GET PAST IT

Cordelia:

Buffy. You're really campaigning for bitch-of-the-year, aren't you?

 

Buffy:

As defending champion, you nervous?

 

Cordelia:

Whatever is causing the Joan Collins 'tude, deal with it. 

 

Embrace the pain, spank your inner moppet, whatever, but get over it. 

 

'Cause pretty soon you're not even gonna have the loser friends you've got now.

 

“Gary tells me one day about his sister, how her son, his nephew, died at eighteen from overdosing on a bad batch of MDMA. ‘Would you talk to her?’ he asks.

 

I see him every day over the course of the production and it is, all in all, a fairly typical experience. 

 

I return to my trailer, content to be wrapping a film without having caused any unnecessary aggravation. Aside from the ice creams. 

 

Gary taps on the door. 

When I open it he already has his sister on the line.

 

I take the phone and close the door and the always slightly absurd ambience of the on-set trailer, in spite of my daft costume, immediately becomes calm and sacred. 

 

Kerry tells me that she is in Brent Cross shopping centre. 

 

‘Excuse me,’ she says, and moves somewhere quiet. 

I sit down and picture her there. 

I breathe and prepare for her story. 

She is tentative and tearful for a few syllables, but propelled by tremulous certainty. 

 

‘James was a beautiful boy. 

More than my son he was my friend. 

So clever and sensitive. 

Not a druggy kid. 

He didn’t do drugs a lot, I know he didn’t. 

I didn’t want him to go out that night. 

I wanted him to stay in. 

I wish I’d stopped him. I couldn’t sleep, I kept looking at my phone. 

I had a bad feeling. 

 

At one fifty-eight I got a text, “I’m all right, Mum”, at two fifty-eight I got another one from his phone saying “James is dead.”’ 

 

At this point the frequency, the intensity, the sharpness of tone changes, the grief is piercing and I try to fall backwards into purpose. 

 

‘My boy died on the street, Russell, on a pavement with three hundred people watching. Outside a club. He was dead by the time he got to the hospital.’ 

 

I try to breathe and reach beyond my own lack of experience, my own inability to know something so profound and painful and source something useful. 

 

‘I’m getting grief counselling and they say I have to let go because the grief is going into my body and making me ill but I don’t want to let go because I deserve it.’ 

 

Then the terrible sound of a mother’s pain.

 

I am not qualified to handle a mother’s grief. 

I have no training in counselling or experience of this poignant and unanswerable despair. 

In this moment, though, I am on the phone to a grieving mother and the practical and rational limitations simply cannot be allowed to prevent me giving her the comfort and love her situation demands. 

 

William Blake did a series of engravings based on the Book of Job, rendering in immaculate tableaux Job’s trials and suffering. It is as if Blake through his art and the Bible through the means of prose refer to the same subliminal truth, as if this story, the Book of Job, contains essential truths that we can only behold fleetingly and through the lens of image or language. 

 

In one tableau, Yaweh, or God, from on high shows Job ‘the behemoth and the leviathan that I made, as I made thee’. These creatures as rendered by Blake are dreadful and uncanny. The dumb, muscular, skinless beast, all sinew and mouth. The deep-dwelling sea serpent ever present but invisible in its awful depths. 

 

When regarding these silently screaming images the horror of God’s power is awesome, more terrifying though is the suggestion of ambivalence and that implicitly God The Creator is Not Only Good. 

 

In these images Job and Yaweh look the same, as if both the man made of flesh and the divine father are enshrined within a single form. 

 

These hypnotic tableaux induce a visionary state where we confront that God is within us and our own moral choices determine God’s values. That the capacity for Darkness and unconsciousness is as much part of the individual’s psychological make-up as the inclination to love and kindness. 

 

That we HAVE to be Good, because if WE are not Good, then God is not Good, that God’s Grace is realized through us and if we do not realize it then it does not exist.

 

Like a terrible quantum equation where our intentions create all that is manifest. Do not be lost in the leviathan deep. Do not be trapped in the dumb carnality of form, transcend; transcend that God may imbue The World with His Grace through you. 

 

Knowing my own limitations I do not answer from myself. 

Knowing the hopelessness of such pitiless despair I do not attempt to placate with platitudes. 

I offer Love. 

