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Christmas and Easter nihilists

Jane Campbell

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Of Spaghetti, Myths, and Donuts

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No, I’m not going down the rabbit hole writing an essay on spaghetti, myths, and donuts.  It’s just a clever title to cover up the fact that I haven’t had time to write in a while as I’ve been whipping The Last War in Albion: Book One into shape, and it’s finally given up and submitted to my ministrations.  It looks like it’s clocking in at 237,000 words and 210 pretty pictures, covering 760+ pages.  Whew.  So that should be coming out pretty damn soon. 

In the meantime, though, I was able to squeeze in some rather lovely conversations with some rather lovely people.  A few weeks ago I sat down with James and Kevin of Pex Lives to discuss some Westerns and some Doctor Who.  We’ve got three Sergio Leone flicks on tap — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.  This “Man With No Name” trilogy (which, by the way, totally applies to LOST) is juxtaposed with the fan-favorite Tom Baker classic, Underworld, which I chose especial for this chat. “What on earth,” you might be wondering, “is this woman going on about? Underworld?!?  Compared to Sergio Leone?!?!?” Well, if you want to find out, you’ll need to listen to the podcast, which you can get here. Because the quest is the quest.

In even more exciting news, I am happy to announce what should be a new regular(ish) podcast series called Giant Woman, as the amazing Shana Wolstein of Oi Spaceman! and I both have a deep abiding passion for Steven Universe and we can talk about a few minutes of material for hours on end! (Yes, I’m exaggerating, but only kind of.)  In our pilot episode, we talk about the first episode, “Gem Glow,” and compare it with the unaired pilot episode that got Steven Universe greenlit into a regular series on the Cartoon Network.  We would be very happy if you would catch that episode here and listened to it with your undivided (undivided, that means “a fusion,” get it? Get it?) attention, and then come back (comeback!) to let us know in the comments what you think.  (Sorry about the sound quality on this one, as we had a small technical snafu, which should totally be fixed when) we cover “Laser Light Cannon,” “Cheeseburger Backpack,” and “Together Breakfast” in our next podcast, which will hopefully come out next week.

And hopefully I’ll get back to writing more about LOST and Doctor Who in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned!…

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The Circle in the Square (Doctor Who)

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(Content note: This post references childhood sexual abuse, the objectifying male gaze, and the repression and processing of traumatic events in general.)

Given that, let’s start with something really abstract.  A symbol, and a pretty basic one as far as symbols go.  A circle, circumscribed by a square.  Simple geometry.  And the Circle in the Square is by no means a hugely important or influential symbol in Western esoterica – it’s minor enough to take some digging to uncover, and what’s uncovered isn’t exactly consistent.  Which, you know, is kind of part and parcel for abstract symbols. 

The first thing that might come to mind is a problem of geometry – “squaring the circle” refers to creating a square of the same area as a given circle, using a finite number of steps with only a compass and a straightedge.  It was eventually mathematically demonstrated to be an impossible problem, which is actually kind of delightful given the subsequent esoteric usages — for if such fusion is technically impossible, its success is necessarily transcendent, pointing to Ascension. Anyways, in basic symbolism, the Circle represents the infinite, the cyclical, the eternal, totality and perfection.  The Square, on the other hand, represents material reality, the four corners of the earth, and subsequent limitation.  As such, the Circle in the Square can represent a “union of opposites,” if you wish, or at the very least the immanence of the divine. 

This basic analysis makes sense of the Masonic use of the symbol – and we should note that the primary symbol of Masonry consists of a square-edge and compass, used for making squares and circles.  Anyways, as W.L. Wilmshurst describes in his 1922 book The Meaning of Masonry, “Deity, symbolized by the all-containing circle, has attained form and manifestation in a ‘square’ or human soul.  It expresses the mystery of the Incarnation, accomplished within the personal soul.”  This, we should note, isn’t just divine immanence (as opposed to a Manichean separation of the earthly and the sacred), but is specifically rooted in the human experience. Wilmshurst goes on to liken the metaphorical squaring of the circle to a kind of “regeneration,” an “ascension into heaven” that accompanies the “necessity of self-dying—not, we repeat, the physical death of the body but a mystical death-in-life of everything except the body” which is fundamental to understanding the esoteric mysteries.

