk fall day this afternoon with a just a hint of winter in the air, that soft brisk smell of chimney smoke and decaying leaf combined with baking cinnamin rolls. Have no idea where the cinnamin roll smell comes from, except that it keeps giving me a craving for cinnamin rolls. About 54 degrees, warmer than it has been and much warmer than it had been in either of our apartments. My friend had just returned from a trip to Colby Kansas with her family for Thanksgiving. 5'1 next to my 5'11 we looked quite the pair, a regular mutt and jeff, as my mother used to say. (Have no idea who mutt and jeff are.) Brushing our feet through the mixture of stale decaying leaves still on the sidewalks we ambled towards the Brooklyn Promendade where we sat for a while on a bench overlooking the Manhattan skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge, discussing people, life, and post-structuralism vs. structuralism. After readingsuperplin's excellent review of Destiny, I'd come to the conclusion that maybe I'm a post-structuralist (I'd thought I was a structuralist) but superplin's definition of post-structuralist fits me better. This would explain a lot, especially some of my heated disagreements online. (Why do I keep hunting explanations for disagreements? Probably because I hate conflict and am non-confrontational by nature - intense conflict makes me ill. Although being stubborn, somewhat opinionated and a masochist - I get into heated debates online all the time...sigh.) My friend, I'll call her Wales, questioned this. I told her while I could accept the structure of things and even liked structures, I did not like to have them imposed on me. Also while I believed in God, more or less, I did not believe in fate or destiny or determinism - I believe we determin and make our own fate - God may make suggestions from time to time, point out different paths, but we choose them. Experience has taught me this. Wales argued that isn't our society built upon a structuralist point of view? Isn't it based on things like fate and natural selection, the inevitablity of things? I argued that I didn't think it was that simple. That someone may change the course of history based on an idea that had zip to do with biology but had to with luck or desire or rational thought. That, the human dilemma may actually be our inability to accept the fact that two opposing views can co-exist in the same space. That maybe both structuralism and post-structuralism co-existed. Black and White can be one. And someone can decide to do something for no good reason outside of the fact that it just happened to feel right at the time. She wasn't sure what that had to do with natural selection and writing this? Can't say I blame her. Actually my musings confuse me sometimes, unstructured and thrown out randomly. She did make me feel good though, when she told me: "Thanks for walking with me today, I really enjoy talking with you, you're really interesting and very smart." I was taken aback and warmed by this comment and told her so. Lately I'd begun to question my abilities. I'd begun to get caught up in my own self-reflective loop ...which was why getting out and having these long walks and discussions with friends is sooo important. It's also I think why it's important to interact with people who strongly disagree with me whether online or off, as well as those who strongly agree - it protects me from getting caught in the self-reflective loop.
On Thanksgiving I watched several movies. The best of the bunch were The Fisher King and The Two Towers. The Fisher King is about a man who hates himself.
So much, that he has cut himself off from the world emotionally. This man, who is the protagonist of the film and is played by Jeff Bridges, is so obsessed with his own failings and own image, that he cannot see anything but that image. There's two types of self-obsessed (and I'm talking about the extreme here, we're all a bit self-obsessed I think), one is the person who hates themselves and is caught in a loop of hatred. They are obsessed with their own failings and project those failings on to the world around them. The other is the person who loves themselves too much and is narcissitic, they've fallen in love with their own reflection and tend to feel the need to project that reflection outward. Everyone is them. In the Fisher King, Jeff Bridges character (JACK) hates himself, he can feel no love. So he cuts himself off. The movie starts with him in a tall chrome and glass apartment above the city, looking down on everyone. Jack has everything you could possibly want - the skinny pretty girlfriend, the perfect apartment, a blossoming career in showbusiness, fame - in fact when we meet him he is auditioning for a role on a situation comedy that was in fact written for him. That's when Jack flips on the tv and discovers that a man, he recently counseled on his radio talk show, went out and killed a whole restaurant full of people then himself - b/c of Jack's advice.
Jack is devastated and spirals downwards from his pristine world to the gutter world of video stores and homeless people and a loud big-haired but warm-hearted girl-friend. We rejoin him three years later in this new dirtier world. But the dirtier world is less cold, less safe emotionwise. It is in this world that he meets Perry, a raving street character who lives in the basement of an apartment building. Perry, it turns out is one of the people who was affected by the man who attacked the restaurant. His wife was killed in that restaurant. And Perry, a character who is a mixture of wisdom, niavete, and sardonic wit - has dealt with the tragedy by focusing on the story of The Fisher King, which becomes a metaphor for how the two men manage to psychologically and emotionally heal each other. Through helping Perry - Jack finds a way of healing himself. And it's not easy, he tries to buy Perry off, he tries to give what he believes PErry wants, but it's not until Jack literally takes on Perry's foolish persona, complete with armored get-up and quest, that Jack finds a way of healing them both. JAck has to walk a mile in Perry's shoes, he has to leave his self-reflective prison and step inside another man's skin - to see the way to heal the man he inadvertently injured. It wasn't directly Jack's fault - but Jack was responsible, or rather what's important here is that Jack felt responsibility for what occurred. By taking responsibility for something he did and attempting to make it better, not undue, but make it better, at great cost to himself, Jack achieves illumination...and is able to love another person, able to see things outside himself, he escapes the self-reflective loop.
