Martin Sheen on Elvis: "Nobody Knew How to Deal with Him."

Martin Sheen on Elvis : 

"Nobody knew how to deal with him."

A Fairy Godfather

xx

 “Inside, Jim. Inside.

Too bad you didn’t Connect — you coulda gone to Juvenile Hall.... 

That’s What You Really WANT, isn’t it?”

•sad mumbling•

“Sure it is! You want to BUG us until we have to lock you up —WHY?”

“Just leave me alone...”

“No!”

Our Culture understands little about these matters, so when we ask The Other Person for Our Gold back, she probably won’t know what we’re talking about. 

She  might say, 

“Last week you were opening doors for me and treating me like A  Princess, 

and this week you’re ignoring me.” 

People don’t understand the dynamics. 

It is only after you get Your Gold back that you can see The Gold of The Other Person. 

When The Time is Right, when you are Ready to Bear The Weight, You Must Get  Your Gold Back. 

If you can do it with Dignity and Tact, that’s Best. 

But you MUST get  it back, one way or another.  

When you are struck, when Gold is being exchanged, sit quietly until The Smoke  clears and You See Where You Are.

If you can talk this out with The Person Holding  Your Gold — with all the Dignity and Intelligence you can muster — it’s a beautiful  way of affirming what is going on. It may be risky, but it is well worth the effort.  

One reason we hesitate to carry Our Own Gold is that it is Dangerously Close to God.  

Our Gold has Godlike characteristics, and it is difficult to bear The Weight of it.  

In Indian culture, there’s a time-honored custom that you have the right to go to  another person — a man, a woman, a stranger — and ask him or her to be The Incarnation of God for you. 

There are Strict Laws governing this. 

If the person agrees to  be The Incarnation of God for you, you must never pester him. 

You must never put  a heavy weight on him — it’s weighty enough as it is. 

And you must not engage in  any other kind of relationship with that person. 

You don’t become friends, and you  don’t Marry Him. 

The Person becomes a kind of Patron Saint for You.  

J. Krishnamurti was a wonderful man. 

Lots of people put Gold on him. 

One  afternoon, he and I went for a walk in Ojai, California, and a little old lady was  kneeling alongside the path. 

We just walked by. 

Later he told me, 

“She has put the  image of God on me. 

She knows what she’s doing. 

She never talks or asks anything of me. 

But when I go for a walk, she somehow knows where I’m going to be,  and she’s always there.” 

What was most touching was his attitude. 

If she needed  this, he would do it.

This is the original meaning of the terms Godfather and Godmother. 

That person  is The Carrier of Godlike qualities for you. 

Nowadays we think of a Godparent as the  one who will take care of us materially in case our parents are not able to see it  through. 

But the original meaning was of someone who carries the subtle part of  your life — a parent in an interior, Godlike way. It’s a wonderful custom. 

Most parents are worn out just seeing their child through to physical maturity.

We need  someone else who isn’t bothered with Authority Issues, like “How much is my allowance this week?” 

Being a Godparent was originally a quiet arrangement for holding a child’s Gold.  

When I was sixteen, two years after meeting Thor, I desperately needed someone like that. 

So I appointed a Godmother and Godfather, and those two people  saved My Life. 

They knew instinctively the duties of this need, and they fulfilled  them. 

My godmother died when I was twenty-two, and I wasn’t ready to give her  up. It was the most difficult loss of My Life. 

I was forced to take my Gold back before I was ready. My Godfather lived until I was in my fifties, and by then I was  ready to let him go.  

I love the idea of Godparents. 

Sometimes Young People come circling around  me, and I bring up This Language. “Do you want a Godfather?” 

If it fits, we work out  the necessary rules. “You may have this out of me, and you must not ask that.”  

These are the old Godparent laws. It’s a version of the incarnation of God in Indian  custom.    

Sometimes Gold is Dark    

I love India, but being there can be challenging, sometimes even dreadful. During  one visit, I nearly sank in The Darkness.  

An Indian friend and I went to Calcutta. He wanted to see his father, who lived  in a politically sensitive zone near The City, where foreigners were not allowed. 

So I  said, “Please go. I’ll stay in Calcutta while you visit him.” 

My Friend tried to help me  get a hotel, but there were no good ones, so I ended up in a sleazy hotel in a dark  part of town. 

Because he was so anxious to see His Father, once he got me settled, I  encouraged him to go.  

Within hours, a woman on the street thrust a dead baby into my hands, children  with amputated limbs poked their stumps into my ribs begging for money, and lepers and corpses were lying in the streets where I walked. 

It was too much for me,  and I didn’t know how to get away from it. 

Normally I could just go to my room  and hole up. As an introvert, that isn’t difficult for me. 

But my room in that hotel  had paper-thin walls, and someone was actually dying in the room on one side,  people were screaming and fighting in the room on the other side, and there was a  nightlong political rally in the square outside my window. 

I just couldn’t take it. 

I  had more in me than I could hold, and I started falling to pieces.  

Gold comes in many varieties. Sometimes our Gold is bright, but at other times  it is heavy and difficult, and seems anything but Golden. 

I had no friends and no  telephone, and couldn’t cope. 

Then I remembered the custom I’d witnessed with  Krishna-murti. 

I needed to ask someone to be the incarnation of God for me,  someone with whom I could share my burden.  

I went to a park nearby to look for a candidate. 

After standing still and observing  many people for about twenty minutes, I selected a middle-aged man who was  wearing traditional Indian garb. 

I felt a particular respect for him. He walked with  great Dignity. I continued to watch him closely.  

Finally, trembling, I went up to him and asked, “Sir, do you speak English?”  

“Yes.”  

“Will you be The Incarnation of God for me?” 

It was the second sentence I  spoke to that Man.  

And, God bless him, he said, “Yes.” 

I told him who I was and how frightened and burdened I was feeling, and that I  was unable to stand it. I poured out my misery, and he just listened without saying  a word. 

Finally I wound down and apologized for splashing all over him. 

I felt so  much better. 

I had my feet under me again.  

I thanked him, and then I asked, “And Who Are You?”  

He told me his name. I said, “Yes, and Who Are You?” 

He said, “I am a Roman  Catholic Preist.” 

There are very few Catholic Preists in India, and I had picked one  to be The Incarnation of God for me. 

He had listened, heard, and understood. Then  we bowed to each other and went our separate ways. 

Because he did that for me,  neither of us will ever be the same again. He did exactly what I needed with a Grace  and a Dignity that lives with me to this day.    

Making the Exchange Conscious    

I’m astonished by the enormity of the transfers of Gold that I watch every day. It  goes on everywhere. 

Often when I give a talk, for example, I single out someone  and speak to him, putting Gold in his lap. 

I do this to nourish myself. 

I used to  think, 

“What kind of adolescent impostor am I?” 

But one day I was lecturing with  Marie Louise von Franz, one of Dr. Jung’s foremost disciples, and she cheerfully  said, “The only way I can lecture is to find somebody I like and talk to him.” What a  relief Occasionally after doing this, I tell the person, but mostly, I don’t.  

Generally we don’t exchange Gold well, and much of our depression and loneliness revolves around misunderstanding this exchange. We run around in a state  of guilt. 

“I’m a failure.” 

“This isn’t working.”

“What are they going to think about me?”

But when you understand the Transmission of Gold, you can honor it and not feel  guilty. You know something indirect is taking place. 

You can sense it, but you can’t  possess it yet. Just try to remember that it’s your Gold that is being held by  whomever or whatever. 

Knowing this gives you a certain Dignity, which we all desperately need.  

People Will Say : 'Monkeys Can Do Paintings.' Well, They Can’t Really.

Welcome to The Planet of The Apes

"You don't invent Technology and then decide what to do with it - 

You come up with An Artistic Problem, 

and then  

You have to invent the technology in order to accomplish it.

So, it is the opposite to what everyone thinks it is, and any Artist will tell you that.

And Art  

- on ALL levels - 

is just Technology.

Which why - 

People will say 'Monkeys can do paintings' 

Well, they can't, really.

They can do scribbling, they can do, like my 2 year old does 

- but if you Want to Say 

' I want to convey an emotion, to another Human Being',

 that's something only Human  Beings can do.

Animals can do it by roaring in your face or biting your hand off (that usually has an effect). 

But to do it in A Painting; to do it in A Play, or A Story, in Poetry - or anything that's in The Arts - you have to be a Human Being.

The Patron creates The Propaganda - and what I wanted to do was go back to some of the Older Propaganda, which was consistant through ALL of The Societies, Mythology -

Which is to say, 

"What Do They ALL Believe..?"

Because all of this propaganda was created INDEPENDENTLY.

And what are these things which they ALL believe,  which is, Relationships with your Father, Relationships with your Society, Relationships with Your History, Relationships with The Gods - all of this stuff, it's old, but there were psychological motiffs that were created, through storytelling, primarily ORAL storytelling, that explained WHAT they believed in and WHO they believed in.

