Showing posts with label Chaplin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chaplin. Show all posts

Sunday 29 November 2020

Multiple Selves and Information Systems











Multiple Selves and Information Systems
by Robert Anton Wilson

Between 1910 and 1939, Charlie Chaplin always played the same character in all his films — the beloved little Tramp that became world-famous. 

In 1939, Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in The Great Dictator, in which the little Tramp did not appear. 

Instead, Chaplin played two characters — a tyrant, based on Hitler, and a Jewish tailor, one of Hitler's victims. 

Audiences all over The World (except Germany, where the authorities banned the film) complained, mournfully and angrily, that they missed The Little Tramp. 


Chaplin, however, having gotten rid of The Tramp once, never did bring that persona back. 





In later films, he played many characters (a serial killer, a kindly old vaudevillian, a deposed king), but never The Tramp. 

People still complained that they wanted to see The Tramp again, but Chaplin went on creating new characters. 

(We will leave it to Jungians to explain why Chaplin had to become two opposite characters before he could personally escape the Archetype of The Tramp...

Many actors have had equally hard battles in getting detached from, if not a specific character, a specific type. 

Humphrey Bogart remained stuck in villain roles, usually gangsters, for nearly a decade before he got to play his first hero. 

Cary Grant never did escape from the hero type — either the romantic hero or the comic hero; when Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to play a murderer, in Suspicion, the studio over-ruled both of them and tacked on a surprise ending in which the Grant character did not commit the murder, after all. Etc.

Back in "the real world," if a member of a family changes suddenly, the whole family suddenly appears agitated and disturbed. 

Family counselors have learned to expect this, even when the change consists of something everybody considers desirable — e.g., an alcoholic who suddenly stops drinking can "destabilize" the family to the extent that another member becomes clinically depressed, or develops psychosomatic symptoms, or even starts drink-ing heavily (as if the family "needed" an alcoholic). 

It seems that we not only speak and think in sentences like "John is an old grouch" but become disoriented and frightened if John suddenly starts acting friendly and generous. 

(Audiences rejected the previously "lovable" Chaplin most vehemently when he played the multiple wife-killer in Monsieur Verdoux. 

Probably, audiences would not have felt upset if the role had gone to the actor who originally wrote it for himself and sold it to Chaplin when the Hollywood moguls blacklisted him — Orson Welles.

If Dickens’s Scrooge had changed, in actuality, as he changed in the book, several people in his social field would have suddenly developed bizarre behaviors they had never shown before... 


Chaplin, amusingly, once made a comedy about the chaos created by a man who conspicuously does not exhibit the "isness" or "essence" our subject-predicate language programs us to expect, City Lights

In this film, The Little Tramp encounters a millionaire with two entirely different personalities: a generous and compassionate drunk, and a greedy, somewhat paranoid sober man

The Tramp and all the other characters soon exhibit behaviors that would look like clinical insanity to the audience, if we did not know the secret none of the characters guess: namely that each "personality" in the rich man appears when brain chemistry changes. 

The Russian mystic Gurdjieff claimed that we all contain multiple personalities. 

Many researchers in psychology and neuroscience now share that startling view. 

As Gurdjieff indicated, the "I" who toils at a job does not seem the same "I" who makes love with joy and passion, and the third "I" who occasionally gets angry for no evident reason seems a third personality, etc. 

There does not appear anything metaphysical about this; it even appears, measurably, on electroencephalograms. 

Dr. Frank Putnam of the National Institute of Health found that extreme cases of multiple personality — the only ones that ortho-dox psychiatry recognizes — show quite distinct brain waves for each "personality" almost as if the researchers had taken the electrodes off of one subject and attached them to another. (O'Regan. op. cit.) 

Dr. Rossi defines these separate personalities as "state specific information systems." 

Not only do we show different personalities when drunk and when sober, like Chaplin's emblematic millionaire, but we have different information banks ("memories") in these states. 

Thus, most people have noted that something that happened to them while drunk appears totally forgotten, until they get intoxicated again, and then the memory "miraculously" re-appears. 

This observation of state-specific information occurs even more frequently with LSD; nobody really remembers the richness of an LSD voyage until they take another dose. 

Emotional states seem part of a circular-causal loop with brain chemistry — it seems impossible, for science in 1990, to say that one part of the circle "causes" the other parts. Thus, we can now understand a phenomenon mentioned earlier, namely that we tend to remember happy experiences when happy and sad experiences when sad. The separate "personalities" or information systems within a typical human seem to fall into four main groups, with four additional groups appearing only in minorities who have engaged in one form or another of neurological self-research (metaprogramming). 

1. The Oral Bio-Survival System. 
This seems to contain imprints and conditioning dating from early infancy, with subsequent learning built upon that foundation. 

If you stop and think about, you know how a carpet tastes, how the leg of a chair tastes, etc. You may even remember how the dirt in a flower pot tastes. 

