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[sebastienne]

"ooh" thought emma, "i haven't had any comment emails for a while, i wonder why not?"

it only just occured to me that posting might be a way to remedy this. i may or may not be going through what steerpikelet terms an "identity crisis". i certainly have a migraine today. i want to do something extraordinary. i had a discussion with someone today, about how selfish it is of life not to allow me to have fun all the time and live comfortably, all the while with the ironic undertones that it is of course selfish of me to expect to be able to have fun all the time with no cost or consequences. where did this sense of duty come from? i have never been a dutiful person, what is happening to me? does it go hand-in-hand with the over-volunteering? what are these imperatives, these "musts" and "oughts" that suddenly guide my actions?

my problem with narnia (no film spoilers follow, fear not) or at least, with lion/witch/wardrobe is how much i, as an "adult", find my intellectual sympathies with the white witch. oh sure, she seduced me in childhood with her turkish delight (oh god, me and food; one day i'll explain why the sexual icons of my childhood were jadis and willy wonka) but now i realise that the books say she is a child of lilith. lilith whom i idolise in the same way as i am glad (in my own his-dark-materials comparable theology) that eve took the apple. and isn't aslan always saying "that is not for you to know" and denying people knowledge just like the god of the garden of eden whom i so mistrust? i have never been able to idolise purity or innocence. is this unfortunate? all i ever enjoyed in narnia books were the stories. maybe that was purity, the ability not to overanalyse everything for theology or slash or psychology or philosophy.

what am i even saying? this migraine is making the screen fuzzy. i am going to go away now.

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[potatofiend.livejournal.com]

I had similar problems with Narnia. I saw it yesterday, and parts of it just made me cringe with their Daily Mail ideology and uncomfortably wholesome aspect.

*hugs* Feel better, babe.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

I think it's perfectly natural to prefer the White Witch: apart from anything else, in a book/film where neither the main icons of 'good' and 'evil' are given any character development or motivations, you may as well prefer the one with more style and guts. And...well, you probably gathered my views on Narnia in general, yes.

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

*hugs* nasty migraine.
Also vague guilt that I may be at least partially responsible for newfound sense of duty, although mebbe I'm just thinking too much of myself.

And yes. Jadis. I didn't like her, because unlike Lilith, and Eve, and all the other female temptress women, she was cold, not passionate. And from quite an early age I suspected that was something to do with Lewis' attitudes towards women as sexual beings.

I like my "evil" women, my women of knowledge and power, to to fiery, and sexual. Jadis was icy and asexual. For me. Part of what Aslan brings back is joy in food and celebration and enjoyment of pleasure. Jadis I see as about empty consumption, consumption without sensuality.

Anyway. My two pence.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

ooh, i hadn't entirely realised that; jadis was icy but for me i don't think she could ever be asexual. like i say above i was seduced by her in that sleigh from a very young age.

there are a lot of things underlying my new-found sense of duty, including things from the most practical (stress which turns previously enjoyable commitments into dutiful trudges) to the most theoretical (philosophical musings on the meaning of life &c). as you are one of the people i respect greatly intellectually you may have had some effect on the latter, but it's not something to feel any guilt over - i'm going through this at the moment because it was something i was inevitably going to have to go through, i feel.

[vampire-kitten.livejournal.com]

jadis was icy but for me i don't think she could ever be asexual.

Agreed. Plus anyone with a chariot of polar bears is just damn hot. :)

[countess-rezia.livejournal.com]

As you know I also tend to side with the "evil" characters in fiction. Initially I did that deliberately, after my rather sudden realisation that in the eyes of a significant portion of the Church I was liable to be counted among that contingent anyway. It brought me to a "they're not evil, just different" way of thinking, and to a rejection that blind obedience and not taking the apple of knowledge was a good thing morally anyway.

And I still believe that.

And yet, I think somewhere along the line I also got too fond of the pure fun of identifying as evil. My issue at the moment is that some of the "bad" things I do are also bad in my own opinion - that I might be ignoring my own ideals as well as those of convention. Which is what I was trying to express in the fic I wrote a few days ago - though I wrote it rather quickly and therefore badly.

Also, food and sex.....yes, the two are undeniably connected in my mind, to a worrying degree. And the last time I tried to work out why it led me to write erotica . One day, I'm going to write more on that - explaining it better - but it's not pretty.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

you just reminded me of a comic strip a friend of mine wrote where every time a slytherin character was called "evil" one of them would pop up and say, "not evil, alternative!".

when i was younger i would ask questions like, "so who are the good guys?" when coming into a room halfway through a film or talking about a book someone was reading. despite varying degrees of fascination with evil characters it only occured to me that you could choose to see them as the "good" ones really quite recently.

and my migraine is gone, hurrah!

I hope you don't find this comment intrusive- you can always delete it if you do.

[ex-leighwoos982.livejournal.com]

I think the seizing of the apple comes when we scornfully declare 'I'm not just going to believe you anymore!' Then we march into a blind landscape of no answers until we have burned away great rocks with fiery thoughts so that they yield a fragment of real truth, a sense of duty or a moral imperative that we know we can trust and we know will guide us where we want to go.

I am glad your migraine has gone. They are ick and bad and not helpful.

