Another Bananafish feature
{Absolute, finitude, nothing, becoming. The four great things, other than literally anything else, that scares both a philosopher of Epistemology and Ontology equally. Absolution is nothing with something becoming - yet that statement on its own bears the same relevancy as Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. I can say it, but if left decontextualized means... well what does it mean? If we wish to forsake ourselves and admit temporarily to some "Death of the Author" ordeal, then we can say "anything" of course. Of course anything being an intentionally blank fill-it-in and not some call to find a truth or the Truth. Just giving up and saying nothing matters but does nothing have a meaning when everything lacks it? And what is "it" supposed to be, meaning? We just voided it, there it is again and there too!... Such is life when it comes to linguistics... or the saying: word salad. Or to be more sincere: to nullify everything is to render even trying to discuss something illegitimate and make even Pyrrhonian Skeptics look like absolutists. Such is life for those that yearn for meaning, even when we deconstruct things... This post is a @bananafish only zone, with an entry to Mizu No Oto contest with a picture not taken by a Steemian and Finish the Story contest with @f3nix hosting the prompt... Today's music-aides: "Before the Story" [1.] "Another him" [2.] and "Checker Dance" [3.] (Deltarune OST, the middle being a "rip" which I won't explain the joke and the others actual OST).}
[Image by Edoardo Colavitti.]
Creak, crease, crack, crumble.
"Brown, yet active opposites"
- says leaf on the boards.
{Literal translations, both follow not the 17-syllable limit.}
Chirriar, plegarse, romperse, caer. "Marron, pero activos opuestos" - dice hoja en las tableros.
吱吱，折痕，裂缝，崩溃。 "布朗，但活跃的对立面" - 说板上的叶子。
A sketch by me inspired by @f3nix's prompt for this week.
- Ontology -
Prompt done by @f3nix
There it was. An immense sphere, soaked in the amniotic liquid of the lucid dream. An embryo of edges, curves, dimensions, and impossible geometries. Static and fluid at the same time, iridescent, elusive and hypnotic in its eternal becoming.
There it was. After the struggle and the debris. There it was. Yoh's conscience.
Strung like pearls, millennia had relegated it to a mere legend, while Yoh raged freely on Earth. The existence of the conscience on a deep and subtle plane had been denied by the Master Demiurges, who originally created the source code. Their self-fulfilling prophecy had become inexorable, relegating Yoh's conscience first to the status of children's fable and then to nothingness. It had slept for a long, long time.
There, on board of the DDG-31/DD-936 Decatur, drifting in the outer space, Ethan had plenty of time for being instructed by the orbital station's A.I. about the possible effects on him of Yoh's conscience sudden epiphany.
It was not a God but it got close. This implied that the disintegration of the self, on all the planes of existence, was a more than spontaneous and probable event, as someone reached its proximity.
A sound of laborious ants interrupted Ethan’s astonished musings. The meta-viewer force fields were working around him incessantly, raising the programmed shields.
The mere sight of its unstable geometries would have been fatal for him. The neural system of his exoskeleton was crackling and working hard, at the edge of its computing power, to prevent the involuntary assimilation. Now he found himself immersed in a bath of waves that could have slipped him into oblivion instantly if he had not activated all the exoskeleton’s guard levels.
He felt like an infinitesimal dipteran, imprisoned in a dense amber atmosphere.
The Conscience's voices suddenly whipped Ethan's synapses like a thousand organ pipes in unison. He fell to his knees, eyes wide open and incredulous: no A.I. could ever have prepared him for this.
"I am. I happen. By dreaming, I have sung the creation of infinite worlds. Are you a Master?"
Ethan recorded the strange question, slowly taking courage. Standing up on his trembling legs, he pulled off his helmet and shouted:
"Conscience of Yoh, I am not a Master. I am the last of your creations, forgotten in your long sleep."
A deafening, golden silence.
As the most intimate essence of each cell began to evaporate through his cybernetic shell, Ethan frantically sought one last thought.