This knowledge dates from the oral stage of infancy in which we take nourishment (bio-survival) through the mother's nipples and also judge other objects by putting them in our mouths.

A large part of parenting an infant consists in following the little darling around and shouting "Don't put that in your mouth" whenever they try to taste /test something toxic. 

Dating from Adorno in the 1940s, psychologists who do surveys on large groups (e.g., entering college freshper-sons) have repeatedly noted a correlation between dislike of "foreign" and "exotic" foods and the "fascist" personal-ity. 

A total Gestalt seems to exist — a behavioral/concep-tual cluster of dislike of new food-dislike of "radical" ideas/racism/nationalism/sexism/xenophobia /conserva-tism/phobic and/or compulsive behaviors-fascist ideolo-gies. 

This cluster makes up the well-known F-Scale (F for Fascism). Where more than two of these traits appear, the probabilities indicate that most of the others will appear. 

This seems to result from a neophobic imprint in the bio-survival system. Those with this imprint feel increasingly insecure as they move in space-time away from Mommy and "home-cooked meals." 

Conversely, those who like to experiment with strange and exotic foods seem to have a neophilic imprint and want to explore the world in many dimensions — traveling, moving from one city or country to another, studying new subjects, "playing" with ideas rather than holding rigidly to one static model of the universe. On this baby-level of the brain, some seem to have an imprint that clings to the familiar ("Oh, Mommy, take me home"), some have the opposite imprint that seeks novelty and exploration ("Let's see what's on the other side of the mountain") and most, following the Bell-shaped curve, have an imprint somewhere between these extremes — "conservative" on some issues, innovative on others. Subsequent learning will tend to get processed through these imprints, and those with strong neophobic reflexes will usually, if they ever reject the initial dogmatic family reality-tunnel, settle at once into an equally dogmatic new reality-tunnel. 

E.g., if raised Catholic, they seldom become agnostics or zetetics; rather, they will move, like iron filings drawn by a magnet, to dogmatic atheism or even a crusading atheist "religion" like Marxism, Objectivism or CSICOP. 

Since the mechanical bio-chemical reflexes on this level remain "invisible" (and cannot even reach translation onto the verbal level except in an altered state of consciousness, such as hypnosis, or under certain drugs), this hard-wired infantile information system controls all later information systems (or "selves") without the knowledge of the conscious ego. 

In most cases, the "happiest" or most tranquil areas of the infantile bio-survival system — those imprinted by the Safe Space around Mommy — can only be "remembered" or re-experienced with drugs that trigger neurotransmit-ters similar to those activated during breast-feeding. 

The attempt to re-capture that state may lead to re-imprinting via yoga or martial arts, or to a search for chemical analogs, which will eventually lead to the opiates. "Disturbed" or "unhappy" (ego dystonic) imprints here may account for opiate addictions. This oral bio-survival system makes a feedback loop from mouth to hypothalamus to neuropeptide system to lymph and blood etc. to immunological system. 

What Transactional Analysis calls the Wooden Leg Game — evasion of adult responsibility through chronic illness — does not appear conscious in most cases. 

Rather a Loser Script in this system depresses the sub-systems, including the immunological system, and renders the subject, or victim, statistically prone to more illness than average. Similarly, a Winner Script on this circuit contributes to longevity and may account for cases like Bertrand Russell (still writing philosophy and polemic at 99), George Burns (busy with three careers until 100) etc. 

2. The Anal Territorial System. Since all mammals mark their territories with excretions, the "toddler" stage of development and associated toilet training produces a system of synergetic imprints and conditioning concerned with territory and what Freudians call "anality" (sadomasochism). 

Those who take a Dominant imprint in this system seek power all their lives; those with a Submissive imprint seek Dominant types to lead them (the Reichian Fuhrerprinzip) and most people settle somewhere between these extremes, taking a masochist stance toward those "above" them (government, landlords etc.) and a sadist stance toward selected victims defined as "below" them (wives, children, "inferior races," people on Welfare, etc.) 

The "self" or information system on this toddler level may function as the predominant self or "normal" personality in those whose lives center around power or it may remain "latent" usually and only emerge in conflict situations. 

Usually, it emerges full-blown when enough alcohol enters the brain and alters habitual circuitry. 

The anal-sadist vocabulary of the typical drunk ("Oh, yeah? Stick it up your ass," "You dumb ass-hole," "Up yours, buddy," etc.) recapitulates toilet training and mammalian habits of using excretions as territorial fight-or-flight signals. 

People say later "He was acting like a two-year-old" or more simply "He just wasn't himself last night.

These remarks signify that the toddler information system — i.e., the mammalian anal-territorial circuits — temporarily took control of the brain. Politicians have great skill in activating this system and easily persuade large crowds to behave like small children having temper tantrums. 

The favorite activating device (dramatized by Shakespeare in Henry V) invokes mammalian pack-solidarity by attacking a rival pack. 