 

I offer this stranger, this woman that I am confronted with, The Best of Me, such as it is, in the hope that within me, within her, within us all, is the capacity to heal and be healed. 

 

There is no code in language, no silver bullet that can undo this pain but beyond language, beyond form, beyond death there is, there must be, connection. 

 

We cannot allow the universe to be unconsciousness and carnality, because we have the choice, because the possibility, the potentiality for love exists in all of us. Its existence as potential is also its demand for realization.

 

Aside from the love, comfort and forgiveness that anyone would offer a grieving mother I suggest that Kerry meets two of the mentors in this book, Manya and Meredith – healers, mothers, strong women who will be able to hold her pain for her until she is able to.”

 

Excerpt From

“Mentors,” by Russell Brand, 

 

 

 

Who Shot First?

“The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn't.”

— George Lucas

“Fans lost their minds. 

It was an affront, the neutering of a badass."

One legal expert argued that Greedo's behavior constituted a direct threat and would clearly warrant preemptive action in self-defense in the United States.

In 2014, when asked by fans who shot first, actor Harrison Ford, who plays Han, replied: 

“I don't know and I don't care.”

Question: is there an objective ‘Reality’ or a series of interdependent mental projections? 

In other words, was Hitler a kind of nationally conjured totem to re-energize castrated and enraged Germany? 

Were The Beatles a quadrant of awakening shamans that carried a generation from plodding rock, to sexy pop, then psychedelia and ultimately consumerism? 

The events in the outer world are governed by subtler energies, many of which pass through our collective psyche. 

No doubt meteors and hurricanes shape environment but culture, by definition, is the manifestation of human drives. 

There are patterns, shapes and archetypes that recur. 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, a serendipitous adventure can take place, also, You know, what the word serendipity comes from? 

Comes from the Sanskrit Swarandwipa, the Isle of Silk, which was formerly the name of Ceylon

And it’s a story about a family that’s just rambling on it’s way to Ceylon, and all these adventures take place. 

And so you can have the serendipitous adventure as well.

BILL MOYERS: 

Is the adventurer who takes that kind of trip a hero in the mythological sense?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Yes, He is ready for it. 

This is a very interesting thing about these mythological themes. 

The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for, and it’s really a manifestation of his character. 

And it’s amusing, the way in which the landscape and the conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. 

The adventure that he’s ready for is the one that he gets.

(Clip from “Star Wars”)

HAN SOLO: 

Look, I ain’t in this for your revolution and I’m not in it for you, Princess. 

I expect to be well paid. 

I’m in it for me.

BILL MOYERS: 

The mercenary, Solo, begins as a mercenary and ends up as a hero.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

He was a very practical guy, a materialist in his character, at least as he thought of himself. 

But he was a compassionate human being at the same time, and didn’t know it. 

The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he hadn’t known he possessed.

(Clip from “Star Wars”)

PRINCESS LElA: 

I love you.

HAN SOLO: 

I know.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

He thinks he’s an egoist, he really isn’t, 

and that’s a very lovable kind of human being, I think, and there are lots of them functioning beautifully in the world. 

They think they’re working for themselves, very practical and all, but no, there’s something else pushing them.

BILL MOYERS: 

What did you think about the scene in the bar?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

That’s my favorite, not only in this piece, but of many, many pieces I’ve ever seen.

BILL MOYERS: 

Why?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, where you are is on the edge, you’re about to embark into the outlying spaces. And–

BILL MOYERS: 

The real adventure.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

The real adventure. 

This is the jumping-off place, and there is where you meet people who’ve been out there, and they run the machines that go out there, and you haven’t been there. 

It reminds me a little bit in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the atmosphere before you start off the adventure. 

You’re in the seaport, and there’s old salts, seamen who’ve been on the sea, and that’s their world, and these are the space people, also.

Yet Alone I am Nothing.

“ Have you ever heard Brian Cox or any other particle physics genius (they’re ten a penny after all!) describing the vastness of our universe? The likelihood that even beyond its fathomless reach are more and more, likely an infinity, of universes? 

When I, with my blunt intellect, fondle these imponderables I feel suspended between awe and despair. Within the infinite all forms of measurement become meaningless as they can only refer to parochial patterns; time and the laws of physics only local customs in our universal village. 

