Month: January 2018

And again, obviously I am in an unusually contemplative mood.  I had some odd stuff come up this morning I won’t talk about, and have had some very odd nights I also won’t talk about, other than they include things like being forced to do long ruck marches in the middle of the night, and succeeding.

But it seems to me the hippies pursued a thousand dead end roads, if the goal was reforming American culture.  True, they have created a tenuous mass of lies buttressed by an obsessive moral certitude, extraordinarily aggressive energy, and a very organized system of signals designed to support the GroupThink they have developed over the past 4-5 decades.

But what they were seeking they did not find.  As Paul Johnson asked of the Communists: if you ‘need to break a few eggs to make an omelet’, where is the omelet?  One can ask of the hippies: if your goal was to create something new and better, where is it?  Craft beer and good coffee don’t qualify.  Yoga classes on every corner don’t qualify.  Where is the culture in your “counter-culture”?  We had a culture.  You did your best to destroy it, and are continuing that process.  What, now, do you want to replace it with other than a repressive tyranny you will call liberating because lying is simply what you do?

No honest conservative ever need apologize for what they believe.  We can and have made mistakes, but it is quite possible, on our side of the aisle, to discuss errors, and figure out ways to do better.  That is all anyone can ask.  The political Left, on the other hand, has vastly more to answer for, including perhaps most saliently and pressingly its inability to EVER admit fundamental error, or to admit that–like the austistic savants I keep speaking of–it does not understand humanity in the first place at all.

Dissociated people have trouble connecting with others for the simple reason that that part of their brain was short-circuited at some point.  How could any child trust a mother like that?  But if the psychologist was a hippy too, as they likely were at that time in Portland, how could they tell the mother “You need to fucking grow up and create a stable home for this child.”?

I see bullshit everywhere.  It is my blessing and my curse.

What prompts this was reading up on Courtney Love.  She was in two Milos Forman movies, and I realized I didn’t know much about her, so I looked her up.  This is what Wikipedia has to say about her childhood:

Love resided in Northwest Portland, Oregon in the early 1980s, supporting herself illegally as a topless dancer

The movie itself, of course, encourages a wide range of interpretations, and indeed is so recondite it was initially booed by some Spanish audiences.

I had to sleep on it, but I think I have reached some conclusions that work for me.

First, though, I wanted to comment on how I am realizing what a deep psychological hunger I feel for symbols which are authentic for me, which I can “eat” and “digest”, and make a part of me.  This hunger, which I think we all feel, is nearly entirely unsated in our modern world.  Where once we had Honest Abe, a problem-free respect for Columbus, a near universal Christianity, and an abiding respect for American democracy, now all the constructed symbols of our political, and largely our religious world, are gone, and this matters.  I won’t say any more on that for now.

I feel all the scenes have a place and a purpose.  First, we see the movie imported into the village.  It comes from somewhere else.  Then we see the father, caring for his bees, and looking at his watch, sadly, it seems to me.  Then we see the wife–who we don’t find out for sure is his wife for some time, writing a letter to her lover, who went off to fight the war, and who may or may not even be alive, then we see her riding to the train to send off her letter.  The father comes home, looks for her, can’t find her, and then asks if there is food.  His house-keeper tells him yes, but he should keep regular hours like everybody else.

The children, at night, light a candle, and Ana’s sister Isabel tells her nobody died in the Frankenstein movie, and that Frankenstein’s monster is a spirit she can conjure.  This, in response to her logical childlike question: why?  Why did the girl die, why did Frankenstein’s monster die?  It made no sense to her.

The father, staying up late, writes the following, from which we get the name of the movie:

Someone to whom I recently showed my glass beehive, with its movement like the main gear wheel of a clock…Someone who saw the constant agitation of the honeycomb, the mysterious maddened commotion of the nurse bees over the nests, the teeming bridges and stairways of wax, the invading spirals of the queen, the endlessly varied and repetitive labors of the swarm, the relentless yet ineffectual toil, the fevered comings and goings, the call to sleep always ignored, undermining the next day’s work, the final repose of death far from a place that tolerates neither sickness nor tombs…Someone who observed these things after the initial astonishment had passed, quickly looked away with an expression of indescribable sadness and horror.

Now, I want to move from description to interpretation, particularly since I can’t remember the precise sequence of events.

The first critical piece of information is that the father knows his younger wife is having or had an affair, that she is thinking about someone else.  We are told that.  He is tending his bees, wondering where she is.  Perhaps she even gave him that watch.  He comes home, looks for her, and she is gone.  This causes him emotional anguish, which causes him to be unable to sleep, and to write what is written above.  Note that he himself is not sleeping properly.  He falls asleep at his desk.  He himself is “undermining the next day’s work” and anticipating death.

So there is a dark secret in the family that both parents know but can’t speak.  The children can’t know this, but there is a fertile, latent underlayer for the creation of foreboding.  Children–even outwardly happy, playing children–feel when something is happening.

The scene with the anatomy lesson: what is the last thing they put on?  What have they forgotten?  The Eyes.  The ability to see.

The farmhouse in the distance becomes the setting for the appearance of Frankenstein’s monster’s avatar.

Let me back up.  The scene with the candle with the two children was, in my view, intended to evoke religion and the Christian Church, which teaches that no one ever dies, and that the spirits–and God himself–are there when we call.  This means that the monster, which did not die, can still be saved.

Logically, then, Ana tries to save the soldier.  What she had feared had happened was reversed.  He came back to life.  A new future was possible (the train symbolizes the future, I think, which she is nearly run over by, and which she was sort of trying to stand in the way of unconsciously).  And then the soldier is killed, and her father seems in her childish mind to have played a role.  Her father becomes a monster to her, first a mob, then the actual monster, and then SHE becomes the monster, perhaps after having in her dream eaten the poisonous mushroom.  She inherits Original Sin.  All the fate and weight of the world–and latently of the anxiety and pain in her home and her nation–falls on her.

This of course makes her sick.  It causes her mother to feel shame and regret.  She burns the letter.  She puts a coat on her husband, and puts away his glasses carefully, showing affection after months or years of having treated him coldly.  Ana looks for redemption in the darkness.  She tries to hope to herself that the monster is still alive somehow, but she fails.  She turns, and the last scene shows her silhouetted in darkness.  She feels like the monster, still.  The monster is not out there.  It is in her.  It is a tragic ending, in my view. And apparently making this movie messed that child actress up for many years.

If I might return to the Original Sin metaphor, perhaps the monster killing the girl–an act of innocence, since he did not know what would happen–is Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge.  Perhaps the monster being killed by a mob is Christ’s redemptive act.

But in this movie, there is no redemption.  There is no resurrection.  The dead remain dead.  This is where I think we should look for the war symbolism.  It is a latent critique of Christianity as a whole, as peddling lies.  And it is a latent critique of the war because the war, in this view, accomplished little or nothing.  Nothing living came of it.  A monster–not THE monster–was slain, but countless more remain, because that monster is in our souls.

And it is difficult, is it not, to separate the grotesque appearance of the monster, with its seeming capacity for murder, with its essential innocence?  It did not MEAN to kill that girl, but it did.  And it was slaughtered as if it had been truly blood-thirsty.

Stylistically, I will comment too how interesting it is that Erice was able to include another entire movie within his own movie, without showing more than a minute or two of the original.

This movie is a tragedy in my view about the loss of innocence, about the loss of faith.  The girl became terrified of her father, but large segments of a nation also became terrified of their new ruler.

I do think this is in the rough neighborhood of the director/author’s intention.  The beehive is life itself, seen from the perspective of someone who feels trapped and helpless.  You have to do your part, even when it feels like farce and horror.

Having said all this, though, it is still a beautiful movie, and one I will likely watch again.  This is the thing: so much of life is beautiful, even in the midst of horror.  We want “life” to give us one signal only, but it gives us many.  Much of the task of living is focusing our attention on the one’s which build us up and make us feel good.  We have that choice.

What struck me immediately was how socially disconnected he was.  He did not know what was funny.  He broke social conventions because he simply did not recognize them by feeling them.  So of course I speculated he had Asberger’s.   And looking this up, it is quite astonishing how many famous people are claimed by some to have been somewhere on the autism spectrum: https://awetismhalloffame.wordpress.com/tag/andy-kaufman/

Bill Gates.  Albert Einstein.  Bela Bartok. Arthur Conan Doyle.  Tim Burton.  Samuel Becket.  Look at it.  It is quite an interesting list.

And I wondered about the value of his performance art.  His fights with Jerry Lawler.  His continual hoaxes, to the point where it was impossible to say for certain he even died, even though his death certificate was issued.  The logic of his friends in stating publicly he DID fake his death, fed by the continued appearances of Tony Clifton.

And then I got to thinking about the nature of creativity. Life itself is confusing.  We are born, we know we are going to die, and we don’t know a whole lot more than that, or at least most of us.  Human kind builds behavioral patterns which promote peace, which minimize our existential anxiety, and get most of us from one side of life to the other.