Re: I hope you don't find this comment intrusive- you can always delete it if you do.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

i think that i would agree more with you if i believed in the idea of real truth. to be honest, i really wish that i could believe in the idea of real truth, because everything was so much simpler when i did. but that's as futile as any pining after lost faith, i guess, so i try not to think too much about it.

how are we to know we can trust a feeling of duty or a moral imperative any more than a god who says "this is what there is now shut up and don't ask questions"? i find myself in a relativist quagmire whenever i try to rationalise my way through these issues.

Re: I hope you don't find this comment intrusive- you can always delete it if you do.

[ex-leighwoos982.livejournal.com]

The point I made above is that the only 'real' truths are the ones we decide are real.

If we subscribe to moral relativism we accept that all truths are equally valid. The ones we claim for ourselves are the ones that survive our own rigorous logical or emotional examination or testing.

We can accept that 'not doing anything to hurt my friends is a good thing' because we might know from experience that hurting our friends leaves us with less friends to rely on at a later date. The experience of this is an elective act of asserting your authority over the world: it has been your decision to value friends as something you want to keep, it has been your experience that has led you to believe that hurting a friend will cause them to leave (or not, depending on your experience) and it is your decision that you want to keep your friends more than you want to hurt them.

Like the decision to dress in a certain way, or participate in something on a public level, this process of decision making becomes a way of saying 'This is me. This is who I am. These are my decisions made for my reasons- so like it or lump it'. Alternatively we could decide that trying to please everybody and fit in is a better way of getting through life, so our outlook and behavior might fluctuate to best enable us to get by where ever we are. If we decide to think as moral relativists we wouldn't cast any judgements on either one as better or less functional than the other. Nor would we see any worth in proclaiming our own 'truths' as preferable to anyone but ourselves. We can trust our own 'truth' because we know it is not true to anything but our own experience and logical reduction (or induction), things we are confident that we can rely upon.

The thing about a sense of duty or moral imperative is that they have to stem from some sort of ethical code, however inconsistent that code might be. So dutiful feelings very strongly imply the presence of ethical ideas. Given that we are raised in a society that has very palpable norms, regulations and projections of ideals of behavior it is entirely unlikely that we can escape inculcating some kind of sense or what should or shouldn't be done. Most people really do believe that they shouldn't hurt others, without even having to think about it. Their ethical codes line up without the unpleasant efforts of thought as they follow whatever seems to make sense around them. In some cases the very opposite happens- a person from a rich but god fearing family may want to live up to Christian ideals of charity, compassion and immateriality but really only feel happy when they are indulging or perpetuating their wealthy status. I've known those kind of contradictions to bring great difficulty and discord into lives, which could have been avoided if, in this example, the subject would just admit 'I put myself first- I believe I should always get what I want and I will step over whoever I have to in order to render myself the things I want, because that makes me happiest'. People only seem to experience satisfaction in their lives when they can align their ethical expectations of themselves with how they live their life, by changing either one of those factors to fit the other.

Ultimately, ethics are a self-serving endeavor. We obey them to banish emotional disquiet or to ensure that we get through life without experience censure or punishment. Sometimes those two objectives contradict each other, sometimes we believe that we are ethically bound to suffer unhappiness for the sake of what we believe. On the rarest occasions we might even choose to suffer even if there is no hope that it will make us happier in the long run. We do this so that we know we can believe in ourselves and in the truths we have decided to hold dear.

Re: I hope you don't find this comment intrusive- you can always delete it if you do.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

i agree with most of this; certainly that we have to construct our own ethics and what they turn out to be is really quite arbitrary and very dependent on our upbringing and our needs/desires.

it is a little distressing to feel that i am so bound to something so arbitrary. i always thought that my ethics were my own construction, and as such, under my control. in retrospect, cultivating amorality was never really going to work, because i believe so strongly in the slightly wishy-washy tenet of being nice to everybody; but it is odd to feel a sense of duty towards a code that i created! (i am quite a selfish person, i think.)

who are you, that art so wise? do i know you in real life, or are you a friend-of-a-friend? thank you for engaging me in an interesting discussion.

Re: I hope you don't find this comment intrusive- you can always delete it if you do.

[countess-rezia.livejournal.com]

Yup, I claim responsibility. Leigh is my friend, you are my friend. This is how lj works.

Re: I hope you don't find this comment intrusive- you can always delete it if you do.

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

... did you just pull that straight out of my head? You've just put some stuff I was thinking and being unable to verbalise about into very neat words. Thankyou.

[anariel-di-gaia.livejournal.com]

I always thought the White Witch was cool, but I didn't want her to win. My favourite was always Edmund, I like that image of 'good', but secretly knowing there is that spark of badness somewhere. *Pauses for world shattering revelation on Narnia*.......*Yet there is none*


Love you honey. xxxx.

[(Anonymous)]

As far as asexuality and the White Witch goes, I found this new one much more subtle and sexually manipulative than the actress in the old BBC adaptation, who seemed to get what she wanted by shouting loudly. And someone claimed she was cold - I'd say that frost can burn, and she if you take her backstory from Magician's Nephew she's not without passion.

I can't say I ever sided with the bad guys, though. They're more interesting, certainly, but thats my inner psychoanalyst rearing her ugly head. I found the evil army in the film quite beautiful, though - during the battles scenes I grew quite jealous of the Pevensies and kept thinking "oh, for an evil that can be vanquished." I miss the belief that there are bad people who can be got rid of and good people who can be saved and that the world will be better when this is done.

Hum.

Helen N