I’m on Lecture 14 of Solomon’s lecture series, No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life. (Still on sale. )

For this lecture, I read the first part of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. I highlighted a whole bunch of stuff I’ll try and make sense of that later. I’ve read Crime and Punishment several times and just read Brothers Karamazov last August. I think that’s all I’ve read by Dostoevsky.

I also bought Kafka’s Metamorphoses, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories intending to just read Metamorphosis, but got totally engrossed and ended up reading the entire book. (This is all I’ve ever ready by Kafka but definitely want to read a novel or two now.)

“Metamorphosis” is heart wrenching!! Just way to close to home - the idea that you completely deny who it is you are and what you are passionate about in order to fulfill a duty, only to find out that your existence was completely reliant upon fulfilling that duty AND that in the fulfilling of that duty, you were incapacitating others around you as well. (Probably a shallow reading, but that’s what I took away from it.) What’s interesting is that the Underground Man in Dostoevsky’s Notes says he can’t even turn into an insect. Yet here Gregor Samsa turns into a monstrous vermin that seems to resemble a huge insect of some sort. (But I’ll try to make sense of that later.)

I also just finished reading Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. I read Siddhartha several years ago and in 2005 I read Demian. Besides Willa Cather and Ray Bradbury, he may very well be my favorite author! Steppenwolf, the movie, is available to “watch now” on Netflix, so I did. I think it stayed fairly true to the novel, but I found it incredibly annoying. I didn’t envision the characters in the same way or the events as being quite so “big”. But it’s probably worth watching. (Not sure how much you’d get out of it if you haven’t read the novel, though.)

I think what I relate to most in Hesse novels is the idea that as a child, there was a “wild side” that our dutiful parents felt had to be beaten out of us which left us with a split that is very difficult to reconcile. (My biggest concern in elementary school, junior high, high school, and well into my 20s with remnants that show up here and there now was that I wasn’t “sweet” enough. I woke up every day praying to God that he’d make me “sweet”. But I was far too inquisitive to be sweet!)

I highlighted a ton from Steppenwolf, too. But this post is supposed to be about Solomon’s ideas on these writers so in true form of a child who has had the wild side almost totally beaten out of her, here are my notes…

Dostoevsky anticipates some central themes in Heideggers works. In Notes from Underground, we are introduced to an unlikable character. Spite and resentment characterizes everything he does. The central theme is that of freedom and free will. Dostoevsky is attacking the enlightenment and the idea that people can improve themselves (which is something Nietzsche also attacks). And he attacks the idea that people can have free choice in a way that it leads to happiness.

Dostoevsky shows that freedom and happiness are opposed. Happiness is very often the absence of freedom. Dostoevsky attacks the entire Enlightenment. What he specifically attacks is the idea that we can create a society that will make everyone happy. But what gets left out with this idea is our personal freedom. What is most important to us is our free will. But in so far as we go along with the plans that are supposed to make us happy, what we loose is our freedom. The Underground Man sees being spiteful as a philosophical freedom, not a character deficiency.

Freedom is a good in it’s own right, it is the most important benefit that we have. Joining and sacrificing freedom for the grand plan of society is to render us inhuman.

In The Idiot, Dostoevsky challenges the assumption that a person who is “very good” will contribute to the well-being of society. Aristotle, Christianity (through the idea of following Jesus’ example) and the Enlightenment all subscribe to this idea: the better the person, the better society. In contrast, the main character of The Idiot, by doing good, makes everybody’s lives terrible. The consequences of goodness are not always good themselves.

Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky’s crowning achievement. The main concern of the novel is nihilism which Dostoevsky is radically against (as is Nietzsche and Kierkegaard - nihilism was taking over Europe during their time.) Ivan has represented the Enlightenment philosophy and represents the nihilistic principles. Through Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha - we see the whole spectrum of society with Ivan caught in the middle.

