888
888 reps divinity and perfection, our attempt to reach the unreachable, the myth of sisyphus, as well as 8 literally being the symbol of infinity, ouroboros, too - its a number to signify the creator/origin/architect, which some call God or Allah or The Great Spirit, but it’s all grasping at the same thing - all religions are moral compasses, none are perfect guide books, for they all originated from us: imperfect beings. they are our best shot at trying to figure out the objective, when in reality, everything is subjective, for perception is reality, and perception is relative; thus, reality is fluid and everchanging. hence, the number 4; which signifies change, and in my eyes, the illusion/rule of luck (4 leaves on a clover) and stands as our number; the human’s number. it represents no true control over anything before us, but there’s an utmost immense beauty in that; the only true way to gain control is to accept you have virtually no control whatsoever, including yourself. In an existence where nothing can ever be truly proven nor disproven in which facts are merely hold-trues until proven otherwise in which we cannot say for sure will happen or not such as if we were in a simulation and gravity were to turn off tomorrow, we have no way to predict that as of now because we are confined within our realm of reality; our perception only reaches as far as our senses go, meaning there is always an unknown, always another step to climb in the infinite staircase.
and ofc, the system is constructed in such a way that we will forever maintain a degree of ignorance; which is the greatest gift of all time. Ignorance is what makes us human, its what unites us; we all were born entirely ignorant to it all, “all we may ever know is that we know nothing” - as long as there is something we dont know, there is always something to move towards and use to grow ourselves… perpetual meaning, perpetual purpose; the meaning of life is quite literally what you choose it to be. “The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but rather, a reality to experience.”
- 3/9/2023, me explaining to friends over discord the significance of my chosen numbers, not in full detail but still
Bonus entry! :O
My initial response to Memento (2000), for film class 3/12/2023: That film… blew me away. Throughout its entire runtime, you could feel Lenny’s confusion beat for beat. You as the viewer, too, existed not in time. At the start of the film, the story was already over. We didn’t know it then… but neither did Lenny. To the outside world with all the context, to us, Lenny’s actions were entirely pointless; but to Lenny, every single segment regardless of time, regardless of context, regardless of memory, had meaning. Despite it being incredibly depressing given the full story and just how terrible his luck was for it to happen in the first place (along with him being Sammy / his wife dying because even after he killed the man who raped her, he still never returned to his previous self), I think the movie also holds a deeper, more beautiful meaning. Lenny kept pushing, despite his condition, to “believe that his actions still have meaning, even though [he] can’t remember them”; a dream that is achieved through his belief, through his subjective lens into the world, his fractured timeline. “When I close my eyes, is the world still there?” is something not even we can truly answer; for all we know, we could just be a simulation of sorts for example, where when we close our eyes it de-renders everything to conserve memory… Reality is what you believe in (Perception quite literally is reality). Although to us, everything Lenny does is meaningless and unreal, to him, it is real, and it has meaning. They’re just as real and meaningful as our lives are before us for all we know, because even our memories we can’t fully trust, for they too could just be implanted into us for all we know; we have no way of even proving whether free will is true or not… Same follows suit for all things, because all we can even attempt to get a grasp on is what lies right in front of us, and even that we can’t ever 100% trust. But, in spite of the infinite things that stand in our way, stand in our path from knowing, we still choose to push forward, we still choose to hope, we still choose to believe. Mementos make up who we were. What we believe and choose to do in this very moment, is who we are now. 2.) Nolan purposely makes the film “all mixed up,” just like what Lenny said about “Sammy’s” notes. The film is in a confusing, seemingly-random (at first) order to elicit the same confusion Lenny experiences into the audience; if Nolan had played it out chronologically, you’d perhaps think something of the same as to what others like Natalie thought… that Lenny is a freak, or flat out crazy, and the movie would be pointless because the “story” was over before it even began (Lenny got his revenge for his wife, but he never got himself back, which is what ultimately, sadly led to the loss of his wife; the thing in which all of this was over in the first place - which we specifically don’t know until the very end since it gives the viewer a desire, a reason to watch to the end so they can solve the mystery, both Lenny’s mystery and the mystery of Lenny, rather than revealing it all at the beginning and then say to the audience, “Watch this crazy guy run around for 2 hours, trust us”). However, putting the audience in the shoes of Lenny (this jumbled up mess of sequences), you grow sympathy for him, you’re put on his side and want him to get what he wants (because you know how difficult it is to be him through these cuts out of nowhere and outside of time, and how unfair, how confining, how frustrating it is - “how can a person live like this at all?” a lot of viewers likely ask themselves). Of course, you grow to know what he wants is unreachable, which is shown time and time again because whenever he’s right there at the forefront of figuring it out, the clock resets, and he’s back to trying to piece together the puzzle from scratch again (all the while, we gain more clues regardless of the reset, whereas he’s still always reset to zero - in which we actively are aware of, thus building more sympathy for him), a puzzle that didn’t even exist. And through Nolan’s calculated layout, that sympathy for some might start to grow into something more; a reflection of oneself. By this I mean we’re all just like Lenny in a way; we tend to push for things we likely will never reach, but that pushing, that believing, isn’t meaningless, even if the goal is simply unreachable or doesn’t exist altogether - it’s what we do when we dream, when we hope (sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t, either way, the action still occurred). What is real is what you believe in, regardless of what others believe in, for everything is subjective. If it is meaningful to Lenny, then it is objectively meaningful in his personal subjective world: “Do I believe the world is still there? Is it still out there? … Yeah.” That’s how it is for all of us; meaning is what we make it out to be, we determine the value relative to ourselves: “We all need mirrors to remind ourselves of who we are. I’m no different,” and hence the title, Memento (a keepsake, or a reminder). This is what the film wants us to realize. Lenny was Sammy all along, and we were Lenny all along (in a way). To conclude, although both “stories” were technically already ended at the very start, (whereas in the opening credits Lenny holds the picture taken after killing Teddy, which in a typical chronological story would be placed as the final scene of this film - also, the death of Lenny’s wife as well as the death of the man he wanted revenge on had already happened before the primary “timeline of the film,” which you’d think would make the film pointless) the film, just like what Lenny held in every snippet we were taken along for, had a meaning and a purpose, even if the story was already over. It told a story with the ending at the beginning and it could be labeled just as meaningful as any other story/film. It absolutely goes to show that stories are more than just a “beginning, middle, and an end”; even if outside of time or beyond our normal familiar flow, those stories can still hold messages, and those messages have meaning.
I had all these same mental dilemmas spiral out of control.. previous obsessions over the “Chris McCandless” lifestyle, and embracing nature as it is my roots, after all. Perhaps it was the one place I actually belonged, perhaps there I could willingly choose to refute my opportunity to climb the seemingly infinite hierarchy of knowledge and understanding, and instead resort to its simplicity and abundant beauty, perhaps wind up dying there just like McCandless had, and I’d consider it a life better lived than what most can say nowadays; hellish isolation day in and day out at your own little personal box down at the office, working away what life you have left as a broken record, is not what I want out of life at all, for that lifestyle, to me, is entirely inhuman. I likely, too, will someday walk something similar to the Appalachian trail… but I know for a fact I will ultimately result the same as you did; happiness is simple, and essentially everything will forever be out of your control. But that is beautiful. And I would not have it any other way.
Thank you so much for this blissful reminder.
- my comment on exurb2a’s video on a hut in the woods
3/4/2023