All acts of genuine newness are inherently potentially unbalancing.  Their effects are hard to predict, and for this reason much of human history has consisted in punishing innovation.  Our modern world has evolved from the idea that creativity is an inherent and beneficial need for human beings, that in some respect the “quest for the self” is part of our nature, and that social institutions needed to evolve to meet this need. 

But I think many of us, now, are confused and perplexed by the very speed with which creativity is happening all around us, all the time.  Nothing seems to be given any more.  We are even now trying to grapple with the long term social effects of smart phones.  I have been wondering recently what will happen as Virtual Reality continues to distance our awareness from the given universe.  It allows us to create universes to our liking.  Is this good?  As with most things, the answer is likely that the effects are mixed.  Some good things become possible, but many bad things do too.

The Hindus and others believe that the universe as we perceive it is a giant illusion, and that recognizing this, progressively, is the path to Enlightenment, and lasting joy and innate fulfillment.

So I suppose it was logical for Kaufman, as a dedicated member of the TM movement, to CREATE illusions, to show people that much of what we take to be true isn’t.

And I think of Michaelangelo, dissecting dead bodies, in an act that would have seen him hung in public had he been caught, doing so to perfect his art, to create something better than what had hitherto been created, and in any event, something different, something unique, something uniquely his.

What I feel is that there is a pendulum, or a balance is a better metaphor, in which we are born to create, but within bounds.  We need a relatively stable platform within which to evolve, but that if we do so too quickly, we lose all connection with our sense of self, and this is a terrible loss, which is spiritually detrimental. Every day becomes an act of recreation, and this is not a good use of time, I don’t  think.

This, I feel, is the root attraction to “socialism”: it promises an end to relentless change. I can feel this mythic attraction, one seen in, among other films, Dr. Strange.  Dormamu is, on my reading, a symbol for stasis, and Socialism its political expression.  This is perhaps the Yin to the Yang of highly creative people.  It is why so many creative sorts have always been drawn to Communism and the many words used as synonyms.

And I feel, too, the wisdom, of a sort, of the medieval Church burning heretics.  They may have been personally sympathetic in some ways to what these people had to say, but felt that the society as a whole was at risk.

We stopped burning heretics some time ago, although the process is still continual, seen metaphorically.  The need for social stability, the need to be able to predict, looking to the people on your left and to your right, what they believe, and how they will behave.  Only in conditions of relative stability can people truly relax, and relate authentically.

Or is this true?  Does INstability breed truer sentiments?  These are deep, highly abstract questions, likely left for concrete contexts and times.

What I feel, though, that we need now is a reliable context for human connection.  We have lost this ability, in far too many cases.  Traditionalists retain the benefits of their particular delusions, but the avante garde among us are not better for having substituted new delusions. 

Happiness is rooted in misery.Misery lurks beneath happiness.Who knows what the future holds?There is no honesty.Honesty becomes dishonest.Goodness becomes witchcraft.Man’s bewitchment lasts for a long time (Tao Te Ching, 58)

What I feel is that all too often, we seek to control the world, to order it, but this ordering is always a lie of sorts.  Kaufman screamed “The world is not real”, but of course dedicated himself to a very long term and very diligent spiritual practice.

What I feel is that when we stop imposing order on the world, stop building sheltering caves in the vast darkness we see, then and only then does the true order of the universe reveal itself.  This is the essence, as I understand it, of the Buddhist teaching of the unconditioned nature of reality.

I have been trying to anchor myself and my own work–which I cannot honestly say yet that I have even begun–in some sort of context.  It is a huge advantage, in seeking to see formlessness, to have a form of sorts to come back to, until you have learned to live there, learned to breathe that air.  Emotionally, I need some sort of context, some sort of tradition. 

I am not a born Buddhist.  I am not a Tibetan.  I am an American, who was raised watching Gilligan’s Island, eating Hamburger Helper, spending my time talking with friends about new movies, new music (new to me or us, since many like to go back now), and feeling a relative stranger to everyone I meet.  What binds us?  I am not the first to ask this.  We have no religion.  And we are Godless, if we reference God as a metaphor for what binds us.  This is the root reason for the obsessiveness of the Left in the world today: there is nothing else.  How else to explain all the Question Authority hippies now DEMANDING an omnipotent government, which we already KNOW is abusing its unfathomable powers, and which we KNOW is quite capable of an eternal dictatorship. 

