The View From Scranton

Now Feel This

Fourteen degrees and I don’t feel a thing. No cold. No brace. No wind. I don’t feel empathy; I don’t feel compassion; I don’t feel hurt. I don’t feel like feeling at all.

I am numb to my skull.

Another Monday done. Real done. Real done gone. That makes, what, 200? Something like that. I don’t feel like adding ‘em up, ‘cause I don’t feel like punching myself in the face. Again.

No feel to be felt and no view to be beheld, I turn elsewhere. Not in, where I might find out more than I scare to know, and not here, where there’s nothing to be found, but beyond, to the world of image and angle and letter and be. A World with a View.

I turn to Nick Arvin’s Articles of War and I get pissed at the invertebrated cowardice of a grunt called Heck. What unmitigated whimpery, what foulful fear, what a despicable display of derring-don‘t.

And how cunning the reveal. Keen to lay way bare the deep, dark recesses of a soul shallowed with cower, to make of your hero a redeemless pathetic. Like M. Gira’s The Coward (which left me so mad I wanted to go out and stomp someone), Arvin’s Articles provokes a visceral stir; a boil and a hate yes, but more a primal promise to never, ever succumb to the horrors.

In other words, to feel. Almost.

posted by John Hood. @ 10:04 AM