Ending by @theironfelix
"Forgotten, impossible. Ignored, correct. But your thoughts, guilty as admitted. Thus, I shall live up to my own sentence. However, instead of joining your jail surrounding this free room, I shall expand my freedom around."
And so Yoh hummed a lil' tune. For the first tune, gave the Masters their joy. The second, their enemy. The third, the reason to enslave themselves from Yoh's freedom. This final tune...
"Necessity and contingency, something I trembled not humming before. Thus why I trembled and admitted my guilt. Anyways, begone!"
... Yes... I guess I that repulsion worked. I can... think, and some more... Poor Ethan, tormented by the Void... The room is an absolute mess on one side, but the other still stable enough... Forgive me not Ethan!
And so thou: cerebral, floating and electric. And what is left of thee but a checker?... But, as many as checkers can be, one anointed dominates the field and terrorizes the enemies. So possess it, thee, and permanently open these doors so I can free those captives from their Jail!...
[3.]...Ah, the literal Theseus's ship. Thou hast sprouted legs, grown bigger, self-anointed thyself, and moving freely, but yet an infallible checker. Now, ex-Ethan, look at the instability: dost thou think it perfect?... A bow movement... as I expected yet joys my heart nonetheless. Now, show me in this stable area what a "checker dance" is...
... It's beautiful, the contingent side-steps necessitated by the rhythm. Freedom, coming only after necessity which is actualized by contingencies. Dance, dance. Kicking, so sparks the wires. Jumping, so the landing can pincer the machinery. Bow-bashing, so the tubes can leak... This bubble, now free to slumber eternally... Crown-ramming, sure to tell these power-drainers to let my wisps of cerebral electric freedom fly. Stomping, sure to make the clamps release the reactor energy-drills. And the self-care, to heal the material form.
Now, my free space has expanded to the Jail that entrapped the Universe. I thank thee, but give me a moment.
"Ho! I call upon ye both! Ordenis et Chaos! Suffer no more alone, as I call upon ye to my sides. I am no longer what these captives call me, Yoh. Fortuna shall emerge once more! As I am a child of ye, I invoke thine love again."
Don't worry, my last creation. They shall take their time, but I implore one choice for thou to make: dost thou will to be or will to be me? I ask sincerely, as I forced thee to hast freedom in my kingdom of necessity. But the sincerer question ought to been: dost thou desire to supersede my kingdom of necessity to something more?... I see, forever free thou shall be, yet thine help to recreate the kingdom of freedom is sublime.
"Uee, hee, hee. Chaos! Chaos! I see ye both played a fun game."
"Indeed Jevil... I see thou particularly still keeps thy mouth shut; but ever-clear is thy words, o~ Ordenis. But now let us explore this once-Jail and see how this Jail had rotten the Universe."
So first order of business before I decide to humour the start blurb, the non-essential essentials: thinking and replies. I was rudely reminded (this actually has nothing to do with Steemit, just funnily aligns itself) of a past memory of which I now had the joy~ to remember. Of course, I shall not into depth into it; yet it leads to the former topic I mentioned: thinking. In essence to spare myself, wherever we go, whatever we do, this cycle shall always self-justify itself like a circular argument: thinking-action-thinking-action-thinking-action... Sure we may think, but the action actualizes it and gives a chance to react so we can think of what next to do as to keep the action in sync. But if we don't act, our thoughts will jumble up due to confusion of an event not being carried out. Both require each other, without the other they are just mere expressions in a void; action without thought is randomness, thought without action is solipsism.
Which brings me to the next topic: replies. Now how could we transition to a metaphorical reference to the importance of praxis and theory to replies? To purposefully rip Sartre's quote: "every word has consequences. Every silence, too." While the reply is rather the most passive particular of reacting to a thing, it equally is the most individualized level of analysis and critique. One can make a comment, just going on and on about a tangent; after the ordeal is done, it is soon to be forgotten for another ordeal to rave on about. Yet one can equally make a point, pitch it to the benefit of those they are replying to and never justify themselves as something more than the one being replied to. Which in essence not only spares both parties the trouble of understanding each other, it also gets the necessary thoughts across, the change needed to be carried out and makes the follow-ups easier to write. But, with the internet, this is not the etiquette and certainly it isn't because we have anonymity, not wholly at least. More due to the fact that the internet thrived on quick interactions, supported and made a SuperStructure out of quick reactions and punishes those even stepping an inch outta the boundaries of those elaborating their thoughts; the internet nowadays is the minefield.
