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

Black Fragility

“We Identify as The Oppressed.” — Weaponised Victimhood

“ Today, we give everybody the Identity they NEED. We even teach it in the schools — it's called ‘Multiculturalism’. 

Everybody gets An Identity based on WHO raped WHOM : 

The Latin Americans understand that the most important thing is to get back at the Spanish colonialists

The Native Americans understand that the most important thing is to get back at The Whites — 

Everyone separated from Everyone Else. 

Fear? 

Hatred? 

Revenge? 

Sure! We give them •that•..! 

But we ALSO give them An •IDENTITY•....

.....and They. Are. Happy....."

" The Leaders at Esalen organised an Encounter Group [Struggle Session] for "White" and "Black Radicals" — 

Both groups would be encouraged to express their Inner Racist Feelings, which had been instilled in them by Society. 

By doing this, they would TRANSCEND those feelings, 

and encounter each other as Individuals.

"I started a series of Encounters entitled 'Racial Confrontation as Transcendental Experience' — 

We thought that we wanted to get that kind of Black-White Confrontation going, so you could REALLY get down to see what was between the two races, NOT by backing off and trying to be polite, but by going RIGHT into The Belly of The Beast of This Beast of Racial Prejudice." 

— George Leonard, 

Esalen Institute Encounter Group Leader, 

1960s.

The Black-White Encounter Sessions were a DISASTER — 

The Black Radicals saw it as an insidious attempt to 

Destroy Their POWER.

By trying to turn them into Liberated Individuals, Essalen was removing 

THE ONE THING that gave them Power and Confidence in their struggle against Racism — 

Their COLLECTIVE Identity as "Blacks"

 [ — The Victims of Racism, and The Oppressed/Socially Inferior Class under Systemic White Supremacy in America. ]". "

hhh

Hitler Bathed Four Times a Day

Why Hitler Bathed Even More Than You Think - Prof. Jordan Peterson

Wall Street Journal

May 12, 2019 12:04 pm ET

OPINION | LETTERS

The Legacy of Eugenics Still

Echoes in America

Rather than a “renunciation” of eugenics in the 1930s, forced-sterilisation laws persisted for 40 more years at some of the best medical institutions.

Stephen Budiansky’s review of Daniel Okrent’s “The Guarded Gate” (Books, May 4) about eugenics in America fails to mention the pervasive forced-sterilization laws which persisted in the U.S. into the 1970s in places like North Carolina. Eugenics in America is important because the best medical journals and medical minds endorsed it. Rather than a “renunciation” of eugenics in the 1930s, forced-sterilization laws persisted for 40 more years at some of the best medical institutions.

And it was used as “evidence” for not just forced sterilization, but also euthanasia programs in Germany. Dr. Peter Breggin has documented that German psychiatrists practiced euthanasia both before and after the Third Reich.

Patience is The Reward paid due to he would  learn the skill to endure The Quiet.

The importance of eugenics for today’s health policy is important but ignored by both the medical community and mainstream media. The best medical journals advocate managed care to protect scarce resources and make America globally competitive. Harsh rationing of medical care to the poor, people of colour and the very sick elderly are a reality of modern managed care. 

The mainstream media and academic medicine do nothing.

We are on the verge of another “evidenced based” purge of “undesirables” in America. A reading of Stanley Milgram’s classic work, “Obedience to Authority,” shows how scientific authority can cause ordinary people to commit murderous acts against innocents. Mr. Budiansky should have taken notice and warned readers that the legacy of eugenics is at work in America today.

Brant S. Mittler, M.D., J.D.

The Engineers' Plot

“ “Alas,” said The Mouse, 

“The World is growing smaller every day. 

At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” 

“You only need to change your direction,” 

said The Cat, and ate it up. “

For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny. 

Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communications theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. 

This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.” Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called compression—for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released. 

The psychology of jokes helps account for part of the problem in teaching Kafka. We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it—to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name Who for the interrogative pronoun who, and so on. And we all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling of not so much boredom as offense, as if something has been blasphemed. 

This is a lot like the teacher’s feelings at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad critical analysis—plot to chart, symbols to decode, themes to exfoliate, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty. Franz Kafka, after all, is the story writer whose “Poseidon” imagines a sea god so overwhelmed with administrative paperwork that he never gets to sail or swim, and whose “In the Penal Colony” conceives description as punishment and torture as edification and the ultimate critic as a needled harrow whose coup de grâce is a spike through the forehead.

Another handicap, even for gifted students, is that—unlike, say, those of Joyce or Pound—the exformative associations that Kafka’s work creates are not intertextual or even historical. Kafka’s evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sort of sub-archetypal, the primordial little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories ‘nightmarish’ rather than ‘surreal’. The exformative associations in Kafka are also both simple and extremely rich, often just about impossible to be discursive about: imagine, for instance, asking a student to unpack and organize the various signification networks behind mouse, world, running, walls, narrowed, chamber, trap, cat, and cat eats mouse.

