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."
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