“Let’s make the world’s stupidest stand and truly mean it.”

“I loved once, but I recovered,” Mark Dawn tells Adolai Shungyosai. –

CHARACTER SKETCH CONVERSATION SCENE – OF TWO MAIN MALE CHARACTERS IN ‘THE SKEIN’

“If you want to take care of the life of this world, you cannot need another,” he continues.

“That’s a lonely way of being.” Adolai argues.

“There is no other.”

“Have you considered what you are missing out on, with this attitude? That connection and love-“

“Delusions,” Mark says.

“Of grandeur, though,” Adolai says. “It is the ultimate dream of human kind of connect in such a way. To find in another… a .. purpose.. a meaning.”

“To do so is to give away the chance to be someone of purpose and meaning. It is a way to give away your chance,” says Mark Dawn.

“Huh, that’s a rather dire attitude,” Adolai says.

“You call these ‘attitudes’. You seem to think decisions are made based on emotional feeling. Rather than how such important matters should be decided,” Mark says. “On reason and philosophical basis. If one decides one’s life based on how one feels, one will be soon, weak. And dead.”

“But…” Adolai Shungyosai wants to protest.

“Yes? You have a philosophical argument to make against this?” Mark asks.

“One’s feelings are.. also important,” Adolai prods. “If one desires to connect with another, doesn’t that desire have possibility. So that one might fulfill it in… What I mean to say is… the chase for the impossible, if you are correct in saying it is a dream to connect two souls or, what we are talking about, the ideal of LOVE. Is not the dream a worthy chase? To strive. There is meaning in the attempt, even if one should fall,” says Adolai.

Adolai continues, “If one falls from such a height, is it not worth the climb, you argue. Or, are feelings only worthwhile… To the degree one can control them?”

“Should we always be in control?” Adolai Shungyosai concludes.

“Someone.. or other, will be in control, if we are not,” says Mark. “If we give up control, it will be taken over.”

“Abdication,” says Adolai.

“Chaos,” says Mark Dawn. “One is better off with the hand on the reigns. The passions are to be tamed by the intellect. This is the way to avoid most pain and disease. In a time when one is surrounded by pain and disease and danger, living without care, proper care, not care for one’s pleasure and good feeling, but to control what one can and have discipline. To take care for what one is duty-bound to oversee… This is the way to steer one’s fate to the measure one is able. Incidentally, this is how one cares for another. How one provides and ensures others do not come to ruin under one’s aegis.”

OKKERVIL RIVER – PLUS ONES

“Let’s get lost. Let them send out alarms.”

He says, “Let’s get crossed out and come to harm.

Let’s make the world’s stupidest stand and truly mean it.

Let’s hit the limit of laws over lovers’ arms – no, let’s exceed it.”