Perhaps they would even want the world run by Artificial Intelligence, by a God of our own making, which cannot know more than what we tell it, which is simply an infinite Games Master, which perfects all the moves on a board it cannot expand, since it is lacking spirit.  Which condenses the universe as it IS, to what can be portrayed and represented symbolically.  Which casts a net over life on this Earth, because we have demanded to be confined as a form of protection from all that we cannot know.

Where I am feeling presently some kinship is the mid-century artists who tried, and failed, to build something new.  When I look back, in my rudimentary and very, very incomplete understanding, I feel that the Beats, and people like John Cage and Martha Graham, were the last generation that were still culturally American.  They were looking everywhere else, but they still had their feet planted in a culture they were wanting to change from within, which reacted when they protested, because it still believed something.  There were still rules they were self consciously breaking.  Now, there are no rules, none that are sacred in any meaningful sense.

Here is a comment by John Cage that struck me:

 In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as “a purposeless play” which is “an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living”.

Another:

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound […] I don’t need sound to talk to me.

It does seem obvious to me that there is a homology here–and indeed with his infamous 4’33”–and Kaufman’s work. 

Within all this is a sense many of us have that the world is being slowly built in the image of a machine. Design is the essence of the machine.  It is what we make it.  It is likely accurate to say that Cage saw music, itself, as a sort of machine from which he wanted to escape, though randomness– which is to say, the universe as it is, and not as we make it.  His was in some respects an act of humility, even if seen socially it was audacious.  So many of us, I suspect, resented that reminder, both of where we come from, and where we seem to be going.

There are, I think, some interesting musings here.  My brain is tired, though.  I need to shower and go for a walk.

I really felt this the other night, on a chilly night, with a light drizzle.  I felt Earth as a giant waystation in the dark, a beacon of light, a hub of hope, of a hustle and bustle unknown on the vast, lonely trails countless souls are traversing across this universe.

There is infinite life we can’t see, infinite awareness we can’t see.  And no matter how miserable a life might be on this planet, it is still better than what is out there.  I feel there are heavens and hells.  There is no being eager to punish or reward us.  There are simply consequences, rules.

And this is a subtle point.  Christians posit a loving God who looks after us.  But Christians are not spared random tragedies, although I’m sure it is true their belief makes it easier for them to deal with them, if it is authentic belief.

What if there is a life beyond, which simply operates according to laws like those of physics?  True Buddhists to not worship the Buddha–although of course He is one of the Three Jewels–but to the extent they worship anything, it is the PATH, the rules, the game plan, the most effective course of action, which he shared, which in the spiritual life is roughly equal to the rules of physics in planning the behavior of matter.  It tells you what to do in order to get where you want to go, or would want to go, if you knew more.

On one level, it is very lonely looking at an infinite universe without some force playing the role of parent, and feeling how we all exist in space, even on Earth, even when sitting at a computer keyboard typing.  I feel this.  But I also feel what a fascinating and interesting game it all is, what miracles lurk underneath the most mundane scenes and experiences.

Life will not come to you.  You must go to it.  And in making that effort, it will meet you in the middle.

I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds deep!!!! (I’m laughing at myself.  I sometimes describe myself as an Alpha Nerd).

Have a pleasant day!!! 

Here is what was really going on with that post.  I know I shouldn’t care, that my passions, from most perspectives, are silly, but that whole thing felt woolly to me. 

It does feel to me like the world is changing, that some astrological alignment, some configuration of energies, something in the air and water, is changing for the better.  That was the feeling I had.  There is literally zero rational content to it.  Then I thought that maybe I was just looking at the world differently.  How can I know if the world is changing when I am changing too?  When you change how you view the world, the world “changes” without changing at all.

Then of course I went to Galadriel.  As a spiritual being, it would be unreasonable to say she was unchanging, but at the same time, she was very stable, she was coming to her intuitions from a stable place.

Now, all this may make no more sense to anyone, but I feel better. 

I might have mentioned a variation on an old saw that I read a few months somewhere, about a Yiddish saying that “if you should be someone else, then who will be you?”

I yam what I yam.  A big, bookish, emotionally timid/damaged, sometimes insightful, curious, and hopeful human being.

I don’t expect anything to come of this, but if I can get 5 comments asking me to do videos, I will.  Being me, they would have to start from first principles, and evolve from there, but it might be fun.  I might do it anyway.  I’m not quite ready to put my ugly mug in front of a camera, but I might get there eventually.  I see so much stupidity, and failure to think things through. I see Ph.D’s in Economics seemingly unfamiliar with what is taught the first week. I see Ph.D’s in Philosophy who could not tell you why it is wrong to molest kids.