George Bush, perceived as a "wimp" by many, raised his popularity to unprecedented heights, just as I looked about for a contemporary illustration of this point. 

Mr. Bush simply invaded a small, Third World country (Panama) where a quick, easy victory came within a week. 

The "wimp" image vanished overnight. 

Any alpha male in any gorilla or chimpanzee pack, feeling his authority slipping, would have followed the same course. 

This system makes a feedback loop between muscles, adrenaline, the thalamus of the brain, the anus and the larynx. Swelling the body and using the larynx to howl (muscle-flexing and noise) makes up the usual Domination signal among birds, reptiles, mammals and politicians. 

Study the speeches of Hitler and Ronald Reagan for further details, or just watch two ducks disputing territory in a pond. 

Conversely, shrinking the body and muttering (or becoming totally silent) make up the usual Submission reflex. 

"Crawling away with its tail between its legs," the dog's submission reflex, does not differ much from the body-language of an employee who made the mistake of disagreeing with the boss and received a Dominator (flexing/howling) signal in response. 

The ego — or self — defined by this system appears more mammalian and evolutionarily advanced than the quick reptilian reflexes of the self operating on the oral bio-survival system. 

Nonetheless, the personality shrinks back to the primitive bio-survival self whenever real danger appears — whenever confronted by threat to life, rather than mere threat to status. 

This difference between mam-malian strategy and reptilian reflex explains why there seems more "time" in the anal territorial system than in the oral bio-survival system. In the later, mammalian system, one explores relative power signals slowly; in the earlier, reptilian system, one attacks or flees instantly. 

3. The Semantic Time-Binding System. After the growing child acquires language — i.e., learns that the flux of experience has had labels and indexes assigned to it by the tribal game-rules — a new information system becomes imprinted and conditioned, and this system can continue growing and learning for a lifetime. This system allows me to receive signals sent 2500 years ago by persons such as Socrates and Confucius. 

It allows me to send signals which, if I have more luck than most writers, will still find their way to new receivers 2500 years in the future. 

This time-binding function of symbolism gives humans problem-solving capacities impossible to most other animals (except, perhaps, cetaceans) and also allows us to create and suffer from "problems" that do not exist at all, except on the linguistic level. 

With human symbolism we can produce (or learn from their producers) mathematical systems that allow us to predict the behavior of physical systems long before we had the instruments to measure those systems (as Einstein predicted that clocks in outer space would measure time differently than clocks on our planet face). We can even build complex machines that work — most of the time. 

With symbolism we can also write messages so profound that nobody fully understands them but almost everybody agrees they say something important (e.g., Beethoven's Ninth Symphony). 

And with symbolism we can create meaningless meta-physics and Strange Loops so weird that society grows alarmed and either locks us up or insists on "medicating" us. 

With such weird symbols, if not locked up or medicated, we can even persuade multitudes to believe in our gibberish and execute 6,000,000 scapegoats (the Hitler case), line up to drink cyanide cocktails (the Jim Jones case), or perform virtually any idiocy or lunacy imaginable. 

If the imprints in the first two information systems differentiate us into large groups — conservatives and pioneers, dominators and followers, etc. — the semantic system allows us to differentiate ourselves still further, giving humanity more tribal eccentrics, both benevolent and malign, than any other class of animals. 

We do not all live in the same universe. Millions live in a Moslem universe and find it very hard to understand persons living in a Christian universe. Millions of others live in a Marxist universe. 

Most Americans seem quite happy in a mixed 19th Century Capitalist and 13th Century Christian universe, but the literary intelligentsia lives in an early 20th Century Freudian/Marxist universe, and a few well-informed scientists evidently actually live in a 1997 universe. Etc. 

The elaboration of such emic realities or reality-tunnels can reach extremes of creativity, in which a person "invents" a totally new and individualized gloss on the whole of existence. 

Such great creators will either win Nobel prizes (for art or science) or will get thrown in "mental hospitals," depending on how much skill they have at selling their new vision to others. 

Some will even get locked up in nut-houses and later become recognized as great scientific pioneers — e.g., Semmelweiss, the first physician to suggest that surgeons should wash their hands before operating. 

(Ezra Pound had the peculiar distinction of winning an award from the Library of Congress for writing the best poem of the year, in 1948, while government psychiatrists insisted he "was" insane.) 

The semantic time-binding system makes a feedback loop between the verbal left brain hemisphere, the larynx, the right hand (which manipulates the world and checks the accuracy of maps or glosses) and the eyes (which read words and also scan the environment). 

The self existing in this system has more "time" than the self on the mammalian territorial system or the reptilian survival system. 

Indeed, it can speculate about "time", or about other words, and invent philosophies about timeless universes, three-dimensional time (Ouspensky), infinite time dimensions (Dunne) etc. 

It can invent new Gestalts which make quantum jumps in our social information banks and it can wallow in utter nonsense endlessly. 