When I hear Cox speaking of Carl Sagan, however, the giant star of astronomy who inspired the then adolescent scientist, I feel held between awe and hope. Sagan was a mentor to Cox. Although they never met, Sagan functioned as a mental symbol, a target, a role model that the younger man could emulate on his own journey to greatness. 

A hero is an emblem that demonstrates the possibility of inner drives becoming manifest. 

It could be John Lennon, whose journey from ordinariness to greatness, from glamour to domesticity, from grandeur to humility provides coordinates to others who want to undertake a comparable journey. 

It might be Amma, the Indian teacher and mystic whose certainty of God’s love has generated profound social change across Asia. Her devotion has inspired others through philanthropic works to establish schools and build hospitals and homes. 

At first, of course though, she was dismissed as a mad teenage girl in a fishing village in Kerala going into trances and cuddling everyone. 

People thought she was nuts. 

Greatness looks like Madness until it finds its context. 

Mentorship is a thread that runs through my life, now in both directions. I have men and women that I turn to when the way ahead is not clear and younger people that look to me for guidance in their own crazy lives. 

Note that the mentor’s role is not solely as a teacher, although teaching is of course a huge part of it. When Cox talks admiringly about Carl Sagan it is not just because of his academic expertise, it is because he felt personally guided by him. 

Watching Sagan’s emotional take on science in Cosmos, was the trigger that made Cox, at twelve, decide to be a scientist. We choose mentors throughout our lives, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, sometimes wisely, sometimes not. 

The point of this book is to understand this process and to improve it. When selecting a mentor we must be aware of what it is we want from them. When we are selected as a mentor we must know what the role entails. 

One of the unexpected advantages that my drug addiction granted me is that the 12 Step process of recovery that I practise includes a mentorship tradition. When you enter a 12 Step program, you have to ask someone else to guide you through the steps, or ‘sponsor’ you. 

This typically induces an unwitting humility; few people would say ‘Hey, babe, it’s your lucky day–I want you to take me on a spiritual journey.’ Usually one feels a little shy on asking someone to sponsor them, a little meek, a bit like you’re asking them on a date. 

In undertaking this we accept that our previous methods have failed, that we need help, that our own opinions are inferior to the wisdom of the mentor and hopefully the creed that they belong to. 

In 12 Step custom the sponsor teaches the sponsee the method by which they practised the 12 Steps; they replace their own sponsor, and they give to another what they have been given. Whilst it may bear personal inflections, it is sufficiently faithful to the original program to inhere its power. 

The same, I note, is true in martial arts traditions, there’s a lineage and a system that is carried from teacher to student. 

Clearly there are parallels in academia, but anyone who’s been to school knows that mass education can be pretty inconsistent and the average harried educator has too many bureaucratic and financial burdens to mindfully endow more than a handful of pupils with the elixir of mentorship. 

In this book I will talk to you about my mentors, how they have enhanced my life in practical and esoteric, obvious and unusual ways, by showing me that it is possible to become the person I want to be in spite of the inner and outer obstacles I face. 

I will encourage you to find mentors of your own and explain how you may better use the ones you already have. 

Furthermore I will tell you about my experience mentoring others and how invaluable that has been on my ongoing journey to self-acceptance, and how it has helped me to transform from a bewildered and volatile vagabond to a (mostly) present and (usually) focused Husband and Father. 

I have mentors in every area of my life: as a comic, a dad, a recovering drug addict, a spiritual being and as a man who believes that we, as individuals and the great globe itself, are works in progress and that through a chain of mentorship – and the collaborative Evolution of Systems  – we can improve individually and globally, together. 

Sometimes in my live shows I ask the audience if they belong to any groups: a football team, a religious group, a union, a book club, a housing committee, rowing club – I am surprised by how few people have a Tribe. 

Whilst the impact of globalization on national identity cannot yet be fully understood, I can certainly appreciate the reductive appeal of Statist Myth. 

I become ultra English during a World Cup, the last one in particular was like a jolly revival of the ‘death of Diana’ in its ability to pull a nation together in collective hysteria. But soon enough the bunting comes down, the screens in public squares go black and we are atomized once more. The space between us no longer filled with chants, ditties and ‘in jokes’, eyes back on the pavement, attention drawn within. 

I’m not suggesting the deep alienation that Late Capitalism engenders can be rinsed away by joining a bowling club, but it’s a start, and having a Teacher within The Group to which you belong provides intimacy and purpose. 

