Terrence McNally, Corpus Christi: A Play
inception is a decent movie but there's so much horror tragedy potential written into its premise and the implications of its worldbuilding and being able to see that and do nothing about it makes me feel deranged
dream technology was developed by the military "so soldiers could practice shooting, stabbing and strangling each other". the only way to escape a dream before it ends is by killing yourself or convincing someone to kill you. you can live entire lifetimes in a dream, only to wake up to the disorientation of realising that only hours have passed in the waking world. prolonged exposure to dream-sharing tech carries the high risk of inducing psychosis to the point that you can no longer tell the difference between dreams and reality. you can carry a "totem" that behaves differently in a dream to counter this, but if anyone else gets their hands on it and figures out how it works, it's game over. dreaming is so addictive that some people sacrifice their waking lives to keep dreaming for longer. people can be hired to break into your mind and take anything they want from it, down to your most intimate parts, and sell them for profit. if that's not paranoia-inducing enough, entering someone else's mind carries the risk of being hunted down and torn to pieces by manifestations of their own psyche in a subconscious act of self-defence that cannot be controlled, because what you are doing is invasive and violent. the premise of the film rests on a superrich man hiring a group of people to fundamentally alter a man's identity because inheriting his father's corporation has the potential to make him a BUSINESS COMPETITOR. the leader of said heist team is so haunted by the suicide of his wife that he (unintentionally) caused by violating her mind to the point of madness that he locks the rest of them into a labyrinth of his own guilt, stalked by the minotaur her vengeful ghost. oh, and on the right cocktail of drugs, you can't wake up from a nightmare, and will instead end up in pure unconstructed unreality, surrounded only by decaying structures built by those who inhabited it before you, whose intentions and regrets might still haunt the landscape like a malevolent physical presence.
and you still have to go to work in the morning!
Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting [The Wire’s] thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.
But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.
ALTDavid Whyte, “Self Portrait”
currently experimenting with taking my orchids in with me when i shower/bathe (for Humidity&Companionship). it seems to make them happy…
i have crazy garlic fingers from peeling and chopping garlic cloves yesterday this phenomenon is always fascinating to me because it reminds me that i, too, am made of meat, and therefore i am also susceptible to being seasoned
Folio from a Manuscript of the Qur'an. Iran, Shiraz, 1550-1575. Ink, colors and gold on paper.
the central construction of ptsd as an etiology seems to be for murderers
vietnam war veterans popularised the construction of the diagnosis in its modern form. and that was a war widely protested locally and fought in a foreign land. it was recognised in the dsm in the 1980s. i should really not be surprised that a book about trauma centers them.
saw a comedian from the middle east joke that only usamerican vets get ptsd, arabs just die or continue to live through trauma.
Palestine has some of the highest rates of mental illness in the world. A quarter of Palestinian adolescents have made suicide attempts; about 23.2% have post-traumatic stress disorder (according to a survey of 1,369 over three years) compared to around 6-9% in the US; and the Palestinian territories have by far the highest levels of depression in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Samah Jabr, chair of the mental health unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health and one of just 32 psychiatrists in the Palestinian territories, doubts those statistics.
“I question the methodology. I think they’re measuring social psychological pain and social suffering, and they’re saying this is depression,” she says. “What is sick, the context or the person? In Palestine, we see many people whose symptoms—unusual emotional reaction or a behaviors—are a normal reaction to a pathogenic context.” There are many people in Palestine who are suffering. But Western-developed tools for measuring depression, such as the Beck inventory, do not tend to distinguish between justified misery and clinical depression. [...]
“The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin