History has Many Cunning Passages.

 

“ When I had a chance... when I was doing a story out in Denver, we went up to Estes Park. It was in the off-season. Went into the Stanley Hotel, and I asked to see the manager. 

And he came out, and we were just having lunch with him. And I said, "Can we talk to you? I write about The Shining." 

He said, "Really?" This fellow told me that he got a phone call from Stanley Kubrick, who said, "I think I want to make a movie about The Shining." 

And then he would keep this fellow on the phone for a long time. 

He said, "We had many long, long conversations in which he picked my brain about everything." 

And at that point, he said, "Kubrick was talking about maybe coming here to make the movie here," which I expect, at that point, that fellow liked the idea of, so it would make his hotel famous. 

And Kubrick said, "I'd like to send out a research team." 

And so he then sent out... the man said it was something like two or three people who came out here and stayed here for two or three months, taking photographs everywhere. 

And they spent a lot of time also down in Denver in the Colorado state archives, finding out, as I would now expect, the full history of Colorado, which... the flag of which plays a part. 

And the gold rush, the Colorado Gold Rush was also a very big event. And there's all... there's still a lot of American Indian/white people tension in Colorado with Navajos and Arapahos just to the south. 

This research team found out absolutely everything about Colorado, about Estes Park, about the Stanley Hotel, about its entire history, took photographs all over the place. 

Three months was the impression that I have of what he said about how this research team gathered absolutely everything. 

Kubrick unearthed an enormous amount about the real history of Colorado, where this takes place, because what he has done is found a way to dig into all of the patterns of our civilization, our times and our cultures, and the things that we don't want to look at. 

And this movie is very much also about denial of the genocides that we committed... we white folk from Europe... committed here and not that... not that white folks are the only people who do genocide. 

All humans do, as Kubrick makes clear in this movie. 

He would research everything and the full history and nature of everything you're gonna see in the movie on the screen and then boil it down and boil it down until he got the universal human and global patterns that make it so real. 

“White Man's Burden, Lloyd, My Man. 

White Man's Burden. 

I Like you, Lloyd. I always liked you. 

You were always the best of 'em. 

The best goddamned bartender from Timbuktu to Portland, Maine, 

or Portland, Oregon, for that matter.”

“Thank you for saying so.”

What does it mean? 

Jack saying, "You always were the best of 'em." 

Starting in Timbuktu? 

Jack The Schoolteacher was never in Timbuktu, but Jack The Universal Weak Male hired by armies to go commit atrocities has always been there. 

Now, of course, the word "Portland" is neat because it means where we landed or where The British or The Europeans landed. 

And Portland, Maine... 

Oregon is where they may have taken off from to go further west. 

Kubrick is thinking about the implications of everything that exists. You know, The Power of The Genie is in its confinement, as the great American poet Richard Wilbur said. 

Boiling it down, you know, 10,000 years in a little lamp, you got to get your act together. 

But that's the essence of great art. 

It's like a dream. 

It's boiled everything down to an emblematic symbol that's got all of life in it. 

Now, if you'll allow me to make a little bit of a link here. 

As I've thinking of this more in recent years, what we now understand to be the nature of What Dreams Are, I mean, it seems to be, the general theory is, that it's a way for the brain to boil down all of the previous experiences and then add in that day's experiences as well to see what kind of overall universal patterns there are to be found, so that you can be aware of what the patterns are out there, so that your subconscious will be all the more ready to react suddenly when you see something dangerous happen or something important happen that may lead you to a mate or to some food or away from danger. 

And therefore, the way Kubrick made movies was not unlike the way, according to these current theories, our brains create memories and, for that matter, dreams. 

That's the ultimate Shining 

that Kubrick does. 

He is like a mega brain for The Planet who is boiling down with all of this extensive research, all of these patterns of Our World and then giving them back to us in A Dream of A Movie... because movies are like A Dream... and that's related to why I think there's a lot of evidence that what Kubrick also gave us in The Shining is a movie about The Past. 

Not just any past -- The Past. 

I mean past-ness. 

It's a movie about how The Past impinges. 

That's what ghosts are. That's what those 

skitter-y voices in the opening shot 

that are following are about. 

There's two phrases from T.S. Eliot that I often think of when I'm thinking about The Shining. One of them is "The night"... 

I think they're both from T.S. Eliot... 

[ It’s James Joyce. ]

"The nightmare of history... 

How can we awake from 

The Nightmare of History?

And the other is his phrase... T.S. Eliot's phrase... 

"History has many cunning passages." 

And I think both of those phrases are directly apt for The Shining, in which we see many cunning passages in The Maze and in The Hotel itself and in which The Past becomes a nightmare, and in which Kubrick shows us how you escape from the nightmare of The Past by retracing your steps, as Danny does in that last line, which means acknowledging What Happened and learning about The Past and then getting out, only if you are going to be able to shine and see what the patterns are so you know to get away from them and avoid them and go for the good things. 