In the guru traditions of India the love between teacher and student surpasses all other forms, for here it is explicit that what is being transferred in this relationship is nothing short of God’s love and how an individual can embody the divine. 

We live in lonely and polarized times, where many of us feel lost and fractured. It is evident in our politics but political events reflect deeper and more personal truths. I’ve been trying for a while now to explain what I feel is happening in the societies that I’m familiar with, by which I mean Europe, Australia, the United States – not that I’m claiming to be a sociologist, I don’t have a clue how to approach whatever the hell may be happening in Pakistan or China, but here, here in our post-secular edge lands where the old ideas are dying and the new ones not yet born, I feel a consistent and recognizable yearning for meaning beyond the dayglow ashes of burnt-out consumerism, lurching dumb zombie nationalism, starchy, corrupt religion and the CGI circus of modern mainstream media. 

I’ve been watching for a long time and I knew before Trump, Brexit, radicalism and the ‘new right’ that something serious was up. You know it too. 

Sometimes we despair and sometimes we distract because it seems like too much for one person to tackle and we’ve forgotten how to collude. 

Yet alone I am nothing. "

It Will Hurt More Than You've Ever Been Hurt — And You Will Have a Scar

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. 

By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.

BILL MOYERS: 

And what does it mean, do you think, to young boys today. that we are absent these myths?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, the confirmation ritual is the counterpart today of these rites. 

As a little Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you’re going to be confirmed by, and you go up. 

But instead of having them scarify you, knock your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a mild slap on the cheek. 

It’s been reduced to that, and 

nothing’s happened to you. 

The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah, and whether it works actually to effect a psychological transformation, I suppose, will depend on the individual case. 

There was no problem in these old days. 

The Boy came out with a different body, and 

He’d Gone Through Something.

INT. KITCHEN - NIGHT

Cornelius and Tyler each stir a boiling pot.

Cornelius (V.O.): 

Tyler was full of useful information.

TYLER : 

Ancient peoples found that clothes got clean when they washed them at certain points in the river. 

Do you know why?

CORNELIUS : 

No

Tyler gestures for Jack to come over

TYLER: 

Human sacrifices were once made on the hills above this river. 

Bodies burned, water seeped into ashes to make lye. This is lye, a crucial ingredient. 

Once it mixed with the melted fat of the bodies a thick, white soapy discharge crept into the river. 

Let me see your hand please.

Tyler licks his lips until they're gleaming wet. He takes Jack's hands and KISSES the back of it.

CORNELIUS : 

What is this?

TYLER: 

This, is a Chemical Burn.

The saliva shines in the shape of the kiss. 

Tyler pours a bit of the flaked lye onto CORNELIUS’ hand. CORNELIUS’ whole body JERKS. Tyler holds tight to CORNELIUS’ hand and arm. Tears well in CORNELIUS’ eyes; his face tightens.

TYLER: 

It will hurt more than you've ever been burned. And you will have a Scar.

CORNELIUS (V.O.): 

Guided meditation worked for cancer, it could work for this.

 

SHOT OF A FOREST, IN GENTLE SPRING RAINFALL. RESUME:

TYLER: 

Stay with The Pain, don’t block this out.

Tyler JERKS CORNELIUS’ hand, getting CORNELIUS’ attention…

TYLER: 

Look at your hand. 

The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes. 

Like the first monkeys shot into space. 

Without Pain, without Sacrifice, we would have NOTHING!

CORNELIUS (V.O.): 

I tried not to think of the words "searing" or "flesh."

SHOT OF A FOREST, IN GENTLE SPRING RAINFALL. RESUME:

TYLER: •STOP•. This is Your Pain, This is Your Burning Hand. It’s right here!

JACK: I’m going to My Cave. I’m going to My Cave, I’m going to find My Power Animal !! —

SHOT OF INSIDE THE ICE CAVE - ON MARLA, LYING NAKED UNDER A FUR COAT, TURNING HER HEAD TO LOOK TOWARDS US. RESUME:

TYLER: NO! Don’t deal with it like those dead people do. Come on!

CORNELIUS : I get The Point!

TYLER: No what you’re feeling is premature Enlightenment.

