Status Updates From Septology

'I think, that because pictures have a spirit painting can be compared to praying, that a picture is a prayer, I think, that the pictures I paint are prayer and confession and penance all at once' p.632

Loosening attachments to the identities that once made the present intelligible.
Outgrowing versions of the Self.
Grief as atmosphere (sisters death)
Questions painting, Fosse explore late-life reckoning, “what happens when the practices that once saved no longer feel needed?”
Asle being relieved of the need to ‘be someone’.

Art, Faith, the Loss of Story:
The painting and prayer matter as they are not interpretive acts, but attentive ones.
They do not explain the self.
They keep it present.
Fosse is asking: what if salvation is not a better story, but the courage to live without one?

All of these absences are deliberate.
This Asle exists w/out the protection of story.
This, spiritually, is a form of surrender.
Opens up the possibility of grace- this is what is happening, I am still here, I do not know why

Fosse is asking us to sit with the fact that a single life contains many lives (yes!)
Some are unlived, but not unreal.
The other Asle as the Unstoried Self:
-life without redemption language
-suffering w/out explanation
-addiction w/out narrative justification
-no trauma origin story

Spiritually:
This is where the title matters, The Other Name:
-the hidden self
-the souls double
-the self as seen by God rather than society
The second Asle is stripped of narrative control.
The self as possibility.
The self as warning.
The self as mercy.

Fosse is Genius.
Jotted thoughts below to help me
process these first 2 installments, The Other Name.

The existential level examined:
“Who would I be if I had taken a different path?”
Embodying:
choice vs. drift
faith vs. despair
endurance vs. dissolution

'I want a silence to come down over me like snow and cover me, yes, I want a silence to come falling down over everything that exists, and also me, yes, over me, yes, let a silence snow down and cover me, make me invisible, make everything invisible, make everything go away, I think and all these thoughts will go away, all the pictures I have, all the pictures gathered up in my memory tormenting me' p.614