Showing posts with label 1984. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1984. Show all posts

Wednesday 14 December 2022

Yeah, You Just Keep Telling Yourself That....

 





Chapter 7 

 Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been 'What's the matter?'

'I dreamt--' he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.

He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable distances. The dream had also been comprehended by -- indeed, in some sense it had consisted in -- a gesture of the arm made by His Mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blew them both to pieces.

'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed I had murdered My Mother?'

'Why did you murder her?' said Julia, almost asleep.

'I didn't murder her. Not physically.'

In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of His Mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened.

His Father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he could not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance -- above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. 

He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.

When His Father disappeared, His Mother did not show any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that was needed -- cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece -- always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. 

For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing His Young Sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying anything

He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned Thing that was about to happen.

He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a gas ring in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He remembered His Mother's statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something in a saucepan. 

Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles at mealtimes. 

He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of His Voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his share. 

His Mother was quite ready to give him more than his share. She took it for granted that he, 'The Boy', should have the biggest portion; but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that His Little Sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. 

He would cry out with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from His Sister's plate. 

He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify him. 

Between meals, if His Mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.

One day a chocolate ration was issued. There had been no such issue for weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days) between the three of them. 

It was obvious that it ought to be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in a loud booming voice that he should be given the whole piece. 

His Mother told him not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings. His Tiny Sister, clinging to Her Mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. 

In the end His Mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave it to Winston, giving the other quarter to His Sister. The little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was

Winston stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate out of His Sister's hand and was fleeing for the door.

'Winston, Winston!' His Mother called after him. 'Come back! Give Your Sister back Her Chocolate!'

He stopped, but did not come back. His Mother's anxious eyes were fixed on His Face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was that was on the point of happening. 

His Sister, conscious of having been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His Mother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in the gesture told him that His Sister was dying. He turned and fled down the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.

He never saw His Mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several hours, until hunger drove him Home. 

When he came back His Mother had disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time. Nothing was gone from the room except His Mother and His Sister. They had not taken any clothes, not even His Mother's overcoat. To this day he did not know with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a forced-labour camp. As for His Sister, she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies for homeless children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which had grown up as a result of the civil war, or she might have been sent to the labour camp along with His Mother, or simply left somewhere or other to die.

The Dream was still vivid in His Mind, especially the enveloping protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained. His Mind went back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as His Mother had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water.

He told Julia The Story of His Mother's Disappearance. Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.

'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,' she said indistinctly. 'All children are swine.'

'Yes. But the real point of The Story----'

From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again. He would have liked to continue talking about His Mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her Feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, His Mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that The Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over The Material World. When once you were in the grip of The Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of History. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter History. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to A Party or A Country or An Idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate The World. The proles had stayed Human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.

'The proles are Human Beings,' he said aloud. 'We are not Human.'

'Why not?' said Julia, who had woken up again.

He thought for a little while. 'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here before it's too late, and never see each other again?'

'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm not going to do it, all the same.'

'We've been lucky,' he said 'but it can't last much longer. You're young. You look normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people like me, you might Stay Alive for another fifty years.'

'No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to do. And don't be too downhearted. I'm rather good at Staying Alive.'

'We may be together for another six months -- a year -- there's no knowing. At the end we're certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off Your Death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without Power of any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although even that can't make the slightest difference.'

'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you.'

'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter : only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you -- that would be the real betrayal.'

She thought it over. 'They can't do that,' she said finally. 'It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything -- ANYTHING -- but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.'

'No,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite true. They can't get inside you. If you can FEEL that staying Human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.'

He thought of The TeleScreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit Them. With all Their cleverness they had never mastered The Secret of finding out What Another Human Being was Thinking. 

Perhaps that was less True when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened inside The Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess : tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning. 

Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. 

But if the object was not to Stay Alive but to Stay Human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter Your Feelings : for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable. 
 

Sunday 23 October 2022

The Architecture of Belief : Two Tribes



PSY-434 - Maps of Meaning
The Architecture of Belief

“…and The Thing about Familiar Territory for us is,
most of the Familiar Territory that you inhabit
most of the time — is Other People.


