You Ask A Student In April How They're Doing And They'll Say "oh I'm Fine" But In Reality They Are Treating

Soham Gupta

just relapsed on seeking human connection

"Trees, rivers, plants, and anything that reminds me of her is now a vague image languishing in obscurity; an obscurity plunked from her departure. Since then shadows have also been cut off from the reality, wandering around like a ghost. These images were once objects of my passion of seeing. But now they look like memories rooted in the depth of my soul, or scars of an old wound that don’t heal. It feels like a “presence” that torments me, stresses me out, and screams inside my inner silent world."

Viewer and the object of view [2021] - Nazli Abbaspour

learning the backstories of any of your female relatives always amounts to taking 500 points of psychological damage and wondering if the world is irredeemably evil

Antonina Yevstigneeva, a lead worker at Astrakhan fish cannery. Photo by Anatoly Bochinin (1961).

Language is presented as an instrument of fraud and cruelty (the blaring newscast; Elizabeth’s cruel letter to the psychiatrist which Alma reads); as an instrument of unmasking (Alma’s excoriating portrait of the secrets of Elizabeth’s motherhood); as an instrument of self-revelation (Alma’s confessional narrative of the beach orgy) and as art and artifice (the lines of Electra that Elizabeth is delivering on stage when she suddenly goes silent; the radio drama Alma turns on in her hospital room that makes the actress smile). What Persona demonstrates is the lack of an appropriate language, a language that’s genuinely full. All that is left is a language of lacunae, befitting a narrative strung along a set of lacunae or gaps in the ‘explanation’. It is these absences of sense or lacunae of speech which become, in Persona, more potent than words while the person who places faith in words is brought down from relative composure and confidence to hysterical anguish. Here, indeed, is the most powerful instance of the motif of exchange. The actress creates a void by her silence. The nurse, by speaking, falls into it – depleting herself. Sickened almost by the vertigo opened up by the absence of language, Alma at one point begs Elizabeth just to repeat nonsense phrases that she hurls at her. But during all the time at the beach, despite every kind of tact, cajolery and anguished pleading, Elizabeth refuses (obstinately? maliciously? helplessly?) to speak. She has only one lapse. This happens when Alma, in a fury, threatens her with a pot of scalding water. The terrified Elizabeth backs against the wall screaming “No, don’t hurt me!” and for the moment Alma is triumphant. But Elizabeth instantly resumes her silence. The only other time the actress speaks is late in the film – here the time is ambiguous – when in the bare hospital room (again?), Alma is shown bending over her bed, begging her to say just one word. Impassively, Elizabeth complies. The word is ‘Nothing’. At the end of Persona, mask and person, speech and silence, actor and ‘soul’ remain divided – however parasitically, even vampiristically, they are shown to be intertwined.

Persona | Review by Susan Sontag

this is exactly what i was saying in the tags. but this person nailed it.

my mom is knee deep into bjp and sanghi propaganda. she's watching videos with titles such as - what's inside a muslim's head? she's trying so hard to rationalize this shit. lmao. i can't, just send help.

she's telling me "so many people have come forward with experiences (with muslims). they are so aggressive." so what do we do after a terror attack? recollect and bond over the few times muslims were rude towards you and forget everything else. every other experience laced with harmony and commonality goes out the window, the experiences which by far outnumber the bad ones. great.