Review: Substance Clad In Shadows - Nietzsche and the Eternal Return

Fanfiction: Substance Clad In Shadows

I've been the prey, praying for a way out of mazes of my own making. Weak, wanton. 

ch 25

He eyes me warily. "You don't know what I want."

But I'm sure I do. Because everyone wants power, but few understand that it isn't titles or speeches or money — it's a whisper in a dark place, a kiss in the corner, a shapeless something in the shadows.

It's in the predatory smile of a young man as he seduces his prey on the cold stone bench of a garden maze. ch 26

I smile at him and inhale, searching for the familiar rush, the beginning of something new, an escape from escape itself:

Freedom. ch 22

He complies, shoving into me hard, hard, hard enough to hurt but it's good, it's the best and I want more. Suddenly I'm moving through the deep, through the dark, through a red haze and an old maze that unfurls like a wrinkled banner and there is no monster here, no blood or victory, there's nothing but release and freedom and up, up, up until I breach the surface of a faraway sun, gasping as I come. The sound is ugly and sharp. ch 22

Is the myth of Daedalus and Icarus well known enough?

King Minos of Knossos had commissioned the Athenian artisan Daedalus to design a labyrinth in which to imprison the monster the Minotaur. Daedalus gave the key of the maze to Minos's daughter Ariadne, who gave it to her lover Theseus so he could enter the labyrinth, slay the Minotaur and find his way out. For this he left her and she became consoled by Bacchus (Dionysius), the god of wine, laughter, excess. For his disobedience Daedalus and his son Icarus are imprisoned in the labyrinth and Daedalus knows the only way out is the sky. He designs wings for them to fly out telling Icarus not to fly too low and be drowned in the sea, nor too high or the sun will melt the wax securing the feathers of his wings. 

In other words, "Take the middle road. Not the road of excess."

Icarus flew too close to the bright hot sun and perished, drowning in the Aegean Sea.

Another variation has Theseus laying a thread down as he enters the labyrinth to slay the Minotaur, so he can find his way out.

And Bella is constantly "following the thread" in her thinking and actions.

But then breathe,

breathe again,

and follow the thread, ch 26

The myth of Daedalus and Icarus

http://www.island-ikaria.com/culture/myth.asp

King Minos and Daedalus had great understanding at first, but their relationships started deteriorating at some point; there are several versions explaining this sudden change, although the most common one is that Daedalus was the one who advised Princess Ariadne to give Theseus the thread that helped him come out from the infamous Labyrinth, after killing the Minotaur.  http://www.greekmyths-greekmythology.com/myth-of-daedalus-and-icarus/

The most important aria in either version is "Großmächtige Prinzessin" / "high and mighty princess", is sung by Zerbinetta. Other important pieces of the opera are the arias of Ariadne "Wo war ich...?" / "Where was I...?", "Ein schönes war es..." / "There was something beautiful..." and "Es gibt ein Reich..." / "There is a realm..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariadne_auf_Naxos

Bella's beloved Ilse her German Nanny of her childhood, who refuses to drug her and leaves would connect the German language and the music.

Her reply is unintelligible, and then footsteps fade, leaving only Ilse's soft, half-sung German.

"Weißt du, wieviel Mücken spielen

in der heißen Sonnenglut?

Wie viel Fische auch sich kühlen

in der hellen Wasserflut?" ch 24 

Substance Clad In Shadows has a scene near the end at the opera when Turandot is being performed. I would suggest an editing with Ariadne auf Noxos instead. The novel consistently is structured round the metaphor of the labyrinth - the maze - on a real and conceptual level. Ariadne auf Noxos begins with Ariadne in a grief stricken state because Theseus has left her. 

Bella's intention is to free Edward and make him hers. To tear the veil of illusion - maya -  from his being as she has done with the others, who revile her for doing so. She is going to slay the god of her childhood, destroy him as he is now, but she becomes caught in her own maze game, as Daedalus  was caught in his labyrinth. She also tries to fly out but finds there is nowhere to go. She is caught in the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge/normality/capital, another name for The Maze of mythology. Her only flight is the excessiveness of Eros.