The idea that freedom is central to Christianity is something Dostoevsky wants to throw into question. This isn’t just a religious problem, it’s a dilemma of humanity writ large. He shows this through the Grand Inquisitor who is stunned by Jesus’ reappearance. He decides Jesus has to go because what Christianity has done over the past 1400 years is succeeded in making people happy. They are happy at the hopes it raises, in being saved, in being in the shadow of Jesus who has not yet appeared. But with the appearance of Jesus, people now have to face reality. Given the choice between freedom and happiness, the Grand Inquisitor says people will always choose happiness. So in the end, Jesus is re-crucified.

The same story is presented in Crime and Punishment. A man commits a brutal crime under the spell of nihilism - there is nothing worth obeying. Although the crime itself is petty, the man is haunted by a deep guilt. In Brothers Karamazov, Ivan said that if there is no God, then everything is permitted. But what we get from Ivan is a picture of nihilism at it’s absolute worst. Ivan’s world is a world that entirely depended upon God for it’s values and depended upon God for the authority for us to obey those values - and it had cast off that God. If we are dependent upon this God, then it follows that without this God we are left with nothing. Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were against this sort of nihilistic thinking. This is why Nietzsche said “God is dead and we have killed him”. Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky think this dependence on an abstract God is hugely problematic.

The absurd is taken to spectacular heights in Kafka. The novella, Metamorphosis, is likely his most spectacular work. It deals with self-identity. In this story, the body is thoroughly changed, but the mind remains exactly as it is. Samsa has to cope with this change. He has to work with his horrible effect on his family. Kafka explores how our self-identity is construed by our body, but especially by our role in society and especially how other people treat us. His family comes to despise him and hate him. (What happens when you redefine the role in your family?)

Kafka’s The Trial sets the stage for Camus’ trial for Mersault in The Stranger. The idea is that we are all essentially guilty and it doesn’t have to do with any particular crime, there may be no crime at all. Just being human, just being conscious, makes us guilty. Consciousness is not just a blessing, it is also a disease. It allows us to see ourselves as inadequate creatures. With that self-consciousness comes not only guilt, but despair. If we say something is Kafkaesque, what we mean is that something is not only absurd, but also upsetting to our very notion of ourselves as human beings and our concept of life as it should be. We think life should be orderly, but life is not orderly.

Hermann Hesse was primarily influenced by Nietzsche and Buddhism. Hesse is one of the few writers who tries to bridge European and Indian thought. Siddhartha (1922) is an entire novel attempting to make this bridge. In Demian, Demian is a very well-adjusted young man. So well-adjusted that he is independent in a way that young men and children are not supposed to be independent. It is a refusal to go along. His influence on his fellow classmates and friends is far from being demonic. It’s just the kind of challenge that philosophers in Existentialism like to talk about.

In Steppenwolf, the central metaphor is of a 45-year-old man who is half man and half wolf. This was a metaphor used by Goethe and secularized by Descartes. Hesse wants to challenge this bifurcated notion of the Cartesian self - not in terms of a unification of the self, but a further fragmentation or elimination of the self altogether.

Harry Haller, the main character, is in every way a Nietzschean man. He considers himself to be one of the Masters but not in a brutal way. He is polite, mannered, and a good citizen. But he is brilliantly educated, extremely creative and exactly what Nietzsche represents in his discussion of the higher man. Like Kafka, Hesse challenges the very idea of NIetzsche’s “self” (the idea of aspiration, the idea of taking life so seriously). What Haller is mistaken in is thinking is that his personality is split half and half (half man, half wolf). Instead, Hesse says Haller has “no self” (which is the same as saying he has many selves). This is demonstrated through the Magic Theater where all values are turned upside down.

The Western conception of the self imagines the self as a fruit - peel off the skin and there is a hard pit core at the center. In Steppenwolf, the self is presented as an onion. Peel off one layer and there is another layer. Peel of that layer and there is yet another layer. There is no center. This is a Buddhist picture. In accepting this picture, Haller can accept a joy and happiness that he was unable to learn otherwise.

Nietzsche’s theory is admirable and persuasive, but there is something obviously missing and that is humor, joy, and happiness. Nietzsche talks about these things, but we are never convinced. Hesse makes us convinced that we can start with something like Nietzsche but attain a passion that even Nietzsche didn’t understand.

