Solutions From VisMin Artists for Game of Thrones Viewers Worried By Death
Problem:
You're a Cebuano who saw Game of Thrones' Spoils of War Episode and you're depressed at the simple fact that, like the characters in the show, we're all going to die.
Daenerys will die, Jon Snow died/will die, the Maesters will die. Cersei will die. The dead will die. Game of Thrones is just your epic reminder that your daily grind, your status updates, Facebook rants, can amount to nothing. I'm not saying it will. I'm saying it can.
So you struggle to find meaning, even if Albert Camus reminds us not to find one in a meaningless universe, and one just has to submit to the complete present and YOLO the fudge out of this life. You want to submit to The Now. What can you do?
Solutions:
1. You can submit to the music of Bacolod's 11th Hour. Their song Pusang Ina is to remind you that even if the Fates of this world are unkind to you, at least in the next life we can be cats. Cebuano readers of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (in which scenes of cat beheadings will bring you straight to the psychiatrist at Perpetual Succor) will find this music video a relief in that this will console them to the thought that we in the next life may join the cats that Murakami slaughtered.
2. You can submit to the 2nd song of the 11th Hour, entitled Maryjaned and feel better even if you're reminded of the thousands of people dead under the Duterte Administration because of drugs. Let the dead be a reminder of how much you haven't lived, and how less of the supposedly ecstatic highs of being in love you still have experienced. And how your next few hours will be spent on finding that love.
If you're about to go for the snap knee-jerk reaction of bashing Maryjaned for being (insert volatile insult here), be reminded of how David Michod pulled off a stunning genius move of using a Katy Perry song to creep you out in that memorable zoom-in scene in his The Rover with Twilight's Robert Pattison. When you mix pop music with profound grief the sound lands a direct flight to your soul. Maryjaned is an attempt to that.
3. You can submit to Juanita Romualdez' Inday and feel better, which I did and by which I'm melted no less than because of how much of Love I had not yet known until I came across everything of Juanita's. I am enamored of her as a bee is of a flower. She has the stare that can shut down systems and the voice that I swear to the gods of old and new can remind me of why I'm still waiting for a kiss. Hers, I wish.
4. You can submit to the song of Cagayan de Oro's Winset Jacot entitled, Kung Pwede Na, Kung Pwede Pa, because I did, and it's a song for her, my last, my one and my only. Which obviously she isn't. No one's your last and your only. Everything is fleeting. And what better way to celebrate your being no longer in this world than listening to a song about waiting?
5. You can submit to the poetry of David Foster Wallace, who doesn't write poetry, because his words are these:
“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”
“An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”
― David Foster Wallace