Two Towers similarly deals with this concept but far more tragically with the character of Gollum. Gollum is two people - one is the creature who killed his brother for the ring of power and has become obsessed with it, the other is Smeagol the good river creature Gollum once was, the creature that Bilbo Baggins could not kill...who wishes to be loved and have friends and hates himself, hates Gollum. Gollum has become caught in a self-reflective loop - that's what the ring of power does - it causes the wearer by having the power of becoming invisible, to lose the ability to see anything outside of himself, any good emotional value the world once had slowly gets stripped away and all the wearer sees is darkness. It hardens his heart, yet while doing so convinces the wearer it is his closest best friend. Gollum having lost the ring to Bilbo is slowly resurfacing, but it's a tough fight, he's been so twisted by its influence, it is literally impossible. Frodo looks into Gollum's eyes and see a version of himself, what he can become and as it a result it becomes tantamount to Frodo to save Gollum, to find a way of redeeming the creature...b/c if Frodo can redeem Gollum from the effects of the ring and the choices Gollum made due to its influence, perhaps there's hope for Frodo when this is all over. Unfortunately, just as Frodo has managed to get through to Gollum, managed to help Smeagol break free and get the dark side of his nature to submerg, the trio (Sam, Frodo and Gollum) get caught by a band of human fighters, good guys, but hardened. And Frodo attempting to save Gollum from these men, ends up from Gollum's point of view, betraying him. By attempting to do something good, Frodo causes Smeagol(Gollum) to once again fall under the influence of the part of him that still belongs to the ring. Frodo loses Smeagol in that scene. And possibly himself.
This scene is similar to a scene in Fisher King, where Jack believes he has helped Perry, but all he's done is push Perry into a situation where he recalls the trauma that made him catatonic - the flashback in affect causes Perry, like Smeagol to be lost to the darker part of his nature. The difference is Perry can still be saved, Jack is able to bring him back.
But will Frodo be so lucky?
There's a passage in Dorothy Dunnett's Queen's Play that bears repeating, pg. 418 (which I skipped ahead to find): " ...the noblest and most terrible power we possess is the power we have, each of us, over the chance-met, the stranger, the passer-by outside your life and your kin. Speak...as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences." A scarier passage I've never read. It frightens me the numerous ways people can take an action, a phrase, a written word that is meant one way and gets taken another.
In the Fisher King - it is a mere phrase uttered by Jack to a radio caller - that sets the man off on a homicidial killing spree. In Two Towers - it is an action that is misunderstood that causes Gollum to decide Frodo whom he'd believed in is now against him.
A word, a phrase, and action. How frightening. It's enough to make me wonder if I should post my writings at all...yet, we can't help but affect one another, can we? Or our environment. Staying hidden from it affects it just as much as interacting. The question I guess is - how much responsibility should I take or we or everyone for our writings, for sending out our thoughts, for our interactions and how much responsibility should those who respond to our actions, words, etc take??
Additional bits and pieces: Realized tonight that James Spader played the original Danial in StarGate the Movie. The movie focused more on Danial than the series seems to. I know it has zip to do with the above, just sort of came to me.
So subconsciously when I write anything in live journal or on a voy board or as an email (although that's very different)...I feel this little voice inside my head second-guessing my every move, wondering if I'd be better off keeping these thoughts safely locked in my hard drive or in a dusty binder hidden from others eyes. Yet, a part of me feels compelled for reasons I don't quite comprehend to post it anyway, even when the responses I recieve may seem to be more negative than positive. Is this masochism on my part? I don't know. My writing style isn't very structured I'm afraid...and is quite ripe with errors in grammar, formatting, spelling, and syntax - which no matter how many times I attempt to edit, it still seems to contain. Very frustrating. Oh I concede it has structure to it (especially when I get around to editing it, which isn't very often, lazy nit that I am), but it is also quite unstructured with a sort of stream-of-consciousness free-flowing style. (Which I'm sure drives some readers to distraction). I jump tracks, go off on tangents, yet it is more controlled than my thought process - since I can edit. I do hope that people don't judge me purely on what I write...as my friend cjl has told me on many an occassion, I'm nothing like what I write...so much of me is edited out of the words that appear onscreen, so much is filtered out through the inability to find the proper syntax or word or grammatical phrase to express a feeling or thought. I also have a tendency to delete stuff...especially lately, because I've been moodier than usual. Emotionally volatile in fact. Has to do with treading water for five years, four at the evil company, and one out of it. I'm afraid I'm starting to sink and land is barely within sight.
