Meditations on Scream 7
And other random thoughts
Dear S,
Emerson once wrote,
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
So I decided to keep these ones before I forgot them.
Yours,
-J
To infinity and benumbed.
This week I learned about Scream 7, Saw 10, and Final Destination: Bloodlines, which is probably the sixth. Then Terrifier 4. Evil Dead: Burn, which I think is film five. 28 Days Later 3 and I Know What You Did Last Summer 4. The sixth Insidious comes next, and The Exorcist 6 for some reason in a Mike Flanagan edition. Then last in this illustrious but incomprehensive ensemble we have Hellraiser 11, Friday the 13th 12, and freaking Halloween 13.
What disturbs me most about these films isn’t just that fat cats keep making them. It’s that people think they’re still interesting enough to keep buying them. Here we have a marriage between absolute degeneracy and the corporate; between terror and routine; between psychopathic outbreak and tradition. I’m not so sure Americans are the first people in history to be so deranged; but we are certainly the first people to ever be so boring about it.
Strength and sociability.
There are two kinds of people who “don’t like to talk about politics.”
People who don’t trust you.
People living with a series of half-baked opinions, untested hypotheses, irrational prejudices, and a fragile ego. In other words, people who don’t trust themselves.
Bad and worse.
Voltaire writes, in his Philosophical Dictionary, that there are two butlers at the door of a house, and you ask them to speak to the master. He’s not home, says the first one. The second butler says he’s home, but he’s in the back rooms spreading bunk facts and making false promises and all kinds of weapons and poisons. You ask why, and he says, to hurt and kill off the people doing the things He Himself planned. The atheist is the first porter, and the second is obviously a Calvinist.
The big question here is pretty straight-forward. If you were God, which servant would you be most offended by? The one who says you don’t exist? Or the one who makes you look like a dick?
All faithful take note: no matter our gist, it is we who are always in danger of the latter.
The barren.
The Institute for Family Studies reports that Republican states are gaining kids while Democratic states are losing them.
It should come as no surprise that when fatness is preferable to fitness, and borders are racist, and winning is selfish, and loving your ethnicity is fascist, and telling the facts is hateful, and the land you're living on is stolen — that when families are both cumbersome and expendable; when marriage vows are easily broken; when sadness is fought off with a prescription; when criminals and losers are martyrs and heroes; and death is inevitable but God is irrelevant — it should come as no surprise, I say, that these regions fail to produce children.
The people who have no reason to live are the same people who have no reason to breed.
Tug of war.
"You shouldn't be selfish” is itself a form of selfishness. We want others to live for us and not for themselves.
Poor and rich.
People who are into politics to save the world: miserable.
People who are into politics to make fun of people: totally fulfilled.
Pale blue God.
A.W. Pink writes, in The Sovereignty of God,
Our obedience has profited God nothing. […] He was perfectly blessed in Himself before the first creature was called into being. And what are all the creatures of His hands unto Him even now? Let Scripture again make answer: Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, He taketh up the isles as a very little thing. And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering. All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity. To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him? (Isa 40:15-18).
— a confusion of the bigness of God with His concern: a total about-face to the God-man who cries at funerals, who floods the whole world when He gets angry, who got brutally murdered in an act of heroism, and dictates much of the Old Testament in the voice of an angry judge, a bereaved parent, and a scorned lover.
Pink here almost sounds like the atheists and other “deep thinkers” who say “the universe is so big that you basically don’t matter” — forgetting that the man who regrets this fact, and the mother who nursed him, are just as much “the universe” as Betelgeuse and the amoeba.