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Diet Soap Interview
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Friday, November 06, 2009
Did this interview last night with Nightstalkers radio, talking about Homo Serpiens, galactic consciousness, and retards!
Night Stalker (1972)
Night Stalker (1972)
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
OK, here's some journal bits from recent SWEDA posts:
It is passivity. It is like giving up. But in a way that's warm and soft, not cold and hard.
I am a dead man. If I stay in the knowing that I am already dead, I experience being a ghost among the living, and the whole world becomes a ghostly hologram. I have found what is real within.
What is real, what has meaning and value, is there at the center of knowing within me.
Silence is an awesome possibility.
***
Feeling a pleasant sense of detachment and neutrality, and faintest curiosity. I wonder if this is, or would be, the predominant mood of consciousness, once it is freed from our patterns: faintest curiosity?
The way the shaman glances at the clouds and passing cars, for signs or indications, but uninvested in the story, like a child reading a comic book on a lazy sunny afternoon? Not wanting to miss anything, yet unconcerned by the outcome.
***
Was thinking yesterday about how, for most of my life, I have been imagining and willing myself into some future state, of happiness and completeness and joy and perfection, while becoming increasingly doubtful I will ever make it to this imagined state. I have clung to this belief that some day, I would be "there," but inevitably combined with the fear, the nagging voice: "What if I never am?" What if this is as good as it gets?
What struck me yesterday (while swimming) was that I don't feel or think like this anymore; I have become, without really noticing it, "warmly OK" with being less than happy and less than perfect as a human being. But the real surprise was that this being warmly OK was what I had always been yearning for, without knowing it. The idea of needing to be something I was not (happy, carefree, funny, loving, whatever) was the only thing keeping me from being OK with myself as I am. And yet this is all we really want anyway!
Not expressing it very clearly, its a sort of living paradox. The moment we are OK with never being OK, we are OK! Really, really OK.
Give it a try some time. It is so much easier than you think.
(Even so, it took me til my 40s to get it! )
***
Living for others as a way for us to feel good about ourselves: it never works. Taking other peoples' "needs" seriously when we can no longer take our own seriously is just habit. It's even a kind of hypocrisy, don't you think?
I used to say it was about giving in without giving up. But now I think that, for us as persons, there really isn't much difference. If anything besides warm OK-ness is what gets us out of bed in the morning, maybe its better if we stay in bed? Maybe we need to be warmly OK with being useless before we can even begin to be useful to anyone?
It is passivity. It is like giving up. But in a way that's warm and soft, not cold and hard.
I am a dead man. If I stay in the knowing that I am already dead, I experience being a ghost among the living, and the whole world becomes a ghostly hologram. I have found what is real within.
What is real, what has meaning and value, is there at the center of knowing within me.
Silence is an awesome possibility.
***
Feeling a pleasant sense of detachment and neutrality, and faintest curiosity. I wonder if this is, or would be, the predominant mood of consciousness, once it is freed from our patterns: faintest curiosity?
The way the shaman glances at the clouds and passing cars, for signs or indications, but uninvested in the story, like a child reading a comic book on a lazy sunny afternoon? Not wanting to miss anything, yet unconcerned by the outcome.
***
Was thinking yesterday about how, for most of my life, I have been imagining and willing myself into some future state, of happiness and completeness and joy and perfection, while becoming increasingly doubtful I will ever make it to this imagined state. I have clung to this belief that some day, I would be "there," but inevitably combined with the fear, the nagging voice: "What if I never am?" What if this is as good as it gets?
What struck me yesterday (while swimming) was that I don't feel or think like this anymore; I have become, without really noticing it, "warmly OK" with being less than happy and less than perfect as a human being. But the real surprise was that this being warmly OK was what I had always been yearning for, without knowing it. The idea of needing to be something I was not (happy, carefree, funny, loving, whatever) was the only thing keeping me from being OK with myself as I am. And yet this is all we really want anyway!
Not expressing it very clearly, its a sort of living paradox. The moment we are OK with never being OK, we are OK! Really, really OK.
Give it a try some time. It is so much easier than you think.
(Even so, it took me til my 40s to get it! )
***
Living for others as a way for us to feel good about ourselves: it never works. Taking other peoples' "needs" seriously when we can no longer take our own seriously is just habit. It's even a kind of hypocrisy, don't you think?