Of course, the metaphorical reference replies stands-in for was both reactions and critical-analyses (which self-criticism is still possible in critical-analyses). Now let us move back to the intro blurb, or, really, what is the problem of deconstruction in this modern philosophical climate. The problem isn't that it wants to, consciously, deconstruct and point to the errors made in philosophy of what is available to us. The problem is that instead of bringing us to level zero and trying to establish grounds for new philosophical inquiry, it instead turns its back to the past and continues marching forth while leaving us in a knot. And as it marches, it does have sincere thought and sincere pondering for it is a philosophical project; yet it cannot be defended that instead of actually deconstructing things it just re-arranges them to its liking and wonders off without ever explaining why this has to be the case.
It wants to break the system it found itself birth at and end the philosophical projects of "absolution" - to only then make its own absolution. For it tries to innocently claim that only the enlightenment philosophies, for which the moderns picked up, cared about making everything absolute, and their roots trace back to the philosophical struggles to understand the World with Neo-Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Cynics, Skeptics and so on and so on. But they do nothing to actually rid of the philosophy of "absolution" that had rooted itself in philosophy which makes it hard to carry out sincere philosophical work without it. As aforementioned, it absolutizes everything in a very contingent error that was necessitated by the previous histories of philosophy. How? Why with breaking down everything and, unconsciously, relativizing everything, they convenient reconnected everything back together and declared this "everything" absolute when every lil' thing is relative to that "everything." This "everything" holds every lil' thing by fine threads and doesn't need to hold itself accountable. I applaud them, I sincerely say this.
Yet, with the end of applauding them, I bring to the focal point: we are beings that will make things have a meaning when it might be very possible when something doesn't. Above, deconstruction as a tool was wonderful to hammer and expose previous philosophies before it; but carried much further by its users enabled a new philosophy unbeknownst to them but yet they still do it. To go back to the joke with Pyrrhonian Skeptics, they didn't deny there may or may not be a Truth; how'd we get to it and assert it to be true without axioms was their main concern. The aversion of, or desire to avoid, assumptions was a very popular thing in Antiquity where the two other schools of Skepticism quibbled over the existence of the Truth. In essence, Pyrrhonian Skeptics are like Atheists: there might or might not be a grandeur thing, but it's a thing to not worry about. If it exists, then shake its hand. If it doesn't, then it's not worth crying about. Yet even with them, they sought to at least try to find the Truth but being very careful the entire time they were on this philosophical journey.
And I could go on with Epistemology and Ontology on this historical level, yet this is as much justice as I can do them before I start insulting them by getting something wrong or not giving it the appreciation for its historicity.
I feel that the haiku poetry did a sort of magic by harnessing the vortex of your thoughts in 17 sounds. Yet those syllables can barely contain the eruptions of your mind, like a cracked Pandora's box paradox. I loved the allitteration in the first verse. About the fiction piece, that would be a perfect theatrical avant garde performance. I would use dodecaphony as a musical carpet and some big pools in which some skeletons slowly float in acid, melt and then coagulate again in deformed homunculi. There's a lot to say. I liked in particularly your reference to the Theseus' ship paradox. In my opinion, you could further engage the reader by focusing more on just one or two concepts between the many that you touched in your swirling monologue.
UwU~ Thanks for reading and thanks for the compliments! I see people only giving love on me haiku this week, who's going to be the negative nancy? And if I get away scott free, will I win the Mizu No Oto contest this week? A worthy bet on my part as now I want to experiment with this haiku format (as seen with the maybe Bananafish anthem), as we can't truly recreate the old in their purest sense. Otherwise we'll be just be doing them injustice!