There are also sources like Elliott Wolfson’s Circle in the Square, which delves into the symbolism of the Kabbalah, and specifically into its gender implications.  According to Wolfson, the Circle (with its curviness and suggestion of a hole) actually symbolizes the female, while the Square symbolizes the male, with the placement of one in the other not only suggesting union (alchemical or otherwise) but a particular hierarchical relationship. 

And yet, despite such inconsistencies and problematic implications, there’s nonetheless the same underlying principle at work, namely the integration of what are seemingly, if not opposites, non-overlapping magisteria.  Which is not unlike what Doctor Who does for a living – namely, smashing together disparate genres in new and interesting ways. …

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Resurrection (memoir)

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Dawn creeps across the ragged field, quiet and diffuse.  I’ve been looking out the window, waiting for my long dark night to end.  Am I still dead?  No.  Flushed with relief, I cross over to the kitchen.  I make coffee, strong and dark. The bubbling echoes in our small loft, but still I have to rouse my carpenter, Harley.  Make breakfast.  Scrambled eggs, sausage patties, buttered toast.  Wake up!  Barely containing myself.  Everything changes.  In the flesh.  I made it. 

Some day, I will go back again, but not today.

We take the dogs for their morning walk.  Damp softness beneath my sandaled feet.  It rained last night.  Three hearty squalls, as promised. It’s warm for early December.  Unlike the carpenter, I don’t wear a jacket, just a long shift.  

“You’re not cold?” he wonders.

“Not at all,” I say.  I’d just as soon wear nothing.

The dogs are all over me like cheese on pizza. The bulldog drools, his slobbering maw agape and panting.  The rat terrier runs around in circles, rubs against me as if he were some kind of cat.  Even the carpenter’s eyes well, but he says nothing of it. 

The light isn’t quite right.  The lavender sky, the fluorescent grass, the copper halos of the street lamps still burning.  A skinny adolescent tree throbs, its thin bark veined with blood-colored sap.  I inhale the musky air.  I love it.  Connected to all.  Pure love.  I will never be alone, never grow cold, for I am one with all the world.  On the other side.  I remembered.  All I can do is choke on my giggles.  This is eternity?  The chorus laughs.  I’m hearing voices, but I don’t care.  Neither do they.

“Are you all right?” Harley asks.  He’s nervous.

“Yes.”  I smile, and look down at the callouses on my feet.  “I’m perfect.”…

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Lost Exegesis (Solitary) — Part 2

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In the first part of our Exegesis of Solitary, we explored the mirror-twinning of Sayid and Danielle, the meaning of do-overs or “mulligans” in golf, and the principle that “names are important” when it comes to decoding LOST in our discussion of Nadia.  We now enter the second part of theses essays, an Intermission where we dive deep into the intertextuality of the show.

 

Intermission

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

With the introduction of Danielle Rousseau, we get our second invocation (after John Locke) to another Enlightenment-era philosopher.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and his mother died nine days later due to complications from the childbirth.  His personal life was, frankly, a mess.  With his semi-literate seamstress, Thérèse Levasseur, he sired five children, all of whom were deposited at a foundling hospital soon after birth, which Rousseau later regretted.  His early writings on music were published in an early Encyclopedia, and he even invented a new system of musical notation based on numbers, but those works were never considered very important.  He alienated every colleague he ever worked with, from Diderot to Hume, and his antagonistic writings against religion forced him to flee arrest in both France and Geneva.  Later in life he became paranoid with delusions of plots conspired against him, as detailed in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker.  He died a recluse, but by no means a hermit, as he still held his wife and a few friends dear.

Rousseau’s writings had a tremendous impact on Western culture.  To him the idea of the “noble savage” is usually attributed; Rousseau imagined that man in his “natural state” – before society – was naturally good, in that such a self-sufficient man was not subject to the vices of politics and government.  As such, things like his Discourse on Inequality have relevance to our Losties, stranded in the middle of nowhere and essentially forced to create a society all on their own.  Indeed, the text of LOST seems to confirm Rousseau’s rebuttal of Hobbes’s contention that in the state of nature, with no civilization, all was “continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”:

“There is another principle which has escaped Hobbes; which, having been bestowed on mankind, to moderate, on certain occasions, the impetuosity of egoism, or, before its birth, the desire of self-preservation, tempers the ardour with which he pursues his own welfare, by an innate repugnance at seeing a fellow-creature suffer. I think I need not fear contradiction in holding man to be possessed of the only natural virtue, which could not be denied him by the most violent detractor of human virtue. I am speaking of compassion…”

