/lit/ - Literature

>>9691201
>>9691257
Ride the Dragon. Symbolically. And literally. It's good advice. And maybe the Tiger too. Ride the Dragon and you can dance with it. In myth the Chinese dragon is a powerful, but benevolent heavenly being, but the esoteric meaning revealed by transposing the myth onto a dance is that without us it cannot come alive. And though the dragon is literally "manipulated" it is still held aloft, not below like a puppet on strings, lest one think that one can subordinate the dragon to man. Additionally, the performing of the dance is a communitarian effort, but not a communal one. There is always someone who is in front of you and someone in the back, with a leader at the head. Nevertheless, should any one falter, then the whole thing risks falling apart. And then the dragon falls on us and devours us. The dragon also reveals in this way the hierarchical but collaborative nature of organized group effort. Myth as *performance art* reveals aspects of it that are occluded when left submerged in the unconscious. And helps us face our fear.

In some variations of the dance there is a performer who carries a decorative ball on a stick that the dragon is supposed to chase. Myths tend to be additive rather than subtractive (and if they are they tend to be "essentialist"), so the ball is likely a later addition. It seems to denote the act of taming the dragon after one has mastered dancing with it. The real interesting thing is that a lot of people think the ball is supposed to represent something, but nobody can agree on what. It's the sun, or a jewel, or whatever. But the meaning of the answer is found in the posing of the question. The very indeterminacy of what the sign is supposed to represent is itself what it is representing. The only thing we are in agreement about is that is an empty semiotic unit. The ball is literally the Meme.

>control the memes and you control the dragon
>easier said than done

>Did anybody see The Great Wall (2016)?
I haven't yet. I'm not sure if I can stand it knowing it's another "ethnic" film with predictably white leads to pander to an audience.