INTEGRAL POST-METAPHYSICAL BIG TREMORS IN LITTLE CHINA

[Layman Pascal]

[Edward theurj Berge]

Nicely done. Photoshop?

[Layman Pascal]

Hastily done, but it's at least looking in the right direction.  I use GIMP -- light, free, open-source alternative to Photoshop.

[Layman Pascal]

Plan of Attack (sic)

1. Identify the Surface Disjunctions which provoke the Tremors (the arising of the concealed, mysterious & terrible One-Many Worm who is not merely phallic).

2. Are Jack Burton's nonchalant braggadocio & reluctant pseudo-heroics as a demonstration of the appropriate colloquial Irony with which we must engage the boundary between the sensible & metaphysical domains -- treating the metaphysical as ultra-mundane, treating the non-metaphysical as barely comprehensible pastiche.  Like the zen master he wields attitudinal directness to dis-empower the extraordinary and regain a zealous astonishment in the face of the ordinary.  He is participatorily indifferent to both modern and traditional worldviews.  To what degree does this stance depend upon his unjustified expansiveness of character?  And how does this relate to Adi Da's unjustified expansiveness of character which supposedly harmonizes with total Mystery of Being and the spiritual relinquishment of even the highest and most mystical states?

3. Who does the Worm kill? When?  Why?  Apply Zizek's "Pervert's Guide to Cinema" approach and remove the worm from the plot in order to discern the psychoanlytic structure.

4. "What's that?"  "Black blood of the Earth."  "You mean oil?"  "I mean Black Blood of the Earth".  The collapse of the function of metaphor in BTLC as the necessary modern preliminary for the actual functioning of metaphor (as in "I LITERALLY shit my pants!" as the minimum intensity necessary to invoke metaphorical pants-shitting).

5. The tremors begin almost immediately after Kevin Bacon devalues the "real girl" for the "fantasy girl".  The termination of attacks coincide with the return of his libidinous heart-relationship to the real girl.  However -- she is also the university girl, the urban girl, the liberal foe of ingrown rural Americana.  In this she parallels the Richard Dreyfus character in "Jaws".  But how we relate the "quadrants" of psycho-personal and socio-ideological conflict?

6. "Lo-pan?  WHICH Lo-Pan???"  Deleuze posits Nietzsche's "which one?" as the means of overcoming the metaphysical "what is it?"  Here this post-metaphysical invitation is transcribed on to the villain function of BTLC but it directly parallels the vagueness concerning the singularity or multiplicity of the worms in Tremors.  To what degree is uncertainty about singularity a defining feature of post-metaphysical attempts...

Just a start --

[Balder]

This is great, Layman -- the graphics and your initial analytical forays...  To continue:

7.  The graboids are the lost Sloterdijkian womb-doubles, the withdrawn-but-nurturing placental With -- that fetal nobject that once served as genius and affirming other, in the primordial less-than-many-but-more-than-one-condition of original fetal spheric intimacy.  For the modern individualist, epitomized by the government-hating survivalists, the placental With has been castrated: discarded as filthy afterbirth, the original being singular plural-ity despised and forgotten, and it now arises in monstrous form, with its three heads representing the denied trinitarian intimacy of all spheric spaces, all healthy immunological zones of existence.  The nurturing, withdrawn nobject becomes the hungry, grabbing other.

The placenta, even as nobject, as withdrawn but nurturant With, has a terrible quality: you cannot really bear to look on it directly and non-tremulously.  In that sense, nobject confronted evokes (Kristeva's) abject.  The ambivalent quality is already there.  But when it is denied or forgotten altogether, when the feeding womb-worm is castrated, then it rumbles in the deep, and when it surfaces, it does so with the face of Cthulhu, many-tentacled (or tongued) and terrible.

P.S.  Just for the sound of it, I think I prefer Big Integral Post-metaphysical Tremors in Little China.

[Layman Pascal]

Aside:

Nondualism, Lovecraft, Tremors, Meditation, Jack Burton, intellectual acuity, leading edge philosophical thought, humorous good cheer, linguistic playfulness...?  It really is a tremendous pleasure. Thank y'all for being.

[Balder]

It's a real pleasure to converse with you, too, Layman.  It's nice to reconnect after a several-year gap in communication.  Thank you (and, of course, theurj), also, for all you are and all you bring.