Emotions are a fascinating thing. I do not believe that there is such a thing as a sentient creature that does not have them. But as I believe I have mentioned before, in the grand scheme of our thought process, our emotions take precedence over our intellect. This is a big part of the reason why the manner in which I write my most direct proxy character, Kronisk, has changed direction in order to make him capable of absorbing emotions and using them as fuel for his powers.
This is a good reason why we so often say things that we mean with all of our hearts at one point, and end up regretting at another. And it also prompts an interesting question. Namely, how do our emotions direct us?
One of my new neighbours, I have been acquainted with for several years. I moved across the city in order (partly) to be nearer her so that I am able to offer some form of emotional support, and hopefully vice versa. And that is a hard thing for me, before you ask. When people tell me that they get something out of knowing me, I have to do a lot to suppress an urge to tell them they must be kidding.
At one point in a fun little film called Equilibrium, after the “hero” tells a woman that he has arrested that he is sorry, she responds that he is not. He is just using a word for an emotion, a feeling, that he has never felt before. And often, I wonder if I am not doing the same, and have been doing so for quite a long time. That is, I wonder if I have been using words that I have been taught to fill the gaps in my experience.
Many positive emotions, joy, amusement, and so forth, are stirred by seeing awful, horrible things in a motion picture format. During Zero Dark Thirty, there is a scene in which one American intelligence agent rips the pants off a suspected terrorist and tells them that the relatively tiny woman he has brought with him can stare at his naughty bits for a while. This may sound racist or bigoted or whatever to some, but given the rampant misogyny in the suspect’s society, I just could not help laughing. My sympathy for the suspect in this scene, nearly non-existent from the start, was replaced by complete mirth at his misfortune.
But as genuine emotions in response to real things go, I am almost entirely in the dark. I rarely feel anything strong unless it is either extremely negative or involves the neurochemical reactions that result from lower blood glucose levels. I never noticed it before, but falling glucose levels, sometimes perfectly normal levels (say, falling from 9.0 mmol/l to 7.9 mmol/l), make me feel a kind of sad that is less fun than being too drunk to fornicate. Not that I have ever really been that drunk before. Drunk enough to be unconscious for days, but… well, you get the idea.
Warped sense of humour aside, investigation of my own emotions reveals a sort of surreal perspective not unlike part of the recent film adaptation of Philip K. Dick‘s A Scanner Darkly. My abusers were fond of telling me that I could go far in their society if I would only please start responding to their abuse in the manner that they expected. But I did not. Instead, I retreated into a dark world where nobody counts, nobody has any value in society, and nobody can possibly contribute things of worth.
Words like “friend” or “love” essentially have a distorted meaning to me as a result of things like this. A trading card set based on The Transformers (the real Transformers, not Michael “I Make Movies For Morons” Bay’s imitation) had quotes from the characters that were meant to summarise the character’s approach to life. One quote that has stuck with me for a long time is “Friend is another word for fool”. Sometimes, when someone calls me a friend, I can only think that they see me more as their fool. Not because I feel maliciously towards them (they would not be friends if that were the case), but because I just never know anymore with other people.
That is, I cannot remember the last time I really had a positive feeling towards another Human being that was before me in the flesh and blood sense. I do not even know how to really properly phrase what I am saying here. I hate trying to communicate with others, because my sense of hearing and my ability to be clear without embarrassing myself are constantly letting me down. Sometimes, a person can be standing as little as six feet from me, and even when they are facing me, properly hearing them is difficult because background noise is too invasive. It makes me feel so useless and draining that I just want to avoid conversations at such times.
Love is a meaningless word in my consciousness. It is like the name of an “artist” whose body of work means nothing to me. Take the moron I refer to as Justin Baby for instance. Just the sound of the little drip talking is repellent to me, so when I say that I do not nor really want to understand the shit he speaks, understand my meaning. The kind of love that comes to mind when I hear others speak the word (with some exceptions I will not get into here) resembles the kind of love shown to a battered housewife or the like. Every example of love that I have seen from sources other than the exceptions I still do not wish to get into has repelled me in some way. The world has become too ugly during the last thirty years for me to love much of it. Or any of it for all I know.
I have made references in the past to how overpopulated the planet has become, as well as how Indulge The Rich At Everyone Else’s Expense economics have hurt families like mine. I think that tells the true story of where our world is going, and has been going throughout my life. If the hippies had a culture of peace and love, we have a culture of hatred and prejudice. You need only look at the language of curebie propaganda in order to confirm this. Their hateful attempts to sell the murder of the neurodivergent shows an incredible confusion about the difference between love and hate. They try to proclaim their love of the people they want to destroy, but the volume at which people like me hear hate in their voice is deafening.
What am I getting at here? Hell if I properly know. When I write, it is a pouring of thought and consciousness from my mind, not a cohesive essay. But if half of what I say is true, especially the bit about how the way we are spoken to as children shapes the way we think as adults, then the image I have carried of how people proclaim to love one another is very nasty indeed.
The Star Wars prequels, yes, I know how fukking terribly they were written, show a good example of this. Hell, let us just cut this back to the final film in the series. Whether George Lucas knows this or not, the manner in which he has written Anakin Skywalker makes him into the classic abusive husband. He loves Padmé in the same sense that he loves his car, or whatever he uses to get around. She is little more than property to the deepest part of his mind (this is not a unique perception – other authors have written this in reviews). The novelisation of Revenge Of The Sith alleviates this somewhat by going deeper into how Anakin perceives things, but the salient point here is that very few examples of what people call love have made a positive impression upon me.
During my youth, I regularly asked Odin to send me positive examples of things I saw others taking for granted. Education, work, and love were the main things. To be fair, I did get a few examples during subsequent points of my life. But I think the examples I refer to also prove that love is a restricted, closed kind of thing. People do not love people that they do not have some form of commonality with. Which restricts the list of candidates I have quite substantially.
I do not know where I am going with this. Except to say that our emotions are shaped by what we experience, and that is a sad lookout for me. For a lifetime, I have listened to people telling me I cannot have this, or I can only have that, or that I am not allowed in this place. My whole character is formulated by this. So when I write in places like this journal phrases like “Where are you, my Quorra?”, I am doing more than just referring to a film that taps into my thought process.
I am making such a desperate plea with fate.
