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 ...

Dilemma is the heart of narrative, as is established by Jeff Kitchen in his interviews. Yet what appears to be dilemma, a decision in between two evils, is quite often nothing more than a scenario wherein one course of action is defensible and others cannot be, but failure is a common risk. It’s in the aftermath of such a failure that excuses come, and often such excuses harden into orthodoxies which become a moral dogma. Yet a moral dogma, though it is dogmatic, is not moral. Though it’s paradoxical to say that something we describe as “moral” is not moral, that’s because to classify a thing as “moral” means to claim that it *aspires* to be moral, yet the possibility of failure leads us to conclude that it is not what it pretends to be, and contradictions in semantics cease to bother us when we remember what the nature of a moral act is truly.   Fans of anime who vilify Light Yagami may claim that it was Light’s *decision* to employ the Death Note which leads to his downfall. ...