Writing practice: 6 different things, broken into approx. 20 min. parts
[1st part: first sentences]
After 500,000 years of erosion, the rock face of Malcolm Bluff exposed the smallest piece of a structure homo sapiens had never seen, at the same time exposing a crack in the periodic table, through which an undiscovered metal shown.
[a bit long, not terrible]
On May 7, 1893, a man who didn’t exist disembarked from a ship that had lain half-submerged for 150 years in the seabed off the coast of Maine, and he swam ashore.
[ok move on to part 2: final sentences]
Tomorrow, Jack knew, was another day, but tonight the voices were gone, and for the first time since that May day of 1963 he fell into a dreamless sleep.
[part 3: iambic pentameter]
Revenge becomes the all-consuming drug
Revenge became the magnetizing force
[part 4: journal]
For Dantes, I think his thoughts of victimization (his own and his family’s) excited his emotions to a frenzy, and such an emotional frenzy is not sustainable so he had to have some way of calming himself to a lower emotional energy level. To do that, he used thoughts of revenge. So like an iron bar, the emotional frenzy heated the metal and put the magnetic dipoles in a state where they could be realigned, and then his thoughts of revenge aligned them and cooled them into a coherent pattern. And as he did this over and over again, he would cycle this process of heating, alignment, and cooling, so that more dipoles each time were aligned. Eventually, his entire psyche became almost completely aligned with revenge.
Thoughts of victimization can be a powerful (negative) way to excite one’s emotions by conjuring feelings of helplessness and loss, and thoughts of revenge can be an antidote because it conjures countering feelings of agency, if not recovery. And the feeling of righteous revenge gives us a sense of moral sanction. When a human has convinced himself he has a moral sanction for justice in the form of revenge, he can become a danger to others and himself, because revenge has no limits. It’s the antidote to feelings of victimhood, and as long as one conjures feelings of victimhood, revenge is the antidote, and as long as one convinces oneself of the moral sanction of justice in the form of revenge, then the revenge won’t stop until the individual is stopped or until he runs out of objects of his revenge.
[part 5: narrative based on passage]
[from measure for measure, 1.1]
[well, i spent the whole time trying to understand it. i’ll pick it up tmw]