End-of-Life Stones

There is a remainder of people at the end of their lives. One woman who was once creative, learning Thai and using it, illustrating, photographing, inventing board games for metropolises (stolen by those who failed at executing them but succeeded in discouraging the inventor), writing—etc., is now a broken record of how unfair the world is to her, but how everyone else is not trying hard enough. Vico might call that a poetic type, perfect in its consistency. But we are not perfect, this is what modern art knows, and at best it throws at the spectator the right symbols that are mirrors. A mirror figures in to one of the motifs of a movie I watched last night when I could no longer read or write, Absolute Hell. A man looks into the mirror and realises he is not there, says the post-war novelist in that film. I consider that the modern man realises he does not match the ideal, being a jumble of good and bad. We are suddenly all shamans, rewriting Jupiter's circumstantial rain on Daphne into catastrophe or new forms of catharsis, depending on mood not social well-being. So the end of life is a collage of whatever happens to be there, for Westerners, rarely edited by social scorn: each person is the museum curator of what they display and what they leave to the darkness of the back rooms of selective oblivion.
What of those dark rooms, the places to which a person can relegate the aspects of self one might not want to develop, like self pity, or righteous indignation (which quickly spirals into abuse of others), or even aspects of earthly life that seem too raw. Does the last item sound Victorian? Victorians, after all, bowdlerized the classics. At the same time, how many even of those bowdlerizers lived according to the censure? So many dark, back rooms, some of them shared. In my opinion, if Jupiter must rain on Daphne, I just want it to mean something.
And to say "meaning" in today's climate, one will be accused of moralising. But if we can talk about prescriptivist vs. descriptivist language, then it should be all right to discuss measure vs. anything goes (like in that awfully succinct refrain of the musical by that name).
In Absolute Hell, a woman, stripped of her accessories, becomes a kind of naked that I would simply describe as the life not well-lived: not possessing the slightest self-mastery, not even the people around her, as a whole, make her account for her shortcomings, rather, they thrive off them. Oddly, this kind of naked is today less culturally acceptable than a literal nakedness; today's naked body is tattooed and seems covered, but imagine the mindset without the body, clinging to cartoons illustrating the records of yesteryear. If the same maxims (tattooed symbols) could be applied in every situation, life would be so much simpler.
But it is not simple, this is probably why most people become calcifications of themselves, hardened into narrowness at the end. Whereas a gem is a gem but changes its glint in the light and angle.

Brush: Ewansiim grunge at DeviantART.