A "clever" imprint in this system usually lasts for life, as does a "dumb" imprint. Subsequent conditioning and learning all occur with the parameters of a fluent (well-spoken, clear-thinking) self or a dull (inarticulate, "unthinking") self. 

4. The Socio-Sexual System. At puberty, the DNA un-leashes messenger RNA molecules which notify all sub-systems that mating time has arrived. The body metamorphizes totally, and the nervous system ("mind") changes in the process. A new "self" appears. 


 Cat and Mouse 

As usual, imprinting and genetics play a major role, with conditioning and learning modifying but seldom radically altering genetic-imprinted imperatives. If the environment provides a sex-positive imprint, adult sexuality will have a joyous and even "transcendental" quality;. if the environ-ment provides a sex-negative imprint, sexuality will remain disturbed or problematical for life. 

The socio-sexual system feedbacks run from front brain through hormonal and neuropeptide systems to genitalia to breasts and arms (hugging, cuddling, fucking circuitry). 

A "good" sexual imprint creates the archetypal "bright eyes and bushy tails," while a "bad" imprint creates a tense (muscularly armored) and zombie-like appearance. 

The self or ego in this system easily learns adult Game Rules (civilized norms, "ethics"), if the sexual imprint has not had strong negative components. 

Where the imprint does have negative or "kinky" components, adult Game Rules do not set in place and either an "outlaw" personal-ity crystallizes (the rapist/criminal with the archetypal "Born to Lose" tattoo) or else the Jekyll-Hyde dualism appears, well illustrated recently by several sex-negative TV preachers who got caught in some very kinky private sex-games. 

Whatever system dominates at a given time appears as the ego or self at that time, in two senses: 




1. People who meet Mr. A when he has the Oral Submissive self predominant, will remember him as "that sort of person." 


People who meet him when he has the Semantic/rational self predominant remember him as another sort of person. Etc. 

2. Due to state-specific information, as discussed earlier, when you have one of these selves predominant, you "forget" the other selves to a surprising extent and act as if the brain only had access to the information banks of the presently predominant self. 

E.g., when frightened into infantile Oral states, you may actually think "I am always a weakling," quite forgetting the times when your Anal Dominator self was in charge, or the Semantic or Sexual imprints were governing the brain, etc. 

(This analysis owes a great deal to Dr. Timothy Leary's Info-Psychology, Falcon Press, 1988. A discussion at greater length, less technical than Leary's, appears in my Prometheus Rising, op. cit.) 
 
But, if we have a variety of potential selves rather than the one block-like "essential self" of Aristotelian philosophy, and, if each self acts as an observer who creates a reality-tunnel which appears as a whole universe (to those unaware of Transactional and Quantum psychology), then: 

Each time an internal or external trigger causes us to quantum jump from one "self" to another, The Whole World around us appears to change also. 
 
This explains why Mary may say, and honestly believe, "Everybody bullies me" one day and then say, and honestly believe, "Everybody likes me and helps me" on another day, why John may feel "Everybody is a bastard" one hour and "I feel sorry for everybody; they're all suffering" the next hour. 

Every person lives in different umwelt (emic reality) but every self within a person also lives in a different reality-tunnel. 
 
The number of universes perceived by human beings does not equal the population of the planet, but several times the population of the planet. It thus appears some sort of miracle that we sometimes find it possible to communicate with each other at all, at all. 

Quantum mechanics says an electron has a different "essence" every time we measure it (or, more clearly, it has no "essence" at all). 

Neuroscience reveals, similarly, that the Mary we meet on Tuesday may have a different "self" than the Mary we met Monday (or, as the Buddhists said long before neuroscience, Mary has no "essence" at all). 
 
As we said at the beginning, the bedrock claim of existentialism holds that "existence precedes essence," or we have no "essence". 
 
Like electrons, we jump from one information system to another, and only those who have not looked closely believe that one "essence" remains constant through all transformations. 

Cat and Mouse Exercizes 

1. J. Edgar Hoover, Head of our Secret Police for over 50 years, now appears to have lived the life of an active homosexual. 

He kept files on the sexual behavior of politicians, business people, famous actors and anybody who could advance or harm his career, and used these files for blackmail.
 
[ AND he was Secretly Black (his parents generation would have called him a Mulatto), passing as White -- he also spied on and persecuted Black Civil Rights Leaders and had a letter sent to Dr. Martin Luther King threatening sexual blackmail and encouraging him towards suicide. ]

Try to figure out Mr. Hoover's imprinted and conditioned selves, according to the above analysis. 

2. Try the same on Jesus Christ. 

3. Try Thomas Jefferson. 

4. Let each member of the study group pick some subject, or victim — not part of the group, but someone the member sees daily. 

Let the member study that person care-fully and analyze which selves appear most often, how frequently the selves shift, and which self (if any) appears dominant most of the time.
 