I used to say it was about giving in without giving up. But now I think that, for us as persons, there really isn't much difference. If anything besides warm OK-ness is what gets us out of bed in the morning, maybe its better if we stay in bed? Maybe we need to be warmly OK with being useless before we can even begin to be useful to anyone?
Secret Life of Movies, the book is out, after ten years sitting on my hard drives, as well as Homo Serpiens, about 8 years in the pipeline. Both books came out the same month, which is an old ambition of mine finally fulfilled: to have two books coming out the same time and double my chances of Being a Somebody. As you all know, by now I am more than a little ambivalent about the whole business of writing books. Maybe for children.
Wish I could encourage you all to buy the book but at $40, I can't blame anyone for giving it a miss. Still, I am pretty sure you'd enjoy it. It's easily the most thorough work I've written on movies. There's an e-book due out soon, and if I can get enough people interested, I will probably make an audio book.
So raise your hands anyone who'd like to buy an audio book, via the Net, for maybe $10? I'd say about 20 buyers would be enough to justify my time in doing it.
My, how the mighty have fallen.
All my time goes into SWEDA now, but maybe I'll start posting some of my personal journal stuff from there, here, just to keep this blog alive.
It's sort of confusing, not knowing who, or even where, my audience is anymore! Since I started doing SWEDA, it feels like my audience is getting smaller, not bigger. But also much closer! So that is probably the right way to be going.
Wish I could encourage you all to buy the book but at $40, I can't blame anyone for giving it a miss. Still, I am pretty sure you'd enjoy it. It's easily the most thorough work I've written on movies. There's an e-book due out soon, and if I can get enough people interested, I will probably make an audio book.
So raise your hands anyone who'd like to buy an audio book, via the Net, for maybe $10? I'd say about 20 buyers would be enough to justify my time in doing it.
My, how the mighty have fallen.
All my time goes into SWEDA now, but maybe I'll start posting some of my personal journal stuff from there, here, just to keep this blog alive.
It's sort of confusing, not knowing who, or even where, my audience is anymore! Since I started doing SWEDA, it feels like my audience is getting smaller, not bigger. But also much closer! So that is probably the right way to be going.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
God's Channel
from Secret Life of Movies
Richard Kelly‘s Donnie Darko (2001) is about as rare an experience at the movies as finding a genuine psychic at a fun fair. It’s a celluloid vision. Donnie is a schizo with the power to see the future and thereby create it. As in Don’t Look Now, Donnie’s visions are self-fulfilling: it’s his terrible fear of what is going to happen (on October 30, 1988, at a precise minute and hour) that causes Donnie to act in just such a way as to ensure that it does. And yet, paradoxically (and Donnie Darko is not merely about paradoxes, it is a paradox unto itself), the knowledge he gains into the mysterious workings of time through his experience permits Donnie to rewrite his destiny, by turning the clock back. This he can only do at the cost of his own life.
Initially, Donnie is spared death due to his tendency to sleepwalk, which is one symptom of his schizo-visionary state and which causes Donnie to be out on the golf course when a passenger plane jet engine falls from the sky and crashes through his bedroom. Donnie was already strange before this, but the inexplicable event (no airline claims the severed engine) only serves to cement his dementia, his sense of strangeness. At the same time, it alerts the audience to the fact that we have entered into a world every bit as weird and incomprehensible as Donnie’s world must seem to him. We have entered the Twilight Zone.
Donnie Darko is the first of its type—the surrealist teen schizo angst comedy (Static, Repo Man, Heathers, Parents, etc)—to successfully pull all the elements together and forge them into a genuine work of art. It’s a bit slack in places (Gretchen’s death, for example), and it’s occasionally self-indulgent, or perhaps just self-conscious, but it’s all of a piece. Unlike the films mentioned above (Static excepted), it has depth both of meaning and of feeling; it comes from the heart and not just the head. Donnie Darko is teen comedy romance spliced with hallucinatory horror movie, and yet the splicing is seamless, invisible and impeccable. Except in the early high school scenes (which the director seems to be deliberately undermining by speeding up the images and drowning out the sound), there’s never a sense of watching a cross genre movie. In fact Donnie Darko doesn’t seem like a genre movie at all, principally because it isn’t. It’s closer to Blue Velvet than The Faculty: It’s a rite of passage, a mythological journey. Donnie Darko is a schizo movie about adolescence in which objective reality (so far as there is one, which is debatable) is even weirder than the subjective reality of the schizo himself. It’s not that Donnie is too weird and crazy to understand what’s happening to him, it’s that he’s just weird and crazy enough.