Our Losties have not been at each others’ throats since returning to a state of nature.  Indeed, they’re pulled together remarkably well to live together (so as to avoid dying alone), despite the fact they’ve hived off into two camps at the Beach and at the Caves. …

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Lost Exegesis (Solitary) — Part 1

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We now begin what I consider to be the second act of LOST’s first season.  The basic tenor of the show has now been laid out – our principal characters have been introduced in some detail, as has the mysteriousness of the Island, and the general tenor of the show’s approach to episodic serialization has been established.  Overall, it’s been a story of how these survivors of a plane crash have adapted to living on an island in the South Pacific, touching on issues of social organization through intense characterization.  Now the show begins to shift focus, adding new dimensions: not only will some of the mysteries introduced early on be revealed, but it starts exploring the implication of the fact that our survivors are not alone.

Which is ironic, given the title of the episode. And yet, in some ways the title of this episode is perfectly chosen, given the extent to which it explores the various connotations of the word and some of its metaphorical implications.  We have Sayid, of course, who has shunned his fellow survivors out of his own shame; we have Rousseau, who lives the life of a hermit; we have Nadia, who experiences solitary confinement; we have Sawyer, a self-described outcast; we have Walt, estranged from his father; we even have the game of golf, which is most typically (though not exclusively) played as individuals competing against others or themselves, unlike most sports, which are team affairs.  And, of course, there’s the fact that our Losties are literally lost on an Island, itself a solitary and unique place.

Let’s start with Sayid.  It’s interesting that we begin this episode right where the previous one left off – indeed, the end of Confidence Man is prophetic, with Sayid heading off to ostensibly “map the Island,” which is practically what we get in Solitary.  We haven’t had this much continuity between episodes since Pilot Part 1 and Pilot Part 2, with a dash of Tabula Rasa thrown in. We also haven’t had a character who blatantly represents a major component of the audience’s desire regarding the show’s mysteries.  Jack is concerned with leading the group, Charlie with facing his demons, Kate with proving she’s a good person, Sawyer with proving he’s not, and all the rest with their own interpersonal relationships. Locke comes close, but he’s already had his revelation, an experience not shared by the audience.  Sayid, on the other hand, has already tried to triangulate the source of the Frenchwoman’s transmission, and now he’s actively exploring the Island. He is now, at least here, our proxy for trying to divine the Island’s mysteries – especially once he finds a mysterious cord laid out across the beach, leading at once out to sea and deep into the jungle.

 

The Hanged Man

As such, I find it very interesting that Sayid eventually finds himself in a position that evokes a couple of mythological connotations when he ends up caught in Rousseau’s trap, hanging upside down with his leg briefly impaled by a pointy stick. …

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Extubated (Poem)

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Hi all.  Busy working on edits for The Last War in Albion, Volume 1, which we’re planning to get out in August.  Also, the next installment of Lost Exegesis (Solitary) is taking quite a bit of research, but this is par for the course, as we’ll be venturing into the Quran, several philosophers, and a long-defunct TV show.  In the meantime, here’s the poem I read last Christmas for the Eruditorum Christmas Spectacular Podcast, but never got posted.  So here it is.  It’s about a man coming out of a ten-day medically induced coma after contracting spinal and cerebral meningitis, complicated by pneumonia, sepsis, and a mild heart attack.  It’s a poem about my dad.

 

The cough is a gong, laden with wet
Uncanny strong for one so feeble
Rattles his chest like windswept shutters
on an ivy-choked wall, a decrepit
          cottage late in autumn
 
The hands askew in twisted palsy
Dervish fingers fly and shudder
His trembling arm rises high
Palm spread wide
          to catch the sun
 
The face a mask for Hallow’s Eve
Furrowed brow, sallow pallor
Wax paper skin loosely wrapped
about his jaw, a frame of balsa
         cowled with grizzled snow
 
Sockets dark, lids red and swollen
Eyes set deep, the one half-open
Not quite rapt, cowers from fluorescent
light, like mine, a daughter lost
         upon a moonless grateful night
 
The mouth is a graveyard
Lips once puckered now surround
his jaundiced tombstones found
by a mangled tongue
        cracked like desert flats
 
Dad’s voice:  “Oh god, oh shit, oh man
Okay, okay, I got to— wow
Fuh—fuh—  oh Jesus fuck
Oh my god, oh god, oh no
        not again”
 
The seizure comes like lightning
Its iron fist grips every muscle, stiff
He stares in disbelief
Are these my legs? Are these my teeth?
        Doesn’t see the flowers         
 
Everything chimes
Heart monitor, blood pressure,
the bed, the phone, his central line;
        no more the stoic ventilator.