So what I wanted to do was go back and find the psychological motiffs that underlie that - those grow out of Popularism.

And to say that - not all - but a majority of people, BOYS, have a certain psychological relationship with Their Father -

And that's been going on through History, and trying to explain that to say : 

"We Know Your DARKEST SECRET. And Therefore, You're Part of US.

Because We All Know The SAME THINGS  - 

We Know What You're Thinking About Your Mother; 

We Know What You Think About Your Bother; 

We Know What You Think  About Your Father REALLY -"

“IT IS NOT TOO FAR-FETCHED TO PREDICT THAT SOME DAY OUR VERY OWN PLANET MAY BE PEOPLED ENTIRELY BY SUPERMEN!” — Joe Shuster assured us back in 1938, but comic-book reality predicts developments in our own in many other ways.

  What we construct in our imaginations, we have a knack of building or discovering. We may not have flying men or invulnerable women racing among us, but we now have access to supertechnologies that once existed only in comic-book stories.

  “Mother Boxes,” empathic personal computers like the ones in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World story cycle, are already here in embryonic form. Is the soothing contact offered by the Mother Box so different from the instant connection that a cell phone provides? Twenty-four-hour access to friends, family, and the buzz of constant social exchange can make us feel cocooned and safe in a reportedly hostile world. 

In many cases, Mother herself can be summoned on the Box.

  Metron was Kirby’s avatar of ruthless, questing intellect, whose Mobius Chair twisted through time and space to make him the god of couch potatoes, surfing channels, gathering information, without ever leaving the comfort of his armchair. Metron’s magic furniture seems less a wonder of supertechnology than a fact of daily life. As Kirby tried to tell us in his book of the same name, we are the new gods, just as we are the old ones, too.

  There is already technology that allows people to drive remote-controlled cars with their minds. What’s to stop someone becoming Auto-Man, the Human Car? Secretly, he sits in his room, munching Maltesers at his computer screen, while he listlessly pilots his incredible RV supercar around town to save lives and fight the crime that ordinary police cars just aren’t fast enough to handle.

  In so many ways, we’re already superhuman. Being extraordinary is so much a part of our heritage as human beings that we often overlook what we’ve done and how very unique it all is. We have made machines to extend our physical reach and the reach of our senses, allowing us to peer into the depths of space and outer time. Our cameras and receivers allow us to see across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. We can slow down, freeze, and accelerate time on our screens. We can study and manipulate microscopic worlds, print our names on single atoms, analyze soil on Mars, and observe the rings of Saturn at close range. Our voices and our photographic records of everything we’ve seen are carried at the speed of light on an expanding bubble of radio, into the infinite. Television broadcasts of the first moon landing are still traveling, growing fainter as the waves spread out. If you had a powerful enough receiver and a TV on a planet forty light-years from here, you could watch Neil Armstrong take his first step on mankind’s behalf and hear our silly, hopeful summer 1969 songs.

  Our space machines are the remote physical tendrils of our species launched across gulfs of nothing to land on other worlds or to travel, gathering data until the signal fades, or until there’s no one left to listen. These ultimate extensions of human senses thread our awareness into the absolute freezing dark 10.518 billion miles from where you’re sitting. As I write, that’s how far Voyager 1, humanity’s farthest-reaching finger, has extended. Launched in 1977, it remains connected to its home world by radio and by the silver thread of its passage through time from launchpad to interstellar void. Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that’s so big we forget it’s there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to fish. We are cells in the body of a singular three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system.

  The superheroes may have their greatest value in a future where real superhuman beings are searching for role models. When the superhumans of tomorrow step dripping from their tanks, they could do much worse than to look to Superman for guidance. Superhero comics may yet find a purpose all along as the social realist fiction of tomorrow.

  Superhero science has taught me this: Entire universes fit comfortably inside our skulls. Not just one or two but endless universes can be packed into that dark, wet, and bony hollow without breaking it open from the inside. The space in our heads will stretch to accommodate them all. The real doorway to the fifth dimension was always right here. Inside. That infinite interior space contains all the divine, the alien, and the unworldly we’ll ever need.

  To find out what higher dimensions might look like, all we have to do is study the relationship between our 3-D world and the 2-D comics. A 4-D creature could look “down” on us through our walls, our clothes, even our skeletons. Our world would be a Cubist X-ray, and perhaps even our thoughts might be laid bare to their gaze.