Lecture: 2017 Maps of Meaning 01: Context and Background


“In this lecture, I discuss The Context within which 
The Theory I am delineating through 
this course emergedthat of The Cold War

What is Belief? 
Why is it so important to people? 
Why will they fight to protect it? 

I propose that Belief unites a culture's 
Expectations and Desires 
with The Actions of it's People
and that the match between those two 
allows for cooperative action 
and maintains emotional stability

I suggest, further, that Culture 
has a deep narrative structure
presenting The World as 
A Forum for Action, with characters 
representing The Individual, 
The Known, and The Unknown --
-- or The Individual, Culture and Nature --
-- or The Individual, Order and Chaos.”




Wednesday 28 September 2022

Fat Old Sun












"Kirby could throw away in one single panel a high concept that would keep others busy for years : Crippled Vietnam War veteran Willie Walker became the vessel for The New God of Death — a black man in full armor hurtling through walls and space on skis. The Black Racer was a twist on Kirby’s original idea for the Silver Surfer, here as an angel of Death, not Life. The Mother Box, a living, emotionally nurturing, personal computer was the fusion of soul and machine carried by all the inhabitants of New Genesis. Metron the amoral science god with his dimension-traveling Mobius chair. The Source was for Kirby the ultimate ground of being, like the Ain Soph Aur of Judaic mysticism, beyond gods, beyond all divisions and definitions. Genetic manipulation, media control, the roots of Fascism — Kirby was on fire and had something new to say about everything under the sun.

  The Fourth World cycle was to be a great interlocking mechanism of books combining to form a complete modern myth, while, as an afterthought, re-creating the very idea of the superhero from the ground up and infusing it with Divinity. It might have run for five more years.

  But then The Fourth World spun off its axis. Carmine Infantino, promoted to DC’s vice president, allegedly looked at sales figures and canceled the books, which were doing well enough but not as well as had been hoped based on Kirby’s name. The King was hit hard, and The World lost the conclusion to a Great Work. He went on to create more titles, of course. Hundreds more original, quirky stories burst from that relentless mind, but the great mythographer had been thwarted in the midst of his masterpiece, brought down by dark forces and jealous gods. Kirby’s personal vision, his avalanche of novelty and energy, was too new for a culture in retreat, looking back to the fifties, dreaming of sock hops and ponytails, in the happy days before ’Nam and Richard Nixon.

  When Kirby returned in 1985, older and more wary, to complete his story, he was given only sixty pages to wrap up a saga that warranted thousands more. Imagine God halfway through Exodus having to hurry it up. The Hunger Dogs showed the passage of time and the footprints left by the relentless march of cynicism. Still The King delivered. As a dreadful elegy for the hopes of the baby boomers and the stark truth of their lives—growing older, facing Reagan and Thatcher — The Hunger Dogs, Kirby’s completion of The Story, was bleak, unforgettable, and in many ways the only perfect end to The Fourth World saga.

  But by the time it was released, Kirby’s hand-to-eye coordination had deteriorated significantly, making some pages appear ugly and rough-hewn. A more generous approach might imagine the artist embracing a new primitivism, a shorthand in which scale and perspective played second fiddle to the immediate expression of the ideas. But too many of the drawings were doodles that told the story with the barest minimum of effort. And his audience had flown. Fashion had passed him by. He was “Jack the Hack” now, an old man mocked and derided by the same people who had hailed his genius twenty years earlier and would again ten years later.

  The Epic had stalled and, like the great Aquarian youth revolution that had inspired so much of it, unraveled into world-weary cynicism. The Forever People had all grown up, gone bald, got jobs, and given up the struggle for a future among the stars. But Kirby had one final trick, one last visionary warning to leave his readers : A new superhero saga that would jump so far into The Future that it’s still reverberating and is more relevant today than it was when it was published to little acclaim in 1974...."

Sunday 18 September 2022

Steve Trevor is MY Hero (still.)


Diana :
[mouthing] 
Oh, my God. It’s you
I missed you.

Diana :
So What Do You Remember?

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
I remember… I remember 
taking the plane up…

Diana :
Mmm-hmm.

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
and thennothing, really. Nothing
But somehow, I know 
I’ve been someplace since then. 
Someplace that’s, uh… 
I can’t really put words to it. 
But it’s… It’s good

And then I, uh… 
I woke up here.