Richard Kelly, the writer-director, has an intuitive grasp of his material that marks him as a genuine visionary, which may be just what he is. What’s more, he has sufficient grasp of his ideas and a basic movie sense (and the technical know how) to do almost full justice to his vision. In the current, post-9/11 climate, this movie is practically a revelation: a work that takes place entirely “inside” the character’s (i.e., the filmmaker’s) head, and yet connects to the universal experience. I certainly know a few young folk, adolescents or post-adolescents, who see the world a lot like Donnie does. They may not see tubes of liquid light coming out of people’s chests, and they may not literally converse with giant rabbits or travel through time; but they have the same basic, shifting sense of reality, the feeling that neither time nor space—or anything at all—is what it seems to be. These kids intuit that something, maybe not “the end of the world,” but something equally awesome and indescribable, is just around the next corner, and even that all of this has something to do with “God,” or with whatever it is we have chosen to call God, in our all-too-human reaching after the intangible.
Donnie doesn’t believe in God until he sees It. I say “It,” because Donnie doesn’t have a religious experience of a Deity, as such; what he experiences is both more subtle and more profound. He perceives a force coming out of people’s bodies, looking like a sort of tentacle that extends forward through space. The opposite of the trail left by a snail, this tentacle doesn’t follow people but leads them; it seems to anticipate their movements, and so gives Donnie a glimpse into the future. At first it seems that these tubes or tentacles are simply that: Donnie’s fourth-dimensional view of reality, i.e., when time is also a perceivable dimension, people become like tubes that twist and turn throughout the spaces they inhabit as they come and go from one point to the next and back again. But when Donnie witnesses this force emerging from his own chest, he sees something else, as the liquid light—clearly a conscious “thing” unto itself—stops and turns and beckons Donnie to follow it. He does so, and it leads him into his parents’ bedroom and to the closet, where he finds the gun with which he will shoot the boy who runs over his lover Gretchen (Lena Malone), all at the designated hour. This same boy, dressed as a giant toothy rabbit, is “Frank,” the other-dimensional entity who has been leading Donnie through his visions to the inevitable apocalypse, or revelation: that Donnie is just a play thing in the hands of Fate. Yet in Donnie Darko, “Fate,” less oppressively but even more mysteriously, is a living Force that exists inside Donnie and within every other living creature.
Donnie admits to his shrink (Katherine Ross) that he has thought about the question of God, or more precisely whether or not he is “alone,” until it has lost all meaning. To Donnie, “the quest for God is absurd.” Yet despite this, or maybe because of it, Donnie finds God. When he witnesses this inexplicable phenomenon, he doesn’t have to think about it; there’s no two and two to put together here, he just knows. And when Donnie speaks with his science teacher, the latter can’t grok Donnie’s discovery as anything but a paradox. If you can see your future, he insists, then surely you have the option of altering it? Donnie has the privileged knowledge of the prophet: he hasn’t just heard about this “God,” he has seen it. “Not if you stay in God’s channel!” he says, or words to this effect. He’s speaking about Destiny vs. Fate.
What Donnie Darko is saying is that there is only one destiny for each of us (or rather, one destiny per person per universe), that this is our path, and that the only “free will” we have (the only way to escape from mere predestination) is to live out this destiny, to find and then stay within “God’s Channel.” The third alternative (never voiced) is to reject our destiny, to rebel, as Lucifer did, and sever our connection to the Universe, the Divine, and so fall out of the sacred groove, out of God’s Channel. Apparently Donnie’s experience, from his narrowly escaping death to his boldly embracing it by entering the time vortex (expressly in order to save Gretchen from the fate that should have been his), is solely for Donnie (and us) to learn this vital truth. The movie gives us the philosopher’s stone and holy grail of human endeavour, the truth that will reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable conundrum of destiny (God) and free will. Donnie didn’t fall out of God’s Channel by surviving, however; what he did (so far as I understand the movie) was to enter into a parallel universe, an alternate time stream in which he survived, and thereby got to see what would happen if he did live, and so understand the meaning of his death, the reason behind it. At the risk of being pat, the movie might be seen as Donnie’s dark and troubling dream, in the final moments before that jet engine lands on him and death takes him forever.
