#theophany

when she fights and Theophanie looks at her

the base I used

When the album released, the world didn't end. We knew, deep down, that it wouldn't. But the tension was still palpable, the sinking gut feeling of "what if?" was still shared between us.

Those what-if's fortunately never materialized. We listened to the entirety of Theophany's album that night. And I've continued to listen to it throughout the next 13 years that would follow. Throughout high school, throughout college, through every break-up and career change and moved apartment.

The world didn't end for Theophany, either. He kept producing music, but nothing ever quite hit like that original Majora's Mask album release for me. It was a wholly unique experience, one that cemented itself within the collective experiences of those who were there, just as the experience of living through the supernatural fear and uncertainty of 2012 did.

Approximately 9 hours ago, Theophany released a remix of Midna's Lament. One of my favorite tracks in the entire franchise, from a game that became as essential to my childhood as Majora's Mask was, created by the same person whose work has stuck with me since I was a teenager. Equally grim, equally heartfelt, equally magnificent.

But I can't help but feel a certain sadness from listening to it. Not from the song itself, not even from the nostalgia, but from the weight of the reality that this song exists in compared to the music that made me love Theophany's work in the first place.

"No AI" it says in the title. A label that would not have been necessary nor would have even made sense not even 15 years ago. And yet, is required by some new unspoken moral obligation today, a new clause in the social contract of being an artist that asserted itself over us practically overnight.

This track isn't heralding the end of the world like his Majora's Mask album. We're not coming together as a species to both fear and satirize an apocalypse that we know won't come to pass, a prophecy based on a culture we don't understand and never experienced. It's not using childhood nostalgia as a means to commentate on real world apocalyptic events.

But the world couldn't feel closer to the brink of ending than it does today. Innocent men, women, and children are being detained and murdered senselessly in the streets of what's supposed to be "the land of the free". Rather than coming together to ironically celebrate a hypothetical apocalypse, we're coming together to survive an unironic revitalization of fascism that's happening right before our eyes.

All the while, we're falling on childhood nostalgia as an escape, a distraction, while forgetting that everything our nostalgia is tied to tried to warn us, tried to teach us while we were young that the systems we're now being oppressed by were always evil, always plotting, always waiting for their moment to strike.

And unlike the foretold apocalypse of 2012, none of these tragedies are coming to pass because of some cryptic prophecy that foretold it. They're coming to pass because of recent history that we've become so disconnected from and apathetic to that we don't even recognize it repeating itself. They're coming to pass because of choices we did and didn't make, many of which weren't even our decisions to make, but of those in power who couldn't be trusted to make them.

God's favorite little angel <3

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Commentary: "The material world has been produced by God and is an aspect of His self-manifestation. It is in this context that God is not defined as a cause in the Aristotelian or theological sense. Cause and effect can be understood to be both one and the same thing yet simultaneously they are different. It is also important to know that the sensory realm does not represent the “totality” of God’s existence and is also not God. Rather the world is a “veil”. Ibn ‘Arabi does not establish an “absolute” identity between God and this veil and at the same time this veil prevents us from seeing the face of God. This incomparability of God with the world is again based on the notion of causality and the suggestion that God is both immanent and transcendent." Muhammad Kamal, "Ibn ‘Arabi and Spinoza on God and the World"

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Gospel According to John (1:1)

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

The Letter of Saint Paul to the Colossians (1:15)

You, O Christ, are the King of glory, You are the Father's everlasting Son

the Te Deum

The Son is properly the Image, the Word, and the Son as such. Likewise, therefore, "Image" designates Him as the expressed likeness, "Word" as the expressing likeness, and "Son" as the personal likeness. Again, "Image" designates Him as the likeness in order of form, "Word" as the likeness in order of reason, and "Son" as the likeness in the order of nature.