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The Dao of Inisherin (first draft)

The Dao of Inisherin Cloaked in elements of eccentric dialogue, gruesome self-mutilation, a captivating score and idyllic pastoral cinematography, The Banshees of Inisherin is widely regarded to be a black comedy characterized by heavily stereotyped Irishness within a loose metaphor to the Irish Civil War of the early 1920s. In the review “ Blarney ” for Slate , Mark O’Connell does well to lay bare the stereotyping in the film as well as its slack ties to the war, describing McDonagh’s Irish setting as “clearly the work of an ‘Irish writer,’ but it’s an Irishness formed as much by distance as intimacy […] reacting against a somewhat abstract idea of the place, informed by an emigrant’s reverence and romanticism”, while the backdrop of war “as a metaphor [is] both vague and clumsy [...] as a political allegory, it seems obviously retrofitted, tacked onto the narrative to add unearned resonance.” Agree or not with the perspective Slate ’s O’Connell offers, the elements described are cer...
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The Disclaimer

 ::: THE DISCLAIMER ::: In order to start a vehicle’s engine, one must engage the ignition. Certainly there are different ways to describe starting a car, however when teaching someone to drive and describing how to start that car, I suspect most people say something along those lines. I’m even more certain that almost nobody explains how to start a car by tasking their pupil to read the issued patent for that vehicle’s particular ignition mechanism. Thus, in order to achieve deeper levels of understanding, a basic understanding must come first. A basic understanding of 道 as a word of convenience allows one to focus less on the word 道 itself and more on the myriad layers of meaning it implies — or, as Bruce Lee stated in Enter the Dragon: ‘don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory’. It is with such perspective that I consider the first line of the 道德經 to be a disclaimer. A basic translation of every word other than 道 in the first line yields: 道 c...
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What is 道 ?

It should be noted that I am not a Chinese speaker; English is the only language in which I am fluent. I make use of resources available via the internet and texts in my personal library to glean definitions as best as I’m able. ::: WHAT IS 道 ? ::: From an entirely rational point of view, 道 is a word of convenience. 道, as a word in the Chinese language, has several meanings attached to it. Such as it is with many words in the English language, e.g., ‘case’, the definition of 道 at any given moment seems wholly dependent upon the context in which it is used. Definitions include: road, direction, path, way, principle, truth, morality, reason, skill, method, say, speak, express, barriers, questions, commands. 道 is also referred to as a ‘measure word for long, thin things’. Measure words are apparently far more common in the Chinese language than they are in English, even though they are fairly prevalent in English as well (a gallon of water, a pinch of salt, &c). In Chinese sc...
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