Like Run Lola Run, Donnie Darko adheres to a very old religious tradition, that of blood sacrifice. It suggests that when God, or Death, decides to take someone, He cannot be denied. If His intended prey somehow evades Him, by some unexpected miracle, He will simply take someone else, usually someone close to the original choice of victim. This is not just religious belief, however; it’s also something like physics. It’s as if Donnie’s unwritten escape creates the opposite of a vortex, a sort of excess of particles in the universe, and that this imbalance has to be corrected by the removal of someone else, preferably someone as similar to the intended “target” as possible. For this reason Gretchen is taken. Having seen all this, Donnie is given a choice. Like John Baxter in Don’t Look Now, Donnie has the all-too-rare gift of seeing God’s plan in action, His method, His modus operandi. Unlike Baxter, however, Donnie is smart (or crazy/open/adolescent) enough to understand what he sees and act upon it, to seize the opportunity of intervening and become co-designer of his destiny. He does indeed, as Gretchen has intuited, become a Super Hero. (Super Heroes have always been schizos; Donnie Darko gives us the first schizo to become a Super Hero.)
Recognizing that he only survived due to a glitch in space-time, Donnie uses the same glitch to repair the damage, and in the act sacrifices himself. The glitch, however, will always remain: there’s still that mysterious jet engine to contend with. Maybe the glitch is Donnie himself? Being on the verge of developing the power to see through the illusion of time and space, to see God Itself in action, Donnie is one of those freaks of nature (like the white-faced dynamo of Powder) who simply has to be removed (translated to a higher dimension) before his existence causes the whole universe to collapse. Donnie’s gift of magic allows him to escape his death, but then it forces him to see why his dearth was necessary, and so compels him (if he wants to stay in God’s Channel) to go back to meet it at the designated time. As a result, the world does not end. This time. But if people (and movies) like Donnie Darko are becoming more and more frequent phenomena, in a world where neither science nor religion is equipped to reconcile the awesome paradox of a magical reality run by God, then it’s only a matter of time. Like all good prophets, Donnie Darko warns us, in the most entertaining fashion, to get ready. The sky’s about to open.
from Secret Life of Movies
Richard Kelly‘s Donnie Darko (2001) is about as rare an experience at the movies as finding a genuine psychic at a fun fair. It’s a celluloid vision. Donnie is a schizo with the power to see the future and thereby create it. As in Don’t Look Now, Donnie’s visions are self-fulfilling: it’s his terrible fear of what is going to happen (on October 30, 1988, at a precise minute and hour) that causes Donnie to act in just such a way as to ensure that it does. And yet, paradoxically (and Donnie Darko is not merely about paradoxes, it is a paradox unto itself), the knowledge he gains into the mysterious workings of time through his experience permits Donnie to rewrite his destiny, by turning the clock back. This he can only do at the cost of his own life.
Initially, Donnie is spared death due to his tendency to sleepwalk, which is one symptom of his schizo-visionary state and which causes Donnie to be out on the golf course when a passenger plane jet engine falls from the sky and crashes through his bedroom. Donnie was already strange before this, but the inexplicable event (no airline claims the severed engine) only serves to cement his dementia, his sense of strangeness. At the same time, it alerts the audience to the fact that we have entered into a world every bit as weird and incomprehensible as Donnie’s world must seem to him. We have entered the Twilight Zone.
