Life as an Extreme Sport

SG-1: Avalon Part 2

Stargate

Sigh. Wake me up when Vala is gone. I trust the show will get better then.

(Okay, fine. I hated the show up until the last 10 minutes, save for Lexa Doig, who’s incredibly cute as a button and I think I will grow to like as the new chief medical officer. I do have to wonder what it is with all these people having prior history with one another; just how small is the Air Force, anyhow?

The last 10 minutes was powerful, though. Some – like Dad – would say that it’s because they killed Vala, and that instantly made everything better. I’m not inclined to disagree. But I also found the scene with Daniel holding the burnt corpse of Vala very touching and moving; he finally stopped shouting and showed another emotion. In thinking about it, I realize that’s one of the things I’ve disliked so much about these last two episodes: Daniel normally is the range of emotions for SG-1, he never stays permanently stuck like the rest do. O’Neill was good for solid obstinance, Teal’c has been unwaivering in his stoicism and reserve, Carter is the driven science brain tempered with curiousity. Daniel’s role was often to bridge all of these with his curiousity, brain, obstinant behaviour, resoluteness, and on. To see him stuck in one, irritating, constantly yelling roll seems to sell him, and Michael Shanks as an actor, short. When he broke out of the yelling mode and emoted a range, the show instantly became more interesting.)

custodial repression?

...and everything else

I was watching the commentary of Bride and Prejudice this evening when the phrase “custodian of culture” came up, in some scene or another. Chadha talked for a few seconds on it, then moved on to talking about… oh, the Jane Austen society, or something. But I got stuck on custodian of culture.

I seem to collect certain sorts of people, and one of those sorts is librarians, who people often refer to as custodians of culture. But in thinking about it, well I dislike the term custodian (or curator), because it seems to denote some sort of control over the culture it’s watching and guarding. Culture doesn’t work like that, though – culture is a living beast that morphs and changes as it touches each of us, and we touch it in return. By existing within the culture, we change it as it reinforces itself with us. Having a custodian, someone who is supposed to stand outside this feedback loop and moderate and maintain it, seems completely anathema to the entire idea of what culture should even be in the first place.

Attempting to guard culture doesn’t end up keeping it pure, it ends up keeping it stagnant.

(And for the record, if someone were to ask me what a librarian does, I would not say they curate or custodialize culture in any way. Librarians are hubs in a cultural system; they’re very connected to the system, and trained in how to perceive, manipulate, and organize it into a form that’s readily digested by people who don’t have those kinds of powerlaw relations with knowledge and information.)

Abyss

life and living

I should sleep, but I can’t. It’s a combination of coffee and spinning mind that’s pushed me to body-tired but mind alive. I somehow found myself walking down memory lane, bringing up pictures, literally and otherwise, of people I’ve not talked to in a dozen years or more. People who were so influential on my life, vanished like the ephemeral memory they’ve become.

It’s time for me to get my data from Michael, so I can weed and walk through the past again. It’s information that tracks me, my damage forming, from innocence to wherever it is I am now. I think it’s important I use that in this upcoming project, although for what I don’t know.

Is there a point where this wall didn’t exist, ever, instead of being something that falls but springs back up as a protective at the slightest provocation? Always the odd child out, but this arms distance from everything and everyone, can I really trace that to being thirteen and sad? To death and heartache and solitude and love and pain and all the cliche’s of early teen passion? Have all my experiences since then just served to reinforce the walls he helped me build? At times like this, it seems so clear, so likely.

How do I deal with 16 years of living like this? How do I tear down the wall? Maybe the answer is to start writing again. Maybe the answer is a letter, a letter to each of them. Raven black hair, huge hands that won’t leave me alone, sly smiles stolen in secret, red braids flowing free, shy grey ghost and sexy rockstar…

It seems that only the extremes and elements bring me to this point where I can stare into my own personal abyss.

Erotic Faith

wisdom and folly

In Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song the murderer Gary Gilmore writes from death row to his incarcerated girlfriend, “What is to become of us Nicole? I know you wonder. And the answer is simple: By love… we can become more than the situation.” That assertion of the power of passionate love by a despicable wretch exemplifies what I call erotic faith: an emotional conviction, ultimately religious in nature, that meaning, value, hope, and even transcendence can be found through love – erotically focused love, the kind of love we mean when we say that people are in love. (I use the term “erotic” not in its narrow sexual connotation but to indicate broadly libidinous desire and a passionate, sometimes romantic, relationship with, affection for, or attachment to another person.) Men and women in the hold of erotic faith feel that love can redeem personal life and offer a reason for being.

Because doubt about the value of love has always been a human constant, historically people have always needed some kind of faith. And with the spread of secularism since the eighteenth century, erotic faith, diverse and informal though it may be, has given to some a center and sometimes a solace that were traditionally offered by organized religion and God. By love we canchange the situation – that sentiment moves people: love relationships have had the highest priority in the real lives of millions as they have had for innumerable characters in fiction.

Erotic faith is not a new thing, a single thing, or a local phenomenon; but, long suppressed or expropriated by Christian and other religious orthodoxies, it has swept the world in modern times as never before. Gilmore’s words mark its popular appeal. “Despite the flood of poems, novels and plays on the themes of romantic appeal and sexual love,” says one historian, “they played little or no part in the daily lives of men and women of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” This is no longer so. Erotic love became an important basis of everyday faith in the nineteenth centurey, and – for good or ill – the evidence of erotic faith is all around.

-Robert M. Polhemus, Erotic Faith, “Faith, Love and the Art of the Novel: ‘The Feather Plucked from Cupid’s Wing'” pp 1-2

realization

Summer 05, Summer Institute

This has been nagging me for a bit, but I wasn’t able to formalize just what has been bothering me until now, and it is this: I’ve taken a wrong tact with the Summer Institute project, I’ve been projecting my issues outside when it needs to be internal. It’s not about him, what he did, but about me and how I’ve reacted, and how I’m cognicent of not liking how I’ve reacted.

This necessitates some change in approach, but the concept is still sound. And better, the concept lets me really tackle what Brian and I were talking about last week. You see, last year’s SI theme was tragedy, trauma, and they really saw how hard it was for the people involved. Brian wanted to do something different, he wanted to do hope. But hope was nixed as cheesy, so they dressed it up in something pretty and resold it. But at the core, this is supposed to be about hope.

No, I don’t trust easily or well, but that should be my focus, that and my desire to come out from beyond it. Hope, not trauma, not hurt. Hope.