A few thoughts on some stuff
It's summer vacation, and I don't have a job (yet...fingers crossed), and I live in one of the most boring cities in the country. So naturally, I spend most of my time online, and most of that time online is spent catching up on TV shows, or writing blurbs of stories that will never be finished, or--let's face it--surfing tumblr to find amusing things regarding the aforementioned TV shows.
But as I hugged a pillow to my chest and winced as Castiel murdered Balthazar in cold blood on the Supernatural season finale, I wondered why it affects us so much. I mean, they're not real people. They're just some (albeit pretty awesome) actors and actresses reading lines that were written by balding, middle-aged men bouncing ideas off of each other in an office.
They're manufactured emotions. Written, packaged, distributed neatly straight into your living room. And we all consume it eagerly, greedily, desperately, because there's no other way to get them anymore.
I can watch the weekday evening news while eating dinner and neither I nor the reporter will even blink while the latter covers a story of a hit-and-run, or a murder-suicide, or a fucking genocide. My eyes teared up when I saw the old console room in The Doctor's Wife. This is not a healthy reaction to things.
But it's not just me! At least I hope it's not. So many bad things happen, all the time, all the sentences that begin with "every second," something awful happens, and there's so much of it that it's impossible to fully process. It's like if somebody asked you to imagine the universe, in its infinite size and infinite detail.
What really got me thinking about all this was a chapter in American Gods by Neil Gaiman This, I feel it necessary to add, is the most well-written book I've ever read--I definitely recommend it--but this chapter didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the book. Regardless of this, or maybe because of it, it had more of an impact on me than the main storyline. My point is, it explains all this better than I ever could:
"Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to a million.' With individual stories, the statistics become people--but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless...we draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain. Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives."
But you know what? I think it's worse than that. It's not that we'd be too affected by the overwhelming knowledge of the vast pain in the world--it's that we wouldn't be affected at all. We're not ignorant of it, but used to it. Nothing short of a living, breathing time machine or a power-hungry angel is going to effect us, because our attention spans are much too short to be bothered with something like a hungry child in a third world country because, let's face it, we've heard it all before. The stories of our lives on earth aren't nearly as interesting as those we see on our television screens.
I figured I'd write something like this instead of a review of tonight's Supernatural because I'm getting a bit tired of the emotional turmoil caused by imaginary stories. I just wish I knew how to stop living through them instead of living through, well, life.
But as I hugged a pillow to my chest and winced as Castiel murdered Balthazar in cold blood on the Supernatural season finale, I wondered why it affects us so much. I mean, they're not real people. They're just some (albeit pretty awesome) actors and actresses reading lines that were written by balding, middle-aged men bouncing ideas off of each other in an office.
They're manufactured emotions. Written, packaged, distributed neatly straight into your living room. And we all consume it eagerly, greedily, desperately, because there's no other way to get them anymore.
I can watch the weekday evening news while eating dinner and neither I nor the reporter will even blink while the latter covers a story of a hit-and-run, or a murder-suicide, or a fucking genocide. My eyes teared up when I saw the old console room in The Doctor's Wife. This is not a healthy reaction to things.
But it's not just me! At least I hope it's not. So many bad things happen, all the time, all the sentences that begin with "every second," something awful happens, and there's so much of it that it's impossible to fully process. It's like if somebody asked you to imagine the universe, in its infinite size and infinite detail.
What really got me thinking about all this was a chapter in American Gods by Neil Gaiman This, I feel it necessary to add, is the most well-written book I've ever read--I definitely recommend it--but this chapter didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the book. Regardless of this, or maybe because of it, it had more of an impact on me than the main storyline. My point is, it explains all this better than I ever could:
"Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to a million.' With individual stories, the statistics become people--but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless...we draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain. Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives."
But you know what? I think it's worse than that. It's not that we'd be too affected by the overwhelming knowledge of the vast pain in the world--it's that we wouldn't be affected at all. We're not ignorant of it, but used to it. Nothing short of a living, breathing time machine or a power-hungry angel is going to effect us, because our attention spans are much too short to be bothered with something like a hungry child in a third world country because, let's face it, we've heard it all before. The stories of our lives on earth aren't nearly as interesting as those we see on our television screens.
I figured I'd write something like this instead of a review of tonight's Supernatural because I'm getting a bit tired of the emotional turmoil caused by imaginary stories. I just wish I knew how to stop living through them instead of living through, well, life.