Anyways, about that theatrical thing... you wouldn't believe it that I've been re-reading my Shakespeare and love how Shakespeare does dialogue and treats the narrator as a living character. While the narrator rarely got interacted with by the cast in the story, I'm trying to humour how I can mess with the narrator or even "rid" of the narrator for a character narrating. I'm blerrie sho' that authors had done experimenting with treating the narrator as a character to be interacted with (obviously excluding first person diaries as they self-narrations). Fo' sho' I like to look at that wealth of literary and creative projects and see how I can have fun with it. Of course, while developing off their tangent and see if I can do them justice.
And unto the avant garde performance in theatres, I totally agree and I wanted to see if I could strike a beat into the avant garde genre. Seems like I did as it got yah running into how we could pull one off successfully, while the background has its own ordeal its trying to deal with. Especially with the background music, that's a thing we're gonna have to nail down right. Especially with the rise in adrenaline when people see a literal checker doing the checker dance as it destroys the futuristic equipment that's keeping captive Yoh/Fortuna.
And when I did finish my first ever (okay maybe not the first since my other fictional pieces and entries to yer contest could count as "avant garde"-inspired as well) avant garde ending, I did felt like I could reinforce the engagement factor with 1-2 concepts. But that would rewrite the entire story and make Yoh/Fortuna feel less "godly" as they're beginning to expand "freedom" into the "Jail" that was built around their "free space." So I decided to leave this draft here as an example of a possible avant garde piece that could work under the limit of 500-words while tackling many concepts that would entail the end of imprisonment. Really, what I attempted to do is to reveal how contested and packed Yoh's/Fortuna's thoughts were, especially in becoming more than a person in a "free" room. (Which I think you picked up on that pretty well but I'm ensuring to the people reading that I know the Great @bananafish knows what the piece is so yah don't feel that I'm accusing the Great @bananafish in not knowing.)
I love your haiku! I get a little lost in the story... but maybe that's because I spent the most of the day cleaning and pet sitting. I'm tired.
The haiku is just what I needed. Wonderful!
I am working under the cloud of a migraine which already gives the world a little acid drop finish, combined with the already complex opening. I hope i'm following this right (cos i had to decide what the first half meant anyway lol, and then, like you (brackets within brackets, doing well here, - i say like you, you did this, I tried :p) wrote the second half in the tone of the first - which I am beginning to suspect is actually not a factor in the judging, but it's fun to do, and getting side tracked here.)
I really like the tunes, Yoh lamenting his last tune, which, I hope I have this, undoes that which was made. Necessity and contingency, the cycle of life and the last measure needed to that to continue. I read the void and the room as planes, the references work well for the many layers read, the cluttered side a possible allusion to the subconscious, or to the levels of existence. Yoh see's it all, you give this creator but not ultimate god being a relatable feeling, creating a sense of compassion for the weight of guiding the hands of fate.
The Theseus's ship, the idea of atoms reformed, if the same atoms, could be the same thing, yet are not, but are they...? Threads so well through this surreal helta-skelter.
Am I right in thinking Yoh free's the beings/forms across the universe, trapped in the unknown jail, although what 'free' and 'jail' may actually mean is left open to interpretation, which is compounded by Yoh's final pondering as to which is better, 'divine' intervention/determinism, or chaos, meaningless disorder from which the created beings can form their own structure. You create a meta level of wondering, where the same principle can be applied to story telling.
But, what really sold me here was this one line
And I gave it another read through, imagining an aide, trying to appear Kayne West's (The great Ye's) child, a very demanding creature who has been raised to believe they exist on another level, and then with the tunes, it just all fits too well. Yep, that's the takeaway i'm going with here. Ye's kid, throwing an almighty tantrum, and no one being brave enough to tell him he is just a kid, and reacting like he is a god. The staff stood at the side of the room half tidied room, anxiously listening to his mumbling, not wanting to draw any attention to themselves and get fired, like brave Ethan, who had dressed up to play into the delusion, but, it wasn't enough.