I guess I’m sort of skipping around. Last post was on Darfur, now I’m back to Sierra Leone and the diamond mine problem.

I watched the History Channel documentary entitled Blood Diamonds which won an Emmy for “Outstanding Non-fiction Special”.

Did you ever stop to think about what makes diamonds so valuable? They actually exist in the world in abundance. Diamonds aren’t rare. So what makes them so precious to us? Why is it that “a diamond is forever”?

The value is thanks to good marketing. Diamond’s are considered extremely valuable in the U.S. thanks to this “diamond is forever” marketing. Since the 1950’s, a diamond engagement ring has been “the thing to do”. But it is very likely that the diamond you are wearing helps aid in the cycle of violence and bloodshed.

Watch a good portion of Blood Diamonds here. It’s extremely informative.

My husband and I haven’t been to church much recently. The last time we went, the minister gave a sermon on Paul Simon’s song, “Diamonds on the Souls of her Shoes”. I took notes on the bulletin. His sermon was entitled: “Few are Guilty, All Are Responsible”.

The song is about diamond mining in South Africa…

(a-wa) O kodwa u zo-nge li-sa namhlange
(a-wa a-wa) Si-bona kwenze ka kanjani
(a-wa a-wa) Amanto mbazane ayeza
She’s a rich girl
She don’t try to hide it
Diamonds on the soles of her shoes

He’s a poor boy
Empty as a pocket
Empty as a pocket with nothing to lose
Sing Ta na na
Ta na na na
She got diamonds on the soles of her shoes
She got diamonds on the soles of her shoes
Diamonds on the soles of her shoes
Diamonds on the soles of her shoes

People say she’s crazy
She got diamonds on the soles of her shoes
Well that’s one way to lose these
Walking blues
Diamonds on the soles of her shoes

She was physically forgotten
Then she slipped into my pocket
With my car keys
She said you’ve taken me for granted
Because I please you
Wearing these diamonds

And I could say Oo oo oo
As if everybody knows
What I’m talking about
As if everybody would know
Exactly what I was talking about
Talking about diamonds on the soles of her shoes

She makes the sign of a teaspoon
He makes the sign of a wave
The poor boy changes clothes
And puts on after-shave
To compensate for his ordinary shoes

And she said honey take me dancing
But they ended up by sleeping
In a doorway
By the bodegas and the lights on
Upper Broadway
Wearing diamonds on the soles of their shoes

And I could say Oo oo oo
As if everybody here would know
What I was talking about
I mean everybody here would know exactly
What I was talking about
Talking about diamonds

People say I’m crazy
I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes
Well that’s one way to lose
These walking blues
Diamonds on the soles of your shoes

The minister, Sid Hall, said that when he was an SMU seminarian, he and several seminarians were upset with some of the investments that SMU was making that benefited corruption. They decided that they were going to change the face of SMU. But a seminarian who was a native of South Africa said that while he felt it was important to recognize the importance of divestment, he had trouble with American liberal self-righteousness that seemed to think there were easy answers. Had the Native Americans been able to resist European diseases in the same way the Africans had been able to resist the diseases, Americans would be dealing with the same thing the South Africans are dealing with today. It’s complicated. There is no easy solution. [Listen to Sid's sermon: here.]

Everything that happens in one place is connected to everything that happens everywhere else. We are all connected and that connection is not based solely upon the positive occurrences new agers emphasize but likewise upon the negative occurrences no one wants to look at. What I am doing and what I am buying has a ripple effect elsewhere. Even “not buying” has a ripple effect.

In the song, both the man and the woman are empty inside: the rich woman and the poor man. The men and women who work in the mines literally walk with diamonds on the souls of their shoes, but this does not make them rich in the materialistic sense because their labor and the dust that results from the labor is forced. Those who are wealthy and are blind to the forces that drive their need for wealth likewise have diamonds on the souls of their shoes. But they are spiritually impoverished.