 

 …

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Esoterica, Power, and Dick Jokes (The Time Monster)

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No essay today — instead we bring you a fabulous podcast!  Shana, Daniel, and I discuss the very weird Doctor Who story called The Time Monster, as a part of Shana and Daniel’s ongoing Oi! Spaceman podcast series.  It’s a hoot. 

Well, not like a hooting owl, which can screech terribly when flapping its wings in the glaring sunlight as it struggles to free itself from its crystalline prison. Hey, actually, now that I think about it, feathers aren’t entirely dissimilar to flower petals.  Maybe I make this into some kind of a “jewel in the lotus” motif.  Nah, that would be ostentatious.  Certainly not appropriate for a gem like The Time Monster.

Anyways, you can get the podcast here. Enjoy.…

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Creature from the Black Lagoon

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Last week we talked about the expression of the Beautiful throughout the history of Doctor Who, and gleaned different kinds of aesthetics employed by the show in the process – from awe at new, strange places… to the banal objectification of women… to an almost ritualized praise of monsters in the modern era.  And it’s this latter sense of beauty that I find most interesting, given how monsters are now used in Doctor Who, especially in the Moffat era.  Because monsters are no longer just villainous plot devices for generating scares.  Quite often they are secret protagonists, and weighted with symbolic value, especially when juxtaposed with our main characters such that they become telling metaphors.  This latter process I call the “monstering” of a character, and of particular interest to me is how Amy Pond becomes consistently monstered during her time on the show.

But what does it mean “to be monstered?”  What does that look like?  And how unique is it to the modern era?  To answer those questions, I’ll step briefly back into the past, to The Android Invasion, aa 4th Doctor story with Sarah Jane in Season 13.  In The Android Invasion the Doctor and Sarah Jane have landed on an alien planet that looks like Earth, but it isn’t Earth, it’s the staging ground for an alien invasion that will use android duplicates of certain Earthlings, which is pretty standard Doctor Who fare when you think of it.  Anyways, there’s this great cliffhanger where Sarah Jane has been replaced by an android duplicate, only the Doctor has figured it out and attacks her, wrestling her to the ground.  Her face falls off, revealing so much circuitry. 

Yes, this the best moment in the otherwise fairly dreadful tale (it was written by Terry Nation, for gods’ sakes), but it’s also freighted with some potentially interesting literary readings.  First of all, Sarah Jane isn’t the only android duplicate – there’s some regular UNIT personnel, and even the Doctor, all monstered by androids.  It’s uncanny because we see characters we’ve known as “good” behaving in ways that are “not good,” which is rather transgressive.  Aside from that, though, there’s the opportunity for the nature of the particular monster to inform us about our characters’ natures.  This works particularly well in the monstering of Benton and Harry – they’re programmatic characters.  Sadly, Terry Nation is not a particularly writerly writer, as the monstering of both the Doctor and Sarah Jane really don’t say much about them at all – well, unless we stretch it a bit.  For example, Sarah Jane’s role as a Companion is often programmatic, from assisting in asking questions for the audience to serving as a plot device.  And even the Doctor, well, it’s a role that could be (and has been) played by all kinds of performers, such that he doesn’t even have a real face anymore. 

Contrast this with the monstering of Amy in Night Terrors.  In Night Terrors, we see Amy transformed into a deadly Wooden Doll, the product of a child’s nightmare, a child who’s afraid of being abandoned. …

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You’re a Beautiful Woman, Probably

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I’ve been thinking about doing another essay on monstering in Doctor Who, especially with regards to Amy Pond, but it occurs to me that this would really benefit in hindsight of a full survey on the show’s conception of beauty.  Which is to say, I think the process of “monstering” is part and parcel of the modern show’s aesthetics, and what better way to explore those aesthetics than to come to some sort of understanding of the place where the Beautiful stands within it?  Well, there’s probably several other better ways, but when it comes to Amy Pond, I think “beauty” isn’t a bad place to start.  Not because Karen Gillan is classically beautiful, but because the character she plays actually articulates a philosophy of beauty that I find altogether more interesting:

WARRIOR AMY: All those boys chasing me, but it was only ever Rory. Why was that?
AMY: You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful, and then you actually talk to them, and five minutes later they’re as dull as a brick? Then there’s other people, and you meet them and think, “Not bad, they’re okay.” And then you get to know them, and their face just sort of becomes them, like their personality’s written all over it. And they just turn into something so beautiful.
BOTH: Rory’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever met.

