WELCOME BACK!

Hello and apologies for the gates being closed recently. The very ground we were built on was having some tectonic activity, and we simply had to wait for the lava to settle. Stronger than ever, now! I am in high spirits, having been reading The Stanley Kubrick Archives all evening last night (he confirms my suspicions: “the screenplay is the most uncommunicative form of writing ever devised” SK/1969) as well as his developmental notes on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, my favourite film of all time.

(A very old picture of me I found from 2004 by Justin Smith, above…) Other things that are making me very content in this moment are the memories of New York I have and seeing my photos of my sisters incredible apartment come together. I wish I could show you a photo, but she may send an assassin in a giant FedEx box to knife me. Instead, I’ll go on. I’m content because the air seems a little sharper and easier to breathe today. Because it’s colder than usual, and the crows are practicing their vowels (Australian crows are much different from American ones. They sound like the kind of thing that could kill a baby.)

I’m also excited to get into three scripts I found on my little brothers’ desk. He’s working at the hospital… but, he has THE best book collection ever. I found shooting scripts for I Love You, Man; Memoirs; and Bride Wars (…what!? It might be interesting.) I found my old copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and the genius A3 book that is An Index of Possibilities. A random flip through each of these books has uncovered this peppering of wisdom for you all. Under no circumstances did I search for these quotes. They came to me like foxes.

First from The Hero With a Thousand Faces…

“The meditations of the postulant have to be adjusted to his progress, so that the imagination may be defended at every step by devatas (envisioned, adequate deities) until the moment comes for the prepared spirit to step alone beyond. As Dr Jung has very wisely observed: “The incomparably useful function of the dogmatic symbol [is that] it protects a person from a direct experience of God as long as he does not mischievously expose himself. “But if…. he leaves home and family, lives too long alone, and gazes too deeply into the dark mirror, then the awful event of the meeting may befall him.” ” (Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 1949, pg 202)

Then some Kubrick…

Fifteen year old Margaret Stackhouse was a sophomore at North Plainfield High School in New Jersey when she wrote her reflections on 2001 soon after the release of the film. Her teacher forwarded her text to Stanley Kubrick, who told Jerome Agel, “Margaret Stackhouse’s speculations on the film are perhaps the most intelligent I’ve read anywhere, and I am, of course, including all the reviews and the articles that have appeared on the film and many hundreds of letters I have received. What a first-rate intelligence!” (Jerome Agel, The Making of Kubricks’s 2001, New York: Signet, 1970) (above & below text is from The Stanley Kubrick Archives, ed. Alison Castle, Taschen, 2008, p. 392)

“[...] Is all that we do in vain? Each person certainly dies without attaining all understanding. Will our race (history) also terminate and begin again, continually, with no progress ever made. Whether the movie is terribly pessimistic or optimistic depends on the answer to the question, “Does the man at the end represent just our ‘cycle’ or all ‘cycles’ for eternity?

1. Pessimistic: Man may never become more “divine” – all chances for rebirth may be merely a mockery. Irony – no matter how much man ruins his life, chances for improvement are always given. Since he will probably continue ruining his life for eternity, this may be the cruel tantalizing by some capricious god.

2. Optimistic: The preceding is impossible to believe if one assumes that there is some life-giving, life-sustaining force in the universe that is the source of absolute good. With this belief, one can hope that someday man will be able to use the divine inspiration offered to him to propagate life-sustaining forces. Probably he will never be able to understand more, but he will use his understanding better. The sunrise, fetus, etc., seem to indicate this hope. Also, it seems that, despite human stupidity, new opportunities to become sublime are always given. Someday, perhaps, man will learn that he cannot truly “live” unless he accepts the gift, in the form of the monolith, that demands human subjugation to a divine force. Then he will not be required to create, and to experience, only death.”

(Apologies for this bad scanning. One day I will have an industrial scanner, or a lovely servant just like Prince Henri has… Alfredo, where for art thou?)

Another, from An Index of Possibilities (the inspiration never stops flowing)…

The Most Successful Organism?

