(no subject)
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.
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.