The genius of this fanfic is that hollelujah has fictionalized the Panopticon, the surveillance mechanism in the Foucauldian Grid 
of power/knowledge/normality/capital

If I listen closely enough, I can hear the clink of glasses from the rooms inside, the 

chatter of his 

parents' guests, so perfectly groomed, raised to their places by a million petty rules, by 

the 

captivity of caring for reputation, for convention. ch 26

The ubiquitous people. Always asking, always talking.

"

Good of them to notice I was gone," I reply.

If my father

 notices my sarcasm, he does not acknowledge it. "Everyone notices 

everything. Reputations rise and fall on perception, Isabella. Ours 

could be destroyed in a minute." ch 27

"Randolph Bourne said that 'Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue it likes,

and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.'"ch 9

 "There is no choice," I choke out. "There's 

nothing else." ch 26 

"There is no outside," says Vija Kinski quoting 

Foucault.

There is no knowledge that is not power, my father quotes from behind a stately-looking podium. - Emerson  ch 23

She understands that seduction is the only way out to endure the Grid, the Matrix. An endless seduction that raises the ante, that increasingly challenges, challenges increasingly, within Nietzsche's Eternal Return.

Because it can't be love. I don't want poems or well-wishes and I will not sacrifice for his happiness, I want nothing to do with it if it means letting him go. ch 26 (Ayn Rand)

I am not enough — but I will be enough. ch 26

And what we have here is a relationship from the future. A sign of a possibility from the future. A possibility that we can provide space and time around it to nourish it, to bring it into being. A relationship that does not leave a man wanting a prostitute for the kind of sex he cannot get or ask for anywhere else. A relationship that does not leave a woman bored and yearning and longing. An erotic relationship where each is both prey and predator turning around and around, challenging each other, seducing each other, wanting each other, gratifying each other. Two people who do not need to provoke sex from others for variety, because they create their own variety. 

FANFIC Review: Substance Clad In Shadows

Rodin The Kiss Wrapped in 1 Mile of Twine by Cornelia Parker
"Rodin's 'The Kiss,' re-imagined," the curator closest to me explains in reverent tones. "Tate Britain is exhibiting it as a piece by Cornelia Parker. The artist wrapped Rodin's sculpture in one mile of string to represent the 'claustrophobia of relationships.' You'll notice the contrast of the two materials: the high culture of the marble, and the low culture of the twine." 
ch 19
Fanfiction: Substance Clad In Shadows

Nietzsche - Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche: The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

The first time I lay eyes on him that night, I think of the desires of Nietzsche's true man. ch 10

He thinks I don't notice the looks he receives as we make our way to the roof. Women watch him, wistful or lustful or smug, their memories or fantasies playing out in an unsubtle panoply of desire across their features. And then their gazes inevitably catch me walking behind him, after which they occupy themselves either by glaring at me openly or looking down and away.

Look at yourselves, I want to sneer. Waiting for me to leave his side so you can simper at his every word, laugh at his inane jokes as you surreptitiously ask the universe for a way to master your gag reflex so you can suck him off in a back room well enough to warrant a quick fuck and a phone call the next day.

There are blondes and brunettes and redheads of all different shapes and sizes, but the vacancies in their eyes make them all look the same. They part unwillingly for us.

I'm sure their panties are wet already. Small wonder that he's bored.

