Rinzai Did Nothing Wrong.

“However well-meaning and strong the individual man may be (if he could only use his strength), he still has not the passion to be able to tear himself from the coils and seductive uncertainty of reflection. Nor do his surroundings supply the events or produce the general enthusiasm necessary in order to free him. Instead of coming to his help, his milieu forms around him a negative intellectual opposition, which juggles for a moment with a deceptive prospect, only to deceive him in the end by pointing to a brilliant way out of the difficulty — by showing him that the shrewdest thing of all is to do nothing.”   -    S.A. Kierkegaard.   The Present Age , by Soren Kierkegaard . Consider three good premises for narratives; you’ll find they have a lot of shocking, almost (dare we say it?) Archetypal Similarities:   I.             A Boy falls down a well (or well-like fissure in the ground) and finds ...

[ I’ve written at some length  upon this, yet the message may be muddled, to some minds, by the emotion. Here’s  a summary of why I do not watch *Attack on Titan*. My dedication goes to Pedro/Spyke for being understanding; you inspired me to write this when I woke from nightmares.] In the first place, that first episode remains the single most egregious act of violence I’ve ever seen in any form of media. Considering that animation is supposed to be amusing, (this was made by “Funimation”) I was shocked by just how horrid the depictions were, as if to use the art form to exaggerate and to manipulate all human sensibility and agony. Yet that first episode was not enough to stop me from continuing to watch it. Why?  Because it was effective. All the blood did serve one function: that it drew a thick red line between the black and white. There was no ambiguity, no coming back from what I’d witnessed, and that was the point: I never would be capable of humanizing the aggresso...