Posted by araucaria
(here)
Posted by ulli
(here)
Thought those two words would exaggerate the polarity ...two famous media clichés...which are constantly being used to capture attention...
also to avoid all ideas of either creation of life (gender related, ie sex) or destruction of life (violence) to leave it to the readers to examine their internal response, independently of language associations.
Hence I was really hoping to come up with a term that would be free from any association with either extreme, something very, very impartial. I'm now thinking more of blending, or mixing....deliberately non-poetic, words that would never manipulate any emotion so that the image can speak for itself.
There is no neutral term. ‘Merge’ certainly isn’t neutral. Highways (artificial constructs) merge, and so do corporations (fictitious entities claiming moral and even real person status). So language is going to let us down however hard we try. And emotion doesn’t even necessarily come into it at all. We talk of parent companies (in French of mother and daughters) in situations totally devoid of any human feeling.
The image itself does likewise. It is an artist’s impression based on a number of snapshots of different galaxies at different stages in a process of coming together that takes millions of years. There is no guarantee that some part of the process is not incorrect, maybe the film is running backwards at some point, and then we are back with deceptive narrative. You can reconstruct an egg on film by playing it backwards, but you still have to mop the floor.
Possibly the only way we humans can relate to an event of such magnitude in time and space is to view it in terms that are familiar to us. The death scenario is the usual one, the birthing scenario I don’t think I’ve seen before, but if you have, then all to the good. The constant bursting out of new life strikes me as being consistent with the notion of ongoing creation of which human reproduction can only give a woefully inadequate idea. There are also things to back up my statement.
First, the astronomer Tom van Flandern describes a theoretical mothering process whereby stars process planets in pairs: they emerge in opposite directions out of the star’s own material. He also suggests that planets behave similarly in producing moons, with smaller planets producing just one. (The likely artificial status of the Moon is probably irrelevant to this argument). If this were to be so, then logically, on the next higher scale up, galaxies might well do likewise. You can either see this as an anthropomorphic projection, or on the contrary as an astronomical template for the animal reproductive system.
Secondly, if you take Gaia as a living conscious entity (we do, don’t we?), and suns also – they are sublogoi of the galactic logos, to use Law of One terminology (although we are wary of channeled information!), a galaxy is the higher conscious being that takes care of our Sun and Earth and ultimately ourselves. It is the top of our family tree, and so there is nothing wrong in tracing some slight family resemblance. It produces a sense of oneness with the universe in a way that the opposite approach, via the violent scenario, does not.
But we are still operating within the finite, where duality rules. Galaxies are finite, just like us, and infinite, just like us.
I’d like to ‘marry’ this discussion, if I may, with the other one, on writing. For me, language is metaphorical, language is metaphor. To use a different one, you rub two (or more) ideas together and you obtain a spark of understanding.
My thoughts on the modern novel were far too incomplete, but they at least gave some idea of the paranormal things that begin to happen when the tale starts wagging the dog
One important notion theorized by postwar writers was to undermine the authority of the author figure (here we refer to the Ego). Roland Barthes even wrote an influential essay called ‘The Death of the Author’. There were practical experiments going on in creative writing workshops (this was long before the Internet) that came up against the problem of clashing Egos.
This forum, and especially the Village, is working towards finding a solution to collective creative writing that avoids the clash of Egos, i.e. by looking after each other first, rather than imposing our own views. We all contribute our differently coloured tiles to the evolving mosaic, hence the magic fairytale element. In other words, the medium is the message, and the message is love. Obviously this cannot be conceived in terms of the sex-violence duality, for in those terms it would be something like total promiscuity
Re: Here and Now...What's Happening?
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