Diana :
Where?

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
I ended up in a bed. Uh… Strange, 
strange pillow bed with slats.

Diana :
A futon, yeah.

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
A futon? Yeah. Well, not comfortable
And really a bit backwards 
if I’m being really honest with you. 
I mean, for a futuristic time like this. 
Nineteen… Eighty-four. 1984.

[both sigh]

[Passenger-Jet airplane passing]

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
That’s amazing
[Steve chuckles in astonishment]

[Diana laughing joyously]

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
Would you like to 
see my futon?

[kicks]

[door closes]

[objects clattering]

[Diana gasps]

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
Yeah. Um… You don’t have to tell me. 
The Place is a mess. Cheese on demand. 
I spent all morning cleaning His Bedroom
but he seems to me to be An Engineer. 
Lots of pictures of himself. 
Not what I would do, 
but to each his own.

Diana :
Oh, so this is how you found me.

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
Yeah, The Phone Book. 
I guess some things 
are just future-proof.

Diana :
So you went to My Apartment?

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
Yeah, I tried to use the bike at first. 
(it's an exercise bike)
I couldn’t really figure out how to get it going, 
so I ran over and saw you come back. 

And I was stunned. There you were
So I just, uh… followed you, like a creep. 
Diana, look at you. It’s… 
It’s like not one day has passed.

Diana :
I can’t say the same thing about you.

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
[sighs] Right, right, right. 

Right. Yeah, he’s, uh… 
He’s got it. [laughing
No, I like him.

He’s great, but all I see is you.



[groaning]
[laughing]
[sighs]
[gasps]

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
Hi.

Diana :
Come here.

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
Good Morning.

[Diana hums happily]

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
Been eating Pop-Tarts all morning, 
and I’ve had about three pots of coffee. 
This Place is amazing. [laughing]

Diana :
'This Place'?

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
Yeah. You know, if I really think about it, 
I don’t think I’ve ever been 
in a room more amazing.

Diana :
It’s True.

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
Yeah.

Diana :
This Room is the most amazing place 
I’ve ever been in, in my entire life.

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
It’s the most amazing place, right?

Diana :
So let’s stay. We shouldn’t go.

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
I really don’t want to.

Diana :
So, let’s not.

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
Okay.

Diana :
Let’s just stay here.

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
Let’s just stay here.

Diana : 
Forever

Although
(nose wrinkles
I should probably go and figure out 
How a Stone brought My Boyfriend 
back from The Dead in 
Someone Else’s body.

[Steve breathing heavily]

[Diana humming]

Steve Trevor's Ghost :
....that’s a fair point. Let’s go.

Wednesday 31 August 2022

1984
















In Xanadu did 
Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river
ran
Through caverns 
measureless to Man
Down to a sunless sea.



Wonder Woman 1984 
Welcome to The Pleasuredome


Life goes on day after day, 
after day, after day
Who-ha who-ha
Who-ha who-ha
Ha

The animals are winding me up
The jungle call
The jungle call
Who-ha who-ha 
who-ha who-ha

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A pleasure dome erect
Moving on keep moving on, yeah
Moving at one million miles an hour

Using my power
I sell it by the hour
I have it so I market it
You really can't afford it, yeah
Really can't afford it

Shooting stars never stop
Even when they reach the top
Shooting stars never stop
Even when they reach the top
There goes a supernova
What a pushover, yeah
There goes a supernova
What a pushover

We're a long way from home
Welcome to the Pleasure dome
On our way home
Going home where lovers roam
Long way from home
Welcome to the Pleasure dome

Moving on, keep moving on
I will give you diamonds by the shower
Love your body even when it's old
Do it just as only I can do it
And never, ever doing what I'm told

Shooting stars never stop
Even when they reach the top, yeah
Shooting stars never stop
Even when they reach the top

There goes a supernova
What a pushover, yeah
There goes a supernova
What a pushover

We're a long way from home
Welcome to the pleasure dome
On our way home
Going home where lovers roam
Long way from home
Welcome to the pleasure dome

Keep moving on
Gotta reach the top
Don't stop
Lay lovin' light, all mine
Keep moving on
Yeah

