DEAR
Existentialists:
Once again, I've been overthinking.
Existentialists:
Once again, I've been overthinking.
I just watched Lucy; a film in which a woman dragged into a drug ring gone wrong is suddenly able to use the entire capacity of her brain. Last night, I watched a film called The Giver, about a seemingly utopian society in which emotion, color, difference, and anything that can set anyone apart from anyone else is nonexistent. After watching these, it made me think.
We, as humans, take things for granted. We make poor choices. We create incredible things. We engineer horrible things. The human race as a whole is incredible, in good ways as well as bad. I could write a dissertation on this subject alone, but I'm going to try to concentrate on one: how we think.
In Lucy, the title character slowly immerses herself in everything around her, until she no longer exists as a person. One of the first things to go are her emotions, after the offending drug bag is removed from her body. She uses logic, but feelings, care of consequences, and pain slowly fade away. She kills without blinking an eyelash. Her existence suddenly loses meaning to her, and she cares for only one thing: saving her knowledge. Imagine if everyone in the world were like that. I shiver just thinking about it.
In The Giver, everyone in the society is given injections that remove the ability to feel emotion. Everyone is supposed to be the same as everyone else, so everything listed next has been removed from their world: emotion, free choice, skin color, nationality, talent, free thought, free expression, ownership of anything of any kind. That means no music, no dancing, no colors, no books, no learning, no expressing your opinion. No expansion of knowledge. No change. If twins are born, one is immediately killed.
When someone speaks out, messes up, or gets too old, they are killed. Babies are reassigned to "family units" so that there is no personal attachment. Imagine if we lived in a world where we couldn't feel. There would be no love, no happiness, no sadness. No determination, no invention, no change. No creativity, which is the thing in all creation that I appreciate most. And the worst part about it all? No one would know any different. That would be the human existence. This creeps me out way more than Lucy, but tell me; what are your thoughts?
Here is a short but not sweet description of how afraid I am of my own thoughts:
Neverever
The darkness blows across the water
like a soulful wind:
waterfalls all around the ground.
Dream sweat– white imagination,
the feeling of lost
While collecting bits and torn scraps of forgotten afternoons.
How can something so black, painful, be
as elegant as this?
A flurry of thoughts, sediments
at the bottom of night’s ink; seething, sobbing.
What’s coming leaves me far behind;
I keep on walking through ghosts–
I am afraid of the landscape of my mind.
With Her Head Between Her Knees, Rocking Back And Forth In A Corner,
Joélle.
Joélle.