Showing posts with label Salt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Salt. Show all posts

Wednesday 5 December 2018

The Difficult Second Album

Scene Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Film

“ I tend to think that what Fame has done is to replace The Sea as The Element of Choice of Adventure for Young People. 

If you were a dashing Young Man in the 19th century you would probably have wanted to run away To Sea, just as in the 20th century you might decide that you want to run away and form a pop band. 

The difference is that in the 19th century, before running away To Sea, you would have had at least some understanding of the element that you were dealing with and would have perhaps, say, learned to swim ... 

The thing is that there is no manual for how to cope with Fame.

So you'll get some, otherwise likeable young person, who has done  

  • One good comic book,  
  • One good film, 
  • One good record, 

suddenly told that they are a Genius

Who believes it, and who runs out laughing and splashing into the billows of Celebrity, and whose heroin-sodden corpse is washed up a few weeks later in the shallows of the tabloids. ”


" As I mentioned in my introduction to Frank's Dark Knight, one of the things that prevents superhero stories from ever attaining the status of true modern myths or legends is that they are open ended. 

An essential quality of a Legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time.

Robin Hood is driven to become an outlaw by the injustices of King John and his minions. That is his Origin. 

He meets Little John, Friar Tuck and all the rest and forms the merry men. He wins the tournament in disguise, he falls in love with Maid Marian and thwarts the Sheriff of Nottingham. That is his Career, including love interest, Major Villains and the formation of a superhero group that he is part of. 

He lives to see the return of Good King Richard and is finally killed by a woman, firing a last arrow to mark the place where he shall be buried. That is his Resolution --

you can apply the same paradigm to King ArthurDavy Crockett or  Sherlock Holmes with equal success. 

You cannot apply it to most comic book characters because, in order to meet the commercial demands of a continuing series, they can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of True Myth. ”








"The Dark Knight"... by on Scribd

Wednesday 3 October 2018

PAY ATTENTION

The Mesopotamian Emperor  
acted out Marduk. 

He was ALLOWED to be Emperor 
insofar as he was 
A Good Marduk. 

That meant that,
He had eyes all the way around his head
and
He could speak magick.


He could speak properly.


Conan: 
What gods do you pray to?

Subotai:

I pray to the four winds... and you?

Conan: 

To Crom...
but I seldom pray to Him -- 
He doesn't listen.

Subotai: 

[chuckles
What good is he then?
Ah, it's just as I've always said.

Conan:

He is strong!
If I die, I have to go before him, and he will ask me,
   "What is the riddle of steel?"
If I don't know it, he will cast me out of Valhalla and laugh at me.

That's Crom — 
Strong on his mountain!

Subotai:

Ah, my god is greater.

Conan: 

[chuckles]
Crom laughs at your Four Winds.
He laughs from his mountain.

Subotai:

My God is Stronger.
He is  
The Everlasting Sky!
Your god lives underneath him.

[Conan shoots Subotai a skeptical look. Subotai laughs]





" The ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians had some very interesting, dramatic ideas about that. 

For example
—Very Briefly—
There was a deity known as Marduk. 

Marduk was a Mesopotamian deity, and imagine this is sort of what happened. 
As an empire grew out of the post-ice age

—15,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago—

All these tribes came together. 

These tribes each had their own deity—their own image of the ideal. 
But then they started to occupy the same territory.



!! THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE !!

 One tribe had God A, and one tribe had God B,
and one could wipe the other one out, 
and then it would just be God A, who wins. 

That’s not so good, because maybe you want to trade with those people, or maybe you don’t want to lose half your population in a war. 

So then you have to have an argument about whose God is going to take priority—which ideal is going to take priority. 

What seems to happen is represented in mythology as a battle of the gods in celestial space. 

From a practical perspective, it’s more like an ongoing dialog :

' You believe this; I believe this. 
You believe that; I believe this. 
How are we going to meld that together? '

You take God A, and you take God B, and maybe what you do is extract God C from them, and you say,
 ‘God C now has the attributes of A and B.’ 

And then some other tribes come in, and C takes them over, too. 

Take Marduk, for example. 

He has 50 different names, at least in part, of the subordinate gods—that represented the tribes that came together to make the civilization. 

That’s part of the process by which that abstracted ideal is abstracted. 

You think, 
This is important, and it works, because your tribe is alive -

And so we’ll take the best of both, if we can manage it, 
and extract out something, that’s even more abstract, 
that covers both of us.’ 

I’ll give you a couple of Marduk’s interesting features. 


He has eyes all the way around his head. 


He’s elected by all the other gods to be King God. 

That’s the first thing. 
That’s quite cool. 

They elect him because they’re facing a terrible threat—sort of like a flood and a monster combined

Marduk basically says that, 
if they elect him top God,
he’ll go out and stop the flood monster, 

and they won’t all get wiped out. 

It’s a serious threat. 

It’s Chaos itself making its comeback. 




SALTWATER 

All the gods agree, 
and Marduk is the new manifestation. 

He’s got eyes all the way around His head, 
and
He speaks magic words. 

When he fights, he fights this deity called Tiamat

We need to know that, because the word 
Tiamat’ is associated with the word 'tehom.' 

