Showing posts with label The Dark Tower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Dark Tower. Show all posts

Friday 25 February 2022

There is a Shining Point Where All Lines Intersect











BILL MOYERS
But Joe, can Westerners grasp this kind of 
mystical trance theological experience? 

It does transcend Theology, 
it leaves theology behind. 
I mean, if you’re locked to 
the image of God in a culture 
where Science determines 
your perceptions of reality, 
how can you experience 
this ultimate ground that 
the shamans talk about?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL
The best example I know in our literature is 
that beautiful book by John Neihardt called 
Black Elk Speaks.

BILL MOYERS
Black Elk was?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL
Black Elk was a young Sioux or Dakota
as they are often called, boy around nine years old, 
before the American cavalry had encountered the Sioux. 

They were the great people of the plains. 

And this boy became sick, psychologically sick. 
His Family…I’m telling the typical shaman story. 
The child begins to tremble, and is immobilized, 
and the family’s terribly concerned about it. 

And they send for a shaman who had had the experience in his own youth, to come as a psychoanalyst, you might say, and pull the youngster out of it. 

But instead of relieving him of the deities, 
he is adapting him to the deities, 
and the deities to himself, you might say. 

It’s a different problem from that of psychoanalysis
I think it was Nietzsche who said, 
“Be careful, lest in casting out your devil, 
you cast out the best thing that’s in you.” 

Here, the deities who have been encountered 
the powers, let’s call them are retained
The connection is retained, it’s not broken. 
And these men then become the spiritual advisers and gift-givers 
of Their People.

Well, what happened with this young boy, he was about nine years old, was he had a vision, and the vision is described, and it’s a vision prophetic of the terrible future that his tribe was to have. 

But it also spoke of the possible positive aspects of it. 
It was a vision of what he called the hoop of his nation, realizing that it was one of many hoops which is something that we haven’t all learned well enough yet and the cooperation of all the hoops and all the nations and grand processions and so forth. 

But more than that, it was an experience of himself as going through the realms of spiritual imagery that were of his culture, and assimilating their import. And it comes to one great statement, which for me is a key statement of the understanding of myth and symbols. 


He says,“I saw myself on 
The Central Mountain of The World, 
The Highest Place. 
And I had A Vision, because I was seeing 
in a sacred manner, 
of The World.” 
And the sacred central mountain 
was Harney Peak in South Dakota. 

And then he says, 
“But the central mountain is everywhere.” 
That is a real mythological realization.

BILL MOYERS
Why?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL
It distinguishes between the local cult image, Harney Peak, 
and its connotation, the center of the world. 

The center of the world is the hub of the universe, axis mundi, do you know, the central point, the pole star around which all revolves. 

The Central Point of The World 
is The Point where 
Stillness and Movement are together



Movement is Time
Stillness is Eternity
realising the relationship of the temporal moment 
to the eternal not-moment, 
but forever - is the Sense of Life. 

Realising how this moment in your life is actually a moment of eternity, 
and the experience of the eternal aspect 
of what you’re doing in the temporal experience 
is the mythological experience, 
and he had it. 

So is the central mountain of the world 
Jerusalem, Rome, Banaras. 
Lhasa, Mexico City, you know? 

Mexico City, Jerusalem, 
is symbolic of a spiritual principle 
as the center of the world.

BILL MOYERS: 
So this little Indian was saying, there is a shining point where all lines intersect?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 
That’s exactly what he said.

BILL MOYERS: 
He was saying God has no circumference.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 
God is an intelligible sphere, let’s say a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. And the center, Bill, is right where you’re sitting, and the other one is right where I’m sitting. And each of us is a manifestation of that mystery.

Tuesday 1 December 2020

PRIORITIES



"The Man in Black fled across The Desert....

....and The Gunslinger followed."

Stephen King —
The Gunslinger

VAN HELSING :
Count Dracula...
Have you eaten?

DRACULA :
I've worked up an appetite.
Good thing there are Two of You.

VAN HELSING :
No.

Puts an Ice-Pick to her own jugular --

Under NO circumstances are there 
Two of Us.

Take Mina, lose me.

I know you don't like to drink The Blood of The Dead.

DRACULA :
You'd die to save this Terrified Child?

VAN HELSING :
I'd die to save ANY Terrified Child.

DRACULA :
Why?

VAN HELSING :
Because I'm Not Like You.
There's a Nobler Purpose to My Life than simply prolonging it.

Settle for Her, or Take Me and LEARN Something.

Mina Whimpers

DRACULA :
Run.
Go! Now!

She Does.

DRACULA :
Agatha Van Helsing
I am Going to Make You LAST.

You'll be Part of Me.

You'll travel to The New World in My Veins.

VAN HELSING :
Come, Boy —
Suckle.





