Wax On, Wax Off?

The Karate Kid... classic story of The Hero's Journey, for those of you familiar with Joseph Campbell. The hero is placed in an unfamiliar setting, is taken under the wing of a master of some skill, and then succeeds in proving his new skill without the help of the master. The story is a metaphor of any rite of passage into adulthood. Where do these archetypes come from?

What marks the physical rite of passage into adulthood? And how do you think the screenwriters came up with "wax on, wax off?" Wax on... wax off? Wax on...... wax off? After he refused to continue doing it, he discovered that he already possessed the desired skill- a skill he had to use responsibly.

Can you figure it out, or do I have to spill the beans?

The Last Place You Look

When people can't find something sometimes they say "It's always in the last place you look." Of course it is. That's because you found it. What kind of maniac would keep looking? Beware if you ever hear someone say, "It was in the third to last place I looked."

The Funniest Thing I Never Said

Sloth and I were at the co-op’s board meeting today with 10 Amish farmers when the subject of bin Laden’s death came up. Someone asked if we'd heard that bin Laden's father had 57 children. I thought of the funniest thing that could be said at that moment- “I had no idea bin Laden was Amish.”

But I couldn't pull the trigger, too busy trying to decide if it was appropriate or not. Just as I realized that although it was probably inappropriate it would still be acceptable, although just barely. I wanted to say it but sadly the moment had passed.

There's no doubt the place would have erupted in laughter. As it died down I could have added, “I should have known by the beard, by why didn’t he wear a straw hat?”

The Dying of the Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Did you ever realize that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s 5 stages of grief, which are generally used to deal with the death of someone close to you, also double as a guide to dealing with our own death? Poor Dylan Thomas only got to the 2nd stage.

Shock- No way will there be a dying of the light!
Anger- I rage, rage against the dying of the light!
Bargaining- Is there anyway I can avoid the dying of the light?
Depression- I’m so sad there will be a dying of the light.
Acceptance- I’ve come to live with the fact that there will indeed be a dying of the light.

I hope your thoughts on death matured after that poem buddy!

Reflections on Freedom

I find it tantalizingly strange that people who believe that we are victims of our environment tend to seem like victims of their environment, and people who believe that we are masters of our our destiny tend to seem like masters of their destiny.

Maybe we are both victims of our environment, and masters of our own destiny, the same as we are both physical (our body) and non-physical (our thoughts.) And maybe we belong to each category in proportion to how much we believe we belong to each category.

Perhaps our bodies are victims of our environment because they belong to our environment, and perhaps our minds are masters of our own destiny because they are not of the physical world.

The physical world effects our minds and helps shape them, but perhaps in the realm of pure thought we are free.

You know, like the guy in this song:



Or the guy in this vat:

http://www.sechumscm.org/WhereAmI.html

Or the guy who wrote these words, sitting inside on a lovely spring Saturday afternoon. Time to go become part of the environment.

Anyone For Barbecue???

I walked outside of our office and smelled the delicious smell of some barbecued meat. We're kind of secluded so I wondered where it was coming from.

For some reason I remembered a time a few months ago when a customer asked me if it was creepy working so near a funeral home. I didn't know what she was talking about. She pointed to a small building maybe 300 yards away and told me it was the crematorium.

I wished I hadn't remembered that- I looked over and saw smoke rising out of the small crematorium chimney and it was blowing right toward us. Thus, barbecued meat.

On the Ephemerality of Life and the Immortal Nature of Transcendence

Elizabeth Taylor died today, and I can’t shake the feeling that she’s not really dead. After watching several minutes of Giant there is no question that she is as luminous as she ever was, even moreso. When I read Henry Miller it’s as if he’s speaking to me. The Carter Family still sings for me. It seems like they’ve bridged some gap. Those in the arts invest themselves in their craft. After they are gone and their work remains, are they somehow still with us?

Look at this picture.



No, she’s not dead. She’s very alive.

Joseph Campbell said that in all cultures a god is “a symbol of transcendence and mystery.” Is Elizabeth Taylor a goddess? Look at that picture again. She is certainly a symbol of transcendence and mystery, and beauty. Aphrodite incarnate. Is that the reason they call actors and actresses “stars”- because like gods, they reside in the heavens? Should we rename the constellations? Instead of Leo the Lion, perhaps Maggie the Cat?

(The Gemini Twins could become The Shining Twins, but I somehow don’t see that catching on.)

No, let’s take a step back- Elizabeth Taylor is not a goddess. That’s ridiculous. She was flesh-and-blood, “one of us.” That’s a fact, but are facts important?

After watching several minutes of my first Herzog film, Even Dwarfs Started Small, I had to take a break. The world was magic. I took a bike ride and couldn’t get the phrase “a strange ecstasy” out of my mind. It repeated over and over. Later I read that Herzog’s goal with every film was to reveal “an ecstatic truth.” He often succeeds, but how? How can a fictional story reveal some great truth about our experience in the real world?

