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ForgetfulRainn β L.O.V.E. - 37
Published: 2009-04-05 04:19:02 +0000 UTC; Views: 3101; Favourites: 52; Downloads: 0
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Description
Official Website[link]
In this strip I made a chiasma, albeit not a very sophisticated one. What is a chiasma? I'll tell you.
Chiasma originally means "cross" in Greek (I think) - and before I forget, the "chiasmic" thing here is how "tells" and "story" interact, in the text.
"He who TELLS a STORY can't live the STORY he TELLS." If you replace "tells" by A and "story" by B, you get a structure like the following: ABBA. Now, if you put those on two lines, you get:
AB
BA
And then, if you draw a line between the A's and then another between the B's, you get... a cross!
And this is why that figure of speech is called a chiasma. More usually you will find them with different elements, and with other figures of speech like oxymorons and the likes. Here's a clichΓ© example:
"The frozen sun melted icily." Admittedly, it's a pretty crappy one, but it'll serve our purpose here. "Frozen" and "icily" both belong to the same lexicon, the cold, and "sun" and "melted" both belong to a lexicon of the hot and warm and whatever. If you turn that line into A's and B's, with regards to the lexicon, you get: ABBA, and that's a chiasma, with added oxymorons.
No oxymorons in my strip, however.
The idea that when you live something you can't tell the story of it and vice-versa was something I had to write a paper about as part of a class on Sartre's La NausΓ©e. The idea is that if you're living something, and then begin to tell yourself the story of it, you somehow put yourself out of the actual events.
I guess these are stories I'd rather tell than live.
Feature
Afraid of Monsters by Xela
[link]
Some instrumental music for you. It's electronica, and just about the only other electronica I like beside Aphex Twin, but I'm really a noob in electronica, so no worries.
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Comments: 35
Are you sure that a chiasma isn't just some secret conspiracy to promote ABBA's song "Dancing Queen"?
(Yes, it was a very lame joke. Cuz that's the only type I have)
Really like L.O.V.E. so far.
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Haha, it is a conspiracy! Damn Swedes...
I'm glad you like the strip!
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I think from all your strips this is the most disheartening one yet (for me).
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Really great, I love this one 
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Thanks! Chiasma for the win!
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*spazzes in gleeful joy*
a fellow xela fan! and you featured my favourite song of them! *tears up*
Anyway, regarding the strip: "The only artists that I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists simply exists in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. There mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise." -- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.Wilde claimed that no one should believe what he wrote (because it was nonsense) or something to that accord, but his logic is so backwards that it makes a U-turn in the right direction. I adore Dorian Gray. It's not my favourite book (I don't have one) but so many epigrams and life philosophies are compact within it; numerous potent quotables! And to think he wrote this a hundred years ago -- what a shock it must've been for the readers of that era.
The book was ahead of its time.
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Nice! That's the only song by Xela that I know, and for a long time I thought it was Aphex Twin! Because the guy who gave me tons of Aphex Twin songs also gave me this one, and it was of a similar quality (meaning divine).
Wilde has loads of great quotes, and in fact, one of the incoming strips uses a quote by him! I don't think I posted that already... But that's a fun coincidence.
I haven't read that novel, or anything by Wilde, actually. Wilde adored JK Huysmans, and he's my favourite French author of all time, but he's sadly underfamed. That was out of the blue but I wanted to say it anyway!
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And inversely, this is the only Aphex Twin song I know. If you fancy xela a lot, maybe I can pass you thier album? ;]
*awaits anxiously for that strip*
JK Huysman -- another author to be put in my never decreasing to-read list. You must read Wilde! D: Dorian Gray wouldn't take so long; it's quite a thin book but like I said, it's compact with aphorisms and stellar thoughts: "Women are the triumph of matter over mind, just as men are the triumph of mind over morals." Haha, that's gold.
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The link didn't work! Quench my curiosity and send it again! I must know!
As to Xela, I was told that most of their stuff is very different from that one song, in a bad way, but maybe that's not true. Either way, I'll gladly accept those songs!
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[link]
I'll pass xela to you in a note
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Thank you!
And woah, that video is extra creepy!
