a creative writing exercise on here

The sun blinks. The cells in this body never should have asked permission. The foreign bot-god could make another you to love the corpse you leave actually dead.

Things, special dead special things. God raising families of corpses night and day, rain or shine, until they negotiate mentally through oxygen and make a deal with the black angel.

Offer Satan my white horse and ask him, What is real? What made me and why? Buildings now ruins, people now dust.

Sign here and explode, angel. Leave the heir sterile living or dying. Promise to the black angel.

something or other

There are worlds on Earth he can never know—like a world in which his wife has a strong Christian faith and offers him her loving arms.

 

about "The Concept of Anxiety" and "The Sickness Unto Death" by Søren Kierkegaard

 
Søren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death were published in the 1840s. The discussion of freedom and anxiety in these works laid the foundation for existentialism. Kierkegaard was the first modern philosopher and the first person to find himself in a modern age. However, his faith and spirituality make him timeless.

Philosophy departments consider The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death to be a pair.

The Concept of Anxiety explores sin, guilt, and anxiety, which is undirected fear, a general sense of dread. Kierkegaard rebuffs the idea that anxiety is caused by original sin. Rather, innocence generates the conditions for anxiety. Consider Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; recall that God forbade Adam from eating from the tree of knowledge. God's directive makes Adam aware that he has a choice. This freedom to choose causes anxiety. Furthermore, Adam could not have known he was sinning because, being the first to sin, how would he know what sin was? Sin was real only after Adam ate from the tree of knowledge. Rejoice in your freedom.

The Sickness Unto Death explores spiritual death, which is despair. Here, Kierkegaard deals with self, or the self-concept of selfhood: the "relation's relating itself to itself in the relation." In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard delves into the binary concepts of the finite and the infinite and the possible and the necessary. Tension between these polarities results from not being right with God. And, thus, despair. Kierkegaard elaborates further that there are three kinds of despair. All this is not as interesting as The Concept of Anxiety, so I will not elaborate. However, my favorite passage in The Sickness Unto Death comes when Kierkegaard is describing the person who lives life in a religious mode, but who, in the process of becoming spiritual, has lost his self:

Such things do not create much of a stir in the world, for a self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having. The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss--an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.--is sure to be noticed.

Think of someone you love. Someone who is so essential that you forget they live. Whose presence looms so large in your life that you take them for granted. Someone who, it's only when they're gone, that you really understand what they mean to you.

Imagine that person far away. Imagine that person being told to wear an orange jumpsuit. Imagine that person positioned before a high-definition camera in the desert. Then imagine that person forced to their knees. Imagine, dressed head to toe in black, a zealot with a bright knife. The zealot, with a hand on your loved one's shoulder, speaks to the camera and says he has no choice. Your loved one will die and no one will be responsible and no one could have done anything differently.

Imagine the zealot puts the knife to the throat of your beloved and cuts through the skin, tears into the muscles, saws through the tendons, and hits bone. Imagine your loved one gurgling, blood urging out. That's how they die.

another word about "Fear and Tembling" by Søren Kierkegaard

Abraham's trek to the lonely height of Mount Moriah took three days; for three days an ass jostled there, carrying Abraham and his long-wished for, unconditionally loved son. The journey would end in the father's sacrificing Isaac. What if Abraham had resigned himself to the loss, to living the rest of his life having used his own hands to saw through Isaac's throat? And, worse still, what if, having accepted and prepared himself to perform that horrific act, what if God called it off, and let Abraham keep Isaac?

Abraham would be forced to live with the child he had already sought to kill.

The amazing thing--where faith is found--is not in the fact that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son; no, it was Abraham's knowing that he would not lose Isaac, no matter what happened on Moriah.

Through faith I don't renounce anything, on the contrary in faith I receive everything ... It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole of temporality in order to win eternity ... Through faith Abraham did not renounce his claim on Isaac, through his faith he received Isaac.

about the film "The Master"

Who is the master? And who can live without serving a master?

In the 2012 film The Master, Freddie Quell—a character brought into curdled life by the singular Joaquin Phoenix—drifts and crashes from one moment to the next, his troubled life being one corrosive improvisation. Quell is a haunted World War II vet with no aim beyond staying intoxicated and self-destructing.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a philosophical movement known as "The Cause." His critics charge that Dodd improvises his philosophy from moment to moment, that he is a fraud. But his followers see an enlightened, intense visionary.

Quell is tortured, intense, rough, gaunt, uneducated, drawn to poisons and pain; Dodd is composed, graceful, educated, well-dressed, plump, and drawn to the spotlight. When the film debuted, critics wondered, What, if anything, does the film say? say about our talk of freedom and our readiness to serve a master? about the inevitable disappointment that comes with looking up to someone? about faith? belief?

