dreaming of that face again

pinned post

meri - sixteen - infp

i like to talk about novels, poetry (look at my goodreads), philosophies (talk to me about metaphysics and humanism!), music and artists (elliott smith, adrienne lenker, tool) homer's epics, religious history, and writing. i'll be posting analysis and stuff. i'm also really into neon genesis evangelion and blame (manga).

current read(s) - corregidora - gayl jones, dracula - bram stoker, hands of the saddlemaker - nicholas samaras

dni - none, just don't piss me off

butches please interact

indisputably the best poetry collection i’ve ever read in my life. the poems are an exploration of the ancient human melancholy reflected in the 20th century. a traveler that explores much more than land, touching on death and violence and love on and for the earth. of the wildness of nature and the wildness of our natures. old churches and saints and bomb shelters, the pacific northwest’s jagged coasts and fishermen and hog hunting in greece. a solitary, but somehow far from lonely, man spills his mind onto the pages as his spirit seems to linger in the nations that he passes through

what can i say about beloved that can possibly illustrate what makes this novel so special, so powerful? words fail me. how to describe the masterful way morrison makes ordinary happenings seem at once chilling in their emotional power, how biblical even the most tiny details feel, how cereberal the text is even at a sentence to sentence level. it is truly a masterpiece.

the very idea that the racist’s imagination stokes their hatred by providing the fearsome image of an untamable jungle within the depths of the black person, therefore prompts the white racist to develop their own cannibalistic violent jungle within themselves and become the thing they fear… that struck me like a gong. morrison’s brilliance cannot be overstated. this is not a novel, it is a power. it’s a haunting.

stranded on a distant planet, with strange, incomprehensible, fantastical processes happening upon its world-covering red sea of oily jelly-like fluid, a man discovers himself haunted by the darkest pit of his past, as the alive planet infiltrates his mind.

solaris begs the theory that humans, in our mad-dash for attempting to find distant life forms, are merely looking for “mirrors” of our own civilization. of something similar, easy to process and understand, for we are just looking for confirmation, that are race is doing things the “right” way, whether our alien counterparts are ahead of us or behind. but here, finding life, a civilization, that is absolutely incomprehensible to all our science, the humans in the world of solaris refuse to accept it. for humanity doesn’t ever accept things that it doesn’t understand, and that is where we fall into mediocrity.

the very technical descriptions do a very good job at showing the very detailed, desperate attempt humanity makes to understand beautiful and strange things as a makeshift reasoning for why those things happen. this can be a hard novel to understand, but it undoubtably pays off nonetheless, as then the incomprehensible bits add a layer of characterization and mystery to the book, as i think was lem’s intention.

the non-technical descriptions, of the planet and happenings upon it, are beautiful. lem seems to write with such a sureity of form that the words nearly float off the page in their rightness. a very beautiful novel, not flowery in the least, but the prose flows very smoothly. the descriptions of the red sea, and the unforgiving dawns were especially well done. in very few words, lem masterfully creates a dark tone and much suspense in these depictions.

overall, solaris is a science fiction novel worth the read. fantasic, original, entertaining, and philisophically probing, there simply isn’t another like it