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It was intended to be a 30-second commercial promo for an Aphex twin album, but the director grew to love the concept more and more, so he made a short film of it.
Which is a much better explanation than when I previously thought the film was a real story. o-o
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Hahaha, oh my, you must have been scared to death. I showed this to my brother (23 years old), and he resented me for having shown him that! He was sick at the time, though. It's hardcore stuff! Very impressive.
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Oh my God.. such an amazing round of though on how not only are we talking about telling a story that one can't live, but just the cross of it all. I'd love to be able to read that paper that you went on through and its actually a great idea to tell stories that you don't want to live. A sort of, safety net to heartbreak even if that heartbreak is being lived by someone out in the world.
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Thank you!
The paper was written in French, and most of it wasn't on that particular topic, I think, and for what there is on that topic, it's mostly about that very novel.
Thank you for the comment!
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Glad you found it interesting!
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Interesting.
And, thanks for sharing Monsters. I downloaded it to my iTunes!
I just recently got interested in electronic and trance music.
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I was a chemist for many years before becoming a physics teacher. In both professions, I spent a lot of time studying research methods. "The Hawthorne Effect" is when research subjects change their behavior simply because they're being studied. Sort of the same idea (on a personal level) here.
Very thought provoking.
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So that's the name of it... I knew of it, somewhat, because of my studies in social sciences, but I didn't know the name.
Has that got anything to do with Nathaniel Hawthorne?
I wanted to be a chemist when I was a kid (mostly I wanted to make explosive experiences with coloured fluids in those triangular-shaped glasses... and I'm sure there's some German name for them, but I can't recall, tell me!). Erlon Meyer? All I can remember is the Bunsen "beak" or something - I learned those words in French, back a long time ago... Memories!
A chemist and a physics teacher! That's awesome. Can you explain string theory to me in a way that I actually understand it?
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I believe the Hawthorne effect was named after a company that conducted a productivity study -- and found that working conditions didn't matter, so long as employees knew they were being researched!
Being a chemist SOUNDS very glamorous -- but in actuality, it involves a lot of time stuck in a tiny, smelly lab with people who like chemicals more than other people! (Good job with lab equipment! Erlenmeyer flasks are, indeed, triangular. And Bunsen Burners are used to heat things!)
As for string theory... This is over-simplifying slightly, but should give you an idea... Einstein showed that energy and matter can actually be converted from one to another (e = mc^2, or the energy in matter is equal to the mass inside it multiplied by the speed of light squared.) This is accurate, but we have very little idea HOW it works. String theory seeks to explain some of this. It says that matter, at its basic level, is made of vibrating "strings." Strings are smaller than atoms or even the PARTS of atoms. And the strings have only one dimension -- length. They have no height or width. Anyway, depending on how the strings vibrate, they can affect the four dimensions that we can detect (3-d space and time.) The math behind it makes sense only when you assume the strings can also affect UNDETECTABLE dimensions. If you assume there are other dimensions that we simply can't detect, then string theory can also start to explain things like gravity. It's exciting because there isn't one theory which can explain BIG things (like gravity, space/time, etc.) and SMALL things (like how electrons behave.) String theory is supposed to be able to do this. The math is lost on me, but it sounds very interesting.
I recommend "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene: [link] It's an AMAZING book and series of TV shows!
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I read a book called... the "Looking Glass Universe", which was very good and dealt with physics and other sciency things. And I heard of 11 dimensions, although I'm not convinced that these aren't more than a way to fill the gaps in the theory, with numbers.
Bunsen burners and Erlenmeyer flasks! Good memory there, hehe.
I think I have a hard time seeing the strings... Are they in straight lines? Or a total mess of a woolball? Do they end anywhere?
(Thanks for your explanation, by the way!)
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My feeble mind could not compute the comprehensiveness of information presented in such eloquent mannerisms demonstrated.
All in all, simple and straight to the point this time around.
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Two in one night? I know you made them earlier, but I'm surprised you posted consecutively in the same evening.
And I really like this one.
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I wasn't able to post as many as I wanted to - one per day - and so there ya go. I may post a third later on. They're all made until 53, and at this rate, I'll always have 20 strips in extra of what is posted.
Thank you!
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