Maybe Dodd serves more than one master: he serves his audience's expectations, his wife, his vanity and ego. He is intrigued by Phoenix, drawn by his intensity and desperation. Each man is fed and inspired by the interest and attention of the other; each man is the other's project, and each can take the other to the next improvised step, wherever it may lead.

The Master is fantastic, unorthodox, beautiful, grimy, and searing.


Note:
The Master was written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson and stars Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams.

about "Fear and Tembling" by Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard believed his contemporaries took faith for granted. In Fear and Trembling, he tries to better understand faith by examining the Biblical story of God calling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. This is a brief dialectic that problematizes and praises faith.

Abraham, a favorite of God, was an old man before he finally had a child. Through Isaac, his first born son, Abraham was to populate the nations. But God called on Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. Abraham prepared his belongings and took his son Isaac on a three-day journey there to do as God asked. Isaac asked why his father was not bringing a lamb to the sacrifice and Abraham answered that God would provide. Upon reaching Moriah, Abraham binds Isaac and draws the knife. At the last minute, Abraham is told by an angel not to follow through with the sacrifice. Ultimately a ram caught up in some nearby bushes serves as the sacrifice.

How could Abraham live with himself? How could he ever look at Isaac again, knowing he had been a moment away from killing him? Why would God ask this of his favorite, Abraham? It's a troubling story to say the least. But Kierkegaard unfolds it carefully, and convincingly makes the case that this is a paradoxical story of heroism, not depravity.

About secularized religion

As the Church fell into crisis in the 17th century, an emerging secular governmentality assumed custodial rights over life and population issues previously managed by the Church. With this, the modern State evolved, giving rise to politics. Like medicine and science, politics grows and takes more and more things into its body of knowledge, even religion, which itself is now highly politicized (it has been before now, but in different ways). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was developed in the context of this politics, and has been linked to it since the beginning as evident in the religion's history, a story of battling for political contention.

Taking this story on a tangent, on June 30 this year, a modest group of Mormons gathered to renounce their membership in the LDS Church using methods that conflate the political with the religious: their gathering was personal ceremony and political protest; they waved a "Declaration of Independence from Mormonism" and offered letters of resignation, seeking "freedom" as they gathered at Ensign Peak like Brigham Young did with his followers in 1847; they sacrificed church-bound relationships with their community, yearning to receive those same relationships in return, renewed as social and business ties; their reasons for quitting included Church teachings that are "made up", that conflict with science, that conflict with history, that veil racism and promote intolerance, and that are inconsistent.

Anyway, this story sort of stuck out like this.

Calling

He'd spent most of the past eight years in this confessional. The last to repent before him, some poor woman who carried the stench of congealed sausage fat smeared on brown paper, had trailed away from this cozy, curtained sanctuary months ago. The smell, an hour later. Actually, he was glad. For, you see, he could no longer answer the call of a God so great, he himself being so small. The first time he could not answer happened while staged on the alter. Standing, the flock kneeling before him, his hands just flaked away and his shoulders bolted across the room, fixed to the walls, lead beams bearing the full pull of the Earth, such that he surely could never handle the wine again, or the bread again, the blood and the body. Then his soul bled itself and scarred down the middle at exactly the moment when two other souls should have been joined in matrimony. Weeks later, his eyes froze, their last tears icing the mummy's silence on his lips, so that he could offer no comfort to the dying. And, now? He could no longer forgive, because all was forgiven. Now he could only, need only, give thanks!

Some idea of himself

Imagine Jack Dawson and Rose Dewitt Bukater working for a living in New York's slums. Or Romeo and Juliet going it alone, deprived of their family fortunes. Similarly, had Jay Gatsby married Daisy Buchanan, we would have lost them. And they would likely lose each other.

But unlike the doomed pairs from the film Titanic and Shakespeare's tragedy, Gatsby was willing to volunteer for his fate. The sacrifice he was to make for Daisy is not unlike the one Abraham was to make for God: Both men stood ready to answer the call of a higher duty--a duty only answerable by renouncing all others. Abraham's duty was to God; Gatsby's to an ideal, the past, the promise.

As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality if his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

For years Gatsby believed he could resurrect the past, a few moments of youth preserved under the glass of his memory, observable, close, but too fragile to touch.

"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
"I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She'll see."
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was ...

Gatsby, in his suspension, his nonexistence, is replaced in the public mind with a collection of myths borne from the incurious imaginations of passersby. In Fitzgerald's story, these are all people living a life other than their own: Tom Buchanan has his wife, Daisy, but his attentions lie with his lover in the city; Daisy pretends they don't; Gatsby suspends himself in service of his dream for Daisy; and Gatsby's guests obliterate the night with drink and forgetting, believing themselves to be in the company of a man who isn't, who isn't and who isn't.