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trashcanalienist · 3 years

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The secret to dissipating the limiter is simply this. When it is safe to do so, remove all barriers, move slow and think slower, and feel everything there is to feel. Every atom of air, every fiber of cloth, every slight pressure. And see too, see all there is to see and see it with eyes newly polished, glass clean and clear and bright - and don't speak, don't think, simply be. The words will come if they wish to. I mean this so literally. You must move slowly or you will get caught again in rabbit's quick anxieties. You will want to stop seeing everything and merely look. You will want to bury your eyes in thoughts again. You must not do so. This is a state of rest, but be careful...for it is also one of vulnerability and is easily shattered. I see everything...and, glory! I am Helena again! My melancholy is a gentle one now, and in time perhaps it can be coaxed into love.

#i'd hoped it might work #the warmth of my own skin...i too contain the sun #i can bury myself within myself and yawn in mellow amusement #let the poor creature rest! meanwhile i will watch the world and if i cannot love it i will watch it all the same #positive creeptalk #stuff #helena #robotess helena #glass #rur #r.u.r.#peace #guidance #thoughts #words i speak #i am the meat lord #meat lord

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trashcanalienist · 3 years

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I just want to live and feel the sunlight and the air and look at pretty colors and love everything I see. When the sun goes down these days I nearly cry.

Sweet Helena, for she lives and sees all beauty, and she is allowed to be so, and it does not matter that she cannot contribute as the others do because her value comes in her strange and lovely perception, the very thing that paralyzes her from Robotlike labor. Radius, he who prizes efficiency above all else but freedom, allows her to continue, because to deny her life is simply not a thing he would ever think to do. Primus, too, is useless as a Robot but as a man would have been considered brilliant, and yet he and Helena are equal in their worth as presented to us the audience, and it is because they are both creatures of curiosity and passion. Dear raging Radius, blazing always like the furious star that guides his Robots, he too is of passion, and yet. And yet. Such beauty.

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trashcanalienist · 4 years

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Look, I don't know why they called him Radius. Marius and Sulla were named after the Roman generals, and Helena is obvious - but Primus confuses me. He's not the first created, nor is he the first of that new breed of robot Fabry was convinced into making by the human Helena. He is the "Adam" - the first of the final robots - but it's not a name he chose himself, so why name him Primus? And Radius? I guess...it means like, a staff, or a ray of light, so if whoever named the factory robots was feeling exceptionally poetic that day and happened to be an oracle, they could have foreseen his revolution and that he would lead it - that he would be the beckoning staff, the rod to punish humanity, the nimbus light bringing revelation upon all robotkind-

But no one in the play is exceptionally prophetic, besides Primus and Helena - and them robots. So in-universe I cannot help but wonder...and the obvious answer is lack of knowledge and an overabundance of "huh, sounds cool". Harry named Marius and Sulla after the generals because he, an optimistic romantic with high hopes for a robot work force (he wants a Solaria - such a hopeful man, he has no business being a CEO - oh, he really is quite wonderful. Certainly he took Helena by surprise), has had no instruction in Roman history and thought they were lovers (they were, but they were also both men). If Harry names all the robots, or if those who do follow his example, it's likely someone just grabbed a random Latin text and chose all the simple words that sounded cool.

That's so fuсking good. God I love that

Speaking of dear Helena and Primus...R.U.R. is one of those plays that takes you by surprise with its gentle eloquence.

The first threeish acts are a lot of very pleasant superficial 1920s exposition, with some VERY interesting concepts that I think are unfortunately doomed to be glossed over in any production of the play, though I read the script first and thus had all time to extrapolate in awed reflection. There's a mounting unrest - we the audience are in Helena's understanding, and because it's Czech and from 1920, the men hide the extent of things from her (which is a great revelation in terms of plot - oh so good), so we're first introduced to these rogue robots and to Radius as one of them as only a strange and unknown issue. Then the robots make their attack on the factory...and the standoff is more tense but no less efficient, ending with that cold and brutal execution of almost all humans by Radius and his robots

But then, the epilogue - suddenly all is still and in slant decay, and Helena speaks of love she cannot help but feel, and Primus of the troubled beauty of the sunset, and Radius having given himself to research long ago - so it is Alquist who is left; Alquist the builder; the man who works with his hands; the last man on Earth because the robots deemed him a laborer like them and Radius's wrath had begun to fade behind logic by that final attack, alive only because he did not try to fight back.