Sid says the song is about the play between the west and the more impoverished nations. It’s a reminder that we are all connected to each other. Notice in the lyrics how everyone ends up with diamonds on the souls of their shoes…

• Diamonds on the souls of her shoes…
• Diamonds on the souls of their shoes…
• Diamonds on the souls of my shoes…
• Diamonds on the souls or your shoes…

It’s all interconnected. It’s not about an idealization of poverty because the idealization of poverty is reliant upon an idealization of the wealthy. And it’s not about an idealization of wealth because wealth is reliant upon the slave labor of the impoverished.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OafqYNCzq5U&hl=en&fs=1]

There are so many versions of Hallelujah and almost all are different from Cohen’s original 1984 version. The lyrics are typically much less ambiguously sexual in the covers than they are in Cohen’s original version.

John Cale was the first to cover Hallelujah and he said when he asked Cohen for permission to cover it, Cohen sent him 15 different lyric versions!!

I’m posting the lyrics with my thoughts in between to try and work through why some covers work for me and some don’t. .

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
that David played and it pleased the Lord,
but you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth
the minor fall, the major lift;
the baffled king composing Hallelujah!

You probably remember that King David was the Jewish ruler who united Israel and Judah and made Jerusalem the capital. He is presented as a gentle poet/musician and sheep herding saint in the Bible. King Saul was the first ruler of Israel but he was subject to fits of melancholy and rage. Before David was King, David came to Saul’s court and played the lyre for Saul which was tremendously soothing and pleasing for Saul and got David into Saul’s inner court. This was a very smart political move on the part of David because it eventually allowed him to orchestrate the takeover of the Kings throne. David wooed the King with the beauty of his lyrics and song. The baffled king composing hallelujah is Saul who has been betrayed by David. (It was Saul’s murder that made David King.)

I suppose it would also work to think of David as the baffled king - not knowing where his music comes from? But Leonard grew up in a Jewish family that believed they were the direct ancestors of Aaron so I imagine he knew his Biblical history backward and forward.

Your faith was strong but you needed proof.
You saw her bathing on the roof;
her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.
She tied you to a kitchen chair
she broke your throne, she cut your hair,
and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah!

The Bible presents David as utterly innocent until he becomes King. Then it presents the more human side of him. Now King, David looks out the window and notices Bathsheba bathing on the roof. He is overcome with desire. He asks around and discovers that she is the wife of Uriah, a leader of David’s troops currently fighting on the the front battle lines. But David calls her to him anyway and sleeps with her. She ends up pregnant which is really bad for both David and Bathsheba (a stoneable offense for Bathsheba and grounds for being dethroned for David). David calls Uriah home in the hopes Uriah will sleep with Bathsheba so he won’t question the pregnancy, but it doesn’t happen because Uriah feels a sense of duty to the men still at the front. So David has Uriah secretly killed and marries Bathsheba. The Bible says this displeased the Lord (unlike the music David played which pleased the Lord). David keeps having to make worse and worse transgressions to cover up the first one. King David has been wooed by Bathsheba. She broke his throne (threatened the stability of his leadership) and cut his hair (when Jewish leaders and priests in David’s time had their hair cut, it was an outward sign that they had committed a terrible sin - it was shameful to have short hair). But still, the Halleljah is drawn from David’s lips just as it was being composed by Saul (the baffled King).

You say I took the Name in vain;
I don’t even know the name.
But if I did, well, really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light in every word;
It doesn’t matter which you heard;
the holy, or the broken Hallelujah!

This gives me goosepimples. Broken or holy, it’s all still Hallelujah!! Every word. Every event. Whether pleasing or displeasing to the Lord.

I did my best; it wasn’t much.
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch.
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you.
And even though it all went wrong,
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!

We’re all fallible humans. Sometimes we totally screw up or have horrible things done to us. But even when everything seems dark and we feel betrayed by our own choices or other events in our life, what else is there to do but stand before life with our gratefulness? Our broken hallelujah? (Hallelujah means to express joy or thanks).

