Skilled Writing

So I already know that I have a powerful imagination, and can be quite sensitive to fiction and art overall. I very easily empathize with main characters in movies and books and feel a slight twinge if someone has, say, their arm cut off.

But when I found a copy of Chuck Palahniuk's "Haunted" at the library, and remembered that I'd read about the incident when Mr. Palahniuk had to stop reading it aloud because people in his audience were fainting, I thought, "Hey, can it really be that bad?"

Apparently it can.

I made it through the introduction without much problems. After about fifteen pages, I was delighted - "This is really taking me out of my comfort zone", I thought, "It's quite provocative."

After another five pages, I was skipping a few lines because I was uncomfortable reading them. At page twenty-three I think it was, I had to close the book because it was making me physically sick and I was afraid I might throw up on it. The fact that the book had big, suspicious yellow stains all over those pages also made me suspect I might not be the first to do so - which didn't help.

In case you're curious, the book more or less starts with one of the characters relating a bunch of anecdotes on people getting injured while masturbating. It starts with "You know autoerotic asphyxiation? Yeah, that's child's play in comparison to what these guys did..." and, well, then it goes on with "That's child's play in comparison to what happened to me."

This blog post is my recognition that, despite being desensitized by years on the Internet, and despite having seen pictures of some pretty gross stuff, Chuck Palahniuk can still cause me to almost vomit, using nothing but words. I tip my hat to that kind of writing skill.

(In the end, I decided to borrow another book.)

On Jesus

"Michael [Cheuk] posted this note on his Facebook page May 21: "Jesus came back today! He was at our local food pantry waiting in line to receive one of 800+ bags of food that was distributed this morning."

Michael's post brought to mind in a vivid way the passage in Matthew where Jesus reminded his disciples (and us) that when we feed the hungry, we are feeding him; every ministry to those in need is a ministry to the Savior."

--there's a proper, Christian way of interpreting Jesus returning, if ever I saw one. More Christians would do well to remember that lesson: The best way to love Christ is to love your neighbour.

The passage is taken from a very interesting website that I just stumbled upon: Ethics Daily.

Broken

Remember that old Greek myth, about how there were once just humans, but then the gods split them apart into man and woman, and they become obsessed with trying to fit themselves back together?

Maybe that's actually a nice metaphor for sexuality overall, hetero- homo- auto- or what-have-you-sexual. Sexuality is in some way, an attempt to fix what is broken. That is why other peoples' sexual hang-ups can seem silly or pointless - because it's not something we ourselves lack. From our point of view, it seems like the other person is trying to fix something that isn't broken.

Heroes

Abd al-Qadir al Jaza'iri

John Woolman

I spend a lot of my time reading, thinking, and writing about heroes. I think it's about time I mentioned these two men. Their stories deserve to be read.

A Duel of Dreams

Tonight I had a triple-layered lucid dream. I think that's the most layers I've had for a good while, and the coolest thing about it is that while I was partially in control of the dream, there were still other agents inside it that I couldn't directly do anything about. I realized that I was dreaming, but I also realized that I wasn't the only dreamer.

It started out fairly straightforward, with an attack on my apartment by bizarre hybrid monsters, such as a gorilla with a terror bird head instead of its right arm. I tried running away from said monsters, but then they started fighting each other; one of them was trying to help me. Before I could properly heed its warning and escape, though, two agents showed up and attacked me, and I was sucked into some kind of vortex and dispatched in a dream-world, a prison world full of mutants, some more human-seeming than others. There, I stumbled upon knowledge of who was behind the plot; one of the agents had an obsession with Napoleon, and using that information I tracked him down and learned that his employer was one of the Fair Folk, a queen of some sort.

It gets crazier. I managed to figure out that I was actually stuck in a dream world at some point around here, and so I tried to escape by waking up. I did, and then went about my day as normal, until I found myself in a grocery store, suddenly surrounded by big crowds of customers asking me how to find everything they were looking for. Eventually it dawned upon me that I was still stuck in a dream, and that my plot hadn't worked. By magical dream logic, I deduced that while I was dreaming, that didn't actually put me on my home turf; the Fair Folk are masters of dream, and can easily snare you even inside your own head. I figured out how to find one of her agents, disguised as a worker in the meat and delicacies section, and entered battle with him. An epic fight ensued, me using dream-shaping against a guy armed with a meat cleaver. Eventually I managed to turn the dream against him, making him forget who he was and turning him into a teenage girl, then ridiculing him until he ran away crying.

Then I made an attempt to wake up. Unfortunately, I still didn't escape, and woke up into an alternate reality instead, one in which I had died five years ago when an obelisk fell on me. I tried desperately to find someone who had known me before my death, but I couldn't find anyone. Eventually I met with a gang of criminals, containing some people I know in real life, but who didn't know me due to the fact that I was dead in this reality - but I managed to convince them to help me, which was good because the other agent was still on my tail.

Here's where it really gets crazy: One of my new gangster friends gave me a cup of noodles, and the cup made me remember the rules for Shaping Combat from Exalted. I realized that, since I was probably still in a dream, I could use these to my advantage. So I shaped away the final agent using the Cup of Desire, turning him into a loving family father, making him forget himself forever. Then I broke free of this dream as well.

That's where I am at now. Two agents have been destroyed, shaped away into dream-figments. The Queen is still out there. I didn't defeat her, but I managed to break free of her. I'm awake.

