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The 8th of November.

The 8th of November.

I want to expand on my previous post and reflect a bit more on V for Vendetta, I thought it would be a good exercise given the current political climate. Perhaps some underlying truth can be gleaned from the things I write, or perhaps I’m just nerding out. V for Vendetta is many things but at it’s heart it’s a story of revolution. V’s play is to strengthen the people to take back the power of government into their own hands. So the most important thing he does is wear the mask, and it could have been any mask. But by doing so you remove the man from the idea. Who is V? who cares? Everyone can be V (as Natalie Portman points out), the people need to band together under an idea to take back the power.

This notion is kind of paradoxical though because V’s plan would have never worked if he didn’t take matters into his own hands as someone willing to do things that an average person wouldn’t; he had to be the superman while all the while convincing the people that he was no different from them.  Maybe something else would have sparked the revolution although from the way future Britain was portrayed everyone was happy just complacently existing. So what really triggered it is what created V and empowered him to take action and that is personal tragedy. Whoever V was is gone: imprisoned, experimented on, and baptized in fire V literally had his identity burned away. All that remains is rage and hatred, and this is tempered over time into what becomes his purpose, a Vendetta against those who destroyed him. V perhaps correctly comes to the conclusion that simply dispensing “justice” to those who wronged him, while personally satisfying, will not fix the real reason he was persecuted: The government, or more specifically the Norsefire party that manipulated these events to ensure a fascist victory. So he has to ensure the downfall of the party as part of his Vendetta or his work will not be done.

So what’s the take-a-way from this? There are no supermen in the real world. No one’s going to swoop in and inspire us to take back the power. Instead we got Anonymous who much like V himself has suspect motivations at best. These groups who have sprung up around us act more like world police acting in spite of the people as opposed to on their behalf and by their will. The symbolic gesture of Evey pulling the lever that would explode parliament needed to happen, if V himself had done it then he would be no different from the fascist dictator he was trying to overthrow. But even Evey wasn’t a total representation of the people because V himself stripped her of her identity and fear in the jail cell, and was baptized by rain washing away the doubt that remained.

But do we need a revolution? It’s easy to take arms when you’re being unequivocally oppressed. When your liberties have been taken away, your freedom of expression is gone, and there are no checks and balances among those in power. You could say V only had but to suggest the idea of a revolution to get the people on his side. But society today is a little more complicated, it’s hard to have conviction unless you have personally suffered at the hands of injustice. So now we hit on the theme again, personal tragedy leads to revolution, but not as easily as is portrayed in the film. The hard part in today’s society is convincing those unaffected by an issue to make a stand in favor or against it. In the movie every citizen was being actively oppressed and that led everyone to revolt. In the world today there are different areas of oppression and they overlap in confusing ways. Are you more oppressed for being black or gay or is being both worse than the sum of its parts? So instead we have movements and those movements are revolutions in and of themselves. These movements seek to bring awareness to issues and to convince the people outside of those directly affected to join their ranks.

So ask yourself this: Are you trying to enact change or are you resisting it? Is that change trying to oppress a section of the population who has no control over the issue? Do your feelings come from a place of fear? Are you letting the fascists win? Don’t vote for a politician, vote for the issues they represent. Don’t vote out of fear, vote out of conviction. Attain that conviction by burning away all the layers of yourself and exposing nothing but the raw core of your humanity underneath. You may feel your vote doesn’t count but you can’t be part of a revolution by staying on the sidelines.

Turning the inner eye

Turning the inner eye

I already procrastinated over a month in getting my next post out which is a very poor rate of blogging as far as things go. But I told myself that I wouldn’t put pen to paper (ed note: fingers to keys) unless I had something churning around in my mind’s stomach and I needed to eject it. Yet, even now I’m not writing because I had an intense thought or emotion I’m just here hammering this out because I’m in a position where I’m just waiting for some things to finish, I’m in a foreign environment, I’m cut off from my usual means of entertainment and my internal bullshit meter has reached it’s fill. So don’t ever let yourself think that creativity comes from a place of routine, but I’m sitting here feeling uncomfortable as all get-out and decided it was a good time to take a stock of the state of Jairo 2016.

I was introduced to the concept of  a mind palace by Sherlock on BBC. There was the one episode where it was used to great effect as a plot device. The concept is interesting, you correlate things you want to memorize to a spatial journey. This way you make a strong connection physically with what you try to remember rather than just abstractly trying to burn something into your mind. The way it was used in the show though was more like a sandbox for Sherlock to spend the time in between seconds pondering out possibilities while also using it for memory recall. I liked the idea of having an actual mind palace where your memories and life experiences are mapped to objects, rooms, or wings inside of it. This is probably the CS major in me trying to enforce order and relationships upon the abstract but wouldn’t it be cool to walk through time and memories as if you were taking a casual stroll in your mansion. So I know what you’re thinking, do I have a mind palace?

Mind shack
Hell yes I do

Alright it’s more like a mind shack. Sometimes stuff gets stolen, or the rain will seep in and make everything soggy, but the general ideas stay intact a little blurry around the edges. Bugs might creep in, and there’s no real plumbing and I can only have a finite amount of things stored in there before I have to throw other things out to make room. Right so you get the extended metaphor here, I’m pretty bad at memories. You could say it’s an early sign of onsetting dementia sure, or that I get such terrible sleep that I can’t process long term memories correctly,  some people might even be inclined to think I’m so selfish I only remember things directly concerning me…that may be true as well. I think the real reason I have such a terrible memory though is because ain’t nobody got time for processing memories. Gotta live fast and loose with my limited RAM, can’t afford wasting those sweet, sweet cycles to write to disk.

The sleepier I get the faster the insanity sets in. I’ll stop writing now before I start jairucinating. What’s that? you thought this post was going somewhere? nope…just killing time. Jairo out!