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May. 27th, 2014 02:04 amGood vs. bad.
Justice vs. consequentialism.
Divine vs. human.
What we should do vs. what we can.
One of Bloom's tropes was "crossings," where a poet seeking to deny the priority of the poetry that told her what was inside her (hence said, created that inside, in Bloom's view) passes from a cruder manner of deception to a more sophisticated one - the most sophisticated of all being a sort of resurrection and purification of the precursor, where you're more them than they are, or at least than they'll appear to anyone who they hadn't hit as hard and as new as they hit the latecomer. I think a lot of Plots cross over in a similar way - to the point where a lot of the plot interest becomes what paradigm the plot will end up following. And like Bloom's and Kohlberg's, these stages tend to progress in the one direction; in this case, from what we feel we'd most like to see to what we're most trying to avoid. This isn't a paradox: we'd like to be able to face what we hate to (because we aren't able), our own actual quotidian dilemmas. An escape that shows us there is no escape is an escape from escape, a "holiday in reality." Activate enough of our sense of the real - more than we allow ourselves in our "real" moments, the shifting denial fantasy we construct from moment to moment - and we forget we could ever have left it. We accept what seemed like drowning in who we are, convinced there was never an air. And this is healing, in moderation. Brings us back into contact with much that we know to be good, contact lost in our violent attempts to pull clear of that hot oven chasing us. Seemingly chasing us. (We do most of our lying through forgetting, I've decided, or at least that's the way it's done for us. (Does everyone age into a Freudian?))
Because it's mostly not so hot as we'd thought and it's not chasing us at all, we're just standing on it. We never take our feet's side over that of our flying eyes until we feel them. Maybe until something really heats them. But gradually, so we can take it. So we feel how the worst heats come down from the head.
There's probably a non-plot under G v E, some chaos like the raw dream free-fall in Inception. Coming out of which may simulate a conflict: Normal vs. Strange. Normal wins without much effort, at least in our heads, as pure escape does not convince. We know there's a better and worse, but we hope to externalize it. The bad are those over there, the good our friends nearby. But it isn't like that either, we know, since the good slip up. No body can be trusted, nor no mind, but certain decisions a mind makes. Which? Let's follow the right rules, the wisdom.
But each of these runs out, is plausibly challenged. Are there rules for living life rule-free? Directions to go in, at least, sans directions to follow?
The glow of where to go can only be put there by us, where our eyes throw ambiguous shine on some unglowing part of a ne'er-glowing world. But was it us that put it in us to put that out? Or did the out? Or some outer than out? Should we trust our rules, trust its, trust another's? Whim, natural law, authority - none of them proving trustworthily whimsical, natural, lawful or authoritative. What we want, how the ground falls most easily, what we're told: these must chasten each other. None alone will tell us how to be or how not.
So we're stuck with the worst, with work, and that's all for the best, and good for us also. But how much can we do? If life is life and not a test, if the present moment's the only inventor of action, if the existence of more than one way means we can't assume one isn't better - how do we sift this? There's so much we'll never know, but we hesitate to say just what; if we could then we'd know what we needed to know, be masters of one day not jacks of them all. No normal but in good, no good but in consequences, nothing consequential but humanity, nothing we should do but what we humanly can (but all of that). But no arguments save via examples, flocks of examples (they call these "exhaustions"). No going up a step without the flattening of feet. A step of wool, of wood, of bronze, of stone. Then toe finds turf and there's no need of story for a time. (Or story becomes something else entirely?)
Justice vs. consequentialism.
Divine vs. human.
What we should do vs. what we can.
One of Bloom's tropes was "crossings," where a poet seeking to deny the priority of the poetry that told her what was inside her (hence said, created that inside, in Bloom's view) passes from a cruder manner of deception to a more sophisticated one - the most sophisticated of all being a sort of resurrection and purification of the precursor, where you're more them than they are, or at least than they'll appear to anyone who they hadn't hit as hard and as new as they hit the latecomer. I think a lot of Plots cross over in a similar way - to the point where a lot of the plot interest becomes what paradigm the plot will end up following. And like Bloom's and Kohlberg's, these stages tend to progress in the one direction; in this case, from what we feel we'd most like to see to what we're most trying to avoid. This isn't a paradox: we'd like to be able to face what we hate to (because we aren't able), our own actual quotidian dilemmas. An escape that shows us there is no escape is an escape from escape, a "holiday in reality." Activate enough of our sense of the real - more than we allow ourselves in our "real" moments, the shifting denial fantasy we construct from moment to moment - and we forget we could ever have left it. We accept what seemed like drowning in who we are, convinced there was never an air. And this is healing, in moderation. Brings us back into contact with much that we know to be good, contact lost in our violent attempts to pull clear of that hot oven chasing us. Seemingly chasing us. (We do most of our lying through forgetting, I've decided, or at least that's the way it's done for us. (Does everyone age into a Freudian?))
Because it's mostly not so hot as we'd thought and it's not chasing us at all, we're just standing on it. We never take our feet's side over that of our flying eyes until we feel them. Maybe until something really heats them. But gradually, so we can take it. So we feel how the worst heats come down from the head.
There's probably a non-plot under G v E, some chaos like the raw dream free-fall in Inception. Coming out of which may simulate a conflict: Normal vs. Strange. Normal wins without much effort, at least in our heads, as pure escape does not convince. We know there's a better and worse, but we hope to externalize it. The bad are those over there, the good our friends nearby. But it isn't like that either, we know, since the good slip up. No body can be trusted, nor no mind, but certain decisions a mind makes. Which? Let's follow the right rules, the wisdom.
But each of these runs out, is plausibly challenged. Are there rules for living life rule-free? Directions to go in, at least, sans directions to follow?
The glow of where to go can only be put there by us, where our eyes throw ambiguous shine on some unglowing part of a ne'er-glowing world. But was it us that put it in us to put that out? Or did the out? Or some outer than out? Should we trust our rules, trust its, trust another's? Whim, natural law, authority - none of them proving trustworthily whimsical, natural, lawful or authoritative. What we want, how the ground falls most easily, what we're told: these must chasten each other. None alone will tell us how to be or how not.
So we're stuck with the worst, with work, and that's all for the best, and good for us also. But how much can we do? If life is life and not a test, if the present moment's the only inventor of action, if the existence of more than one way means we can't assume one isn't better - how do we sift this? There's so much we'll never know, but we hesitate to say just what; if we could then we'd know what we needed to know, be masters of one day not jacks of them all. No normal but in good, no good but in consequences, nothing consequential but humanity, nothing we should do but what we humanly can (but all of that). But no arguments save via examples, flocks of examples (they call these "exhaustions"). No going up a step without the flattening of feet. A step of wool, of wood, of bronze, of stone. Then toe finds turf and there's no need of story for a time. (Or story becomes something else entirely?)
