Thank you :) These memes are fun. The words themselves are about how I wish to be seen, but I am sure there is an underlying context that reveals more of myself than I am aware of.
I had bad experiences with possessive love: the people who claimed to love me and wanted to possess me were also ready to destroy me if they didn't get what they wanted. There is nothing attractive or noble about wanting to possess someone. In the end it has nothing to do with love.
Othello might have told himself that he loved Desdemona but he despised her power over him, and when she seemed not to be what he wanted her to be, he killed her.
I really like this piece from Bazon Brock: "Death must be abolished, this damned mess must stop. He who speaks a word of consolation is a traitor." (Original: Der Tod muß abgeschafft werden, diese verdammte Schweinerei muß aufhören. Wer ein Wort des Trostes spricht, ist ein Verräter.)
It's not only about the fear of physical death. To me fear of death is more symbolic-a sort of castration fear. To protest again death, a seemingly foolish undertaking, since death cannot be defeated, is an expression I admire: to protest against the glorification of "acceptance".
There is this passage in the children's book The Neverending Story, where a boy ends up in front of a mirrored portal, which stands in the middle of a desert. He could just walk around that portal and continue his way, yet he realises that in order to truly continue his perilous journey he has to find a way to open it-only then can he see what really lies behind, where he has to go. (I know: simplicistic analogy, but it's a children's book.)
In that context I am less concerned with an afterlife (or if it does interest me, then it must do so subconsciously ... :) but more with the uncritical acceptance of the factual, the "We can't change xy, so why worry about it?"
I understand it's often a coping mechanism-I just dislike it when people parade their wilful ignorance as some sort of spiritual wisdom. It's impossible to always distinguish the ones, who acquired a certain point of view in the course of their experiences from the ones, who only parrot the selfhelp column in their newspaper or their favourite daily soap.
And The Greatest Sin is perhaps to generalise as much as I do so I shut up now :D
Oh, do you want to see Blade Runner? I can upload it onto my Dropbox! Meanwhile there are three versions or so ... a theatric version, a director's cut and I think another director's cut with extra 20 minutes or so ... not sure which ones I have :)
You kow, Othello is one of the few of Shakespeare's plays that for some reason never sticks in my head well. I should read it again some time, refresh my memory. I remember there was Othello, and Iago (Kenneth Branagh! :) ) but have very little active memory of even the film beyond that. Ah well.
But I definitely respect your opinions of love, in any case. I have some very personal experience with that sort of destructive love you're referring to, if not directly, but because two people I was very close to were in the midst of it, and taking all their loved ones down into the inferno with them by sheer proximity. I think that really, seriously, jaded my views of this traditional, possessive, all-encompassing thing called 'love' that everyone is so obsessed with. Mind you, it makes a great STORY, but t's just a story. Fiction and reality have never mixed well. This ideal 'love' the world holds in such high regard is very much like you say, it's possessive, it's destructive, it's vicious, and it's unhealthy. Again, I was jaded on the subject when I was very young, but in my opinion, I can't imagine why anyone would ever want it, so to hear you talk about your relationships, and your views on monogamy and such, is really refreshing. I feel like 'this may or may not be a way that suits everyone, but at least it's sane, and it's not trying to emulate some bullshit that Hollywood has been spoon-feeding a steady diet of and that, if it exists at all, is completely obsessive and insane.'
And, dude, I LOVE the Neverending Story. You have no idea. :) I watched the first film obsessively as a kid, and I know exactly the scene you're talking about, when Atreyu is going through his trials to save the world from the Nothing. I want to watch it again now, even though I've seen it probably fifty times. :) I didn't read the book until a few years ago, and I'm glad I waited, because you can take so much more out of it as an adult than you would be able to understand as a kid. So, if maybe our views on death are very different, I think we do both agree on the basic point that you can't turn away. It's something you have to look at seriously, and then form an opinion on. Once you have formed an opinion, it's part of you, it affects your view of the world, and no one can take that away from you. I'll spare you the whole detailed analysis of my personal beliefs from this point, because there's no way to explain it briefly, and it might make your head explode if I tried. :)
As for blade runner, that's quite alright. I never really had much of an interest in it, but if I did, I can easily get it through netflix. I just thought it was funny that your favorite movies were both 'classics' that I'd never seen. I honestly don't know if I could name my favorite movie. I mean, the Harry Potter series, obviously. And Lord of the Rings, but I also really loved Dead Poet's Society, the Neverending Story (but only the first one. the second film sucked.), Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, and several others. To narrow it down and say 'this is my favorite', I honestly don't think I could do that.