“We are hidden from ourselves by fixed habits of perception. Because we learn to talk at the same time that we learn to think, our language, for example, encourages us to see ourselves as a plant or animal – as an isolated sack, a thing, a contained self.

“Ecological thinking, on the other hand, requires a kind of vision across boundaries. The epidermis of the skin is ecologically like a pond surface or a forest soil, not a shell as much as a delicate interpenetration. It reveals the self enobled and extended rather than threatened as part of the landscape and ecosystem, because the beauty and complexity of nature are continuous with ourselves” (Paul Shephard and Daniel McKinley – The Subversive Science)

I must admit that the concept of the body as earth is a leaf’s width away from joining my list of things to which one could Wank Off & Die thinking about, BUT it is more the concept of human as boundless, uninhibited, unshackled to the body, which fascinates me. I patiently await the day society unclips itself from its dependence and obsession with the body, a fleshy vessel that will rot into the ground sooner or later (sorry to break it.)

However, one amazing piece of prophesizing in this book – An Index of Possibilities is the very book that inspired my Theory of the Universe about a year ago – is the following paragraph I found in the book, on “Information Energy,” mysteriously written in 1974… by a man using what powers of future-thought he had available to him… and which have surely been validated. Just look at your own position right now and what you have turned on in front of you, and you will see what I mean:

“Electronics will totally transform management by the year 2000, says Robert Sarnoff, chairman of the US-based RCA Corporation. Sarnoff outlined his vision of a future executive’s environment in a lecture to the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London in early 1974.”One of the major changes will be in the executive office, where paperwork will virtually disappear in favour of cheap and speedy electronic data storage.

“The executive will have a small data terminal on his desk, through which he can summon up any information he needs. In effect this means he can spend less time gathering information and more time acting on it. Says Sarnoff: ‘A manager is essentially and information processor who spends most of his working hours gathering and sifting information in order to make decisions. With the new integrated electronic tools, he will turn on information, just as he turns on electricity.’ ” (International Management, April 1974)

And finally… (my gosh, Gash, I have missed you.) More from Stanley Kubrick, regarding the searingly subconscious (and for some, unsettling) experience that is 2001: A Space Odyssey:

“When some critics opined that the film needed more dialogue, Kubrick replied that he had tried to work things out so that anything important in the movie was transmitted through action rather than in dialogue scenes, which account for only forty-six minutes of the film’s 139-minute running time.

“There are certain areas of feeling and reality,” Kubrick told the New York Times, “which are notably inaccessible to words. Non-verbal forms of expression such as music and painting can get at these areas, but words are a terrible straightjacket. It’s interesting how many prisoners of that straightjacket resent its being loosened.” (Gene B. Phillips, “Music in 2001: A Space Odyssey,”  The Stanley Kubrick Archives. (p 390))

I know many prisoners like this, politicians, conspiracy theorists and feminists are some such nameable groups who come to mind – all those ‘he’ and ’she’ debates, “man as X”, God is a woman! and so on. What I know matters is not the word itself, but the idea being presented, the feeling that is conveyed, not the ridiculous semantics and letter combinations dreamt up and woven into our culture and classes by older human beings who are long gone now. I say, chill.

“The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it” SK, 1968

Which brings me, at last, to the love I have right now of the state of mind,  I DON’T KNOW. What human is less hard, more open, more loving and GREAT than someone who admits they do not know everything, or even anything? I think the most wise and knowledgeable persons continually admit they know not a single thing. There is so much to absorb and learn, and just like road tripping, love affairs, life itself – there is STRONG reason to believe that learning, not knowing, is where the fun is. It’s not the getting there that blesses you with pulsations of white light and everlasting heaven and power and joy, no!! It’s the steady unfolding of time as one strives towards something. That is where happiness is. The flowing black road of night, such excitement of having someone to love and love back, the absorption and stumbling upon of more books, more concepts, more vivid bright sparks of disintegrating fuzzy patches in your brain!!!  That is what I enjoy the most. And that is what I intend to enjoy for many vivid happy years.