Today after taking a long walk with a friend through the back streets of our neighborhood, I came home to discover that my landlord had responded to my pleas and the heat was on. Yay. Now, for the first time in days I'm warm and cosy listening to the hiss and crackle of the radiators. I'd begun to have fantasies of sitting on tropical beaches or sitting in front of a roaring fire. (I didn't have heat the last two weeks in my apartment and it was in the 40's and 30's, at night, 50s and 40s during the day.) Very happy to be able to type without my fingers feeling frost-bitten. It was a brisk fall day this afternoon with a just a hint of winter in the air, that soft brisk smell of chimney smoke and decaying leaf combined with baking cinnamin rolls. Have no idea where the cinnamin roll smell comes from, except that it keeps giving me a craving for cinnamin rolls. About 54 degrees, warmer than it has been and much warmer than it had been in either of our apartments. My friend had just returned from a trip to Colby Kansas with her family for Thanksgiving. 5'1 next to my 5'11 we looked quite the pair, a regular mutt and jeff, as my mother used to say. (Have no idea who mutt and jeff are.) Brushing our feet through the mixture of stale decaying leaves still on the sidewalks we ambled towards the Brooklyn Promendade where we sat for a while on a bench overlooking the Manhattan skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge, discussing people, life, and post-structuralism vs. structuralism. After reading
superplin's excellent review of Destiny, I'd come to the conclusion that maybe I'm a post-structuralist (I'd thought I was a structuralist) but superplin's definition of post-structuralist fits me better. This would explain a lot, especially some of my heated disagreements online. (Why do I keep hunting explanations for disagreements? Probably because I hate conflict and am non-confrontational by nature - intense conflict makes me ill. Although being stubborn, somewhat opinionated and a masochist - I get into heated debates online all the time...sigh.) My friend, I'll call her Wales, questioned this. I told her while I could accept the structure of things and even liked structures, I did not like to have them imposed on me. Also while I believed in God, more or less, I did not believe in fate or destiny or determinism - I believe we determin and make our own fate - God may make suggestions from time to time, point out different paths, but we choose them. Experience has taught me this. Wales argued that isn't our society built upon a structuralist point of view? Isn't it based on things like fate and natural selection, the inevitablity of things? I argued that I didn't think it was that simple. That someone may change the course of history based on an idea that had zip to do with biology but had to with luck or desire or rational thought. That, the human dilemma may actually be our inability to accept the fact that two opposing views can co-exist in the same space. That maybe both structuralism and post-structuralism co-existed. Black and White can be one. And someone can decide to do something for no good reason outside of the fact that it just happened to feel right at the time. She wasn't sure what that had to do with natural selection and writing this? Can't say I blame her. Actually my musings confuse me sometimes, unstructured and thrown out randomly. She did make me feel good though, when she told me: "Thanks for walking with me today, I really enjoy talking with you, you're really interesting and very smart." I was taken aback and warmed by this comment and told her so. Lately I'd begun to question my abilities. I'd begun to get caught up in my own self-reflective loop ...which was why getting out and having these long walks and discussions with friends is sooo important. It's also I think why it's important to interact with people who strongly disagree with me whether online or off, as well as those who strongly agree - it protects me from getting caught in the self-reflective loop.On Thanksgiving I watched several movies. The best of the bunch were The Fisher King and The Two Towers. The Fisher King is about a man who hates himself.
So much, that he has cut himself off from the world emotionally. This man, who is the protagonist of the film and is played by Jeff Bridges, is so obsessed with his own failings and own image, that he cannot see anything but that image. There's two types of self-obsessed (and I'm talking about the extreme here, we're all a bit self-obsessed I think), one is the person who hates themselves and is caught in a loop of hatred. They are obsessed with their own failings and project those failings on to the world around them. The other is the person who loves themselves too much and is narcissitic, they've fallen in love with their own reflection and tend to feel the need to project that reflection outward. Everyone is them. In the Fisher King, Jeff Bridges character (JACK) hates himself, he can feel no love. So he cuts himself off. The movie starts with him in a tall chrome and glass apartment above the city, looking down on everyone. Jack has everything you could possibly want - the skinny pretty girlfriend, the perfect apartment, a blossoming career in showbusiness, fame - in fact when we meet him he is auditioning for a role on a situation comedy that was in fact written for him. That's when Jack flips on the tv and discovers that a man, he recently counseled on his radio talk show, went out and killed a whole restaurant full of people then himself - b/c of Jack's advice.