I mean, The Shining is his movie about how Families break down, whether they are an individual family or the larger societal family that tries to break up individual families. 

And his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut is the opposite. It's about A Family sorely tried, Bill Hartford and his wife and child, that survives all the horrible temptations that are in our DNA.”

The Russian General

You Hurt Him! See, He’s NOT a Machine, 

He’s a MAN — Be MORE Man Than He Is!

“I’m inclined to suspect that Jung was influenced by Joyce, because Jung certainly had the highest regard for “Ulysses”. 

He recommended it as a new Bible for the white race on the grounds that The Bible has warped the development of Western Humanity in certain egotistic directions, and Jung thought the development of the True Self - The Higher Self - required a dose of Oriental thinking and feeling - he said Joyce had brought that into Western literature with “Ulysses”.  

When Finnegan’s Wake started to appear, Jung wrote a comment on it in which he said that ‘This is either Mental Illness, or a degree of Mental Health inconceivable to most people’, and I think Jung finally decided it was a degree of Mental Health inconceivable to most people, because a lot of Jung develops right out of FW, just like a lot of Joseph Campbell did.  

The synchronistic element includes many seeming cases of precognition.  I’m going to do a whole book about this eventually, just to annoy The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, but Joyce has much better credentials as a prophet than Nostradamus does.  

So many things in FW seem to refer to events after 1939, when FW was published.  For instance, the middle chapter of the book, The Story of How Buckley shot The Russian General.

Buckley was a friend of Joyce’s Father who served in The Crimean War, which for Joyce was a symbol of all wars, because it had the word ‘crime’ in it, and Buckley saw A Russian General in The Field, and was going to shoot him, because The Primary Military Rule is ‘Always shoot the highest ranking officer of The Enemy Army’.  

As Buckley was about to shoot, The General took down his pants and sat down to take a crap in The Field, and Buckley, telling The Sory in Dublin pubs as he was (inaudible) to in old age, said ‘It made him look so Human, I couldn’t shoot.’.  

And then The General finished and pulled his pants up again, and he was An Enemy Officer again, and Buckley shot the poor bastard down in his tracks.  

And somehow, to Joyce, this is the symbol of The Fight or The Predicament or The Comedy of Humanity, that The General is Human with his pants down and his ass sticking out, and he’s Not Human with The Uniform on.  

And in telling The Story of How Buckley shot The Russian General, Joyce incorporates all the battles of human history.   

You can find every battle in every history book, The Charge of The Light Brigade, and Bryan Boru fighting The Danes at Clontarf in 1014, the Peloponnesian Wars; there have been long commentaries on all the military histories that Joyce put into that one chapter, together with all the anal jokes of which the English language is capable.  

Joyce seems to have shared Freud’s view that war is anal sadism, and mixed in with this is a running theme about the atoms and if’s, which goes back to the first sentence of the book, “Riverrun past Adam and Eve’s”.  

Eve And Adam are the male and female archetypes that dominate the book, and become all the different male and female combinations.  

And they’re like the Yin and the Yang in the I Ching, they’re also A River and A Mountain as well as a woman and a man, and they seem to be complementary cosmic principles.  

And the ‘atoms and the if’s’ is a pun on the ‘Adam’s and the Eve’s’, the basic Yin and Yang duality, but it also refers to The Uncertainty Principle in atomic physics, atoms and if’s, everything is uncertain on the quantum level, and Joyce has all these quantum puns running through the chapter, not only atom’s and if’s, but ‘blown to atoms’, which takes you back to The Garden of Eden again, and there are “sullied bodies all atom’d”, and then there’s a reference to “nokie-soakie”, followed closely by  a reference to “lipinese long-wage” which is the 'Nipponese language', which is followed by “Sayonara Poke-hole son” which is Nipponese language for  “Farewell Honorable Pookah”, the pookah being a six-foot tall white rabbit who resides in County Kerry and is well-known in Irish folklore.  

But “Sayonara poke-hole son” is also a well known in Norwegian yiddish for “Look at the hunchbacked fool”, and there’s a theme about The Hunchbacked Sailor cheating The Tailor all through that chapter, and The Sailor and The Tailor are like The Two Twins changing places, The Sailor is The Tailor and The Tailor is The Sailor, it’s just an S-T transformation, which is part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the S-T transformations in the Space-Time equations, then there’s The Charge of The Light Barricade, which refers to The Two-Hole Experiment in Quantum Mechanics where Light is both Particles and Waves, and that’s followed by a geranium curtain, which sounds like the flower the geranium but Joyce spells it with a ‘u’ so you’ve got Uranium in there, that’s The Trigger of The Atom Bomb, and it runs all through the chapter, you can find this theme of the atom bombing of Nagasaki, which hadn’t happened yet except in Joyce’s Head.  

And that’s the aspect of FW, as I said, that I’m most interested in these days.