For now. chapt 9

First, that the burly man does not appreciate Armani-clad barflys attempting to seduce his girl. "He kissed her!" he yells. ch 10

I see him, I think. I see him. ch 10

 This is a man of hidden wants, buried needs, and I'm going to leave him sated, satisfied but first comes the extraction of his longings and I'll dig, god I'll dig right into him until he's free and mine. ch 11

"I see you," I whisper, and his mouth opens to form words he doesn't yet know. ch 11

Mapplethorpe

Akhmotova - Modigliani

"Your women are too easy, Edward Cullen," I whisper in his ear, nipping at the lobe. "They're so happy just to have you look twice at them, do you know why?"ch 11

"Those women take what they can get from you because they don't know their place. They don't know how bland they are, how bored you are." ch 11

 "'We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.'" ch 19

"I am your danger and your play," I hiss. "And I'm going to make you work for it." ch 11

"Bella, Bella, Bella," he breathes, and I'm one fantasy closer to owning him. ch 11

He is everything right now, my prey and my prayer and my captive, my spoils of war, my conquered city and my friendly fire. He is the thief of my skin,

my monster in the maze,

my sun god, grounded.

He is mine. ch 25

I sink down even further and stare as he comes apart, panting and chanting my name and fuck, fuck, fuck. ch 11

"Edward," I grind out, the sound trial and triumph. "You have to know… I'm the best you're ever going to have." ch 11

_____________________________________

"The Blacks are being more than accommodating right now, especially in light of this… indiscretion, Isabella," he says sternly. "Make sure you remember that when making new friends." ch 11

"Have you found her?" a man asks nearby.

"I've got her. I think she was stuck in the maze." ch 12

____________________________________

Warm us on his skin, my fingers cry plaintively. We are frozen. ch 12

He blinks. Stares. Breathes in, breathes out, and then: "Who are you?"

"I'm the only one in this building who knows what you are," I answer quietly.

He frowns. "What am I?"

+.+.+.++.+.+.+

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain

stitching her eyes before she made a sound...

Her body flaked into transparent salt,

and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem

too insignificant for our concern?

Yet in my heart I never will deny her,

who suffered death because she chose to turn.

[Anna Akhmatova, "Lot's Wife"]

+.+.+.++.+.+.+

"You already know what you are. I've already told you. You're bored. You're bored and you're lazy and you're mine. You think I don't know what it's like? To be surrounded by people who don't know, who can't know. ch 12

He is stone-still beneath my hand, his eyes hard. "Will you ever want more?"

I am silent for a moment, a series of moving images flashing across my mind's eye: domesticity, predictability, two-sink bathrooms, tragically tight smiles, a home in the

Hamptons, a ring on my finger, a swell in my belly, a staff to clean the penthouse and put a roast in the oven each night. Dinners in the city with his colleagues, his former fucks. Cold brunches spent staring at one another with open resentment. And boredom.

Above all, boredom.

Every bit of that life seems a shackle, another lock to keep me in a different kind of cage.

"Peter Ustinov thought it was true... 'through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.'" ch 18

 I'm not complaining – I have a good life. But it's rare to be around someone real."

"Am I real, then?"

His eyes find mine, unreadable. "I think so. And I think... you may have ruined me for others who aren't," he confesses quietly. ch 16

Hamlet and Ophelia - Louise Bourgeois

This Bella is a Nietzschean strategist. We see her like in Dominique Francon in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, a woman who is determined to destroy Howard Roark. Dominique has been interpreted for almost 70 years in the psychological swamp of interpretation as a masochist, rather than a Nietzschean strategist. 

We are married by a French clerk, and I wear red dress. ch 28 

Dominique wore black.

In DeLillo's Cosmopolis the Foucauldian character of Vija Kinski tells Eric Packer in a quote from Foucault, "There is no outside." She adds that money no longer refers to anything at all except itself. Money talks only to money. Foucault in discussing the end of representation in language argues that Cervantes Don Quixote is the first novel in the western world to leave the fetters of representation, Quixote refers only to literature. Substance Clad In Shadows is fanfiction and the first one to make clear that the Edward/Bella/Twilight fanfic refers only to other to itself. SCIS refers to Twilight both the books and the films, to other fanfic, and to Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson in their personal lives and their tabloid lives. All these resonate within SCIS as well as the poetry of Akhmatova whose language has been absorbed by hollelujah along with a multitude of quotes from literature past and present, classic and pop. It is a joy to read, and an erotic joy.