5. This exercize will seem the hardest in the book, but try it anyway. 

Observe yourself for a week, and try to see which selves appear most often, if one self appears dominant, etc. 

Wednesday 29 July 2020

The Anti-Subtle Humour of Clowning




The only halfway effective strategy I’ve come up with for exploring Kafka’s funniness in class involves suggesting to students that much of his humor is actually sort of unsubtle — or rather anti•-subtle. 







“All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.”

Charlie Chaplin,
My Autobiography (1964), Ch. 10



Multiple Selves and Information Systems
by Robert Anton Wilson

Between 1910 and 1939, Charlie Chaplin always played the same character in all his films — the beloved little Tramp that became world-famous. 

In 1939, Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in The Great Dictator, in which the little Tramp did not appear. Instead, Chaplin played two charac-ters — a tyrant, based on Hitler, and a Jewish tailor, one of Hitler's victims. 

Audiences all over The World (except Germany, where the authorities banned the film) complained, mournfully and angrily, that they missed The Little Tramp. 

Chaplin, however, having gotten rid of The Tramp once, never did bring that persona back. 

In later films, he played many characters (a serial killer, a kindly old vaudevillian, a deposed king), but never the Tramp. People still com-plained that they wanted to see the Tramp again, but Chaplin went on creating new characters. 

(We will leave it to Jungians to explain why Chaplin had to become two opposite characters before he could personally escape the Archetype of the Tramp...

Many actors have had equally hard battles in getting detached from, if not a specific character, a specific type. Humphrey Bogart remained stuck in villain roles, usually gangsters, for nearly a decade before he got to play his first hero.

 Cary Grant never did escape from the hero type — either the romantic hero or the comic hero; when Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to play a murderer, in Suspicion, the studio over-ruled both of them and tacked on a sur-prise ending in which the Grant character did not commit the murder, after all. Etc.

Back in "the real world," if a member of a family changes suddenly, the whole family suddenly appears agitated and disturbed. 

Family counselors have learned to expect this, even when the change consists of something everybody considers desirable — e.g., an alcoholic who suddenly stops drinking can "destabilize" the family to the extent that another member becomes clinically depressed, or develops psychosomatic symptoms, or even starts drink-ing heavily (as if the family "needed" an alcoholic). 

It seems that we not only speak and think in sentences like "John is an old grouch" but become disoriented and frightened if John suddenly starts acting friendly and generous. 



(Audiences rejected the previously "lovable" Chaplin most vehement-ly when he played the multiple wife-killer in Monsieur Verdoux. Probably, audiences would not have felt upset if the role had gone to the actor who originally wrote it for himself and sold it to Chaplin when the Hollywood moguls blacklisted him — Orson Welles.

If Dickens’ Scrooge had changed, in actuality, as he changed in the book, several people in his social field would have suddenly developed bizarre behaviors they had never shown before... 

Chaplin, amusingly, once made a comedy about the chaos created by a man who conspicuously does not exhibit the "isness" or "essence" our subject-predicate language programs us to expect, City Lights


In this film, The Little Tramp encounters a millionaire with two entirely different personalities: a generous and compassionate drunk, and a greedy, somewhat paranoid sober man. 

The Tramp and all the other characters soon exhibit behaviors that would look like clinical insanity to the audience, if we did not know the secret none of the characters guess: namely that each "personality" in the rich man appears when brain chemistry changes. 

The Russian mystic Gurdjieff claimed that we all contain multiple personalities. Many researchers in psychology and neuroscience now share that startling view. As Gurdjieff indicated, the "I" who toils at a job does not seem the same "I" who makes love with joy and passion, and the third "I" who occasionally gets angry for no evident reason seems a third personality, etc. There does not appear anything metaphysical about this; it even appears, measurably, on electroencephalograms. 

Dr. Frank Putnam of the National Institute of Health found that extreme cases of multiple personality — the only ones that ortho-dox psychiatry recognizes — show quite distinct brain waves for each "personality" almost as if the researchers had taken the electrodes off of one subject and attached them to another. (O'Regan. op. cit.) Dr. Rossi defines these separate personalities as "state specific information systems." 

Not only do we show different personalities when drunk and when sober, like Chaplin's emblematic millionaire, but we have different information banks ("memories") in these states. 

Thus, most people have noted that something that happened to them while drunk appears totally forgotten, until they get intoxicated again, and then the memory "miraculously" re-appears. 

This observation of state-specific information occurs even more frequently with LSD; nobody really remembers the richness of an LSD voyage until they take another dose. Emotional states seem part of a circular-causal loop with brain chemistry — it seems impossible, for science in 1990, to say that one part of the circle "causes" the other parts. 

Thus, we can now understand a phenomenon mentioned earlier, namely that we tend to remember happy experiences when happy and sad experiences when sad. The separate "personalities" or information systems within a typical human seem to fall into four main groups, with four additional groups appearing only in minorities who have engaged in one form or another of neurological self-research (metaprogramming).








