111.3 May 2019
Almost noon on a rain-dreary Friday. The Columbus Dispatch came late and you both just finished reading it. Carol spent the morning washing clothes, you swept the usual floors. You don't know how to respond to Miss Havisham's late blog page comment yesterday. - Amorella
1204 hours. Here is Miss Havisham's comment: "The soul doesn't concentrate; the soul absorbs the heartanmind as the nose absorbs a fragrance."
1207 hours. First, I need specific definitions of concentrate and absorb.
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concentrate- verb
1 [with no object] focus one's attention or mental effort on a particular object or activity-
ORIGIN mid 17th century (in the sense ‘bring towards a center’): Latinized form of concenter, or from French concentrer ‘to concentrate’. -
Selected and edited from the Oxford/American software
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absorb - verb [with object]
1 take in or soak up - take in and understand fully (information, ideas, or experience) -
ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin absorbere,
from ab- ‘from’ + sorbere ‘suck in’.
Selected and edited from the Oxford/American software
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1230 hours. "Absorb" is the better word because suggest an absolute - "to take in and understand fully" and I can see the reasoning behind the use of "fragrance".
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fragrance | - noun a pleasant, sweet smell:
ORIGIN mid 17th century: from French, or from Latin fragrantia, from fragrare ‘smell sweet’.
Selected and edited from the Oxford-American software
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I accept the combined heartanmind contained in the soul as pleasant. mh
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pleasant - adjective (pleasanter, pleasantest) giving a sense of happy satisfaction or enjoyment-
• (of a person or their manner) friendly and considerate; likable:
ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense ‘pleasing’): from Old French plaisant ‘pleasing’, from the verb plaisir (see please).
Selected and edited from the Oxford/American software
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Yes, Mr. Orndorff, "a sense of satisfaction with my functioning in that I am friendly and considerate whereas you (heartanmind) are not always so, thus my assimilated
patience." mh
Post. - Amorella
You stopped at McD's for two large diet Cokes and are parked in the north lot of Heritage Park facing west with the picnic shelter behind. Carol left for her walk at 1725. - Amorella
1729 hours. After Miss Havisham's last comment, I find myself wondering if what I sometimes think is a ghostly presence in my otherwise empty room is my soul (once I have excluded you Amorella).
More likely it's likely, as you can split yourself into a variety of fictional and/or otherwise useful cognitive identities. The evidence is: encountersinmind@blogspot.com as well as the original Merlyn trilogy. - Amorella
1744 hours. Well stated. I concur. I do try to learn something from these many escapades from the norms of reality.
Why don't you take the time to learn more from the likes of me? - mh
1748 hours. Gladly, I would. I do not have the intelligence to ask the right questions, particularly if you are solely an imaginary character.
Over the years you have been convinced that Amorella is a reality although perhaps she is completely imaginary. mh
1752 hours. I am convinced mostly because she is true to her character, she continually speaks from the position that she feels she is real, and I allow her that freedom.
But originally, according to your old notes and the encounters in mind blog, she addresses you. You did not know of her existence. You did not search for her. mh
1757 hours. That's true. I assume my unconsciousness called her to consciousness.
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Carol just returned and is beginning a book she hasn't read by Harlan Coben, Darkest Fear, copyright 2000, 356 pages, and she is laughing already. You are happy she is happily reading. - Amorella
And a short time ago, Amorella introduced you to a personified and thus translatable me. mh
1821 hours. True, she did. The point being, I assume, is that I trust Amorella, thus I should trust her to bring forth my real soul, or at least identifiable aspects of my real soul. The rationale being that people personify their hearts to communicate with them and they personify their minds to communicate with them; so why not personify their souls to communicate with them.
You assume correctly. mh
1828 hours. Written evidence shows I have listened to my heart, and I have listened to my mind also. It is not unreasonable under these circumstances that I can listen to my soul too. I need to take a break.
Later, my young friend. - Amorella
Suspension of disbelief
Coleridge's original formulation
2059 hours. I do not have the conscious memory experience to be self-instructed by my personified soul, Miss Havisham.
Several times in your adult life you have hypothetically attempted empathetically to come to an understanding of alien and/or angelic characters in your fictional stories. Personified, I am little different. mh
2211 hours. My weakness, as it were, is to invest so much freedom in my characters that they follow through (my creativity/imagination) to the point that they are believable to me in context with the hypothetical story I am creatively investing for myself and my readers (with me being one of the first readers). If I am to create a "willing state of disbelief" in the reader I have to allow this "willing state" in myself. At the same time, in context, I have to consciously recognize the difference between fiction and non-fiction.
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Suspension of disbelief
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term suspension of disbelief or willing suspension of disbelief has been defined as a willingness to suspend one's critical faculties and believe something surreal; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment. The term was coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgement concerning the implausibility of the narrative. Suspension of disbelief often applies to fictional works of the action, comedy, fantasy, and horror genres. Cognitive estrangement in fiction involves using a person's ignorance to promote suspension of disbelief.
The phrase "suspension of disbelief" came to be used more loosely in the later 20th century, often used to imply that the burden was on the reader, rather than the writer, to achieve it. This might be used to refer to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. These premises may also lend to the engagement of the mind and perhaps proposition of thoughts, ideas, art and theories.