So to me, the primary theme of the song is about the inability of being anything but grateful, no matter what horrible, awful things happen in our lives. Even if it is a broken hallelujah, it’s still hallelujah! There is nothing else!!

John Cale uses the first two verses but replaces the last two verses with a different version Cohen wrote (Jeff Buckley uses the exact same version as Cale):

Baby I’ve been here before, I know this room
I’ve walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
I’ve seen your flag on the Marble Arch
Love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

There was a time you let me know
What’s really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
I remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Maybe there’s a God above, all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who out drew you
And it’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

Love is not a victory march - it’s not a conquest, something to win. It’s about being vulnerable. Being willing to let go of the “self”. The line about “I remember when I moved in you, and the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was Hallelujah” is gorgeous. Sort of Kierkegaardian, maybe? It makes you realize beauty? The love he is referring to here is not agape love, it’s desirous love. But that desirous love has the potential to humble you and bring you to your knees. It can make you vulnerable and until you become vulnerable, it’s impossible to experience any type of Hallelujah.

That’s my take on it. I love this song for the same reason I love David Lynch. It’s so danged compassionate!! So when it’s performed like it’s nothing more than a bitter love song, it falls flat. It may be about bitterness, but that’s only the tippy tip of the surface. It’s so much deeper than that. That’s my problem with K.D. Lang’s version and Buckley’s live version (I’ve never heard his recorded version). It’s too depressing. Lang’s version is also way too showy which makes me think she’s missed the point of the song altogether. Buckley has a much better execution - much more simple (and very much like Cale’s.) But it still seems more like giving up than acceptance. I do think the song is about surrender. But surrender is not about giving up, it’s about accepting what is and in that acceptance, recognizing the beauty of what is. I don’t feel the Hallelujah when Buckley sings it. I am moved, but not in a joyful way like I am by Crowe, Wainwright or Cohen. I just feel sad. (Of course, someone else could experience it completely differently.)

Two things I noticed while working through this. Crowe uses Holy Ghost instead of Holy Dove. Wainwright uses Holy Dark instead of Holy Dove.

There are so many beautiful renditions of this Leonard Cohen song. Here’s another…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIMOdVXAPJ0&hl=en&fs=1]

My daughter and I watched a short little DVD, The Short Life of Anne Frank,that we got from the library. My daughter has been reading Anne Frank’s diary, but I’ve never read it. Must do that one of these days. I’ve read many adult European Jewish perspectives on the events surrounding the Holocaust. It will be interesting to read a young person’s thoughts. It does seem a sort of miracle that her journal escaped the Germans, that friends found it and kept it, and that her father survived to publish it.

We also checked out an interesting documentary on Gustav Mahler, A Wayfarer’s Journey: Listening to Mahler. I know a little of his music but didn’t know anything about him. Interesting guy! I think, perhaps, he was a mystic. He was born a Jew in Bohemia in 1860 and was raised in Moravia. At the age of 15, he was admitted to the Vienna Conservatory. By the time he was 20, he had a growing reputation as a conductor and composer. At 37, he was offered the dictatorship of the Vienna Opera which was the most prestigious musical position in the Austrian Empire. Problem was, he was a Jew and according to Austrian law, Jews could not serve imperial posts. So, he converted to Roman Catholicism and took the position. Much of the music he wrote has elements of Catholicism within it, but the conversion had been somewhat problematic for him spiritually. He was never able to adopt the idea of the trinity yet maintained a sort of mystical view of God and the universe.

Mahler actually met with Freud because of troubles in his marriage. But Mahler had difficulty understanding Freud’s lack of belief in God. Freud believed that belief in God was based on a need for certainty. But Mahler confronted him…

You don’t believe in God. There is a division between who I am and who I am. As a conductor, as director of opera, as a performer, I am certain of everything. I have no doubts whatsoever. But as a human being, I am riddled with doubt. And as a composer, I describe the chaos, the confusion, and uncertainty of life - my life, your life, all life. And the beauty, too. Love, nature, fleeting rays of happiness - but mostly, uncertainty and the descent into destruction. That is why people resist my music. Our world is disintegrating, and they cannot face it. God only knows what lies in store for us - a vision of a new horrifying universe. And that’s also why my music is so unpredictable because life is also unpredictable, savage, cruel. To be human is to be uncertain.