  As comics readers gazing down from a higher dimension perpendicular to the page surface, we can actually peer inside characters’ thoughts with balloons or captions that provide running commentary. We can also control time in a comics universe. We can stop on page 12 and look back to page 5 to check a story point we missed. The characters themselves continue to act out their own dramas in the same linear sequence, oblivious to our shifting perspective. 

They can go back in time only with the help of supermachines, like the Flash’s cosmic treadmill, but we can look at 1938 Superman next to 1999 Superman without colliding the two stories anywhere but in our heads.

SINCERITY

He closes the hood. Group moves across to other car.

JUDY and PLATO. The other kids are behind them. JUDY looks to see that their attention isn't on her, then speaks quietly to PLATO.

 JUDY

 Is he your friend?

 PLATO

 Yes. My Best Friend.

 JUDY

 What's he like?

 PLATO

 Oh, I don't know. 

You have to get to know him. 
He doesn't say much but when he does you know he means it. 

He's sincere.

JUDY

 Well, that's The Main Thing--

Don't you think so?

PLATO

 Maybe next summer he's going to take me hunting with him--and fishing. 
I want him to teach me how and I bet he won't get mad if I

 goof. 
His name's Jim. It's really James but he likes Jim more.

 (laughing)

 People he really likes--he lets call him "Jamie."

JUDY

 Want to finish my hamburger? I only took a bite.

 PLATO

 Okay.

Full shot. Guarded cars. 

JIM is close in f.g. at wheel of his car.BUZZ is beyond, at wheel of his. Both boys are gunning their engines, listening critically. JIM lets his idle.

JUDY, GOON and group. 

They watch in silent anticipation.

PLATO starts away from them.

Traveling shot. PLATO hurrying away from the group. 

He stops, looking off.

JIM and BUZZ. 

PLATO in distance.

 BUZZ

 Better try the doors. Jump out.

JIM opens his door.

BUZZ

 No--quick, man! You got to break quick.

JIM shuts his door and tries again. So does BUZZ. Then both boys walk forward to The Edge. Neither says a word.

BUZZ puts his hand on JIM's shoulder.

High angle. The edge of the bluff (process). JIM and BUZZ are directly below us. Under them the plateau falls steeply away in a sheer drop of a hundred feet to the ocean below.

Two shot. JIM and BUZZ. JIM is staring below. He is beginning to perspire. He lights a cigarette. Without taking his hand from JIM's shoulder, BUZZ borrows the cigarette from his lips, takes a drag and hands it back.

JIM takes another puff then tosses it into The Abyss.

 BUZZ

 (quietly)

 This is The Edge, boy. 
This is The End.

JIM

Yeah.

BUZZ

 I like you, you know?

JIM

 Buzz? What are we doing this for?

BUZZ 
(still quiet)

 We got to do something. 
Don't we?

David Foster Wallace - The Problem with Irony 

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal”. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

This was further examined on the blog Fiction Advocate by Mike Moats:

The theory is this: Infinite Jest is Wallace’s attempt to both manifest and dramatize a revolutionary fiction style that he called for in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” The style is one in which a new sincerity will overturn the ironic detachment that hollowed out contemporary fiction towards the end of the 20th century. Wallace was trying to write an antidote to the cynicism that had pervaded and saddened so much of American culture in his lifetime. He was trying to create an entertainment that would get us talking again.

"Cultural critics love hypothesizing about hipsters. And certainly hipsters make for useful lab rats if you're interested in the culture of young, gentrifying, trendy, affluent, and white college graduates. But it's easy to let this hypothesizing go too far, and you get into trouble when you try to charge hipsters with representing the "ethos of our age." They're just kids making their way from young adulthood to the rest of their lives.

Yet that's exactly what Princeton professor Christy Wampole does in her recent New York Times op-ed, titled "How to Live Without Irony." She tells us, with disconcerting certitude, that irony is the ethos of our era, and she knows because, I mean, just look at those hipsters with their ironic mustaches, record players, and trombones, right?

If hipsters aren't convincing enough, Wampole offers a second proof that we live in the "age of Deep Irony": advertisements. Not a specific advertisement, mind you, but, she writes, "an ad that calls itself an ad, makes fun of its own format, and attempts to lure its target market to laugh at and with it." You know, that one. That's irony, she says, and because she's raised the specter of an unidentified advertisement, along with the unidentified hipsters, we're supposed to believe that the overwhelming ethos of our time is irony.

But you can't determine the ethos of an entire age by looking at a sub-sub-sub-sub-culture."

“ What is The New Sincerity? 

Think of it as irony and sincerity combined like Voltron, to form a new movement of astonishing power. 