Jane Goodall once told Campbell about a band of chimpanzees “going bananas” after hearing a huge thunder clap. They all started charging in mock displays of aggression. He recognized their behavior as a basic form of religion- realization of transcendence and mystery (in the form of thunder) as a genesis for ritual behavior. Campbell believes this recognition is the dawn of humanity. (Remember the obelisk in 2001?) The chimps’ god was fictional, but would it lessen their experience to learn that the thunder can be explained scientifically?

Herzog does not believe in the difference between fact and fiction in film. He’s made many documentaries and many fiction films and says he can not tell the difference between them. For documentaries he has staged shots and written dialogue. For fiction films he has cast non-actors as leads and actually drug a boat up over a mountain. These strategies have only added to the power of his films.

In Even Dwarfs Started Small his cast was made up of what would have in times past been called sideshow freaks. They each have their own distinct look. Their bodies are deviations from the norm, but they each possess a strange beauty. I’m not sure that any are presented with a single redeeming quality, and some are monsters- but still each scene possesses transcendence and mystery.

Campbell spoke of some monsters that, although evil, were still sublime. Bukowski comes to mind. Maybe Bukowski was a monster- his poetry, although perfectly capturing all of the foul horridness of the human condition, is still somehow sublime. Like Herzog with film, many of Bukowski’s poems capture some ecstatic truth. Were his poems real, were they factual? Does it matter?

Bukowski was ugly and Elizabeth Taylor was beautiful. They might be facts, but he thought she was the ugliest woman he’d ever seen- the 25-year-old Elizabeth Taylor! An aberration to an aberration I suppose. (History doesn’t record how Elizabeth Taylor felt about Bukowski’s attractiveness… I suppose we can only speculate.) Want to hear Bukowski rant about how ugly Elizabeth Taylor is? Watch this:



Maybe she was a monster. Or maybe Bukowski had a bit too much to drink. Or maybe we’re all monsters. And maybe we’re all sublime. We’re all facts and symbols- our true selves versus the way people see us.

Kachina dancers of the Hopi Indians are both real and not real- the members of the tribe know that the dancer is their buddy in a costume, but the fact doesn’t matter, the symbol matters. The kachina dancer is treated as the god he symbolizes. During the dance they are that god.

I’ve heard Christians say that it doesn’t matter whether Jesus ever existed, what matters is that they follow his example. Exactly, the symbol is important, the fact is meaningless.

Religions fail when they see themselves as fact. They succeed when they acknowledge themselves as symbol. Black Elk, when speaking of a vision he had concerning the Sioux’s defeat of Custer saw himself on the “sacred, central mountain of the world,” referring to Harney Peak in South Dakota, and he added, “but the central mountain is everywhere.” Campbell saw this as a recognition of the symbolic nature of their own myths. They were true to the Sioux, but the myths of other cultures could also be true.

Recognizing their symbolic nature does not make religions false, as many adherents believe. All religions can become true by recognizing the true nature of their essence. Through symbol they satisfy not Christian, Native American or Ancient Greek psychological needs, but rather human psychological needs- answers to the universal questions- “What happened to my friend after he died?,” “What will happen when I die?,” and “How should I live my life?”

Recognizing their symbolic nature also answers the question “Would have I still been a Christian if I was born before Jesus's time on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean?” In fact, no. In symbol, yes- because what Jesus symbolizes pre-dates Christianity, and transcends culture.

Many religions’ fear of becoming extinct causes them to cling to facts. Ironically, their facts prohibit them from adapting- and that which doesn’t adapt, dies. A Christianity that recognizes the Bible as a symbol is the only one that can survive. (This leaves room for debate on whether it should survive.)

Of course, in the past I’ve completely underestimated humanity’s power for accepting cognitive dissonance. We can’t avert our eyes when looking at the similar archetypes that run through all cultures, can we?

Herzog has said “the poet can not avert his eyes” when one has the urge to turn away from current pop culture. He continued “This is why I watch the Anna Nicole Smith Show.” I used this quote recently as a challenge for a friend to watch Rebecca Black’s video “Friday.” The challenge was denied. The reason offered was- “No man can live up to the words of Herzog, so I'll accept no challenge. You speak of a demigod.”



A demigod? I agreed. Then someone said- “For a man with no religion, Ben sure has a lot of gods.” I suppose I do. There are many who I see as symbols of transcendence and mystery. Are they gods? Yes, if that’s your definition. Are they people? Yes, in fact.

Am I an atheist? If the question is whether God is a fact, then yes, I’m an atheist. If the question is whether God is a symbol, then nobody is. Watch this:



“Wow,” is right. Was I just hit by Zeus’s lightning bolt?

What symbolizes me? I’m somewhat renowned among my friends for my list of 600 favorite films. I recently whittled it back down to 100, and I know that when I die someone could watch those films and have a pretty good idea of who I was. The life that art reflects is the same life I see in myself, and the same life all of us have in ourselves.

Herzog is the reality, his films are the symbol of him, and they will live on after he’s gone- the way the films lived on for Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and the rest. Those men are still here with us- not their consciousness, but their essence. By sharing their essense they helped us recognize those same qualities in ourselves.

What does it mean to be human? To recognize transcendence. What does it mean to be a god? To transcend. An Onion headline today read “Gorgeous 25-Year-Old Dead at 79.” That says it all.