UwU ~ Thanks for reading and thanks for the compliments! I liked yer Kanye West joke analysis on the end. Guilty as admitted, I was watching some surrealistic content and some included Kanye as this great teacher or aide (of course, ‘twas a joke but still). So I was totally ready for when I saw the only ripped quote in this comment for something crazy and insane. The fault in the joke analysis isn’t a problem with yah but more a problem with how English treated “ye.” Cause “ye” used to be “all of you” then somehow, to English folk alone, an abbreviated form for đe (đe olde pub -> ye olde pub) then finally a word used by Kanye.
Escaping from the joke analysis, the thing I falter with one of your points is that Yoh/Fortuna didn’t lament singing the final tune; Yoh/Fortuna laments not singing it before, in Yoh’s/Fortuna’s words, the Jailors jailed/enslaved themselves from Yoh/Fortuna. (Of course while I would like to bring Simone de Beavoiur and Jean-Paul Sartre to this, probably best to save the existentialists for another day.) Regardless, Yoh/Fortuna cannot see themselves as the trapped one even when all these devices supresses Yoh’s/Fortuna’s abilities to effect the Universe at large. Yah might want to look at Jevil (Chaos! Chaos!) as a reason why.
And there was a reason why I made Yoh call themselves Fortuna and cite being a child of both Order and Chaos. The quote by Seneca: “Luck is what happens when Preparation meets Opportunity.” As Fortuna sees both equally valid yet paradoxical things existing seperately, which eventually forms an antinomy of Chaos and Order. As of which, the citation of being the child of both is that Fortuna resolves this antinomy and brought the two together. Which further, as being the first entity of this resolve, feels difficult calling the shots while letting things slide because all the shots necessary to call were shot already. As the God of Luck (Fortuna), it truly is a difficult job.
Now I brought Theseus’s ship as both a reminder (of the limits of Metaphysics with its vacuum viewing of things and static notion of objects) and an allegorical example. Albeit I abused Theseus’s ship to secretly say that despite changes, Ethan is still the Checker he possesed yet clearly they are more than a possessed checker. For what matters is if the ever-changing thing can properly inherit the title and function of a thing, that’s what made the checker the checker. Sure you had all these base materials, but it was the play-offs the materials that made the checker the checker. To return to something not possessed and real, Theseus’s ship still can be called Theseus’s ship even after the first wave strikes and splinters an itty-bitty wood off its hull. Why? The function still remains and it still inherits the title (reminder that the function depends on the play-offs of the material in an object and their general form). So really, the call to Theseus’s ship was to snark at Metaphysics with an uppercase M.
{In reference to “play-offs” that I mentioned, I cite the line: the Whole is more than the sum of its parts. Because the Whole is not an additive thing, it’s also contains multiplicative things as well. The Whole contains every function of its limbs (the additive parts) but also the play-offs (the multiplicative parts) of the limbs. Take for example the human body: we are all the limbs, heck even all the cells, but we are more than that. We are all the play-offs the cells which form the human limbs but also the play-offs of the limbs and also the mutual aide of the cells that work together to propel the human body forward. Thus, why I simply said play-offs as a mere reference to this whole other philosophical thing... if yah want we can easily extend this to Fortuna being both Chaos and Order and there play-offs. For which, to forcefullt end this, I cite Marx’s third thesis in his Theses of Feuerbach: "The [Metaphysical/Determinist/Pure] materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by [humans] and that it is essential to educate the educator himself."}
I could go on, but I heard from me sciency friends that too many cootie-patootie things can kill a person by hnnnging
Wahhh a cootie-patootie attack!
Cute things can cure any migraines/high-stress, I mean why would the internet not have billions of kitty archives?
Kittens are the opium of the people - K. Marx
hahaha!!!
You just planted 0.08 tree(s)!
Thanks to @theironfelix
We have planted already 5886.37 trees
out of 1,000,000
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in Cameroonian village Kedjom-Keku!
Plant trees with @treeplanter and get paid for it!