Jack is devastated and spirals downwards from his pristine world to the gutter world of video stores and homeless people and a loud big-haired but warm-hearted girl-friend. We rejoin him three years later in this new dirtier world. But the dirtier world is less cold, less safe emotionwise. It is in this world that he meets Perry, a raving street character who lives in the basement of an apartment building. Perry, it turns out is one of the people who was affected by the man who attacked the restaurant. His wife was killed in that restaurant. And Perry, a character who is a mixture of wisdom, niavete, and sardonic wit - has dealt with the tragedy by focusing on the story of The Fisher King, which becomes a metaphor for how the two men manage to psychologically and emotionally heal each other. Through helping Perry - Jack finds a way of healing himself. And it's not easy, he tries to buy Perry off, he tries to give what he believes PErry wants, but it's not until Jack literally takes on Perry's foolish persona, complete with armored get-up and quest, that Jack finds a way of healing them both. JAck has to walk a mile in Perry's shoes, he has to leave his self-reflective prison and step inside another man's skin - to see the way to heal the man he inadvertently injured. It wasn't directly Jack's fault - but Jack was responsible, or rather what's important here is that Jack felt responsibility for what occurred. By taking responsibility for something he did and attempting to make it better, not undue, but make it better, at great cost to himself, Jack achieves illumination...and is able to love another person, able to see things outside himself, he escapes the self-reflective loop.
Two Towers similarly deals with this concept but far more tragically with the character of Gollum. Gollum is two people - one is the creature who killed his brother for the ring of power and has become obsessed with it, the other is Smeagol the good river creature Gollum once was, the creature that Bilbo Baggins could not kill...who wishes to be loved and have friends and hates himself, hates Gollum. Gollum has become caught in a self-reflective loop - that's what the ring of power does - it causes the wearer by having the power of becoming invisible, to lose the ability to see anything outside of himself, any good emotional value the world once had slowly gets stripped away and all the wearer sees is darkness. It hardens his heart, yet while doing so convinces the wearer it is his closest best friend. Gollum having lost the ring to Bilbo is slowly resurfacing, but it's a tough fight, he's been so twisted by its influence, it is literally impossible. Frodo looks into Gollum's eyes and see a version of himself, what he can become and as it a result it becomes tantamount to Frodo to save Gollum, to find a way of redeeming the creature...b/c if Frodo can redeem Gollum from the effects of the ring and the choices Gollum made due to its influence, perhaps there's hope for Frodo when this is all over. Unfortunately, just as Frodo has managed to get through to Gollum, managed to help Smeagol break free and get the dark side of his nature to submerg, the trio (Sam, Frodo and Gollum) get caught by a band of human fighters, good guys, but hardened. And Frodo attempting to save Gollum from these men, ends up from Gollum's point of view, betraying him. By attempting to do something good, Frodo causes Smeagol(Gollum) to once again fall under the influence of the part of him that still belongs to the ring. Frodo loses Smeagol in that scene. And possibly himself.
This scene is similar to a scene in Fisher King, where Jack believes he has helped Perry, but all he's done is push Perry into a situation where he recalls the trauma that made him catatonic - the flashback in affect causes Perry, like Smeagol to be lost to the darker part of his nature. The difference is Perry can still be saved, Jack is able to bring him back.
But will Frodo be so lucky?
There's a passage in Dorothy Dunnett's Queen's Play that bears repeating, pg. 418 (which I skipped ahead to find): " ...the noblest and most terrible power we possess is the power we have, each of us, over the chance-met, the stranger, the passer-by outside your life and your kin. Speak...as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences." A scarier passage I've never read. It frightens me the numerous ways people can take an action, a phrase, a written word that is meant one way and gets taken another.
In the Fisher King - it is a mere phrase uttered by Jack to a radio caller - that sets the man off on a homicidial killing spree. In Two Towers - it is an action that is misunderstood that causes Gollum to decide Frodo whom he'd believed in is now against him.
A word, a phrase, and action. How frightening. It's enough to make me wonder if I should post my writings at all...yet, we can't help but affect one another, can we? Or our environment. Staying hidden from it affects it just as much as interacting. The question I guess is - how much responsibility should I take or we or everyone for our writings, for sending out our thoughts, for our interactions and how much responsibility should those who respond to our actions, words, etc take??
Additional bits and pieces: Realized tonight that James Spader played the original Danial in StarGate the Movie. The movie focused more on Danial than the series seems to. I know it has zip to do with the above, just sort of came to me.
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I tend to agree
Date: 2003-12-01 08:54 pm (UTC)I think this is probably true. Having posted online for almost three years now - I've noticed a trend in the who agrees and disagrees with each other - it really does seem to be broken down along those lines. Having met several of the posters in person or spoken with them on other topics? I see a similar split. No matter what we dicuss, if one is post-structuralist and one is structuralist - a disagreement will arise when the conversation touches on that issue. In fact I've seen people agree...then suddenly vehemently disagree - right when they hit a topic that deals with structuralism vs. post. Interesting.