AFFECTION

    I begin with the humblest and most widely diffused of loves, the love in which our experience seems to differ least from that of the animals. Let me add at once that I do not on that account give it a lower value. Nothing in Man is either worse or better for being shared with the beasts. When we blame a man for being “a mere animal,” we mean not that he displays animal characteristics (we all do) but that he displays these, and only these, on occasions where the specifically human was demanded. (When we call him “brutal” we usually mean that he commits cruelties impossible to most real brutes; they’re not clever enough.)

    The Greeks called this love storge (two syllables and the g is “hard”). I shall here call it simply Affection. My Greek Lexicon defines storge as “affection, especially of parents to offspring”; but also of offspring to parents. And that, I have no doubt, is the original form of the thing as well as the central meaning of the word. The image we must start with is that of a mother nursing a baby, a bitch or a cat with a basketful of puppies or kittens; all in a squeaking, nuzzling heap together; purrings, lickings, baby-talk, milk, warmth, the smell of young life.

    The importance of this image is that it presents us at the very outset with a certain paradox. The Need and Need-love of the young is obvious; so is the Gift-love of the mother. She gives birth, gives suck, gives protection. On the other hand, she must give birth or die. She must give suck or suffer. That way, her Affection too is a Need-love. There is the paradox. It is a Need-love but what it needs is to give. It is a Gift-love but it needs to be needed. We shall have to return to this point.

    But even in animal life, and still more in our own, Affection extends far beyond the relation of mother and young. This warm comfortableness, this satisfaction in being together, takes in all sorts of objects. It is indeed the least discriminating of loves. There are women for whom we can predict few wooers and men who are likely to have few friends. They have nothing to offer. But almost anyone can become an object of Affection; the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating. There need be no apparent fitness between those whom it unites. I have seen it felt for an imbecile not only by his parents but by his brothers. It ignores the barriers of age, sex, class and education. It can exist between a clever young man from the university and an old nurse, though their minds inhabit different worlds. It ignores even the barriers of species. We see it not only between dog and man but, more surprisingly, between dog and cat. Gilbert White claims to have discovered it between a horse and a hen.
 
C.S. Lewis,
The Four Loves
 
 
Perfect-10
The Paradox is Broken. 
We've reverted back, one year and one day. 
Two minutes past eight in the morning.
 
UNIT CENTRAL
This is UNIT Central. What's Happened up there? 
We just saw the President assassinated.

Perfect-10
Just after the President was killed, 
but just before the spheres arrived. 

Everything Back to Normal. 
Planet Earth restored. 

None of it Happened. 
The Rockets, The Terror. 
It never was.

MARTHA
What about the spheres?

Perfect-10 : 
Trapped at The End of The Universe.

FRANCINE: 
But I can remember it.

Perfect-10
We're at the eye of the storm. 
The only ones who'll ever know. 

Oh, hello.  You must be Mister Jones. 
We haven't actually met.

(The Master runs for the door just as Jack is coming in.)

JACK
Whoa, big fella! You don't want to miss The Party. Cuffs. 
So, what do we do with this one?
 
CLIVE
We kill him.

TISH
We execute him.

Perfect-10
No, that's not The Solution.

(Francine aims the pistol at The Master.)

FRANCINE
Oh, I think so. 

Because all those things, 
They Still Happened because of him

I Saw Them.
 
The Burning Man
Go on. Do it.

Perfect-10
Francine, you're better than him.

(The Doctor gets Francine to lower the gun and he hugs her, then hands her off to Martha.)

The Burning Man
You still haven't answered The Question. 
What Happens to me?

Perfect-10
You're My Responsibility from now on. 
The only Time Lord left in existence.

JACK
Yeah, but you can't Trust him.

Perfect-10
No. The only safe place for him is The TARDIS.

The Burning Man :  
You mean you're just going to keep me?
 
Perfect-10
Mmm. If that's what I have to do. 
It's time to change. 

Maybe I've been wandering for too long. 
Now I've got Someone to Care for.

(Lucy shoots The Master. The Doctor catches him as he staggers back.)

JACK
Put it down.

Perfect-10 : 
There you go. I've got you. I've got you.

The Burning Man
Always The Women.

Perfect-10 :
 I didn't see her.

The Burning Man
Dying in your arms. 
Happy now?

Perfect-10
You're not dying. Don't be stupid. 
It's only a bullet. Just regenerate.

The Burning Man
No.

Perfect-10
One little bullet. Come on.

The Burning Man : 
I guess you don't know me so well. I refuse.

Perfect-10 : 
Regenerate. Just regenerate. Please. 
Please! Just regenerate. Come on.

Burning Man : 
And spend the rest of my life imprisoned with you?

Perfect-10 : 
You've got to. Come on. 

It can't end like this. 
You and Me --
All The Things We've Done. 

Axons. Remember the Axons? 
And the Daleks. 
 
We're The Only Two left. 
There's no one else. Regenerate!

Burning Man :
 How about that. I win. 
Will it stop, Doctor?
 
The Drumming. Will it stop?

(The Master dies.)

Perfect-10 : 
No!

(Somewhere, later, the Doctor lights the Master's funeral pyre then walks away.