“ The Gospel of Thomas is not in our canon for several reasons.

The Gospel of Thomas has become very famous, though, in the last part of the twentieth century because it was rediscovered and published and created something of a sensation.

According to the tradition, according to the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus had a Twin Brother and his name was Didymus Judas Thomas. 

Now, Didymus is simply the Greek word for "Twin," it's also used as the Greek word for "testicles" for obvious reasons; there are usually two of them. 

Didymus is the Greek word for "Twin" and Thomas is from a Semitic word, either Hebrew or Aramaic, or Syriac, which are all three similar languages, "Thomas" would look like in "Twin" in those. 

The guy's name is Judas, the Hebrew version would be Judah, the Greek word would be Judas, and the English version is Jude, so you sometimes see it in English translations Didymus Jude Thomas but it's the same word, Judah or Judas. 

His real name is Judah or Judas and Didymus, and Thomas are his nicknames, one Greek and one Semitic or Aramaic. 

He was The Twin Brother of Jesus, according to early Christian tradition, now just one strand of early Christian tradition that is Thomasine Christianity, the forms of Christianity, popular especially in Syria and the east which traced their existence back to the Apostle Thomas. 

There really was an Apostle Thomas among the 12 of Jesus' disciples and having the nickname "Twin." 

Traditional orthodox Christians don't believe he was •Jesus'• Twin Brother, they just believe that he had the •nickname• “Twin” because he was Somebody Else's Twin Brother. 

But in Thomasine Christianity he was connected to Jesus himself as Jesus' Twin.

According to some forms of eastern Christianity therefore, especially the early forms in Syria, Mesopotamia, and India--and yes there was very, very early forms of Christianity in the west coast of India. 

And if you meet an Indian person who's from that part of India and who considers themselves Christian, and they've been Christian for generations they will tell you, “Yes, Thomas was the apostle who brought The Gospel to India the first time.”

There are ancient traditions about this and modern Indian Christians still trace their church back to the Apostle Thomas.

There are all kinds of Thomas literature from the ancient world. It's not all alike, it doesn't all represent one kind of Christianity or one church, or even one region. 

Besides the Gospel of Thomas we know of The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, this is a wonderful documentary if you took my historical Jesus class you get to read the fragments of The Infancy Gospel of Thomas that we still have. 

It shows Jesus--everybody wonders, well what was Jesus like as a kid? 

What games did he play? 
Did he play cops and robbers? 
Did he play with dolls? 

What did Jesus do as a kid? 

Well Thomas tells you, it tells you for example, that he made a bunch of clay pigeons, and when this Jew--it's kind of anti-Jewish document, this Jew comes up and says, “You’re not supposed to be doing that on the Sabbath”, so Jesus claps his hands and the pigeons all fly off, the clay pigeons fly off. 

Or when one of his buddies get--when he gets mad at one of his buddies so he strikes the kid dead and then has to raise the kid up again. 

When one of his teachers criticizes him, he says, ‘What do you know you bimbo?’ and strikes the teacher dumb and blind or something. 

Jesus as a Little Kid in The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, is kind of a little rat but that's the way people imagined him as a child.”




“ My point is not that his wit is too subtle for US students. In fact, the only halfway effective strategy I’ve come up with for exploring Kafka’s funniness in class involves suggesting to students that much of his humor is actually sort of unsubtle — or rather •anti•-subtle. 

The claim is that Kafka’s funniness depends on some kind of radical literalization of Truths we tend to treat as metaphorical. I opine to them that some of our most profound collective intuitions seem to be expressible only as figures of speech, that that’s why we call these figures of speech expressions

With respect to “The Metamorphosis,” then, I might invite students to consider what is really being expressed when we refer to someone as ‘creepy’ or ‘gross’ or say that he is forced to ‘take shit’ as part of his job. 

Or to reread “In the Penal Colony” in light of expressions like ‘tongue-lashing’ or ‘tore him a new asshole’ or the gnomic “By middle age, everyone gets the face they deserve.” 

Or to approach “A Hunger Artist” in terms of tropes like ‘starved for attention’ or ‘love-starved’ or the double entendre in the term ‘self-denial’, or even as innocent a factoid as that the etymological root of ‘anorexia’ happens to be the Greek word for ‘longing’.”


SOME REMARKS ON KAFKA’S FUNNINESS FROM WHICH PROBABLY NOT ENOUGH HAS BEEN REMOVED,
by David Foster Wallace

Saturday 25 July 2020

The Little Tramp


“But truly, if I were not Alexander, I wish I were Diogenes."



The Tramp: 
Go on! Do me in then, you bastard cowards!! 
I don't want to live anyway...not in a stinking World like this...!!

Alexander The Great : 
Oh...and what's so •stinking• about it...?

Tramp: 
It's a Stinking World because there's no Law and Order anymore! It's a Stinking World because it lets The Young get onto The Old, like you done. 