Donnie Darko is the first of its type—the surrealist teen schizo angst comedy (Static, Repo Man, Heathers, Parents, etc)—to successfully pull all the elements together and forge them into a genuine work of art. It’s a bit slack in places (Gretchen’s death, for example), and it’s occasionally self-indulgent, or perhaps just self-conscious, but it’s all of a piece. Unlike the films mentioned above (Static excepted), it has depth both of meaning and of feeling; it comes from the heart and not just the head. Donnie Darko is teen comedy romance spliced with hallucinatory horror movie, and yet the splicing is seamless, invisible and impeccable. Except in the early high school scenes (which the director seems to be deliberately undermining by speeding up the images and drowning out the sound), there’s never a sense of watching a cross genre movie. In fact Donnie Darko doesn’t seem like a genre movie at all, principally because it isn’t. It’s closer to Blue Velvet than The Faculty: It’s a rite of passage, a mythological journey. Donnie Darko is a schizo movie about adolescence in which objective reality (so far as there is one, which is debatable) is even weirder than the subjective reality of the schizo himself. It’s not that Donnie is too weird and crazy to understand what’s happening to him, it’s that he’s just weird and crazy enough.
Richard Kelly, the writer-director, has an intuitive grasp of his material that marks him as a genuine visionary, which may be just what he is. What’s more, he has sufficient grasp of his ideas and a basic movie sense (and the technical know how) to do almost full justice to his vision. In the current, post-9/11 climate, this movie is practically a revelation: a work that takes place entirely “inside” the character’s (i.e., the filmmaker’s) head, and yet connects to the universal experience. I certainly know a few young folk, adolescents or post-adolescents, who see the world a lot like Donnie does. They may not see tubes of liquid light coming out of people’s chests, and they may not literally converse with giant rabbits or travel through time; but they have the same basic, shifting sense of reality, the feeling that neither time nor space—or anything at all—is what it seems to be. These kids intuit that something, maybe not “the end of the world,” but something equally awesome and indescribable, is just around the next corner, and even that all of this has something to do with “God,” or with whatever it is we have chosen to call God, in our all-too-human reaching after the intangible.
Donnie doesn’t believe in God until he sees It. I say “It,” because Donnie doesn’t have a religious experience of a Deity, as such; what he experiences is both more subtle and more profound. He perceives a force coming out of people’s bodies, looking like a sort of tentacle that extends forward through space. The opposite of the trail left by a snail, this tentacle doesn’t follow people but leads them; it seems to anticipate their movements, and so gives Donnie a glimpse into the future. At first it seems that these tubes or tentacles are simply that: Donnie’s fourth-dimensional view of reality, i.e., when time is also a perceivable dimension, people become like tubes that twist and turn throughout the spaces they inhabit as they come and go from one point to the next and back again. But when Donnie witnesses this force emerging from his own chest, he sees something else, as the liquid light—clearly a conscious “thing” unto itself—stops and turns and beckons Donnie to follow it. He does so, and it leads him into his parents’ bedroom and to the closet, where he finds the gun with which he will shoot the boy who runs over his lover Gretchen (Lena Malone), all at the designated hour. This same boy, dressed as a giant toothy rabbit, is “Frank,” the other-dimensional entity who has been leading Donnie through his visions to the inevitable apocalypse, or revelation: that Donnie is just a play thing in the hands of Fate. Yet in Donnie Darko, “Fate,” less oppressively but even more mysteriously, is a living Force that exists inside Donnie and within every other living creature.
Donnie admits to his shrink (Katherine Ross) that he has thought about the question of God, or more precisely whether or not he is “alone,” until it has lost all meaning. To Donnie, “the quest for God is absurd.” Yet despite this, or maybe because of it, Donnie finds God. When he witnesses this inexplicable phenomenon, he doesn’t have to think about it; there’s no two and two to put together here, he just knows. And when Donnie speaks with his science teacher, the latter can’t grok Donnie’s discovery as anything but a paradox. If you can see your future, he insists, then surely you have the option of altering it? Donnie has the privileged knowledge of the prophet: he hasn’t just heard about this “God,” he has seen it. “Not if you stay in God’s channel!” he says, or words to this effect. He’s speaking about Destiny vs. Fate.