Shooting stars never stop
Shooting stars never stop
Shooting stars never stop
Even when they reach the top
There goes a supernova
What a pushover

Shooting stars never stop
Even when they reach the top
There goes a supernova
What a pushover
There goes a supernova
Who-ha who-ha
Welcome to the pleasure dome
Who-ha who-ha
Going home where lovers roam

Who-ha who-ha
Welcome to The Pleasurdonee dome
Who-ha who-ha
War is won
Who-ha who-ha
War is won
Uh, uh, uh
Boy, boy, boy
Uh, uh, uh
Keep moving on
Gotta reach the top
Don't stop

Layin' love in lines, all mine
Keep moving on, oh yeah
Shooting stars never stop
Shooting stars never stop
Shooting stars never stop

Who-ha who-ha
There goes a supernova
Who-ha who-ha
What a pushover
Shooting stars never stop
Even when they reach the top
Shooting stars never stop
Even when they reach the top
Shooting stars never stop
Even when they reach the top
Shooting stars never stop
Even when they reach the top
There goes a supernova
What a pushover
There goes a supernova
What a pushover, yeah

Ha, we're a long way from home
Welcome to the Pleasuredome
On your way home
Going home where lovers roam
Long way from home
Welcome to the pleasure dome (who-ha who-ha)
(Who-ha who-ha)

We're a long way from home
Welcome to the Pleasuredome
Welcome

The world is my oyster
Ha ha ha ha ha

The world is my oyster
Ha ha ha ha ha

The world is my oyster
Ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha ha ha

Welcome





  "In 1984, I started down the same road as Descartes. I did not know it was the same road at the time, and I am not claiming kinship with Descartes, who is rightly regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. But I was truly plagued with doubt. I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory. After that, I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to me as an alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do.

  I was simultaneously tormented by the fact of the Cold War. It obsessed me. It gave me nightmares. It drove me into the desert, into the long night of the human soul. I could not understand how it had come to pass that the world’s two great factions aimed mutual assured destruction at each other. Was one system just as arbitrary and corrupt as the other? Was it a mere matter of opinion? Were all value structures merely the clothing of power?

  Was everyone crazy?

  Just exactly what happened in the twentieth century, anyway? How was it that so many tens of millions had to die, sacrificed to the new dogmas and ideologies? How was it that we discovered something worse, much worse, than the aristocracy and corrupt religious beliefs that communism and fascism sought so rationally to supplant? No one had answered those questions, as far as I could tell. Like Descartes, I was plagued with doubt. I searched for one thing—anything—I could regard as indisputable. I wanted a rock upon which to build my house. It was doubt that led me to it.

  I once read of a particularly insidious practice at Auschwitz. A guard would force an inmate to carry a hundred-pound sack of wet salt from one side of the large compound to the other—and then to carry it back. Arbeit macht frei, said the sign over the camp entrance—“Work will set you free”—and the freedom was death. Carrying the salt was an act of pointless torment. It was a piece of malevolent art. It allowed me to realize with certainty that some actions are wrong.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, definitively and profoundly, about the horrors of the twentieth century, the tens of millions who were stripped of employment, family, identity and life. In his Gulag Archipelago, in the second part of the second volume, he discussed the Nuremburg trials, which he considered the most significant event of the twentieth century. The conclusion of those trials? There are some actions that are so intrinsically terrible that they run counter to the proper nature of human Being. This is true essentially, cross-culturally—across time and place. These are evil actions. No excuses are available for engaging in them. To dehumanize a fellow being, to reduce him or her to the status of a parasite, to torture and to slaughter with no consideration of individual innocence or guilt, to make an art form of pain—that is wrong.

  What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments. Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics cannot escape from its reality. Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That became the cornerstone of my belief. Searching through the lowest reaches of human thought and action, understanding my own capacity to act like a Nazi prison guard or a gulag archipelago trustee or a torturer of children in a dungeon, I grasped what it meant to “take the sins of the world onto oneself.” Each human being has an immense capacity for evil. Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not. And if there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced—then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening.

 Meaning as the Higher Good


  It was from this that I drew my fundamental moral conclusions. Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency—your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You’ve fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.

  Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering. You have now placed at the pinnacle of your moral hierarchy a set of presuppositions and actions aimed at the betterment of Being. Why? Because we know the alternative. The alternative was the twentieth century. The alternative was so close to Hell that the difference is not worth discussing. And the opposite of Hell is Heaven. To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. That’s a state, and a state of mind, at the same time.

  Jung observed that the construction of such a moral hierarchy was inevitable—although it could remain poorly arranged and internally self-contradictory. For Jung, whatever was at the top of an individual’s moral hierarchy was, for all intents and purposes, that person’s ultimate value, that person’s god. It was what the person acted out. It was what the person believed most deeply. Something enacted is not a fact, or even a set of facts. Instead, it’s a personality—or, more precisely, a choice between two opposing personalities. It’s Sherlock Holmes or Moriarty. It’s Batman or the Joker. It’s Superman or Lex Luthor, Charles Francis Xavier or Magneto, and Thor or Loki. It’s Abel or Cain—and it’s Christ or Satan. If it’s working for the ennobling of Being, for the establishment of Paradise, then it’s Christ. If it’s working for the destruction of Being, for the generation and propagation of unnecessary suffering and pain, then it’s Satan. That’s the inescapable, archetypal reality.

  Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It’s short-term gain. It’s narrow, and selfish. It lies to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It’s immature and irresponsible. Meaning is its mature replacement. Meaning emerges when impulses are regulated, organized and unified. Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed at the betterment of Being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining. It will provide the antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make everything better.

  If you act properly, your actions allow you to be psychologically integrated now, and tomorrow, and into the future, while you benefit yourself, your family, and the broader world around you. Everything will stack up and align along a single axis. Everything will come together. This produces maximal meaning. This stacking up is a place in space and time whose existence we can detect with our ability to experience more than is simply revealed here and now by our senses, which are obviously limited to their information-gathering and representational capacity. Meaning trumps expedience. Meaning gratifies all impulses, now and forever. That’s why we can detect it.

  If you decide that you are not justified in your resentment of Being, despite its inequity and pain, you may come to notice things you could fix to reduce even by a bit some unnecessary pain and suffering. You may come to ask yourself, “What should I do today?” in a manner that means “How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?” Such tasks may announce themselves as the pile of undone paperwork that you could attend to, the room that you could make a bit more welcoming, or the meal that could be a bit more delicious and more gratefully delivered to your family.

  You may find that if you attend to these moral obligations, once you have placed “make the world better” at the top of your value hierarchy, you experience ever-deepening meaning. It’s not bliss. It’s not happiness. It is something more like atonement for the criminal fact of your fractured and damaged Being. It’s payment of the debt you owe for the insane and horrible miracle of your existence. It’s how you remember the Holocaust. It’s how you make amends for the pathology of history. It’s adoption of the responsibility for being a potential denizen of Hell. It is willingness to serve as an angel of Paradise.

  Expedience—that’s hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That’s covering the blood you just spilled with a carpet. That’s avoiding responsibility. It’s cowardly, and shallow, and wrong. It’s wrong because mere expedience, multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon. It’s wrong because expedience merely transfers the curse on your head to someone else, or to your future self, in a manner that will make your future, and the future generally, worse instead of better.

  There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient. There is no careful observation that actions and presuppositions matter, or that the world is made of what matters. To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord. You can set up the preconditions, you can follow meaning, when it manifests itself, but you cannot simply produce it, as an act of will. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.

  What is expedient works only for the moment. It’s immediate, impulsive and limited. What is meaningful, by contrast, is the organization of what would otherwise merely be expedient into a symphony of Being. Meaning is what is put forth more powerfully than mere words can express by Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a triumphant bringing forth from the void of pattern after pattern upon beautiful pattern, every instrument playing its part, disciplined voices layered on top of that, spanning the entire breadth of human emotion from despair to exhilaration.

  Meaning is what manifests itself when the many levels of Being arrange themselves into a perfectly functioning harmony, from atomic microcosm to cell to organ to individual to society to nature to cosmos, so that action at each level beautifully and perfectly facilitates action at all, such that past, present and future are all at once redeemed and reconciled. Meaning is what emerges beautifully and profoundly like a newly formed rosebud opening itself out of nothingness into the light of sun and God. Meaning is the lotus striving upward through the dark lake depths through the ever-clearing water, blooming forth on the very surface, revealing within itself the Golden Buddha, himself perfectly integrated, such that the revelation of the Divine Will can make itself manifest in his every word and gesture.

  Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose—the glorification of a reality so that no matter how good it has suddenly become, it can get better and better and better more and more deeply forever into the future. Meaning happens when that dance has become so intense that all the horrors of the past, all the terrible struggle engaged in by all of life and all of humanity to that moment becomes a necessary and worthwhile part of the increasingly successful attempt to build something truly Mighty and Good.

  Meaning is the ultimate balance between, on the one hand, the chaos of transformation and possibility and on the other, the discipline of pristine order, whose purpose is to produce out of the attendant chaos a new order that will be even more immaculate, and capable of bringing forth a still more balanced and productive chaos and order. Meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that.

  Do What is Meaningful, not What is Expedient.









“I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years and not all of 'em was good.”

He once said, "How do you get all of that"... meaning the Holocaust... "into a two-hour movie?" I think he found the Holocaust of such evil magnitude that he just couldn't bring himself to treat it directly, which is why he used the form of a horror film to treat it indirectly. I believe Kubrick, possibly consciously, has solved a kind of problem that history has, which is that it's very hard for many people to connect emotionally to a gigantic big k*ll we hear about in the past. People who don't have direct family experience of it themselves may hear the statistic. You know, h*tler, among other things, k*ll 6 million Jews in his Holocaust. 6 million's a number too big. I mean Stalin is reputed to have said, you know, "You k*ll one person, it's a m*rder and a tragedy. "You k*ll a million people, it's a statistic." He was talking about a psychological fact. And, you know, Stalin himself was... what is it... starved about 3 million people in the western Ukraine in the '30s on purpose. My point is it may be that Kubrick was conscious of having offered a kind of way to bridge that inability to feel for those gigantic statistics in that, if you go and see The Shining innocent the first time and are terrified... you're just terrified and you'll always remember being terrified... and then go back aware of what the symbolism and the general larger pattern meanings of the movie are, then you can begin to make something of a connection, saying, "Oh, my God." I remember being terrified for the individual little Danny and Wendy here. And that feeling is actually being... is for people who are symbols of v*ctim of all kinds of horrendous genocides. And of course, his wife has subsequently talked about, you know, how close he came to making his Holocaust movie, The Aryan Papers, but that he got mom and mom and more depressed and was relieved when he had an excuse not to do it. He used Schindler's List as saying, "Ah, it's already been done." I mean, that struck a bell with me. And I've done a lot of stories as a journalist about people who study... either talked to people who are v*ctim of horrors or study it. And there's... Freud talked about it as the contagion. The depression seeps into you. It's... you know what... Kubrick had a wonderful comment about this when somebody asked him. "Isn't it true that your movies are showing us "just the horrendous side of humanity. You know, that's awful bleak." And Kubrick said, "Ah, but there's something very positive about it as well. "And that is, it shows at the very least that we can get our minds around what that horror is." And Danny, from the beginning, has his mind all over the problem. He's looking at it. In a way, Danny's big wheeling back and forth, up and down the hallways... Danny is learning that hotel. He's learning all the horrors. He's seeing them. But they're just in the past, and Hallorann gave him the secret. He said, "Remember, Danny." Remember what Tony tells him. Remember what Mr. Hallorann said: "They're just like pictures in a book. They're not real." Now, that's a really important lesson. People who shine, who see through history, understand that the past simply does not exist except in one place. And that's the present tense instant of the mind, remembering. That is, exactly... that is a place you can go to somehow and yet it doesn't exist. And so Hallorann tells Danny, "You're gonna see some horrible things." Apparently, he told him. "You're gonna see some horrible things, "but remember, they're not real. "They're like pictures in a book. They no longer exist." That's a key to not getting depressed about it. And that's... You see, this is a movie about what the past... how the past impinges, any past, and about how to get over that and how not to be a v*ctim of history. You know, if you doubt what I've written about it, just go see the movie. I've figured all this out from just seeing the movie. It's there. It's obvious, and most people who went and saw the movie said, "Oh, my goodness. It IS there."