Wordsmoker

I am beginning a minor in Ethics. I can only afford (maybe) to do this slowly, but I have to admit I am already slow and maternal when it comes to what ought to be. “Centres” that can hold ideas of right and wrong as something more than a passing mood are inferior.

–That being said, I am a phantom here. Here for the kill.

I’ve recently started working with someone whom has (a duality of) Aspergers and Schizophrenia. I’ve also read Yi Fu Tuan’s Escapism, and rediscovered a number of things in the language of academia, especially that of the humanities.

So often, and I know as I have been a Messiah Goddess of a Little Emo Army, people will romanticize symbols and imagery of the Dark Night; that, as escape. Rebellious above average intelligence will seek it out, unless your daft and boring. (Did I just say “daft”?)

Media, art, culture, language, and (yes) even tumblr portrays darkness with the inverse reaction formation of access to the darkness. People stimulate, literally with erratic clicking, to their romance of images of war, the esoteric, the dead, the occult, and the power of one’s thoughts to affect reality, often violently. Negative visualization goes back to the Cynics and Stoics; yet, laughably degenerate society as we are, there is no shortage of Goths, Emo’s–an ever re-identifying Vampire.

Yi Fu Tuan’s Thesis is that “Excapism is argued to be human and inescapable. There is nothing wrong with this. What makes it suspect is the goal, which can be quite unreal. Nothing is wrong with wild fantasy so long as it remains a passing mood.” When anything but a passing abstract, a personal hell is bred; it yet, will have an insidious appeal.

As a Phantom Ethicist, I’d like to ask whether the Vampire can be a tragic-good, or, at least, a tragic-ought-to-be.

Yi Fu Tuan continues “My aim is persuade readers, especially those who have fed too exclusively on the literature of despair, to recognize the good that has already been–through insecurely–achieved, and hence to look upon the idea, if not heaven on earth, then of an earth periodically visited by heavenly bliss, in a less dismissive, more hopeful light”.

It is one thing, Little Darkling, to erratically click around watching for the horror, looking to escape reality. It is another thing entirely to walk with someone whom struggles to visit a real-enough Earth for just a moment without crushing fear that each and every shadow is conspiring to kill everyone if stepped upon.

And far nobler of a creature is the latter. Perhaps I say this only out of Folie a deux with my Schizophrenic Derp; that he is rare, and rare is beautiful. It may also be the daunting presence of romanticism, in sad culture, unbeknown to the struggles of those other-side-of-the-escapee who tries so hard.