What Donnie Darko is saying is that there is only one destiny for each of us (or rather, one destiny per person per universe), that this is our path, and that the only “free will” we have (the only way to escape from mere predestination) is to live out this destiny, to find and then stay within “God’s Channel.” The third alternative (never voiced) is to reject our destiny, to rebel, as Lucifer did, and sever our connection to the Universe, the Divine, and so fall out of the sacred groove, out of God’s Channel. Apparently Donnie’s experience, from his narrowly escaping death to his boldly embracing it by entering the time vortex (expressly in order to save Gretchen from the fate that should have been his), is solely for Donnie (and us) to learn this vital truth. The movie gives us the philosopher’s stone and holy grail of human endeavour, the truth that will reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable conundrum of destiny (God) and free will. Donnie didn’t fall out of God’s Channel by surviving, however; what he did (so far as I understand the movie) was to enter into a parallel universe, an alternate time stream in which he survived, and thereby got to see what would happen if he did live, and so understand the meaning of his death, the reason behind it. At the risk of being pat, the movie might be seen as Donnie’s dark and troubling dream, in the final moments before that jet engine lands on him and death takes him forever.
Like Run Lola Run, Donnie Darko adheres to a very old religious tradition, that of blood sacrifice. It suggests that when God, or Death, decides to take someone, He cannot be denied. If His intended prey somehow evades Him, by some unexpected miracle, He will simply take someone else, usually someone close to the original choice of victim. This is not just religious belief, however; it’s also something like physics. It’s as if Donnie’s unwritten escape creates the opposite of a vortex, a sort of excess of particles in the universe, and that this imbalance has to be corrected by the removal of someone else, preferably someone as similar to the intended “target” as possible. For this reason Gretchen is taken. Having seen all this, Donnie is given a choice. Like John Baxter in Don’t Look Now, Donnie has the all-too-rare gift of seeing God’s plan in action, His method, His modus operandi. Unlike Baxter, however, Donnie is smart (or crazy/open/adolescent) enough to understand what he sees and act upon it, to seize the opportunity of intervening and become co-designer of his destiny. He does indeed, as Gretchen has intuited, become a Super Hero. (Super Heroes have always been schizos; Donnie Darko gives us the first schizo to become a Super Hero.)
Recognizing that he only survived due to a glitch in space-time, Donnie uses the same glitch to repair the damage, and in the act sacrifices himself. The glitch, however, will always remain: there’s still that mysterious jet engine to contend with. Maybe the glitch is Donnie himself? Being on the verge of developing the power to see through the illusion of time and space, to see God Itself in action, Donnie is one of those freaks of nature (like the white-faced dynamo of Powder) who simply has to be removed (translated to a higher dimension) before his existence causes the whole universe to collapse. Donnie’s gift of magic allows him to escape his death, but then it forces him to see why his dearth was necessary, and so compels him (if he wants to stay in God’s Channel) to go back to meet it at the designated time. As a result, the world does not end. This time. But if people (and movies) like Donnie Darko are becoming more and more frequent phenomena, in a world where neither science nor religion is equipped to reconcile the awesome paradox of a magical reality run by God, then it’s only a matter of time. Like all good prophets, Donnie Darko warns us, in the most entertaining fashion, to get ready. The sky’s about to open.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
All Good Things...
...come to an end
Today I posted the last episode of the Shooting the Ghost series, in which I subjected Chris to the God Game treatment, and got him to expostulate on his philosophical beliefs and his knowing about life, death, devil and christ, whether God = intelligent Universe, how to follow the signs, and what, exactly we are doing here.
Chris also talks for the first time about the rush of power he experienced while terrorizing others through acts of violence, his remorse for the people he has hurt in the past, how he has wrestled to keep his inner devil from consuming him, and what he really thinks about Jesus!
So - it's been fun, hope you;ve enjoyed the ride, till we meet again. Let me know what you thought of these Podcasts, and whether you'd like to hear more of them, if and when I meet up with Chris again.
****
On a side-note: I was just informed by my publishers that THE SECRET LIFE OF MOVIES is going to be available as an audio book. This is good news for those of you (like me) who'd balk at throwing down $40 for a book. I'll provide a link as soon as it's available.
...come to an end
Today I posted the last episode of the Shooting the Ghost series, in which I subjected Chris to the God Game treatment, and got him to expostulate on his philosophical beliefs and his knowing about life, death, devil and christ, whether God = intelligent Universe, how to follow the signs, and what, exactly we are doing here.