Suspension of disbelief is often an essential element for a magic act or a circus sideshow act. For example, an audience is not expected to actually believe that a woman is cut in half or transforms into a gorilla in order to enjoy the performance.
According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is an essential ingredient for any kind of storytelling. With any film, the viewer has to ignore the reality that they are viewing a staged performance and temporarily accept it as their reality in order to be entertained. Black-and-white films provide an obvious early example that audiences are willing to suspend disbelief, no matter how implausible the images appear, for the sake of entertainment. With the exception of totally color blind people (achromats), no person viewing these films sees the real world without color, but some are still willing to suspend disbelief and accept the images in order to be entertained. Suspension of disbelief is also supposed to be essential for the enjoyment of many films and television shows involving complex stunts, special effects, and seemingly unrealistic plots and characterizations.
Coleridge's original formulation
Coleridge coined the phrase in his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, in the context of the creation and reading of poetry.Chapter XIV describes the preparations with Wordsworth for their revolutionary collaboration Lyrical Ballads (first edition 1798), for which Coleridge had contributed the more romantic, gothic pieces including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Poetry and fiction involving the supernatural had gone out of fashion to a large extent in the 18th century, in part due to the declining belief in witches and other supernatural agents among the educated classes, who embraced the rational approach to the world offered by the new science. Alexander Pope, notably, felt the need to explain and justify his use of elemental spirits in The Rape of the Lock, one of the few English poems of the century that invoked the supernatural. Coleridge wished to revive the use of fantastic elements in poetry. The concept of "willing suspension of disbelief" explained how a modern, enlightened audience might continue to enjoy such types of story.
Coleridge recalled:
... It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us ...
The notion of such an action by an audience was however recognized in antiquity, as seen particularly in the Roman theoretical concerns of Horace, who also lived in an age of increasing skepticism about the supernatural, in his Ars Poetica (with the quotation Ut pictura poesis).
Suspension of disbelief is sometimes said to be an essential component of live theater, where it was recognized by Shakespeare, who refers to it in the Prologue to Henry V:
[…] make imaginary puissance […] 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings […] turning the accomplishment of many years into an hourglass.
Psychological critic Norman Holland points to a neuroscientific explanation. When we hear or watch any narrative, our brains go wholly into perceiving mode, turning off the systems for acting or planning to act, and with them go our systems for assessing reality.
We have, in Coleridge's second, more accurate phrase, "poetic faith". That's why humans have such trouble recognizing lies: they first believe, then have to make a conscious effort to disbelieve.
Only when we stop perceiving to think about what we have seen or heard, only then do we assess its truth-value. If we are really "into" the fiction – "transported", in the psychologists' term – we are, as Immanuel Kant pointed out long ago, "disinterested". We respond aesthetically, without purpose. We don't judge the truth of what we're perceiving, even though if we stop being transported and think about it, we know quite well it's a fiction.
Suspension of disbelief has also been used within a mental health context by Frank DeFulgentis in his book Flux. It is an attempt to describe the phenomenon of forgetting irrational thoughts associated with cases of OCD. In the book, the author suggests 'suspending disbelief' as opposed to forcing ourselves to forget; similar to how one would put a virus in quarantine. We can thereby allow ourselves to be absorbed in the activities around us until these irrationalities vanish on their own accord.
Aesthetic philosophers generally reject claims that suspension of disbelief accurately characterizes the relationship between people and "fictions."
Kendall Walton notes that, if viewers were to truly suspend disbelief at a horror movie and accept its images as absolute fact, they would have a true-to-life set of reactions.
For instance, audience members would cry out, "Look behind you!" to an endangered on-screen character or call the police when they witnessed an on-screen murder.
Not all authors believe that suspension of the disbelief adequately characterizes the audience's relationship to imaginative works of art. --
J. R. R. Tolkien challenges this concept in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", choosing instead the paradigm of secondary belief based on inner consistency of reality. -
Tolkien says that, in order for the narrative to work, the reader must believe that what he reads is true within the secondary reality of the fictional world. -
By focusing on creating an internally consistent fictional world, the author makes secondary belief possible. Tolkien argues that suspension of disbelief is only necessary when the work has failed to create secondary belief. -
From that point the spell is broken, and the reader ceases to be immersed in the story and must make a conscious effort to suspend disbelief or else give up on it entirely.
Selected and edited from Wikipedia (My underlining for emphasis.)
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What you wish me to do is to create my own 'willing suspension of disbelief' when "Tolkien argues that suspension of disbelief is only necessary when the work has failed to create secondary belief." I am a human soul, your human soul. I cannot in truth recreate what I am. mh
2248 hours. This is my dilemma. I have to accept that you are my authentic soul (personified) because you and Amorella say you are.I am willing to do so in context with focus and content of this blog and particularly this blog #111.
We (Richard, Miss Havisham, and myself) willingly agree on this subject of "willing suspension of disbelief" in relationship to this blog: "Encounters-in-Spirit". Post. - Amorella
Note - Posting times in this blog series of posts are not accurate. It is presently 2308 hours.
Note - Posting times in this blog series of posts are not accurate. It is presently 2308 hours.
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