DUSTY: A Review - A Fanfic by YellowBella

DUSTY A Fanfic by YellowBella 

The postmodern way of reading has changed the way we read. The text is no longer expected to contain all the TRUTH that the author intended. The claim that if the author said it that's what s/he meant, or if the author did not say it then it was not meant. All that is gone.

It is the reader who brings meaning to the text. The deeper the reader has read, experienced, contemplated etc enriches the text. Authorial style is no longer the important component. We are following Nietzsche now: the style must be even more so than what the text is revealing and concealing; and it must have music to our listening ears.

To explain: Anyone can read 50 Shades and like it. Reading Twilight first and seeing the movies is not a necessity for its enjoyment  - or purchase. 

BUT: IF you have read Twilight - carefully and lovingly - and seen the movies over and over, 50 Shades will be a different book for you than it is for the woman - or man - buying it over the counter. I don't think there is a fan of Twilight who will disagree with me. It's probably the only one thing they can agree on BTW.

Yes, you can read DUSTY without having read Twilight. BUT you will have a different reading experience than the Twilight afficianado. And by precession - another post modern term - you will now reread or remember Twilight with added resonance. So bringing yourself to the text resonates both forward and backward.

YellowBella have taken (there are 2 authors) have taken Twilight and owned it. DUSTY has created resonances in Twilight that were concealed and revealed them to us. 

1. We meet a Renee who might have been, had she stayed in Forks and remained married to Charlie. A charming, lovely mother with bourgeois aesthetic tastes instilled by a sophisticated advertising milieu that is total. Bella herself is a product of it. Renee is in a symbiotic attachment with her daughter. She infantilizes her as a means of controlling her. Renee and Charlie are authoritarian parents as befits the Chief of Police of Forks. We surmise they vote conservative and have drawn hard limits and boundaries for behavior that their daughter must conform to. They are the family microcosm of one aspect of our larger political spectrum.

2. We first meet a Bella who is striving to conform to those boundaries set for her. Many Twilight fans have expressed over and over how important this is in parenting. How very necessary, and Kristen Stewart is openly and covertly criticized for not adhering to these ladylike expectations of proper normal behavior. Bella is securely caught in the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge/normality Foucault so painstakingly draws in his 1974-75 Lectures on Abnormal at the College de France and in his books: Madness and Civilization and in Discipline and Punish. 

Agnes Martin Grid Painting

This Grid is inescapable and DUSTY fictionalizes it so beautifully that anyone of any age reading DUSTY can immediately understand a profound, graduate level world wide, original contribution all of human behavior - that of the relation of power/knowledge. Power and knowledge are not separate, cannot be separated, cannot exist separately as they are always in a relation. Power cannot be given, taken, traded,or any other verb used. There is no Big Power, Big Other over us. Power seeps through the Foucauldian Grid through the interstices of that Grid. When we meet Bella she has assumed the responsibility of being perfect in order to adhere to those requirements. She looks perfect, dresses perfect, acts perfect, behaves perfectly. She is an alive, lovely, charming Barbie doll that her mother has created and we can imagine what might have been her fate had she never met the Cullens, and far more so than in Twilight. This is why DUSTY is an exceptional example of fanfiction that stands on its own merits, inverts Meyer's Twilight and rips into our hearts in a real way that Twilight never attempts. 

Michel Foucault

I am hesitating here because I see that one blog post is not going to do it. So I will stop and continue in manageable fragments  as you read it, read through me, and then carry my reading back to DUSTY. 

Just as DeLillo's Cosmopolis is a far richer book if read through:Moby Dick; James Joyce: Lacan: Freud; Baudrillard; Nietzsche; Foucault; Gradiva; Greek Mythology; Ayn Rand; etc than if you read it just as a story on its own as women are reading 50 Shades without a clue of Twilight or other fanfic. 