Oh...it's no World for an Old Man any longer. 

What sort of a World is it at all? MEN on The MOON, and men spinning around The Earth ....!! and there's not no attention paid to Earthly Law and Order no more...!!


Sometimes The Truth isn't good enough. 

Sometimes people deserve more.

Sometimes people deserve to have their Faith rewarded. 


“The man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German Reich.

Tired but happy, Goebbels arrived home that night at 3 A.M. Scribbling in his diary before retiring, he wrote:

”It is almost like a dream . . .  a fairy tale . . .  The new Reich has been born. Fourteen years of work have been crowned with victory. The German revolution has begun!”




"Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches. 

I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler.

Ever since he came to power -- till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter -- I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. 

The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs -- and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett's edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. 

In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself

The initial personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is there. He is The Martyr, The Victim. Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. 

One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against Destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme. 

Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond easesecurity and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. 

The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for The Tin Soldiers; Tin Pacifists somehow won't do. 

Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfortsafetyshort working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. 

However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin's militarized version of Socialism. 

All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. 

Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time,Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. 

Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation "Greatest happiness of the greatest number" is a good slogan, but at this moment "Better an end with horror than a horror without end" is a winner. 

Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

George Orwell,
New English Weekly
21 July 1940

Wednesday 22 July 2020

City Lights (1931)

With the aid of a wealthy erratic tippler, a dewy-eyed Tramp who has fallen in love with a sightless flower girl accumulates money to be able to help her medically.




And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon the place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones of the place, and put it under his head, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, the LORD stood beside him, and said: “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac. The land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. And in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee back into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.” And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: “Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.” And he was afraid, and said: “How full of awe is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

—  Genesis 28:10–17 Jewish Publication Society (1917)


Multiple Selves & Information Systems 

Between 1910 and 1939, Charlie Chaplin always played the same character in all his films — the beloved little Tramp that became world-famous. In 1939, Chaplin wrote, direct-ed and starred in The Great Dictator, in which the little Tramp did not appear. Instead, Chaplin played two charac-ters — a tyrant, based on Hitler, and a Jewish tailor, one of Hitler's victims. Audiences all over The World (except Germany, where the authorities banned the film) complained, mournfully and angrily, that they missed The Little Tramp. 

Chaplin, however, having gotten rid of The Tramp once, never did bring that persona back. 

In later films, he played many characters (a serial killer, a kindly old vaudevillian, a deposed King), but never The Tramp. 

People still complained that they wanted to see The Tramp again, but Chaplin went on creating new characters. 

(We will leave it to Jungians to explain why Chaplin had to become two opposite characters before he could personally escape the Archetype of The Tramp...

Many actors have had equally hard battles in getting detached from, if not a specific character, a specific type. 

Humphrey Bogart remained stuck in villain roles, usually gangsters, for nearly a decade before he got to play his first hero. 

Cary Grant never did escape from the hero type — either the romantic hero or the comic hero; when Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to play a murderer, in Suspicion, the studio over-ruled both of them and tacked on a sur-prise ending in which the Grant character did not commit the murder, after all. Etc.

Back in "The Real World," if a member of a family changes suddenly, the whole family suddenly appears agitated and disturbed. Family counselors have learned to expect this, even when the change consists of something everybody considers desirable — e.g., an alcoholic who suddenly stops drinking can "destabilize" the family to the extent that another member becomes clinically depressed, or develops psychosomatic symptoms, or even starts drink-ing heavily (as if the family "needed" an alcoholic). It seems that we not only speak and think in sentences like "John is an old grouch" but become disoriented and frightened if John suddenly starts acting friendly and generous. 

(Audiences rejected the previously "lovable" Chaplin most vehement-ly when he played the multiple wife-killer in Monsieur Verdoux. Probably, audiences would not have felt upset if the role had gone to the actor who originally wrote it for himself and sold it to Chaplin when the Hollywood moguls blacklisted him — Orson Welles.) If Dickens° Scrooge had changed, in actuality, as he changed in the book, several people in his social field would have suddenly developed bizarre behaviors they had never shown before... Chaplin, amusingly, once made a comedy about the chaos created by a man who conspicuously does not exhibit the "isness" or "essence" our subject-predicate language programs us to expect, City Lights. In this film, the little Tramp encounters a millionaire with two entirely different personalities: a generous and compassionate drunk, and a greedy, somewhat paranoid sober man. The Tramp and all the other characters soon exhibit behaviors that would look like clinical insanity to the audience, if we did not know the secret none of the characters guess: namely that each "personality" in the rich man appears when brain chemistry changes. The Russian mystic Gurdjieff claimed that we all contain multiple personalities. Many researchers in psychology and neuroscience now share that startling view. 