“Those That Ran The Soviet Union believed that they could plan, and manage 

A New Kind of Socialist Society.

They had discovered that it was impossible to control and predict everything — 

and The Plan had run out of control.

But rather than reveal that reveal this, The Technocrats decided to pretend that everything was still going according to The Plan.

And what emerged instead was 

A Fake Version of The Society.

The Soviet Union became a Society where EVERYONE knew what their leaders said was   

Not-Real, because everyone could see with their own eyes that The Economy was falling apart —

But Everybody Had to Play Along, 

and pretend that it was Real — Because No-One Could Imagine an Alternative.

One Soviet writer called it HYPERNORMALISATION —You were so much a part of The System that it became impossible to see beyond it :

The Fakeness was HyperNormal

The Engineers' Plot

This episode details how the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came into power in 1917 attempted to industrialize and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods. 

The Bolsheviks wanted to turn the Soviet people into scientific beings.

Aleksei Gastev used Social Engineering, including a 

Social Engineering Machine, to make people more rational. 

Gastev founded the Central Institute of Labour (TsIT), Soviet think tank dedicated to the improvement of industrial efficiency.

But Bolshevik politicians and bourgeois engineers came into conflict. Lenin said: 

"The Communists are not directing anything, they are being directed." 

Stalin arrested 2000 engineers in 1930, eight of whom were convicted in the Industrial Party show trial. 

Engineering schools gave those loyal to the party only limited training in engineering, to minimize their potential political influence. 

Industrialized America was used as a template to develop the Soviet Union. 

Magnitogorsk was built to closely replicate the steel mill city Gary, Indiana. A former worker describes how they went so far as to create metal trees since trees could not grow on the steppe.

By the late 1930s, Stalin faithful engineers like Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikita Khrushchev grew in influence, due to Stalin eliminating many earlier Bolshevik engineers. They aimed to use engineering in line with Stalin's policies to plan the entire country. At Gosplan, the head institution of central planning, engineers predicted future rational needs. 

Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuk, from the USSR Academy of Sciences, describes the level of detail as absurd: 

"Even the KGB was told the quota of arrests to be made and the prisons to be used. The demand for coffins, novels and movies was all planned." 

The seemingly rational benchmarks began to have unexpected results. When the plan measured tonnes carried per kilometers, trains went long distances just to meet the quota. Sofas and chandeliers increased in size to meet measurements of material usage.

When Nikita Khrushchev took over after Stalin he tried to make improvements, including considering prices in the plan. 

The Head of the USSR State Committee for Organization and Methodology of Price Creation is shown with a tall stack of price logbooks declaring that 

"This shows quite clearly that The System is Rational." 

Academician Victor Glushkov proposed the use of cybernetics to control people as a remedy for the problems of planning. 

In the 60s computers began being used to process economic data. Consumer demand was calculated by computers from data gathered by surveys. But the time delay in the system meant that items were no longer in demand by the time they had been produced.

When Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin took over in the mid 60s, the economy of the Soviet Union was stagnating. By 1978 the country was in full economic crisis. Production had devolved to "pointless, elaborate ritual" and endeavours to improve the plan had been abandoned. 

"What had begun as a grand moral attempt to build a Rational Society ended by creating a bizarre, bewildering existence for millions of Soviet people".

WOKE

“The Result? 

The Result you can see. 

Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system.

You are stuck with Them. 

You cannot get RID of Them. 

They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. 

You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. 

In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. 

To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States Society.”

How About Another Joke, Murray?

Douglas Murray | Wokeness: 

The New Western Morality

The singular journalist and writer Douglas Murray talks to John about the glaring problems with the new forms of 'morality' that are being held with increasing fervour around the Western world.

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 ease, security 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 comfort, safety, short 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

CULTURAL REVOLUTION — Towards A “New Normal"

"All ideas contrary to Mao's Thinking and the objects that represented them, HAD to be destroyed - not just Confucianism and Budhism, but even more so Foreign Faiths, like Christianity.

Throughout the country, Churches were closed, clergy unfrocked, religious symbols smashed - the statue of The Virgin Mary was replaced by a portrait of Mao.

One form of Worship gave way to another.

The physcial destruction wrought by The Red Guards was unparalelled even in China's long history.

Monatstries as far away as distant Tibet were ransacked and razed to The Ground,

The most important sites, like The Forbidden City, were protected on the orders of Cho En Lai, but elsewhere, Mao's stormtroops had free reign.

Cho En Lai's implicit distinction between smashing Bourgouis IDEAS and smashing Bourgouis INDIVIDUALS was quickly forgotten.

Over the next few weeks, tens of thousands of people in Beijing and surrounding regions were harranged and severely beaten - hundreds died.

The highest-ranking victims, brought out for Public Humiliation before Mass Meetings in a Football Stadium - they wore placards around their necks, with their names crossed-out like common criminals, awaiting execution."

“Hence a man’s reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. 

These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut :

whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. 

Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. 

Where men are forbidden to honour a King, they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. 

For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison. 

And that is why this whole question is of practical importance.”

— C.S. Lewis

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. “

George Orwell's Review of Mein Kampf (1940)

Adenoid Hynkel has just said that 

“Yesterday Tomainia was down, but today She has risen.”

"Democracy is fragrant.”

"Liberty is odious.”

"Freedom of speech is objectionable.”

In 1940, George Orwell (of "1984" and "Animal Farm" fame) reviewed Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf." 

In explaining Hitler's rise to power, however, Orwell explained much of what we see around us now. 

David Wood discusses Orwell's book review and the lesson for today.

Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

(unabridged translation) 

It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett's unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious intention of the translator's preface and notes is to tone down the book's ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both Left and Right concurred in the very shallow notion that National Socialism was merely a version of Conservatism. 

Then suddenly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all. As one result of this, Hurst and Blackett's edition was reissued in a new jacket explaining that all profits would be devoted to the Red Cross. Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change has taken place in Hitler's aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn't develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics. Probably, in Hitler's own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. 

Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. 

But Russia's turn will come when England is out of the picture -- that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a different question. 

Suppose that Hitler's programme could be put into effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of "living room" (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder. 

How was it that he was able to put this monstrous decision across? It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. Again, the situation in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was obviously favourable for demagogues. But 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 ease, security 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 comfort, safety, short 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.

New English Weekly, 

21 July 1940

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.

This Year, We Shall Examine The Various Concepts of Immortality and Their Basis in Actual Fact.

As we pass the flaming turmoil which is the edge of your own galaxy, we will enter the realm of The Red
Krypton Sun: the source of your strength and nourishment and the cause of our eventual destruction.

The Planet Krypton, My Son. 
Your Home, as it were.

This Year, We Shall Examine The Various Concepts of Immortality, and Their Basis in Actual Fact.

Ra’s Al Ghul: 
Did you not think I would return, Bruce? Hmm?
I told you I was Immortal.


Bruce Wayne: 
I watched…I watched you die.

Ra’s Al Ghul: 
Oh, there are many Forms of Immortality - 
Once, I had a Wife. My Great Love.

She was taken from me.

Bruce Wayne: 
You were The Mercenary.

[back in the prison cell, Ra’s Al Ghul nods his head]

Bruce Wayne: 
Bane is Your Child. 
Your Heir.

Ra’s Al Ghul: 
An Heir to ensure The League of Shadows fulfills it's DUTY
To Restore Balance to Civilisation.

Bruce Wayne: 
No.

Ra’s Al Ghul: 
You yourself fought the decadence of Gotham for years. 
With all your strength, all your resources, all your moral authority.
And the only victory you could achieve was a lie. 

Now you understand, Gotham is beyond saving.

Bruce Wayne: 
No!

Ra’s Al Ghul: 
And must be allowed to die.






Blind Prisoner: You do not fear Death. 
You think this makes you Strong. It makes you Weak.


Bruce Wayne: Why?
Blind Prisoner: How can you move faster than possible? Fight longer than possible? Without the most powerful impulse of the spirit. The fear of Death.


Bruce Wayne: 
I do fear Death - I fear dying in here, 
while My City burns with no one there to Save it.

Blind Prisoner: 
Then make the climb.

[Bruce laughs dryly]

Bruce Wayne: 
How?

Blind Prisoner: 
As The child did. Without The Rope. 
Then Fear will find you again.

Foley’s Wife: Jim, He’s not here.
[Gordon looks down the hallway behind her]

Commissioner Gordon: 
You let Your Wife come to the door when The City’s under occupation?!

[Foley appears behind his wife]


Foley: 
Wait in the kitchen, honey.
[Foley’s wife turns and leaves them]

Commissioner Gordon: 
What did you do? 
Bury your uniform in the backyard?

Foley: You saw what they did to those Special Forces.
Commissioner Gordon: 
Have you forgotten all the years we were out on patrol when every gangbanger wanted to plant one as soon as our backs were turned?

Foley: 
That was different and you know it! These guys run The City, the government’s done a deal with them.
Commissioner Gordon: Bane’s got their balls in a vice. That’s not a deal.
Foley: You move on Bane, the triggerman is gonna hit the button.
Commissioner Gordon: You think he’s given control of that bomb to one of ‘the people’? You think this is part of some revolution? There’s only one man with his finger on the button, that’s Bane.

Foley: 
Look, we’ve all gotta keep our heads down till they can fix this. 
If you still had family here…

Commissioner Gordon: 
This only gets fixed from inside The City! 
Look, Peter, I’m not asking you to walk down Grand in your Dress Blues. 
But something has to be done.

Foley: 
I’m sorry Jim. I gotta…

Commissioner Gordon: 
Keep your head down? 
What good’s that gonna do tomorrow when that thing blows?

Foley: 
You don’t know that’s gonna happen.
[Foley closes the door in Gordon’s face]