/lit/ - Literature

i want to talk about something else here too, or at least meme-seed it for future conversations. it came up while i was playing (or, rather, watching some bullet hell stuff the other day), but it relates to the nature of violence, fear and guilt and other things that all kind of trickle into these conversations.

the basic rule of Bullet Hell is that two points cannot occupy the same space at the same time. if you and the bullet are both on that same pixel, you both get wiped out. the "fun" of higher-level play in these games ultimately seems to come down to *enduring* higher and higher levels of ever-more complex swarms of patterns, and boss battles are grit-your-teeth episodes in manic concentration which are fun for this reason.

now the reason i bring this up is because this seems to me an interesting minor discourse on the nature of violence itself, if hostility becomes a question of pattern recognition. what alarms about the face of the hostile other is its *radical possibility.* you don't actually know, IRL, how hostile scenarios are likely to go. now in a bullet hell scenario, you actually can *see* the threat - it's the waves of bullets. and all you have to do is dodge them and return fire. eventually, one of you will burn out.

now IRL, the nature of language, gesture and sign and so on is radically indeterminate, and to see in the face of an angry other only an analogue for Hibachi would be profoundly strange. we're empathetic, we don't work like that. and yet there is some correspondence in this: it is that *panic* involves a relation of *infinite possibility* to *extreme time deficiency.* it is why, for example, a slow-down (or Bullet Time) feature is a crucial mechanic in these games, because when *time slows down you can navigate the patterns without fundamentally changing them, or negating them.*

if *fear* is an apprehension about the radical possibilities in an *immanent future,* we might also say that *guilt* is an apprehension about the radical possibilities of an *unchangeable past.* and the nature of time IRL is that there is - apart from deep breathing, and not even then - nothing like a slow-down feature.

this is why, i think, the Chinese - but Heidegger also - sussed out something like the fundamentally *temporal* nature of all life. and any such Cosmotech religion or metaphysical sensibility would have to start from considering the relation between *time* and the *affects.* anybody can be triggered. and words and texts can very much be like bullets, in their own way: that was Lacan's whole point w/The Purloined Letter. the *meaning* of the letter was death, because the mechanism of recognition worked like a guillotine. sphinx-stuff.

things to think about.