{ she sees God in the turning of the tides }

I've just written up my lecture notes for Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty which is the wonderful novel on which I am writing my Narrative and Culture essay. The computer has just been turned on because I need to print off my extra LTC assignment, and I'm online because I'm trying to find two of Frank O'Hara's poems that aren't in the edition the University told us to buy (which, yeah, useful). But I've been musing about this since yesterday and I feel midday (or circa) is an appropriate time to take a break and think about Catholicism.

( This gets long )

I’ll leave you with one last thought before I go back to lecture notes. Both Bartleby in Dogma and Gabriel in Constantine fall; they both state only humans are given the choice to be welcomed into the love of God, that angels were created loving. Both see humans as unworthy. And both see hell as a PHYSICAL PLACE when it’s been defined as the absence of God. So, by definition, both Gabriel and Bartleby are in hell even though they are on Earth. Hell isn’t a place. Hell is the absence of God. "Why did You leave me?" Bartleby asks, and for a film that’s fairly funny, for a moment you suddenly have to come to stop and think what these stories are actually telling us.

ETA: Onto notes on Frank O'Hara next - a man who loved New York City. Don't be surprised if that sparks a diatribe, too.

{ the walls are falling away from themselves }

You know, even when I saw Objects in Space the first time, it completely held me as a story, and not just because it became the end of Firefly as a series but because it was about River and her character really reaches out to me in a very brutal way. I just watched the episode again, this time with Joss Whedon's commentary and whilst I can see what he wanted to do and how successfully he achieved that aim, I still respond to this episode in a radically different way to what he was aiming. Does that make sense?

Originally my fascination with River stemmed from seeing that picture of Summer Glau and the fact that her face fit exactly with the way I was envisioning Lise at the time (I now use that more as a base and Lise has evolved into something a little less elegant, more messy but very, very direct) but then it segued into a fascination with the character herself. The delicacy of her. And Objects in Space is all about this tentative, literally awesome power. I love that idea, that she is incomprehensible, but she's still a child. And I love the idea of her becoming the ship; identifying with it as a body and a space within a space. Obviously, she's not the ship but I still like the thought that it would have made perfect sense.

Mostly, this episode is so quiet and sparse. And what I read into it was that the episode transcended itself, or rather the idea of River Tam transcended the plot and became the episode. She became a literal representation of the story. I love that so much. And now my brain is just hovering on all those pictures, and my responses to it, and what Joss Whedon expected from it and-- and it's fantastically incomplete. Surreal, solid, intangible and, even more paradoxically, confoundingly, complexly simple.