Chris also talks for the first time about the rush of power he experienced while terrorizing others through acts of violence, his remorse for the people he has hurt in the past, how he has wrestled to keep his inner devil from consuming him, and what he really thinks about Jesus!
So - it's been fun, hope you;ve enjoyed the ride, till we meet again. Let me know what you thought of these Podcasts, and whether you'd like to hear more of them, if and when I meet up with Chris again.
****
On a side-note: I was just informed by my publishers that THE SECRET LIFE OF MOVIES is going to be available as an audio book. This is good news for those of you (like me) who'd balk at throwing down $40 for a book. I'll provide a link as soon as it's available.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
A girl locked in a room, the prisoner of love.
An ex-stripper. She was desperate to take her child away from “the life.”
A Sicilian mobster. He would do anything to prevent his son from being taken from him.
The son: an innocent pawn caught in a tug of war between the forces of Light and Darkness!
(How dysfunctional can one family get?!)
The driver: he brought her food; he tried to mind his own business.
Just leave the food and go. Don’t talk to her. Don’t listen to her. Don’t look into her eyes.
“Help me,” she said. Two words were all it took.
He was a sociopath. A man without a conscience. When she turned to him for help, he couldn’t turn away.
He risked everything to help her.
He’s been on the run ever since.
This is the culminating true-life tale from nomad and ex-mob driver, Chris, in which we at last see his heroic side come fully to the fore. Is that you, John Wayne? The answer is yes.
It’s a tale out of a movie, hence the copy and title (taken from Chris’ favorite John Wayne film) for the latest episode of Shooting the Ghost.
Chris describes how he put his life on the line to try to help an ex-stripper and mobster’s wife get her child away from her husband and start a new life. It didn’t work, but he did what he could to make it happen. Why? Only Chris knows for sure. Some quality deep inside him, that cannot turn away from someone who needs his help; in this case, the archetypal “damsel in distress.”
In this particular scenario, few people could argue that Chris acted heroically. Based on this isolated incident, most of us would assume Chris to be a virtuous, even heroic character. Certainly anything but a “bad man.”
Yet we have already heard other, conflicting stories about Chris from his own mouth. We know he has been diagnosed as a sociopath devoid of human feeling or conscience, a man capable of torturing and maiming total strangers because of their debts to the mob. When asked how he felt about cutting people’s fingers off with garden shears, Chris replied, “It’s nothing personal.”
Most of us have a fairly standard view of what makes for virtue or depravity in a human being. We think we know what makes one man good, another bad. But such a perspective cannot encompass the mass of contradictions that Chris embodies. “By their fruit shall ye know them”? But how are we to know, or judge, a man who is as capable of acts of courage and selfless nobility as he is of savagery and base cruelty?
There doesn’t seem to be any way. It is probably futile to try. But suspending judgment is something that, as human beings, we have never learnt to do. Remaining neutral on such questions as good and evil, right and wrong, is as unthinkable to us as being impartial about what we eat, or our own pleasure and pain. The mere idea seems inhuman to us.
What if the reverse is the case? What if, in our rigid, socially imposed ideas about “good and evil,” humanity and inhumanity, we are forcing ourselves and others into a limited expression of the full spectrum of human possibilities? What if these very “moral” restrictions are what give rise to the distorted expressions of behavior we then label as “evil” and “sociopathic”?
It’s been a while since I quoted Nietzsche, but writing about Chris has led me into some old, dark waters that apparently I am not fully done with—perhaps because they are not done with us!
Here's the syphillitic one on his favorite subject, good and evil:
“One cannot be one without being the other . . . with every growth of man, his other side must grow too . . . That man must grow better and more evil is my formula for this inevitability. . . . With every increase of greatness and height in man, there is also an increase in depth and terribleness: one ought not to desire the one without the other—or, rather: the more radically one desires the one, the more radically one achieves precisely the other. . . Terribleness is part of greatness: let us not deceive ourselves.”
This piece is continued at our sister blog, the A.R.G.O.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
I was hoping to start up some occult text work on Chris' story here, provide some pointers on the archetypal narrative at play here; unfortunately life on the road (and another secret life) isn't giving me a moment to breathe. Meanwhile, here's an impromptu podcast for you all, part of a chat Chris and I had last night, about Brothers and stuff.
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