Mahler coped with this uncertainty through music. Christoph Eschenbach, distinguished conductor and pianist, offers thoughts throughout the documentary. He believes that Mahler depicts human kind through his music which can become therapeutic for the listener. It’s a means to view problems through a mirror and solve them through compassion. Mahler’s life was full of struggle, loss and pain but his music is of hope. Eschenbach quotes, Kafka: “A book or any piece of art should be the axe for the frozen ocean in us.”

Eschenbach was born in a Jewish family in 1940 in Germany. His mother died giving birth to him and his father was slaughtered in a Nazi punishment camp shortly after his mother’s death. As a small boy, he was sent to live with his Grandmother and they had to flee. After a year of flight, his grandmother died and he was left alone in a refugee camp. Death was all around him, and he nearly died of typhus. He had lost the ability of speech and communication because of the trauma. Thankfully, he was rescued by a foster mother who did her best to revive him. What finally worked was music. His foster mother asked him if he wanted to express himself through music and he managed a “yes”. This expression opened his soul. He said his pain joined with the pain in the music. Minus plus minus equals plus and he became happy. But he cautions, “The roots of the inner pain and the knowledge of it can never be wiped out or blown away. It stays with me all my life, fortunately, because no where have I found more of that magical healing than in music.”

In his late 50s, Mahler’s heart began to give out on him and he was confronted with his mortality which threw him off balance. He said he had lost all of his clarity and the sense of peace he had achieved and had to start over again. He did finally came to a place of acceptance. Someone in the film explains that acceptance is not a giving up, it is an active integration of reality. Instead of being done out of desperation, acceptance is done out of a sense of freedom. It recognizes our freedom to choose - how we respond - in a given set of circumstances.

Like Beethoven and Bruckner, Mahler’s last completed symphony was his ninth. He died just before his 51st birthday.

I had written a draft for myself that was a challenge to compare Job, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra and totally forgot that I had intended to do this until going through my drafts today. (I am so easily distracted.) I think I thought it would help me cement several ideas but I’m not sure I have a hold of those ideas anymore. So I’m just going to try and work my way through it and see if I can remember what it was I had in mind. Bare with me.

I think the place to start is with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey which was briefly mentioned in the back of my edition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It begins by discussing composer Richard Strauss’ opera, Also sprach Zarathustra. Strauss says of his work:

I did not intend to write a philosophical music or to portray in music Nietzsche’s greatest work. I wished to convey by means of music an idea of the development of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of its development, religious and scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the superman. The whole symphonic poem is intended as an homage to Nietzsche’s genius, which found its greatest expression in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Stanley Kubrick used Strauss’s Thus Sprach Zarathustra for the music of his film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The movie move through various stages and ends with a fetus floating in “a womb-like galaxy”. (Gives me goosepimples thinking about it - I LOVE 2001!!!)

These stages mirror the Zarathustra’s stages of metamorphoses. For this, I’m going to use the explanation of the stages I gave to Kristen in one my comments about The Way of Suffering:

Stage 1 - Camel. Dutiful “yes” saying. If you are willing to be dutiful, you will eventually come to a point where you are willing to question values to see if they hold or not. This usually requires some sort of excursion off the beaten path where the values you have held so dutifully are no longer helpful. He questions the values and if he discovers they don’t hold in this new terrain/situation, etc., he enters the second stage to slay them. At the camel stage, shame and humiliation (not guilt) is potentially valuable because it makes you face your blind allegiance to your values. The example Miller uses in The Way of Suffering is a very generous man who makes himself available to all. But he is not available to his son who is gay and believes his father will never accept this so commits suicide. The son’s suicide is what prompts the father to begin questioning the values he has held. (Miller’s book was written in the 1980s.)

