Another Holden's Bookshelf entry today? Pfft, nah. At least probably not. You may have noticed that hasn't popped up with any more entries since the first one, and Sunday Comics has been absent as well. The reasons for this are entirely divergent: in the case of Sunday Comics, I've begun to feel like I'm running out of comics to spotlight. As big a comics nerd as I can be, I only personally own so many, so the output for those entries may see a decrease in frequency. Holden's Bookshelf has the opposite problem: I have too many books to choose from (I recently bought a second bookshelf, and a third one becoming necessary could easily only be a couple years away). I feel overwhelmed, and I didn't bother to set many rules, moreover, for what sorts of books I'd review. Maybe I shouldn't have as much ruling, and it can be Sunday Comics' freer cousin.
In any case, that's not what today's focus is about. Today's post comes entirely courtesy of Cineris, a talented gal who in addition to her main blog (The Infinite Contradiction Of Endless Hope), has recently launched an intriguing sci-fi/philosophy experiment one called Sidereal Stilus. Over in Infinite Contradiction, she recently posted an entry that I just had to take my own stab at (the exercise itself being derived originally from none other than prominent author Neil Gaiman). This exercise is simply called "I Believe."
An "I Believe" entry is, simply, a list of truths you hold. They need not necessarily be religious or philosophic truths, though that can certainly play into it. They can be serious, they can be silly, and honestly it seems best for the whimsy of the exercise when a degree of both are present. Do it all in one go if you can, and if you don't, try to avoid breaks in the text. It should feel like a lengthy but seamless block.
So, I crack my knuckles and here I go, my own take on this, unfiltered and originally scrawled in one of my too-many half-full notebooks.
I believe that reality is a book, both metaphorically and, in an odd cosmic ethereal sense, literally, and it exists in a simultaneous state of having already been fully written and in being actively written each second, and each human being that lives and dies is a character whose life forms a subplot so tiny yet so intrinsic to the whole that the overall plot could very well be fractal. I believe that due to this, the answer to the age-old question of why "bad things happen to good people" is character development, as there never was an interesting plot that arose without some degree of conflict present. It is the nature of stories themselves, as a form, to contain it, and as much as most of us loathe adversity we cannot refute that it keeps life some kind of interesting. Incidentally, this also blows away whether art imitates life or vice versa: indeed, under the Book Assumption life IS art, the two are equal, with life as the greatest work of art, existing in a medium unto its own, its layers so numerous that we have not analyzed a fraction of it after milennia of intent gazing, and it in fact brilliantly doubles as its own museum to showcase itself. It also, I believe, cannot be truly copied, only crudely imitated and, perhaps later down the line, at least somewhat convincingly imitated, but the original will always shine brightest, for as long as human beings are imperfect by nature and insist on creating things with our clumsy meat hands, or with machines created by said hands, or machines created by machines created by said hands; all down the line an inescapable imprint of imperfection yet the very attempt at creating still makes us gloriously unique out of all that moves.
I believe in the old adage that something worth having is also worth waiting for. Patience is an increasingly rarer virtue. I believe the solution to ridding pop culture and public attitudes of the Male Gaze is NOT, in fact, to introduce a greater influx of Female Gaze; this only makes the issues of accepted sexism twofold. I believe my words have more power when I write them than when I speak them. I believe in the importance of breaks from routine. I believe in the importance of routine. I believe human chipping is a bad idea, for the same reasons we have a sense of privacy. I believe Monsanto is a bad company, at the very least their produce/farming division. I believe in proper and thorough sex education for anyone mature enough to need to know. I do not believe that nudity is automatically pornography, and believe that the line between the two is to some extent (but not fully) a subjective one. I believe black licorice tastes of the whimsy and spices of the old world and red licorice tastes of the dull affronting plastic of a bitter future. I believe the current Western beauty ideal of the tall, curveless, wheedling, glamour-hungry girly-girl is one of the least attractive archetypes we could have chosen for the job. I believe infants are more intelligent than we give them credit for, they just don't have a means of communicating back yet, and are brand new to the concept of being. I believe that for every product concept, no matter how inane, will have someone out there who will buy it, provided it's advertised right. I believe life requires a degree of pessimism but cannot be enjoyed if one identifies wholly as a pessimist. I believe there are few musical devices more potent to one's adrenaline than a chugging bass riff traveling straight through your body. I believe animals do not have souls, but do not believe that this justifies killing them wantonly. I believe if you take up hunting as a sport you should intend to eat what you kill. I believe that human beings are born capable of willingly perpetrating wrong, and that ideas of human beings being "born good/innocent" or of humanity being "basically good" are, very frankly, bullshit. I believe evil is dependent on the existence of good, but believe good is not dependent on the existence of evil--they are not codependent. I believe that the two most important qualities of food are how nourishing it is and how it tastes, and believe there are appropriate times for sacrificing one of the sake of the other, for both factors. I believe that an ugly personality will totally negate the physical beauty of even the world's most gorgeous person.
I believe that graffiti isn't always a bad thing, even if it is illegal. I believe that as much as we may hope, flying cars will never happen, but robot butlers will. I believe in the distinct possibility of sentient alien life, but do not believe it is a given. I believe television is a great entertainment medium but a terrible educational medium, not because of content but in the very way it operates. I believe in wearing scarves in the winter. I believe in dancing when you feel like it. I believe in going shirtless when you're home all alone in the summer. I believe tea and cheese should always be high-quality when possible. I believe moths are actually melevolent undead butterflies. I believe I have more of these and I'll type them out in a later entry.
[Holden Out.]
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