Which kind of gets where I’m going with this idea, namely that we have multiple conceptions of beauty, which we can roughly bifurcate into those predicated on appearances, and those predicated on interiority.  This is actually a false dichotomy, which we’ll get to later on, but for now this represents the axis I want to explore, especially when we get to the Revival.  Anyways, what I’ve done is look for instances of the word “beautiful” and its variants within the show’s dialogue.  This was done using a blanket google site search on Chrissie’s Doctor Who transcripts at chakoteya.com, coupled with individual searches of all the remaining Revival episodes, plus City of Death, for as it turns out google site search isn’t as thorough as I’d hoped.  As such, I’ve haven’t thoroughly surveyed all the Classic stories, so if you remember any pertinent lines from something not covered here, please say so in the comments.

Now obviously this isn’t going to fully capture what the show actually finds beautiful. Dialogue, after all, is more reflective of the characters speaking it, and as such certainly can’t represent the implied authors of Doctor Who. Still, for a character to conceive of something as being beautiful, the implied authors have to conceive of it too, even if they might disagree.  Which is to say, there’s still an acknowledgment of a kind of beauty that someone can behold.  Furthermore, it’s much more difficult to pin down an acknowledgement of  “beauty” without being explicitly told.  Not impossible, no – for example, the production cues of Doomsday, when Rose is finally torn from the Doctor through their last moments on the beach, clearly flag an understanding of tragic beauty, whether it’s from the score or the location design or just from the story itself. …

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Lost Exegesis (Confidence Man)

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Sometimes everything you need to know about an episode of LOST comes from the title.  That’s surely the case here.  Confidence Man is an episode about the art of the con, and the different confidence men (and women) who practice it.  And it’s certainly the case that the episode title is a clue to character connections, or at the very least represents the prevailing sort of relationship at this juncture in the Losties’ adventure on the Island.  In fact, I think we can safely say at this point that everyone featured in this episode is either a con artist of one kind or another, and many of them are simultaneously marks as well.

Obviously, of course, we have Sawyer, both on the Island and in the Flashbacks.  We’ll get back to him in due course, for this is what we’d expect given the episode title.  Instead, let’s begin with some of the less obvious con artists running about.  Because, I mean, it’s not exactly apparent that everyone is a  con artist, or who their marks are.  Some, of course, are obvious simply from what we’ve seen prior to Confidence Man.  Kate, for example.  She lied to the farmer, Ray Mullen, about her identity back in Tabula Rasa, when she was a fugitive on the lam hiking across Australia.  When hiking up the mountain with Sawyer, Sayid, Shannon, Boone, and Charlie, after Sawyer shot the polar bear, she feigned ignorance regarding how to use and dissemble a handgun.  And yet, in this episode, she doesn’t seem to be conning anyone: she’s the subject of Sawyer’s con to get a kiss. 

But upon closer examination, doesn’t she kind of go out of her way to figure out Sawyer himself and his story?  She doesn’t have to get so deeply enmeshed in the episode’s drama, but she dives right in anyways.  The seminal moment, I think, is when they kiss.  Because up to that point, she’s expressed a tremendous amount of disgust towards Sawyer, but that kiss betrays a passion that’s the antithesis of disgust.  She’s played the part of “the good girl” with him, with a certain amount of righteousness, but this is just cover for her true feelings.   Kate, as it turns out, is really good at the art of con.

Charlie is, too.  He wants Claire to move to the Caves with him, but she’s all, like, preferring to stay on the beach and shit. However, there’s something she really wants – peanut butter.  So she manipulates Charlie into finding peanut butter on the Island.  Of course, Charlie can’t find any peanut butter.  There isn’t any to be found, much to his consternation.  So Charlie does his best to con Claire by pretending that he has, in fact, found peanut butter.  But all he can actually offer is an empty jar.  Only through the power of his imagination can he convince her to enjoy the creaminess of emptiness.  And he succeeds.  She agrees to move to the Caves. 

Another con artist actively plying the trade is Sun. …

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