Transcript

I also couldn't pass this up. An excellent example of how, late-at-night, poetry and art can open a wildfire of loosely connected and broad philosophical topics.
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Tyler: wait wanna see a poem I wrote? Dance of the raven: Dance of the raven. Find a haven. Metamorphosis comes. Adrenaline drums. Look into the sun. Song of a gun.
my mind was racing the other night, I wrote four little poems and I'M not quite sure what they mean... still Fred: I once wrote rhyming couplets from the perspective of DF in exactly that manner and put them together as a story DF tells of killing people at night. Czartan loved em.
Tyler: yeah... those ones are just weird Run through the forest Bloody your nuckles Feel no pain My demon chuckles what do you you get out of them? I mean... I know what I was thinking... but what do you think about them?
Fred: I thought that the demon chuckles bit was almost a Tyler Weast reference. You could easily put them together as a dialectical poetic structure between the three aspects of Tyler's mind. Tyler mentions demon, demon speaks, Tyler mentions angel, angel speaks, angel mentions demon, demon speaks mentioning angel, angel speaks, Tyler speaks, some outside observer speaks, a friend speaks, each speaks in turn.
Tyler: three images merge to one precision lost chaos won
Fred: Yeah, it'd be a great way to get a better feeling for the character, too.
Tyler: wow... the poems make so much more sense now the last one was:
Fred [while he types]: Trust me from writing: Your mind has a way of spilling relevant crap in poetic structure. Poems can be very dream-like in that way.
Tyler: Enter. Dance. Ascencion. Trance. Death. Chance.
Fred: You start piecing together shit, seeing more and more symbols, and then you learn about yourself and your world and you widen your world. Let's see: Enter = introduction line, Dance = interplay between the three, Ascension = angel and Tyler's hope for sanity.. Trance = Demon and the demon buying off Tyler's mind with power, Death and Chance = the two possibilities of the fragmented mind Tyler has constructed. Your Chance is the corellary to Fred's Hope. Notice a distinction: Chance is external, as Tyler's life is heavily dominated by external forces; whereas Fred constantly focuses on individidual responsbility against a nasty universe, even when such responsibility is a pointless crusade against the zeitgeist.
Tyler: and I've had a problem with constantly moving around "Chance." "Trance" and "Dance."... cuz you interchange them anywhere and it seems to make sense
Fred: Well, the three have linked elements, but I see them arranged as Dance, Trance and Chance. All three are about external forces, the will of nature and of probability and of trying to momentarily see or become one with those. Consider this: Shamans danced in order to put themselves into a monomaniacal trance state in order to control or manipulate chance. And notice also how your own comment says that out of three images arises order. Which is in turn a counter-dialectical concept, as Hegel postulated that the tripartite version of evolving history would evolve towards order. Again an example of Tyler struggling against a universe seeming to block his every move.
Tyler: holy shit dude
Fred: I'd say that Tyler's salvation will instead come from oscillating between three poles constantly, so fast like a stroboscopic light that one cannot see it, so that order is brought out of chaos. A way of bringing the light out of dark that affirms Fred's theory but is rather different/
Tyler: you have an uncanny nack at making my nonsensical tendencies sensical
Fred: Lots of philosophy bullshit helps. You just have to run with it. If you imagine your writing as applying to a character, you can ossify it, then unossify it when you realize its universal implicationas. It's actually a heuristic, like in math: first you apply it to a specific case, see its application, then derive the general. Inductive logic. I'm just glad that I think I've found out the methodology that Tyler would use to achieve a measure of salvation. Now how he applies it is a separate story. Ah, simple. Tyler's final ability has his aura fluctuate by chance. Just like the I Ching or fortunetelling, where from random events you see the pattern of the future, his incredibly energy changes incredibly quickly, allowing him to adjust at a moment's notice. Bringing order out of chaos. And every move he makes to bring order out of chaos lets him stave off the pure light of the angel, the pure light of the demon, and his own struggles between these two poles. Which in turns makes Tyler in his ultimate personal power an incredibly dangerous foe because his very aura predicts and is formed by chance and future patterns. In fact, in discussions of chaos theory, scientists note that while order moves to chaos in complex systems, it also moves back, and Tyler rides the crests and valleys. Meaning that traditional shamanistic enemies, i.e. Thrash/Remzeyr, who use trances to achieve unpredictability, open themselves up to Tyler. It also means that any instance he can contemplate three distinct sides of any argument and come up with not only the famous two alternatives "Yes" and "No" but the third alternative that everyone hides behind their back or rhetorically makes problematic and in fact non-existant. Your poems also point to what Tyler should do story-wise: Spirit quests. Shamans often were schizophrenic or similarly insane, and yet leveraged it to speak to the spirits, rather than in the Middle Ages where Christians, due to dualistic ideas of good and bad, put people on ships of fools. And now we're back to insanity! Wee. _____________________________
This is an edited transcript. This is all a conversation about poems that Tyler wrote, not knowing what their significance was. We were able to connect them to a character and talk about them, deriving deeper meanings from a mustard seed. This is the great part of roleplaying: One really can explore characterization, symbols, philosophy, in a way that no boring college class can teach.