Stage 2 - Lion. Says “no” to the ideas and values that the camel has determined are no longer meaningful. He slays the dragon. This is what I equate with Miller’s understanding that a hero means converting even the most humiliating circumstances into heroic acts. If the lion doesn’t do this, he’s going to revert to the camel and the creative process can’t be completed because the lion still has to become the child. But it is true that if the lion succumbs to self-adulation, he will not be able to move on to the third stage. If you are slaying dragons for the sake of slaying dragons, then you aren’t in the lion stage, you are back in the camel stage because your behavior is motivated by a duty to your compulsions and this is not the will to power, it’s the will to feel powerful (will to control). There has to be a break with duty (including duty to addictive compulsions.)

Stage 3 - Child. This is innocence. The child is no longer burdened by the values of the past so when the child says “yes” it isn’t based on duty, it is a “sacred yes” which allows for the creation of new values and the cycle starts all over again.

2001 follows these stages in three stages of it’s own. Take a look at Kubrick 2001: The space odyssey explained. It’s an animated explanation and is extremely well-done.

SPOILER WARNING!

A monolith is planted on earth and on the moon by an extraterrestrial being 4 billion years BC. The meaning is not explained but it represents the Zarathustrian challenge of “overcoming”.

The movie begins with Part I, The Dawn of Man. This is prehistoric man who are basically asleep until they discover the monolith. They are starving but aren’t doing anything to change it. When they discover the monolith on earth, we see their defining characteristics: Fear, Courage and Curiosity. Soon after, they discover “the tool” in the form of a bone they can use to kill both man and beast. This bone is tossed into the air and becomes a space craft. This is man at the height of his evolutionary development. Except, in space, he’s like a child again. He has to eat baby food, learn to walk, and be toilet trained. And, when these men face the monolith on the moon, they have none of the wonder and curiosity that prehistoric man had when they discovered the monolith on earth. This man is civilized, rational, and scientific.

Notice the stages of metamorphoses? Prehistoric man is starving until something unexpected is placed in their path - the monolith. This challenges their former way of being and allows them to take on heroic qualities that move them from prehistoric man to homo sapien. At the height of their evolutionary development, they become childlike again. But this has it’s problems and the cycle has to begin again.

2001, Part II: Jupiter Mission. It is 18 years later there is a new species, the Hal 9000 who is the brain and nervous system of the Discovery. Hal sees humans as boring, bored, artificial, and needing to be virtually dead in order to get around. Humans think he is incapable of making a mistake, but he does make one. And this begins the battle between tool (computer) and man. Hal wins the first battle but hasn’t calculated that within modern man resides the ape’s fear, courage and curiosity. Hal is “killed” with the simplest of tools - a screw driver. This ends man’s evolutionary relationship with the tool. But he is left to fend for himself in space.

Notice the stages: Man is asleep/virtually dead until he runs into a snag in his value system. What is running everything and is keeping them alive is capable of making mistakes and it threatens the mission and their lives. (This is the civilized, rational, scientific mind taken to an extreme.) This awakes in man his heroic qualities which puts an end to the crisis, but again leaves them totally vulnerable and open to the unknown, like a child.

2001, Part III: Beyond the Infinite. Man has won his battle with his tools, but there is one last evolutionary stage awaiting him - death. Dave Bowman ages before our eyes. He breaks his wine glass, but the wine is still there. The container is not the content. The body is the container, the spirit the content. The body will break, but the spirit will still be there. At the very the very end of the film, Dave Bowman is a fetus. This is another overcoming and the beginning of a new way of being. It’s all cycles within cycles.

According to Nietzsche: “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes-saying.” He also says, “one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star”.

Ok so this is getting long, but I see where I was going with it and am very glad I have worked through this! On to Job!!

Job, in The Book of Job in the Old Testament, undergoes the same cycles! I’m borrowing here from Stephen Mitchell’s translation.

