#hungry ghosts

[taurzza]

3. Love Song

[jamabushi]

[theartofthecover]

Anthony Bourdain's Hungry Ghosts #1 (2018)

Art by: Paul Pope

[yeiratan]

Guys Hungry Ghosts is peak

[babylon-crashing]

morsels

Tsavd Tanem. Let me take your pain. As in

I'll eat it. I'll vomit it. I'll transform

it. All that horror spewed. Call me Shaman

of Thieves and Sonnets. Call me a Firestorm

that Heals. If not now then when? If not me

then who? This is what a Hungry Ghost dreams

of. You say that you wail like a banshee

during sex. I say nightmares and daydreams

taste the same. Tsavd Tanem. Hymn that stifles.

Song that bleats. This is what a Hungry Ghost

dreams of; such tasty morsels. Tsavd Tanem.

Tsavd Tanem. Tsavd Tanem. All these, “trifles.”

Love, let me take this from you. You almost

gave up. Call me Cursed; my one pseudonym.

][][

Notes.

In Armenian, Tsavd Tanem (Ցավդ տանեմ) is a colloquially phrase used to express sympathy or affection. I, on the other hand, am taking it literally. In Buddhism, Hungry Ghosts (餓鬼) are spirits who are driven by unquenchable emotional needs, often depicted as tormented by grotesque desires that they are unable to ever fulfill. If that doesn't sum up my entire life in a nutshell I don't know what would.

[fanofspooky]

Scream King - Ryan Corr

Requested by @untilendofyear

[telomeke]

4 MINUTES – HUNGRY GHOSTS?

OK this is me going out on a limb again...

I'm certain at least some of the characters in 4 Minutes are from the spirit realm. And as the broadcast schedule of 4 Minutes overlaps the seventh lunar month, in which the Thai-Chinese Ghost Festival wan saat jeen takes place, part of me is wondering if there is further significance...

The Ghost Festival is sometimes also called the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. The belief is that during the seventh lunar month the gates of hell are thrown open, and the previously imprisoned spirits are allowed to wander freely in the world of the living. And as they've been sequestered away for the previous year, they are ravenous as they roam the land (so believers will lay out offerings at shrines and altars in a bid to satisfy their ghostly hunger).

There is a parallel in 4 Minutes, and I don't know if it's intentional (but I want to believe it is).

Part of me (a GREAT part of me, hah 🤣) is leaning into the theory that the white-clad characters in 4 Minutes are actually ghosts. They're back for a spell in the world of the living, and I think we're seeing them (Great especially, but also Korn) re-living episodes of their time on earth, reviewing what they could have done better (I think this probably will play into how long or severe their punishment in the Netherworld has to be, before they are allowed into the next cycle of rebirth/reincarnation perhaps).

And we see all of them morally doing the right thing, while clad in white – it's do-over after do-over. Great's four-minute rewinds allow him to remake his bad decisions (e.g., Manee's hit-and-run, and also saving the lives of Dome and Nan). Korn in his ghostly do-over is the kindly elder brother to Great, gentle with Nan and (somewhat) solicitous with his employees as he oversees the betting operations (whereas in Ep.6 he's curt and literally has blood on his hands). Win continues with the investigation after being ordered not to by the corrupt higher-ups, and he offers to protect Ton Kla in the process.

But the parallel with the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts is this: we are also seeing the white-clad characters display a certain neediness, hungering perhaps, for that which was (I think) denied to them before, in the versions of events that are presented as alternatives to the Ep.6 narrative (that the fandom, me included, appears to believe is the actual reality – although my caveat is that I think a small part of the episode may also be someone else's revisiting of the past as well).

We have Great being sought out and showered with affection from Tyme (whereas Tyme used and discarded him in Ep.6); Korn having Ton Kla always at his disposal, always adoring, while also being entrusted with leading the family business; and Win winning (sorry, couldn't help it 😂) Ton Kla's affections over Korn. I would even add Great's mom, who's risen to a position of respect and prestige as the elegant (and official, no longer common-law) wife of a business mogul.

If they are ghosts, what we're seeing in their do-overs is them satiating certain very primal hungers that seem to motivate their characters.

Hungry ghosts? I'm thinking the 4 Minutes broadcast dates are too much of a coincidence, and I wouldn't put it past Sammon to have worked this in...

But with only two episodes to go, we'll be getting the explanation soon enough! I'm betting on Den to be the key in divulging the answers to the mystery. He mentioned that he's going to help Lukwa (whose appearance in the series is replete with clues to her ghostly state of being) meet another patient/ghost with experience of the Four-Minute Rewind. That patient could be Great. But I'm thinking it could also be Korn (remembering that it was Korn who said – was it in Episode 1 or 2? – that he knew a physician who might be able to help Great with his own four-minute rewinds)...

And when that meet-up happens, we can be sure to expect a whole lot of relevation! 😍

‌

[thinkingimages]

Excerpt from Hungry Ghosts

Hungry Ghosts sees the prize-winning poet Gabriele Tinti collaborate with the acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen on a unique artistic engagement with the furthest edges of life and consciousness. Drawing inspiration from the Petavatthu verses of the Buddhist tradition, Hungry Ghosts is a thrilling evocation of the disturbing visions and the yearnings for a world beyond that have fed both ancient and modern understandings of the afterlife.

Taking as their starting points the simplest of media—respectively the brief epigraphic verse and the photographic negative—Tinti and Ballen have produced something truly extraordinary: a masterfully crafted series of poems in dialogue with a stunning array of phantasmagoric images. Tinti’s verse has become renowned for its combination of rigorous sparseness on the level of diction with imagery of an extraordinary power and resonance. These qualities are once again much in evidence in Hungry Ghosts, but Tinti’s response to Ballen’s brilliant and disquieting works has also led him to explore an entirely new terrain: the uncanny borderlands between life and death...