Suspended's thread
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luka
Well-known member
It's true I liked 3 of her posts I chose randomly but only cos she liked all of mine and I felt mean for not reciprocating. She's a vulnerable young woman going thru a difficult situation
mvuent
Void Dweller
as the first person on the forum to read this start to finish (luka definitely didn’t) i’m looking forward to where the next installments go. so far my feeling is that the farther the writing strays from the movie, the better it gets. which makes sense, since as you say, it’s not really about avatar. but there’s obviously a deliberate choice to keep the narrative of the film as the spine of the writing.
Probably my masterpiece
in that respect, it reminds me of what might be my favorite of your previous essays, fool’s gold. but the idea-palette of that essay strikes me as very different from this one (though related on an underlying level). and there's another important difference. from what i could glean, the show that fool’s gold centered on, lodge 49, seemed genuinely good. which doesn’t seem like the case with avatar 2. you talk about alchemical transformation in fool's gold, but your writing on avatar is itself an ambitious alchemical feat; it's no easy task, turning the cheap plastic of a jake sully mcdonalds action figure into gold. and the fact that you're putting up such a valiant showing in part 1 really has me hooked to see if you can stick the landing.
will post a few passages so revelatory that they’re worth force-feeding to everyone lurking this thread…
mvuent
Void Dweller
"All stories are eco-stories; all hero’s journeys are really narratives about ecology. The causal ripples, the structural interdependence, the pressures and tides. The hero is significant because of how he alters the balance. All heroes—and all villains—are either disruptors, protectors, or restorers of equilibrium. This is why all monomyths begin with departures from reality: the arrival of a falling star, a new stranger in town, a causal ripple which journeys through time and space to the hero’s world. The ready-at-hand becomes present-to-hand. The inherited rituals grow maladaptive. The old gods walk again."
mvuent
Void Dweller
"Some organisms, blessed with chloroplasts, derive most of their energy freely, from the sun. The rest of us—even the herbivores—must destructure other forms of life in order to keep on living. Must tear and chew and grind and bathe in acid. This is food: the decomposition of complex structure, an increase in entropy. Organization converted into heat. Making a mess of the Other, in order to keep your internals orderly. Keeping the fire of the self burning by breaking down cell walls and molecular bonds. Even for plants, life is far from peaceful. Real estate conflicts are inexorable; roots battle over access to water and quality soil; leaves shade each other out, and struggle for sun through a crowded canopy. Flowers mimic and compete for pollinators in elaborate deceptions, emit false chemical signals to sabotage the growth patterns of rival plants. Amidst this conflict, cooperation abounds, no question: trade networks between evergreen and deciduous trees, mutualisms between the plants and the bacteria that help feed them. Nature is not only war. And war involves elaborate cooperation. This is what the microbiologist Lynn Margulis understood, in her work on endosymbiosis. Nature is as thoroughly defined by cooperation as conflict, and neo-Darwinian tales of selfish genes are partial narratives. I will try to argue that if you look closely enough, conflict and cooperation are revealed to be not opposed but self-constituting, interdependent processes. By the same token of group selection, if you’re not in you’re out, and if you’re not with us, you’re against us: the fact of multicellularity and cooperation, the emergence of teams and family units, does not change the ubiquity of warfare. It merely re-draws battle lines. It merely makes the warfare more elaborate."
mvuent
Void Dweller
"Already we have the revenge cycles, the feedback loops of blood for blood. Some people think blood feud is a cultural construct; this is backwards; even vervet monkeys blood feud, and inherit the sins of their fathers. Culture is built to suppress blood feuds, to put a tamper on tribalism. The Laws of the Ancestors. The Tulkun Way. The Sermon on the Mount."
mvuent
Void Dweller
"In other words, fear doesn’t excuse you, because everyone’s scared. Just because we sometimes forget that anger is a mask for fear doesn’t mean it should move our hearts when the fear is revealed. The question is, what do you do with that fear. How much you prioritize your own security, or those of loved ones, over everyone else. Anxious mothers make petty tyrants because they lose sight of the big picture."
mvuent
Void Dweller
"What Robert Axelrod discovered was that tit-for-tat, strictly observed, leads to a death spiral. If one player makes a mistake—or for some reason is hard-pressed, and can’t reciprocate—then the other player will burn him right back, and he’ll burn them in turn, ad nauseam. In other words, blood feud. Hatfield–McCoy shit. And so what Axelrod pioneered instead is a strategy named “forgiving tit-for-tat.” If you defect on me, I’ll give you a second chance. And if you set up a simulation that is sufficiently life-like, then two paired-off players employing forgiving tit-for-tat strategies will win the highest earnings."
mvuent
Void Dweller
"The Universe is unfolding like a tree from seed. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Things start simple, multiply, and diversify. Atoms transmutate at higher temperatures into ever more complex atoms. Minerals evolve, from simple hydrogen and helium into carbon, oxygen, silicon, nitrogen, and a thousand more. In the process, minerals invent life—lightning strikes amino acids, in the envelope of a clay pore—and life, in turn, goes on to invent a thousand more minerals. At every step, the Universe moves ineluctably towards complexity, born of ever more complicated bonds, arrangements, and organizations. Life begins unicellular; there are symbiotic mergers, to form complex cells; the complex cells coordinate, to form multicellular life; the multicellular life coordinates, to form ant colonies and institutions, like the Catholic Church—and all of this pointing to Gaia, to the Teilhardian noösphere, to planet-scale patterns."
mvuent
Void Dweller
"There is an almost divine wholeness that the Universe is working toward, a Paradisal sync. And if all aggression is born of fear, fear of the Other, then forgiveness is essential to this unfolding. Jesus died on the cross to teach us a lesson. It doesn’t solve the problem of limited resources and limited turf. It doesn’t solve the conflict that arises from two, mutually exclusive desires. But it gets us closer to Heaven."
sus
Moderator
I was cooking
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
sus
Moderator
Cruel cruel man. No one, you bastard. But you knew that already.
sus
Moderator
I think I'm doing decently well at this but I'm worried my window is closing. I want to see India. I want to see China.