(no subject)

My father got mad at inanimate objects when difficulties involving them arose. When no one else was in the room he would rage at them, sometimes for quite a while. For him, as for many in his generarion, swearing where kids could hear was a real taboo so he usually remembered to not - but his replacement was worse, as he invented (or borrowed?) new ones that were simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying. Terrifying because it felt like the hate had invented the new word, like it had needed to because of its excess, had auditioned all possible sound combinations and arrived at what would have always fit it best. One I remember most vividly, can basically still hear - drenched in rage so intense it was hard to believe it was happening, a rage I've only dimly recognized in myself in a handful of unhappy occasions. Said this way: "Oooooooh. You. Stug." Loudly, very loudly since clearly audible from a floor away, but somehow with the tone of a declarative, the way someone might conduct the seventh hour of a conversation with their worst enemy across a fifty foot ravine. A murderous hate yell that was nonetheless fully controlled.

Hence my boundless contempt for rage in self or others. For me that's the stug. Which, yes, makes me angry at myself. But this enraging paradox has the bright side of giving me glimmers of understanding. I don't have much of a personal relationship with the universe, at least not on an affective level, but he did. My activated scorn for such relationships does seem abstractable enough from the people conducting them that my nearest approaches to empathy come after reaching peak frustration at their anger either at or on behalf of the inhuman. I start to halfway get it. Which doesn't affect my contempt or my objective understanding of what they're doing and why, but gives me a taste-guess of what life is like second to second in their warped and stunted world. Which I picture as one of those world maps with stray flaps at bottom and top representing the loose ends of being comoressed into two dimensions, but with the continents replaced by the black and red crayon squiggles of a raving problem child.

The stug scene would seem to be the opposite of religion, at least as reapplied to the macrocosm, but it uses religion's stand-in for logic, and of course rage at how things stand in the way of ideas about how they should be is a frequent failing of the religious, broadly defined. My religion is not anti-religion and cannot be, words meaning what they do, but affectively I can approach the worst of the religious at my own worst. Treating as persons those things that are not persons, even when these are habits or aspects of people, puts you on that path to improper intimacy with reality. And once you start to feel like that's a valid way to conceptualize things religion starts to seem more natural, less awkward and impossible and off-base. Seems to fit how you and it relate.

Not that anger at a person is such a great thing, but the mode really is natural to us, like love et al. It makes its own sort of sense, and of course gets picked up on by people around us. It's a form of communication where we're prettyy much the talk, not the talker, but at least there are hearers around, hearers who might respond.

I couldn't complete the process, when young. It was silly. The world was the world: was not even things but something in its own category. You could pretend you were speaking to it, or where it might overhear you, but that could only ever be a stakeless game, or at best a roundabout way of talking to yourself. For me ventriloquizing the universe has a charge not unlike that of a beautiful woman with a male hairstyle or garment - what's much more jarring than the similarities is the differences. Addressing life makes felt at once how far from us life is.

But there are similarities, and when you tune into them these too can jar with what you'd expected. In certain freakish ways "it" does "talk" back. The qualifications to such a statement require a Cupertino of lawyers, but it csn still be made, and in a lot of distinct little ways - like all the things for which one noun can be a productive metaphor, in the right context. It isn't any of those things, of course, until we play around with "is." Religion forgot it was playing. Which I'm sure made the game a lot more fun at first, and still does for everyone not able to see out of the place of at first. But then the buts began, begin.

A personal relationship with the world. We have personal relationships with all sorts of not-quite people, like our own past, or rather whole Agatha Christie drawingrooms full of interpretations and assemblages of past. And we probably should: probably certain knowledges we need cannot exist as replicable facts, but only as imagined relationships with people-ish, world-ish things neither person nor world. The crucial thing, I think, is to distinguish among them. And to let them die when an air comes they can't breathe. To not lend them your own.

Where was I going with this? New thoughts papered over the old. I'll come back later and reassess.

(no subject)

Lost thoughts turning into Mulholland Drive thoughts:

The diminishing returns with Ethan should have been obvious from the first. His initial uncloseting was amazing - him at the jungle edge was certainly one of the most memorable shots in all of television, but that was context dependent. He could never be that again, which was one reason they immediately killed him in the first place. Presumably ABC's fault rather than the writers? "Ethan worked best, do more Ethan." Genuinely dispiriting, as television has mostly always been. I wonder if in ten years we'll see even Breaking Bad as tarnished by habits from the dark ages? Even the not so great stretches in season 1, the middle of 2 and some sprinklings in 3 tended to fail more in the direction of low energy than comfortable cliche, I'd say; there was plenty of tv cliche toward the beginning, which gradually got replaced by cinema cliche, but it was usually used well - a backdrop from which more interesting things could emerge one by one for controlled consideration. Nevertheless it was amazing to feel the booster rockets fall away.

Lost. The Jacob and bro. scenes are what are keeping interest alive in the beginning of 6, and mostly just those - and soon that element too will be ruined. I like the kevinformatics graphs a lot because of their ridiculous degree of accuracy, at least for comparing series episodes against one another (imdb voters love House and Supernatural to eyebrow raising degrees), at which they're certainly near-flawless where Lost is concerned. I disagree about the Eko episode (anger that he'd died outshouted consideration of how well he was killed). I disagree even more, though, about the upcoming Richard episode, which I remember being the first crippling blow to the show's final area of fascination. Not even Richard, who saw the whole history, proves interesting, and not [..............] does it. Ruining Richard was not something the show could survive.

Because the mystery juice had pooled in him, angry irony intended, and that mystery had to have something interesting surviving its being drained away. The creation myth episode later on you came into assuming it would just extend that disillusionment - which it did, but even if it hadn't it would have been seen that way. The last chance of this meaning something living was lost.

But here he's still got some - his haplessness making him if anything more interesting, as though even his knowledge was being disturbed by the present revelations. Good, we want the present to finally matter in a story. And Ben's confrontation with Jacob was just great: "What about you?" You sympathize with both their points of view, which is fantastic for any murder scene: Jacob, who's essentially planned this, or at least predicted it and worked it into those plans, nevertheless is honest in his contempt. Ben is everything the monster thinks people essentially are.


(Massive text loss just occurred - the iOS update has led to a lot of crashing. I may reconstruct some of it when less irritated.)