The Flame Alphabet Second Selection

"I did not give up on my religion. I found only that I no longer required reminders, assertions, repetitions, harangues. Nothing outside myself. Whatever I believed played on inside me with no help from the radio. I'd heard enough for a lifetime. I found I could do without more things to misunderstand." (pg 275)

This passage is interesting because it represents the state of completely internalized, abstract concepts that Samuel and others strived to achieve the entire time they spent as dedicated followers of their sect of "Forest Judaism." Even though Burke claimed that he was the one true source from which teachings could be heard, this blind, unquestioning faith is exactly what caused them to stray from enlightenment. We see this when LeBov reveals that Burke's sermons were simply an old recorded loop, and Thomas was simply another of his own false identities; willingly preventing thought and critical analysis, while theoretically could make you more receptive to organic feelings and religious ideas in their pure form, also puts you in a position of extreme vulnerability as there is no way of knowing that someone is taking advantage of you-- or is simply misguided as well. A sermon by its very nature is already tainted, from a secondhand source. The only way to be truly confident in the infallibility of an idea or spiritual feeling is to have it originate from within, and to keep it your own. You avoid the marring influence of comprehension because you are not attempting to wordlessly feel something as described by another, instead it keeping on the fringe of your consciousness where you can feel what you mean without putting it into organized thought. This makes me think about those who reject modern organized religion in favor of their own manifestation of spirituality, and I wonder at what point they decided that this style of prescribed religion was not pure enough for them.

11/20/14 Cristal Kim

"Or perhaps, if I ever did develop a script that could be read without sickness, restoring language to our fine species, I wouldn't be so quick to share it with the good people of Forsythe.
Perhaps, such an invention, kept private, was just what I needed to find my leverage" (Ben Marcus The Flame Alphabet 172).


This passage helped illustrate how important language is; obviously, throughout this text, I realized how lightly we take language, but this excerpt further solidified that idea. The idea that you could withhold such information in such a starved environment is strange and menacing. In a society that has been reduced to almost nothing, people can still be selfish and manipulative, thinking of solely how to benefit themselves. And this can be achieved through the use of language. I never expected something so mundane in our everyday lives to be used for such great purposes. Yes, this novel made me think about the consequences and weight of my words, but I never thought they could be used as leverage against not just one person, but an entire society.

2nd Flame Alphabet Selection

“Thinking is the first poison, said someone. One often fails to ask this of a crisis, but why was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought? Who cares about the word made public, it’s the private word that does more lasting damage, person by person. The thinking should have stopped first. The thinking. Perhaps it is next in the long, creeping conquest of this toxicity, another basic human activity that will slowly be taken from us” (266).

This passage was one of the most thought-provoking in The Flame Alphabet for me. After pondering the statement, I wondered why the author did not bring up thought until this late in the novel. After all, thought is the basis of language. Without thought, language would not be possible or necessary. Thoughts come to us in the form of words and phrases. The influence that language has over our mental processes is amazing, and it is amazing how easy it is to forget about the importance of language on thought. On a deeper level, this passage brings up the idea of mental illness and depression. In this novel, speech and the written word caused an epidemic that affected the population physically. In real life, thought has already afflicted a great many people, but not in a physical way. It is an interesting point to realize that there are toxic characteristics to thought and language that affect people in a very real way, and it is not just the work of fiction writers.

Second Selection from "The Flame Alphabet"

This selection is taken from page 227 of "The Flame Alphabet" by Ben Marcus:

"As she got dressed and made her way out of my room, Marta looked at me plainly, as if she was curious, in the detached, scientific sense, why I would have any interest in hurting her. I'd seen that face before, and I hadn't realized it was a face that could be shared, used by more than one person, but it had appeared on Claire, and I had always thought that it was hers alone, to use only on those special occasions when I had disappointed her. But apparently this was a face that Marta had access to as well."

I chose this passage because it directly relates to the conversation we had about body language in class today. Body language seems relatively objective on the surface, but in fact, it is a highly subjective means of communication because one's intentions may not easily be transferred into a non-verbal display of gestures. Even though Marta may not have been thinking anything out of the ordinary when she looked at Sam in this passage, he perceives her gestures as signals, nonetheless. Marcus does a great job of putting the reader into Sam's mind as he thinks these thoughts, which allows the reader to more effectively step into his shoes and witness his experiences firsthand. As stated in class, body language is a universal means of communication, which is interesting because it does not harm anyone in the book. If it is the act of understanding something through communication that triggers the sickness, then body language must be too abstract of a concept to create fever-inducing comprehension. If this fact is purposeful in the book, then Marcus may be alluding to the fact that body language should not be understood as a concrete expression in our everyday interactions with other people, because misconceptions may have harmful effects on the giver and receiver of body language signals. I find this to be a very compelling thought, and I applaud Ben Marcus for his ability to make his readers think critically about the issues he presents in his book.