Tehom is the Chaos that God makes Order out of at The Beginning of Time in Genesis, 
so it’s linked very tightly to this story. 

Marduk, with His eyes 
and 
His capacity to speak magic words, 
goes out and confronts Tiamat
who’s like this watery sea dragon. 

It’s a classic Saint George story: 
Go out and Wreak Havoc on The Dragon. 

He cuts Her into pieces
and 
He makes The World out of Her pieces. 

That’s The World that human beings live in. 

The Mesopotamian Emperor acted out Marduk. 

He was ALLOWED to be Emperor 
insofar as he was 
A Good Marduk. 

That meant that he had eyes all the way around his head, and he could speak magick; 
He could speak properly

We are starting to understand, at that point, 
The Essence of Leadership.

Because what’s Leadership? 
It’s the capacity to see what the hell’s in front of your face, and maybe in every direction, and maybe 

The Capacity to Use Your Language Properly to Transform Chaos into Order. 

God only knows how long it took the Mesopotamians to figure that out....

The best they could do was dramatize it, but it’s staggeringly brilliant. 

It’s by no means obvious
and this Chaos is a very strange thing. 

This is a Chaos that God wrestled with 
at The Beginning of Time. 

Chaos is Half-Psychological 
and 
Half-Real. 

There’s no other way to really describe it. 

Chaos is what you encounter when you’re blown into pieces and thrown into deep confusion—when your world falls apart, when your dreams die, when you’re betrayed. 

It’s The Chaos that emerges, 
and 
The Chaos is everything it wants, 
and 
It’s too much for you. 

That’s for sure. 

It pulls you down into 
The Underworld, 
and 
That’s Where The Dragons Are. 

All you’ve got at that point is your capacity to bloody well keep your eyes open, 
and 
To speak as carefully and as clearly as you can. 

Maybe, if you’re lucky, 
You’ll get through it that way 
and 
Come Out The Other Side. 

It’s taken people a very long time to figure that out, and it looks, to me, that the idea is erected on the platform of our ancient ancestors, maybe tens of millions of years ago, because we seem to represent that which disturbs us deeply  
using the same system that we used to represent  
Serpentile, or other, Carnivorous Predators. 






We’re biological creatures. 

When we formulated our strange capacity to abstract and use language, we still had all those underlying systems that were there when we were only animals. 

We have to use those systems that are there

Part of the emotional and motivational architecture of our thinking, part of the reason why we can
Demonize our Enemies 
who upset our axioms, 

Is Because We Perceive Them as if They’re Carnivorous Predators. 

We do it with the same system. 

That’s Chaos itself
The Thing That Always Threatens Us—

The Snakes That Came to The Trees 
 when we lived in them, like 60 million years ago. 

It’s the same damned systems. 

The Marduk Story 
is partly 
The Story of Using Attention and Language to Confront Those Things That Most Threaten Us. 

Some of those things are Real World threats, but some of them are Psychological Threats
which are just as profound but far more abstract. 

But we use the same system to represent them.

 That’s why you freeze, if you're frightened. 

You’re a prey animal. 
You’re like a rabbit, and you’ve seen something that's going to eat you. 

You freeze, and you’re paralyzed. 

You’re turned to stone, which is what you do when you see a Medusa with a head full of snakes. 

You turn to stone. 
You’re paralyzed, and the reason you do that is because you’re using the predator detector system to protect yourself. 

Your Heart Rate Goes Way Up, 
and 
You Get Ready to Move. 

Things that upset us rely on that system. 

The Marduk Story
for example, is the idea that, 
 If there are 
 Things That Upset You

 —chaotic, terrible, serpentine, monstrous, underworld things that threaten you

The Best Thing to Do 
is 
Open Your Eyes, 
Keep Your Speech Organized, 
and go out, 
Confront The Thing, 
and 
Make The World Out of It. 

It’s staggering. 
When I read that story and started to understand it, it just blew me away. 

It’s such a profound idea, and we know it’s true, too, because we know, in psychotherapy, that 
you’re much better off to confront your fears head-on than you are to wait and let them find you.

Partly what you do, 
if you’re a psychotherapist, 
is you help people 
Break Their Fears into Little Pieces
—The Things That Upset Them—
and then 
To Encounter Them One by One 
and Master Them. 

You’re teaching this process of 
Internal Mastery Over The Strange 
and 
Chaotic World.





Conan's Father:
Fire and Wind come from The Sky, 
from The Gods of The Sky. 

But Crom is Your God - 
Crom and he lives in The Earth. 

Once, Giants lived in The Earth, Conan. 
And in The Darkness of Chaos, They fooled Crom,
and They took from Him The Enigma of Steel.

Crom was angered. And The Earth shook. 
Fire and Wind struck down these Giants, 
and They threw Their bodies into The Waters, 

But in Their Rage, The Gods Forgot The Secret of Steel and left it on The Battlefield.

We who found it are just Men. 
Not Gods. Not Giants. Just Men.

The Secret of Steel has always carried with it a Mystery. 

You must learn its Riddle, Conan. 
You must learn its discipline

For No-One - No-One in This World can you trust. Not Men, Not Women, Not Beasts.

[Points to sword]


This You Can Trust.