...at least I think so.

The Fangirl and I

So I was thinking about major money-grabbing corporations after reading Iceye's little post about the Nintendo DS. I... don't really have anything to comment on it since I don't know the first thing about Nintendo DS. However, it got me thinking about Quality again, specifically lack of quality, which I presume is what she implies about Disney in that post.

In the last post, I talked about what is good. Now I wonder, what is bad? Do I have any right whatsoever to declare a given piece of artwork "bad"? I... honestly can't come up with any arguments for this. It's easier to argue for good; this is something inexplicable that we feel, that resonates within us without rhyme or reason. This I can live with.

Bad art, though, comes with a more fundamental problem. At least when I see something that I think is beautiful and good, I know this. But bad art generally creates weaker emotions - generally, a failure to provoke any kind of thought or emotion at all is a sign of bad art (unless it's so bad it's good, but that's another thing - let's not bring comedy into this, comedy is the single most incomprehensible thing in the world to me). Bad art is bad because it doesn't do anything, much like a broken piece of machinery doesn't do anything. It's useless. It lacks utility.

But maybe that's just because I can't understand it? There's tons of art out there, that I would consider bad but which clearly resonates with people, clearly makes them feel very strongly about it. When teenage girls rail about Edward vs. Jacob, they do it because they have very, very strong feelings about it. As a matter of fact, the rabid devotion of a fangirl is probably a far more powerful emotion than anything I have ever felt as a result of any work of art. How can this be? How can there be so much fantastic, passion-inspiring, truly wonderful art out there that I just can't get?

In other words, this is my thesis: If I read, for instance, Twilight and don't feel very strongly about the book, that's a very sad thing, because it means I'm reading it wrong. Clearly there is a certain way of enjoying this book - a certain point of view - which makes it inspire true passion. Which makes it better than anything I have ever encountered. Failure to enjoy it is a tremendous loss, one which I can make up for with other works of art, but still. There's something here that I'm missing. That I won't be able to experience.

To use a poorly-constructed simile: "What if my true love really is out there, except we're both male, and we're both straight as arrows"? Something wonderful which you're missing out on because of preferences which you can't change, preferences which are just hard-coded into you for no good reason.

It's pretty sad, don't you think?

The Good Delusion

My philosophy of values is something that gets revisited a lot on this blog. What with it being called Absurd Heroes and all, I suppose that's not really strange - philosophy of values is something I place a lot of value in. Ironic, I know.

So, let's for a moment go over the basic idea behind absurdism again. Absurdism states that there are no inherent values - the world is meaningless and devoid of any real content, save for what values we invent for ourselves. The idea behind the philosophy is that causes - something to champion, something to be a hero for - fill our lives with meaning. Essentially, any goal we set is arbitrary and meaningless, but the struggle towards that goal is meaningful, because of the challenge it poses, because it keeps us moving. When Sisyphus gets the rock to the top of the mountain, it rolls down on the other side - nothing is achieved, nothing has happened - but the struggle to push the rock gives him something to do.

So much for values as in goals. The struggle to create a good fiction, or a nice drawing, or a beautiful piece of music, are valuable; the outcome basically isn't really important. So what of being a patron of the arts? Is enjoying art also an entirely arbitrary thing? Maybe. I'm thinking it probably is.

The reason I'm philosophizing about this is because I just watched a magical girl transformation sequence and started crying. My thoughts at the moment were basically "My God, this is so beautiful". Yes, you read that right. I was deeply touched by a cartoon depicting a poorly-drawn girl spouting random English nonsense and then magically changing into a pretty outfit. Now, normally - to protect my pride - I would probably blame this reaction on sleep deprivation, or making some association, or some other excuse. But the fact remains: I was deeply touched. I felt the essence of True Art for a moment, art that moved and inspired me.

And I'm thinking, can you argue for something being True Art and something else not being? I don't think so. Beauty, or Quality, much like a religious experience, is something which cannot be quantified, measured, or established in repeatable experiments. Just like God, it's only something we feel, not something we can ever prove. So when we say, "This is a good song", we are saying essentially the same thing as "I felt the presence of God". You are saying you felt something, the existence of which you cannot prove, an intangible, unquantifiable, unmeasurable something, with no substance, no essence, no form. You're essentially saying you saw something that for all intents and purposes doesn't exist.

And yet, there are trends. There are some things that are more widely considered beautiful, and there are whole academic fields devoted to trying to understand quality. And there are shortcuts, like the golden ratio, or tropes, or literary techniques, which are recipes that will likely result in something of quality. But we won't find universal consensus. The whole thing reminds me a bit of the ancient Jews, reading the Torah and trying to understand the nature of God, trying to say, "This here text proves that God is good, because it describes benevolence in his actions", much like a literary critic might say, "This here text proves that Catcher in the Rye is good, because it describes its expert usage of the unreliable narrator technique". In both cases, you can flatly deny the arguments. "It is true because it's in the Bible", they say, and you say, "But I don't believe the Bible is true, and you can't prove it. You can't even demonstrate it, actually - you can't even provide indications that it might be."

And yet, I think, a lot of people claim that Good is something real. You'd certainly think so, what with how hurt people can be when you insult their favourite pieces of art. Firefly sucks. The Final Fantasy series is for losers. Hyperion is a terrible book.

It hurts, doesn't it? It feels so wrong somehow. Art is very important to us. And yet we haven't even got a clue what it actually is.