At the beginning of the Book, there is a poem telling the tale of Job who is righteous and pious and has never done anything wrong. For no reason, all the rewards of his righteousness are taken away from him. But he remains steadfast and perfectly pious. The camel to an extreme. His anxieties have been made manifest. His “worst fears have happened; his nightmares have come to life.” In order to transcend his suffering, he has to be willing to enter into it. There is no use saying, “these things shouldn’t be happening to me, I’m righteous and pious.” If he doesn’t, then he is rebelling. He is refusing to submit. The Job of the poem lacks generosity and wholeheartedness. He’s too terrified from within his squalor to do anything but bless the Lord. People throughout history have praised this quality in Job: “the patience of job”. But it isn’t admirable. It’s the role of a terrified, dutiful, victim.

Finally, we are shown the Job that curses God. This is the lion that says no to the values that he previously held. His friends don’t understand him because unlike Job, they have no direct experience of God. So they construct opposite syllogisms.

Friends: Suffering comes from God, God is just. Therefore Job is guilty. (The Camel)
Job: Suffering comes from God. I am innocent. Therefore God is unjust. (The Lion)
The unthinkable at this point: Suffering comes from God. God is just. Job is innocent. No therefore. (The Child)

The more Job’s friends accuse him of being the cause of his suffering, the more he accuses God. He is not blaming his injustices on his fellow man, he is blaming the creator for his misery. This is so hugely significant to me after learning that the term sin doesn’t show up in the Bible until Cain kills Abel. Cain’s anger is misplaced. It should have been directed at God (”the father”) rather than at his brother. According to Rabbi Kushner, original sin is the first time man blamed man for his misery. He’s also not blaming man-made ideas like original sin or a devil. He’s blaming God.

In order to approach God, Job has to let go of all of his ideas about God. He has to give up his illusions. When he does this, his first response is awe. He is silenced. (Silencio! - couldn’t help but put a little Mulholland Dr. in here.)

Mitchell writes: “Surrender, on the contrary, means the wholehearted giving-up of oneself It is both the ultimate generosity and the ultimate poverty, because in it the giver becomes the gift. When Job says, “I had heard you with my ears; but now my eyes have seen you,” he is no longer a servant, who fears god and avoids evil. He has faced evil, has looked straight into its face and through it, into a vast wonder and love.” (The camel, the lion, the child!)

In the end, Job’s comfort is his mortality.

Mitchell quotes Kafka (and I so love this - I’ve never read Kafka but I suppose I’m going to have to now): “The messiah will come only when he is no longer needed.”

Irish in America is definitely not the sort of music I’d just sit around a listen to, but I found it really interesting after having watched Out of Ireland and learning about the long-standing oral tradition that still remains in Ireland since Celtic times.

Dan Milner says he has been involved in Irish traditional song all of his life. He and Bob Conroy lecture on Irish American themes at the International Folksong & Ballad Seminar in Co. Donegal. They say that the Irish recorded their experiences in folk songs and this CD is a musical record of the Irish People in the U.S. from 1780-1980.

Interesting way to experience history.

Classic Albums: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon

by Matthew Longfellow

I was ten years old when this album came out, but it was among the first I’d ever owned. It was also among the first CDs I ever purchased. And the album cover served as a backdrop to my fish tank in college.

This documentary with the aging members of Pink Floyd offering their thoughts on the making of the album was absolutely fantastic. Roger Waters says the whole album is about whether or not we can solve the problem of “us” and “them”. Can humanity be humane? It is an empathetic concept album.

I’d always loved Alan Parsons’ Project and had no idea that Alan Parsons engineered Dark Side of the Moon. He explains how the songs were layered and put together in the documentary.

David Gilmour had replaced Syd Barret as lead guitarist and vocalist for this album and Roger Waters, the bass player, took over as lyricist and head vocalist. (Syd Barret’s erratic behavior lost him his place in the band. Part of that erratic behavior involved shaving his eyebrows which is why Pink shaves his eyebrows in “The Wall”). Rick Wright, whose true love was jazz, played piano/keyboard and explains how he came up with the unusual chords used in the album.

Fascinating film that makes me like Pink Floyd all the more (if that is possible).