Or think of it as the absence of irony and sincerity, where less is (obviously) more. 

If those strain the brain, just think of Evel Knievel. Let’s be frank. 

There’s no way to appreciate Evel Knievel literally. 

Evel is the kind of man who defies even fiction, because the reality is too over the top. 

Here is a man in a red-white-and-blue leather jumpsuit, driving some kind of rocket car. 

A man who achieved fame and fortune jumping over things. 

Here is a real man who feels at home as Spidey on the cover of a comic book. 

Simply put, Evel Knievel boggles the mind. 

But by the same token, he isn’t to be taken ironically, either. 

The fact of the matter is that Evel is, in a word, awesome. ... 

Our greeting: 

A double thumbs-up. 

Our credo: 

“Be More Awesome”. 

Our lifestyle: 

“Maximum Fun”. 

Throw caution to the wind, friend, and live The New Sincerity.

Lord — These Affairs are Hard on The Heart

“Yes, You Buy Me Many Things.  Thank You.”

The evening before the test, someone recalled “the frogs had gathered in a little pond by the camp and copulated and squawked all night long.” 

Oppenheimer chain smoked nervously and sat quietly reading the French poet Baudelaire:

Seductive twilight, the criminal’s friend Silent like a wolf

The sky is closing down

A dark cloth drawn across an alcove

Where the impatient man changes into a beast of prey

At 5:10, the countdown began at zero minus twenty minutes. 

As loudspeakers ticked off the time at five minute intervals, Oppenheimer wandered in and out of the control bunker, glancing up at the sky. 

At the two minute mark, he was heard to say to himself,

“Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.” 

Minus one minute... Minus fifty-five seconds...

Ella Oppenheimer was “very delicate,” a friend remembered, with an air of sadness about her. 

Robert was precociously brilliant, and both parents were protective of his uncommon gifts. 

Frail, frequently sick, 

he was attended to by servants, driven everywhere. 

He rarely played with other children.

Priscilla McMillan, writer: 

He wasn’t mischievous. 

He was too brilliant to be just one of the children. 

But his parents treasured him; 

treated him like a little jewel. 

And he just skipped Being a Boy.

“My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that The World

 is full of cruel and bitter things,”

 Oppenheimer said. 

“It gave me no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.” 

Sometime around the age of five, Robert’s grandfather gave him a small collection of minerals. 

“From then on,” he said, 

“I became, in a completely childish way, an ardent mineral collector. 

But it began to be also a bit of a Scientist’s interest, a fascination with crystals.”

Martin Sherwin,

Historian: 

He wrote to the New York Mineralogical Society on a typewriter. 

They were so impressed with what he had to say that, of course, thinking he was an adult, they invited him to give a lecture, and little Robert, at age 10 or 11, shows up at the New York Mineralogical Society, and has to stand on a box in order to see over the lectern to give this lecture. 

That is NOT a normal, 

average childhood.

Narrator: 

Eight years separated Robert from his brother Frank, 

too many for companionship. 

Robert was a loner. 

And at New York’s Ethical Culture school, he inhabited his own rarefied world, more comfortable with his teachers than with the other students, who nicknamed him “Booby” Oppenheimer. 

To protect himself, he relied on his preternatural brilliance and grew aloof and arrogant.

 Priscilla McMillan, writer: He didn’t grow up. He studied a great deal, which shielded him from the world. 

And the emotional side of him didn’t catch up until much later.

Narrator: 

Oppenheimer graduated high school valedictorian 

and then conquered Harvard. 

He studied chemistry, physics, calculus; English and French literature; Western, Chinese and Hindu philosophy; 

He even found time to write stories and poems.

Richard Rhodes, writer: 

He described it as being like The Huns invading Rome, 

by which he meant he was going to swallow up 

Every bit of Culture and Art and Science 

that he could possibly do.

Martin Sherwin, Historian: 

Harvard’s an environment in which 

The Intellectual Life is a rich feast, 

But the Social Life is a desert.

Narrator: 

In all his years at Harvard, 

he never had a date. 

He remained immature, uncertain, 

easily bewildered in social situations. 

One friend remembered 

“bouts of melancholy, 

and deep, deep depressions.” 

"In the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence," he said later, 

“I hardly took an action, hardly did anything that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong. 

My feeling about myself was always one of extreme discontent.” 

His doubts about himself came clear in his poems:

The dawn invests our substance

With desire

And the slow light betrays us,

And our wistfulness...

We find ourselves again 

Each in his separate prison 

Ready, hopeless

For negotiation 

With other men.