proximoception

Ozymandias -> Mending Wall

The two are one, in fact, even if Shelley is lone and level sands and Frost is apple orchard.

Finally doing the very, very obviously right thing when you suddenly have nothing to lose isn't precisely heroic, but it's still nice to see.

Were the earlier seasons of The Leftovers using bible stories as templates? The last one uses a lot.

( . . . )

I've been thinking further about The Leftovers.

( . . . )

Relocating yet again, this time to a couple kilometers outside of Toronto. Your move, life.

But of course what I really mean is that the intense feelings we feel when scripture or screenwriting leads us beyond the edge of the world of causes that fit their effects are not useless errors. God and piled-up coincidences, while lies, can be shortcuts to the true and truly blessed state, where you remember that you matter because you're in the world and that the world matters because it's in you. That positive feedback loop of mattering (the "big" of Little, Big) has as its endpoint not a foolish narcissistic fantasy but the limits of our potential to both take and give, perceive and do, which are not only nowhere near where we typically are but far beyond where we imagine them to be. The one thing unforgivable in a story that brings us back some part of what we are when we really are is its own belief that we aren't that, not really - that the story itself is either a lie or depends for its truth on some force greater than nature (that is, on a lie).

If the shortcuts didn't think of themselves as shortcuts, as cheats ... then they wouldn't be. "By the incantation of this verse": I was not only capable of thinking I was more, but I put that thought into words that, read by anyone, make them think it, no matter how many times, no matter where, no matter when. There are parts of the world (words are part of the world) out of which the mind can make what will make the mind more.

The story must believe in itself. The most efficient, though not the easiest, way to do that is to be right. There is much to be right about. Much that we have been made to forget, because the intruder in our minds, the one that keeps us living (in general) far beneath our potential, would lose its power over us if we remembered and kept remembering.

Lindelof understands this, in part: the seekers of god or death are made to see that the ones they love are more than god or death to them. The immensity of their losses has in fact created the false, respectively positive and negative peaces they crave, proving the immensity of what they had had in the lost ones - and have still, or can gain again, in others. The true God, reality, isn't the one they've sought, and true death isn't the rest they've dreamed it into. Other people, too, are giants in time. Most moments make them and us seem like pygmies because most moments are distorted, are rippled, puff themselves up into convex mirrors to diminish our reflections.

Stories of the sort I mean are glasses, not blinders, correcting the lies of our eyes. Which is more wrong about the world, what we see out the window or the globe on the shelf?

Proust did what Kafka did in a different fashion, and to do that to Kafka was why Proust came. In reality parable's gain need not be reality's loss. Tripping over the invisible wire at our feet is quicker than throwing a world's worth of ink on the world. But it's crucial to know there's a choice.

Twin Peaks 3.8

( . . . )

We rewatched 3.9 because it was so interesting and we'd been half asleep last time.

( . . . )

She had a theory that leaving certain areas of her body, ones a wanted he would want to see, just partly uncovered would both remind him how much he wanted to see them and make him put effort into guessing about those stretches he couldn't yet perceive. The effort was the key. We have, she held, a certain allowance of moments we're given that we can spend on fleeting impressions, revulsions, amusements - most anything. But whatever takes us beyond this becomes real to us, is something we are now invested in. She called it the five second rule, but it was its inverse: since the goal is to get on the menu, climb onto the table, you need to earn a person's attention for more than five seconds. We all have a few family members we actually think of as family, a few friends who we categorize as our real friends, as well as a few crushes, a growing roster of enemies, some idols, and a few uncategorized persons who seem to represent something to us - though we may not be sure just what - so are capable of entering our unfrivolous thoughts, of earning entries in our mental index. Push past that five second interest threshold and you're of that number, she insisted. To attract was not enough. Attraction is fluid, associative, metamorphic. After years of further refinement she added to her theory, and practice, that only one carnal fascination should be cultivated at a time, one point of focus provided for eyes that, allowed to roam, would never open. Showing cleavage? Wear drab, loose-fitting jeans. Baring midriff? A closed jacket and a long, pleated skirt. The fashion magazines were probably onto this notion, may even have given it a name of their own. It was her commitment to this practice that was striking, her self-consciousness. To the point where if you earned more than five seconds of her own attention (something she was usually quite careful to withhold) she seemed to feel it was her duty to bring you into the heart of her life to see what sort of place there might be for you there. I don't mean she wouldn't speak to non-intimates for more than five seconds, of course. She would have said that most of a conversation was not about or even directed toward the other person, but at the topics raised, feelings evoked, wordplay aroused. I do think she felt that eye contact counted, as she had a tendency to suddenly, daringly, stare straight into your eyes at the briefest socially permissible distance then immediately look directly away, an in and out movement not unreminiscent of ballroom dancing. I could never tell if this behavior seemed so unnatural to me because she was incorrect, or had gotten the timing or some other crucial element wrong, or that it was instead entirely normal and had simply been rendered eccentric by the unusual closeness of my attention to it. So strange do we become after seeing just a part of what we are.