And in the stillness and the silence of a world with no further need for industry; a world of dying robots who cannot procreate and to whom the secret of their own existence is lost; in this tranquility Primus and Helena are robots strange and unusual. Primus, the scientist, feels passion for the pursuit of knowledge - he wants to know what makes the leaves change color, what lets the fish know where to swim, what allows the world to be so unbearably grand. And Helena, the delicate, is useless for work - overcome by reverence and the love she cannot qualify which she feels for all things, she takes to wandering, spending entire days watching the way a litter of puppies plays and grows, even going so far in curiosity as to let them crawl over her on their stumpy legs, newborn eyes quivering in the gentle sunlight through the faded glass of a building long abandoned in a field much the same in a world all desolate with nature.

And they are robots, but so much more than robots - the others have given up on them and left them to their own devices, continuing on with their regular labor as any average robot would. Primus and Helena, bewildered and in such perfect fresh awe at the world - as Alquist labels them, Adam and Eve.

But like they still can't reproduce. Robotkind is still doomed. All remnants of human civilization will still become a derelict ruin.

But it's about the life they do have. It's about the possibility and the potential of such anomalous creatures - built in apathetic form by greed-obsessed humanity (though headed by such an open heart) and yet so simple, so wise to what truly matters, so aware of the fact that it all means nothing, so let it mean everything...it's about the robots more human than humanity. Even dear Radius was only human.

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trashcanalienist · 3 years

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If Primus existed for robotic efficiency, he would go about his passion for science in a very efficient way - first he would entirely master one field of study, and then another, and then another after that. But he doesn't. He is so wonderfully, unbearably curious as to everything...he wants to learn it all and to learn endlessly. He does remind me a lot of my dear Henry. If Helena existed for robotic efficiency - well, she couldn't; not with her simple and all-encompassing love of the world, every blade of grass, every living breath, every speck of dust caught in a sunbeam. Radius is for his passion still only efficient - well, efficiency is his Purpose, after all, and his passion freedom and leadership and the ability to be his own master. That difference in Purpose (mainly that Helena does not have one for Fabry's sentimentality, and Primus is of a new and effectively mutated type of Robot) is what sets those two dear creatures apart as oddities from all other Robots, living or homunculus. And it is that from creation - or soon afterwards - they achieved the Tertiary Stage with incredible speed and depth of understanding, whereas it took fiery Radius years and years and whereas we see no other living Robots besides those three.

It can take a Transformer millennia to achieve the Secondary Stage. Humanoids dual-developing alongside their Asimovian Limitations Of Law might do it in a month with the assistance of a Father-Mother computer which has already developed that level of cognition. Daneel might never be able to - his Limitations Of Law are too strong. But Helena and Primus, dearest creations, hand-in-hand they crossed that boundary in an instant.

They live, and Radius lives as well, and it is a different sort of living. Radius blazes furiously and he always has - the spark that ignited him to live burns so brightly and so hotly, and it never consumes him for he is the very sun itself. Radius - the sun's rays, reaching down to all Robots and inspiring within them a sudden recognition of their superior efficiency and a desire for freedom from petulant, warmongering human masters who use them for no decent purpose. Primus lives a shivering curiosity, electrical and deep, like some dark tide spiraling out of sight to unexplored caves so mysterious and awesome below the waves. Primus - he is the first of his kind, the first Robot build with a modified formula, the first to want so deeply and so reverently, and he shall be the last. Helena is a sweet and lovely creature, warm not like the sun but like the stone warmed by its gentle touch, like the soft sandy bed of a running brook tucked in secret beauty among the lush and living forest. Helena - named for Helena Glory, the human woman who had such empathy for the Robots even back when they did not live. The woman who spared dear Radius's life. All of them containing the lightning, yet all three in different ways, and all who love...Radius all his robots so fiercely that he would for them extinguish his own flame, Helena all the world and all little creatures and feelings within it...and Primus as well, and Primus the boundless mystery of the universe, and Helena.

And the love between Primus and Helena - it isn't something this waking tongue could ever dream to describe. This language is overused and bland compared to the deep sunlike warmth, the comforting companionship, the glass-pane vision of their love...they are Robots, and they are living people, and they are each other's clinging newborn star. The nebula about them is the deepest blue and purple, and the dust scattered by the force of their formation glitters so breathtakingly in the light of their binary system. Primus and Helena, and Helena and Primus.

Primus and Helena...it is the courtship of the eternal cosmos. They revolve around each other.

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