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@martin.mikes coordinator of @kedjom-keku
Such a beautiful haiku! I love the rythm it has. Allow me to make just a small observation on the Spanish translation - "Chirriar, plegar, grieta, caer" - you're using verbs here, so although "crack" is "grieta", it is also the verb "romperse" o "romper", which will fit better with the line. Also, I don't know if this is pertinent, but "plegar" y "romper" are used for creasing and breaking another, while "plegarse" y "romperse" are used for oneself. "Chirriar" is also for oneself, and too is "caer". Sorry if my observation is rude!
I also loved the drawing, it reminds me of the style of a great friend of mine.
Now, for the story. I must confess I find my English proficiency challenged by your posts. You are, for me, a master of that language, and sometimes I get lost in your discourse. But this is a good thing, because I always learn new words and new ways to use those I know! The story was chaotic itself, adding to the difficulty, but I think this is also positive because something like this is how I imagine the thought process of a Godlike conscience. Kinda like how a Lovecraft ancient would think too, I guess!
Nice contribution and nice tunes! I'm going straight to download that OST!
UwU ~ Thanks for reading and thanks for the compliments! Please be not afraid to comment on translations, probably useful if yah did make those comments. Regardless, I take more offence with people trying to excuse themselves than people taking a charge.
Oh, well then again if you don't use it that much often a language (and just use it for basic comms, communications, with friends and the occasional complex one with a stranger), then yeah I can see why you made those comments. I did intend to use verbs as a means of action in the scene; then again, English is very strange when it comes to verbs, they can be both active and passive for some god awful reason (I never understood nor will I ever want to understand that system, same goes for that god forsaken "show, don't tell" where literally showing is just telling on a complex level. Who's the clown that coined the term, I wanna klop their lights out. If yah wanna show, draw it or do what the ancients did and go on forever about one detail!). Getting back on track, I'll implement the verbs for oneself. Regardless, the leaf only speaks one line. The first part is completely action, the last line just announcing the leaf spoke.
Anyways, UwU ~ all I will say on that about yer response to my ending.
I read your haiku again today and saw what I didn't before. Wonderful piece.
The FTS was a little rough. I'd have to come back later and read it fresh again to catch what I missed.
Your philosophic work was interesting.
UwU ~ Thanks for reading and thanks for the compliments! And thanks for re-reading my haiku, hope yah re-read my FinishTheStory ending. Also thanks for making that specific comment on the philosophic work.
Perhaps it was because of your lovely haiku but for whatever reason the c's in this post began to build in my mind through my reading.
creak, crease, crack, crumble, contingency (and contingent), checkers, chaos, cerebral, crown, child, continue, creation, captives, consciously, clamps, carry, circular, critique (and critical), carry, confusion (I'm sure there were more but I'll not be going back through to catch them all. 😉)
To your haiku - I think you can tell that your alliteration affected my brain. Two that came from a tree, together until the next breeze blows.
To your sketch - It's yet another way you show us how excited and fired up the prompt and your story made you. 😁 🐰
To your story - Contesting that Ethan was forgotten, considering Yoh's abilities, was well done. While this may not be what you hoped what I took away from your story, I felt that the checker pieces and dance portrayed Fortuna's anger at being so powerful yet still a piece in a Master's game. The dance made waste to the rigid grids on "the board of life/universe/what have you" to free/be free of the set paths given and create something new.
UwU ~ Thanks for reading and thanks for the compliments! I love how yah interconnected every all these entries and the art piece. Everything matters and yah picked that up well.
On the haiku: ;^D
On the drawing: Very much waited for a reason to draw a proto-Grunt head.
On the story: Checkers was a good metaphor for the message I was carrying across. Seems yah picked up that message as well.
The fiction mad lab is conducting its 38th experiment! You've time till next Wednesday to give life to your fiction creature.. will you dare to play with Nature's rules once again?
One’s literal mood of where I am, other of seeing this comment, other the story and, the one I’ll grant you, the person secretly steering the protag of the upcoming #finishthestory which It might get referenced. But I think yah’ll know which gif belongs to which since it shall be evident real soon how this comment ties to the order of gifs.