(no subject)

Lost

Did the thingie do a retinal scan on Juliet or something? And does this imply she set it loose as part of her failed plan to earn Kate's trust?

The brainwashing tape implies a continuity throughout history, and that the group on the island is a chosen people a la the descendants of Jacob--of whom Benjamin was the youngest son. "Jacob's list" is the one that Locke's on and Kate et al. are not, because they are betrayers. Though there's hypocrisy involved, since when Eko realized he'd in fact betrayed no one the island's system could do nothing with him but kill him. No second chance to get on that list.

So, a Joseph will obviously pop up, and Jacob may be the Real Leader if he isn't dead or a computer or something--or that shapeshifting manipulator in the jungle. Not sure how they'll handle Esau, but surely that's needed because of the nature of "God loves you like he loved Jacob"--which was by hating Esau. And that will feed back into the dark side/light side business from Season 1.

This also makes the three Davids a bit more significant.

What is it that they stay for? Eternal youth? The luck that brings a spinal surgeon in just in time to remove a tumor? Something most excellent, even worth the price of having no descendants--though they're working on that.

Desmond called the island(s) a snowglobe, when he tried to leave (an expert sailor) and wound up back at the shore, Identity-style. One thinks of the dome in the comicbook, apparently on the moon or some lifeless planet. The moon was part of the mandala sequence in the brainwashing tape.

(no subject)

Cities of the Plain

I drank too much of the strong tea and stayed up all night finishing the book yesterday, because I knew I wasn't sleeping, but was too tired and jittery to make full sense of the Epilogue. I liked some of the book and disliked some. All the Pretty Horses is an excellent and very fun book, The Crossing less good and much less pleasant but greater, great and haunting. This last one I need to think about more.

I wonder most of all what the exploding dog episode meant. Grady being pulled apart by the competing ties of principle/El Paso/America/Cole-ness and fate/Juarez/Mexico/Billitude? Heh, surely something, though presumably not that.

The thing with the Epilogue is I wasn't sure if it was talking about McCarthy's writing the book or Billy's having somehow dreamed Grady. Billy's story is I suppose the more dreamlike--the first two books are versions of one another--but John's is a traditional narrative, a novel, infused with how things ought to be. Realistic but perhaps ultimately unreal, where Crossing is surely meant to be symbolic but of true things.

Anyway, whoever dreamed it, it is the dreamed figure who has the gnosis--a curious one merging total freedom and contingency, as though consciousness were just matter from the inside (?; as I read it)--and is able to accept death and save the girl, who is surely named Mexico whatever her limits turn out to be. The real one can't do it, and apparently needs women to save him.

Freaked out by this coincidental IM exchange simultaneous with my writing the above:

D: i keep having really long action-movie dreams
D: last night was set in some jungle swamp, like vietnam or Southern Comfort
S: Actual nightmares?
D: there were lots of bugs.
D: they cant be nightmares cause i'm not really in it. there's a main character who i occassionally inhabit.

Like what the authorial Mexican spoke of. Like Billy I don't think I ever did this. Going to have to reread the whole Epilogue clearly.

(no subject)

s: Yeah, right, so we're the sparks or at any rate our lives are. We're something implicit in matter released by the action of some engine of the God of this world, that flare upon the night and then are gone.
s: Now, either the Judge is that God, and fears the mystery inside things, and wants to free it by calculating and corrupting it, so that it becomes a tool of his or assimilated to his principle (the black, alien sky)...or the wandering driller is some still more foreign God interested in fire for its own sake and the Judge is the air desperately seeking to snuff out whatever sparks it can. Not because they'll start a blaze but because they are proof of some order beyond his ken, sharers of the life of fire.
s: McCarthy leaves it deliberately ambiguous, I think; just as it's ambiguous whether the Kid has any real victory over the Judge. He resists, but not firmly or in the name of some other way of doing things. And the Judge basically says, huh, okay, then I'll take you down the OTHER way. So the divinity/value of the spark is an open question. Dark, no?
s: Is life anything more than a brief eddy in the seagoing river of death, or is it something in itself, some other world.
s: Read the Border Trilogy and find out! And then explain it to me!
s: The most recent books have their own answers, but those don't mesh well even with each other.

(no subject)

from Yahoo:

"It's a tough war," Bush said. "The American people are weary of this war. They're wondering whether or not we can succeed. They're horrified by the suicide bombing they see."

Yet Bush used a horrific tale in Iraq — one in which terrorists put children in a car to get through a checkpoint, then exploded the vehicle — to describe why he won't pull back.

"It makes me realize the nature of the enemy we face, which hardens my resolve to protect the American people," Bush said. "People who do that are not — it's not a civil war, it is pure evil. And I believe we have an obligation to protect ourselves from that evil."

Um, both Sunnis and Shiites are doing that, and for the most part their targets are one another. So what's that, exactly, bad planning among the evil purists? Actually I can't even take the ironic approach, the complete appallingness and mindlessness of this man and his friends and works burn through any annotation. When history judges the fuck out of us I hope it bears in mind that there was a large element of stunned disbelief in our passivity.

(no subject)

How do I know I didn't put them there,
Those back high places rimmed out from my mind
With snowflake foliage off delightful vines--
Weaving in on blue as that on black--
And angled meadows nooking novel mammals
Watching me from all 'round while I watch them all 'round.

Because the falling off is sensible.
One step they all fade back for each thing else that happens.
The snowflakes blue away, the blues black out
And blacks pass back behind those blacks and on.
The creatures close their eyes and drift away.