What you bring to DUSTY will determine the depth of your reading of DUSTY, as aspects of Kristen and Rob fold in as well as the characters of Bella and Edward. And fans are going to bring going on 5 years of obsessive contemplation and observing. Now it is time for DUSTY to reveal some hidden secrets to you. And in doing so, introduce you to cutting edge philosophical and political thinking for our damned times. You do not need a graduate education to understand it. Kristen already understands it and acts on it unknowingly but surely, adroitly, and in an absolutely original way. 

Can you keep up with her? Bella in DUSTY  can. 

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon  late 1700's - Design for a Prison

   SURVEILLANCE is the most effective means of controlling human behavior and Foucault has said it is our most dangerous situation now, so it must be resisted. See how Ai WeiWei has resisted in Nietzschean, Baudrillardian style.

Panopticon Jeremy Bentham

Now Dusty is out as a book - Innocents

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19214578-innocents

To Love Truly Is To Want The Other Free

LOCKS representing true love forever on Paris bridges

From l'mmoraliste

At the heart of love à la française lies the idea of 

freedom. To love truly is to want the other free, and this 

includes the freedom to walk away. Love is not about 

possession or property. Love is no prison where two 

people are each other’s slaves. Love is not a commodity, 

either. Love is not capitalist, it is revolutionary. If 

anything, true love shows you the way to selflessness.

 The entire article here

So please tell me where is the grey, boring, monotonous 

thought of "cheating" coming from?

The French Know

 Yet, instead of sharing the naïve joy of the world’s 

Romeos and Juliets, some Parisians have felt 

increasingly irritated. Walking on those bridges 

has become almost insufferable for them. The pain 

doesn’t come only from the fact that some bridges, 

like Pont de l’Archevêché and Pont des Arts, now 

feel as if they could collapse under the weight of 

tourists’ undying love but also from the idea 

that a lock could represent love. Such an 

idea is abhorrent to many French people.

“The fools! They haven’t understood a thing about love, have they?” 

.......Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir famously never married and 

never lived together and, although a couple in the absolute sense of the term, 

they had lasting and meaningful relationships with strings of brilliant minds 

and pretty faces. They deemed jealousy bourgeois and 

banal.

In his recent book, “In Praise of Love,” the French 

philosopher Alain Badiou 

reminds us that love implies 

constant risk. There is no safe, 

everlasting love. The idea 

that you can lock two people’s 

love once and for all, and toss 

the key, is a puerile fantasy. 

For Mr. Badiou, love is 

inherently hazardous, always 

on the brink of failure and 

above all vulnerable. Embrace its fragility, wish your 

beloved 

to be free and you might just, only just, have a chance to 

retain his or her undying gratitude, and love. But don’t 

ever 

dream of locks and throwing keys overboard, 

especially not 

in Paris.

DeLillo's Elise in Cosmopolis:

No he (Cronenberg) didn't keep the relationship between Elise and Packer the same as in the book:

What is money to a poet, she says, love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Without Elise there's no love of the world. No Elise makes the movie as detached as Eric is in it. Cosmopolis the book is a verse. Cosmopolis the movie is not, it's a movie.

Instead of words from the book, Cronenberg says he gives an actor's face.
This post is for Elise's face missing in the movie when Eric realizes he loves her and she slips away.

For Elise, the face of love. The kind of love which sprungs out mysteriously in unexpected places; which enables, is not selfish, makes one do foolish things and wear turbans, which supports and understands without asking, which gives and makes one free to be a gull at dawn, anything and everything one can be. Which makes one an overman. Even if everything and anything one is, is dead in the end. Precisely because that which one ultimately is in the end is dead .

Amor fati, nothing altered, nothing alterable.

Cronenberg thought this part was a fantasy because Cronenberg thinks love is a fantasy.

“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.” - Judith Butler

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes (and I have quoted this many times), “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love.”

In Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes writes (he is speaking of emotional intelligence), “…intelligence is everything that permits us to live superlatively with another person.”

This is where knowing how to treat someone well and wanting to treat someone well converge.

From Masha Tupitsyn: 

http://mashatupitsyn.tumblr.com/post/36858226254/untitled-28