I had bad experiences with possessive love: the people who claimed to love me and wanted to possess me were also ready to destroy me if they didn't get what they wanted. There is nothing attractive or noble about wanting to possess someone. In the end it has nothing to do with love.
Othello might have told himself that he loved Desdemona but he despised her power over him, and when she seemed not to be what he wanted her to be, he killed her.
I really like this piece from Bazon Brock:
"Death must be abolished, this damned mess must stop. He who speaks a word of consolation is a traitor." (Original: Der Tod muß abgeschafft werden, diese verdammte Schweinerei muß aufhören. Wer ein Wort des Trostes spricht, ist ein Verräter.)
It's not only about the fear of physical death. To me fear of death is more symbolic-a sort of castration fear. To protest again death, a seemingly foolish undertaking, since death cannot be defeated, is an expression I admire: to protest against the glorification of "acceptance".
There is this passage in the children's book The Neverending Story, where a boy ends up in front of a mirrored portal, which stands in the middle of a desert. He could just walk around that portal and continue his way, yet he realises that in order to truly continue his perilous journey he has to find a way to open it-only then can he see what really lies behind, where he has to go. (I know: simplicistic analogy, but it's a children's book.)
In that context I am less concerned with an afterlife (or if it does interest me, then it must do so subconsciously ... :) but more with the uncritical acceptance of the factual, the "We can't change xy, so why worry about it?"
I understand it's often a coping mechanism-I just dislike it when people parade their wilful ignorance as some sort of spiritual wisdom. It's impossible to always distinguish the ones, who acquired a certain point of view in the course of their experiences from the ones, who only parrot the selfhelp column in their newspaper or their favourite daily soap.
And The Greatest Sin is perhaps to generalise as much as I do so I shut up now :D
Oh, do you want to see Blade Runner? I can upload it onto my Dropbox! Meanwhile there are three versions or so ... a theatric version, a director's cut and I think another director's cut with extra 20 minutes or so ... not sure which ones I have :)
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But I definitely respect your opinions of love, in any case. I have some very personal experience with that sort of destructive love you're referring to, if not directly, but because two people I was very close to were in the midst of it, and taking all their loved ones down into the inferno with them by sheer proximity. I think that really, seriously, jaded my views of this traditional, possessive, all-encompassing thing called 'love' that everyone is so obsessed with. Mind you, it makes a great STORY, but t's just a story. Fiction and reality have never mixed well. This ideal 'love' the world holds in such high regard is very much like you say, it's possessive, it's destructive, it's vicious, and it's unhealthy. Again, I was jaded on the subject when I was very young, but in my opinion, I can't imagine why anyone would ever want it, so to hear you talk about your relationships, and your views on monogamy and such, is really refreshing. I feel like 'this may or may not be a way that suits everyone, but at least it's sane, and it's not trying to emulate some bullshit that Hollywood has been spoon-feeding a steady diet of and that, if it exists at all, is completely obsessive and insane.'
And, dude, I LOVE the Neverending Story. You have no idea. :) I watched the first film obsessively as a kid, and I know exactly the scene you're talking about, when Atreyu is going through his trials to save the world from the Nothing. I want to watch it again now, even though I've seen it probably fifty times. :) I didn't read the book until a few years ago, and I'm glad I waited, because you can take so much more out of it as an adult than you would be able to understand as a kid.
So, if maybe our views on death are very different, I think we do both agree on the basic point that you can't turn away. It's something you have to look at seriously, and then form an opinion on. Once you have formed an opinion, it's part of you, it affects your view of the world, and no one can take that away from you. I'll spare you the whole detailed analysis of my personal beliefs from this point, because there's no way to explain it briefly, and it might make your head explode if I tried. :)
As for blade runner, that's quite alright. I never really had much of an interest in it, but if I did, I can easily get it through netflix. I just thought it was funny that your favorite movies were both 'classics' that I'd never seen. I honestly don't know if I could name my favorite movie. I mean, the Harry Potter series, obviously. And Lord of the Rings, but I also really loved Dead Poet's Society, the Neverending Story (but only the first one. the second film sucked.), Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, and several others. To narrow it down and say 'this is my favorite', I honestly don't think I could do that.
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