As Gurdjieff indicated, the "I" who toils at a job does not seem the same "I" who makes love with joy and passion, and the third "I" who occasionally gets angry for no evident reason seems a third personality, etc. There does not appear anything metaphysical about this; it even appears, measurably, on electroencephalograms. Dr. Frank Putnam of the National Institute of Health found that extreme cases of multiple personality — the only ones that ortho-dox psychiatry recognizes — show quite distinct brain waves for each "personality" almost as if the researchers had taken the electrodes off of one subject and attached them to another. (O'Regan. op. cit.) 

Dr. Rossi defines these separate personalities as "state specific information systems." Not only do we show different personalities when drunk and when sober, like Chaplin's emblematic millionaire, but we have different information banks ("memories") in these states. 

Thus, most people have noted that something that happened to them while drunk appears totally forgotten, until they get intoxicated again, and then the memory "miraculously" re-appears. This observation of state-specific information occurs even more frequently with LSD; nobody really remembers the richness of an LSD voyage until they take another dose. Emotional states seem part of a circular-causal loop with brain chemistry — it seems impossible, for science in 1990, to say that one part of the circle "causes" the other parts. Thus, we can now understand a phenomenon mentioned earlier, namely that we tend to remember happy experiences when happy and sad experiences when sad. The separate "personalities" or information systems within a typical human seem to fall into four main groups, with four additional groups appearing only in minorities who have engaged in one form or another of neurological self-research (metaprogramming). 


Messengers from Heaven: 
Gen. 28:10–19 
Rebekah, Jacob’s mother, has warned him away from his brother, Esau, who is in a rage: Jacob tricked their father, Isaac, into giving him the blessing due to Esau as the older son. Jacob runs away to Haran, where his uncle lives. As God addresses him directly for the first time, restating the covenant made with Abraham, the patriarch dreams of a grand stairway reaching to the sky, where mal’akim go up and down:  angeli – unknown in classical Latin. The older Greek translation influenced the Latin version: by the time that text was produced in late antiquity, biblical and extra-biblical Hebrew writings were using mal’akim for ‘angels’, like the current English word: for intermediate and later developments, see 1.7 , 12 , 15 , 18 ; 2.1 , 4 , 6 ; 5.10 – 11 , 15 ; 6.4 , 11 . * 

Jacob left Beersheba to go towards Haran. Reaching a certain point, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. When he lay down to sleep, he took one of the stones there to put under his head. He dreamed of a stairway set on the ground with its top reaching to the sky, and God’s 
messengers were going up and down on it. Beside him stood the Lord and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the ground on which you lie. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth … I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’ Waking from his sleep, Jacob said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know!’ He was shaken and said, ‘How fearsome this place is! This is none other than the house of God, which is heaven’s gate.’ Early in the morning, Jacob took the stone he had put under his head, set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. That place he called Bethel, though its name had been Luz.


Marley was dead: to begin with.  There is no doubt whatever about that.  The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.  Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.  Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind!  I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail.  I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.  But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for.  You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead?  Of course he did. How could it be otherwise?  Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years.  Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner.  And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from.  There is no doubt that Marley was dead.  This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.  If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot -- say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance -- literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley.  The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley.  Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him.

Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.  A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.  He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge.  No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him.  No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.  Foul weather didn't know where to have him.  The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect.  They often "came down" handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, "My dear Scrooge, how are you?  When will you come to see me?"  No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge.  Even the blind men's dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, "No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!"

But what did Scrooge care?  It was the very thing he liked.  To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call "nuts" to Scrooge. “

Tuesday 21 July 2020

The Militant Suffragette (1914)






“Mable’s Busy Day” (originally titled The Militant Suffragette), 1914
A Busy Day. Director: Mack Sennett. Performer: Charlie Chaplin. Keystone, 1914.

A Busy Day (1914) is Charlie Chaplin’s first female impersonation film. In this short film, Chaplin plays a “militant suffragette” who is jealous of her husband’s flirting with another woman during a parade. Chaplin (as the wife) follows her husband around, trying to catch him with the other woman. In the process, she disrupts a film set and ends up being pushed into a pier. By presenting the wife as comically angry and jealous of her husband’s flirting, the film promotes the stereotype of suffragettes being belligerent, unreasonable, and ultimately unlovable women.

This description is an excerpt from an SF Silent Film Festival Blog post, “Silent Films and Suffragettes“:

In director Mack Sennett’s 1914 short A Busy Day (originally titled A Militant Suffragette), Charlie Chaplin plays an obnoxious female character who [spoiler alert!] is knocked into the sea and left to drown. The film in its current state contains no overt references to the suffrage movement, but film historians believe the character would have been recognized by movie audiences of the time. It also features Mack Swain, Phyllis Allen, Ted Edwards, and Billy Gilbert with cinematography by Frank D. Williams. Chaplin, uncredited, according to the film’s IMDB listing, edited the short.

You can find information about A Busy Day and other silent films related to suffrage in Kay Sloan’s documentary Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema.

You can also read a review of A Busy Day at the Chaplin: Film by Film website.