SHOT OF INSIDE ICE CAVE - NAKED MARLA PULLS CORNELIUS  DOWN ON TOP OF HER - CORNELIUS KISSES HER - CIGARETTE SMOKE COMES FROM HER MOUTH - CORNELIUS  COUGHS. RESUME:

 

Tyler SLAPS CORNELIUS’ face, regaining his attention…

TYLER: This is The Greatest Moment of Your Life, man! And you’re off somewhere missing it.

CORNELIUS,, snapping back, tries to jerk his hand away. Tyler keeps hold of it and their arms KNOCK UTENSILS off the table.

CORNELIUS : 

No I’m not!

TYLER: 

•SHUT UP• 

Our Fathers were our models for God — if Our Fathers bailed, WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU ABOUT GOD....?

Tyler SLAPS CORNELIUS’ face again…

TYLER: 

•Listen to Me.• 

You have to consider the possibility that God DOES NOT LIKE YOU, he never WANTED You –– In all probability, He HATES You. 

This is Not The Worst Thing That Can Happen.....

JACK: It isn’t…?

TYLER: 

We don’t need him. 

Fuck damnation. Fuck redemption. We are God's Unwanted Children? 

¡¡ SO BE IT !!

CORNELIUS looks at Tyler -- they lock eyes. CORNELIUS does his best to stifle his spasms of pain, his body a quivering, coiled knot. He bolts toward the sink, but Tyler holds on.

TYLER: 

Listen. You can run water over your hand and make it worse, OR -- Look at Me! -- OR, you can use Vinegar and neutralize The Burn.

TYLER: First, you •HAVE• to give up —

First you have to KNOW, not fear, •KNOW• That Some Day You Will Die ––

CORNELIUS : 

You don’t know how this feels!

Tyler shows CORNELIUS  a LYE-BURNED KISS SCAR on his own hand. Tears begin to drip from CORNELIUS' eyes.

TYLER: 

It’s Only After We’ve Lost Everything, 

That We’re Free to Do Anything.

Tyler grabs a bottle of VINEGAR -- pours it over CORNELIUS' wound.

TYLER: 

Congratulations –– You’re one step closer to hitting Rock Bottom

BILL MOYERS: You visited some of the great painted caves in Europe.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, yes.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me what you remember when first you looked upon those underground caves.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, you didn’t want to leave. Here you come into an enormous chamber, like a great cathedral, with these animals painted. And they’re painted with a life like the life of an ink on silk, the Japanese painting. And well, you realize the darkness is inconceivable. We’re there with electric lights, but in a couple of instances, the concierge, the man who was showing us through, turned off the lights and you were never in darker darkness in your life. It’s like a, I don’t know, just a complete knockout of, you don’t know where you are, whether you’re looking north, south, east or west. All orientation is gone, and you’re in a darkness that never saw the sun. Then they tum the lights on again, and you see these gloriously painted animals. A bull that will be 20 feet long, and painted so that the haunches will be represented by a swelling in the rock, you know, they take account of the whole thing. It’s incredible.

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever look at these primitive art objects, and think not of the art but of the man or woman standing there, painting or creating? I find that’s where I speculate.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, this is what hits you when you go into those caves, I can tell you that. What was in their mind when they were doing that? And that’s not an easy thing to do. And how did they get up there? And how did they see anything? And what kind of light did they have the little flashing torches throwing flickering things on it, to get something of that grace and perfection? And with respect to the problem of beauty, is this beauty intended, or is this something that is the natural expression of a beautiful spirit. You know what I mean? When you hear a bird sing, the beauty of the bird’s song, is this intentional, in what sense is it intentional? But it’s the expression of the bird, the beauty of the bird’s spirit, you might almost say, and I think that way very often about

this art. To what degree was the intention of the artist, what we would call “aesthetic,” or to what degree expressive, you know, and to what degree something that they simply had learned to do that way? It’s a difficult point. When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature, you know, it’s instinctive beauty. And how much of the beauty of our own lives is the beauty of being alive, and how much of it is conscious intention? That’s a big question.

BILL MOYERS: You call them temple caves.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Why temple?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Temple with images and stained glass windows, cathedrals, are a landscape of the soul. You move into a world of spiritual images, that’s what this is. When lean and I, my wife and I, drove down from Paris to this part of France, we stopped off at Chartres Cathedral. There is a cathedral. When you walk into the cathedral, it’s the mother, womb of your spiritual life Mother church All the forms around are significant of spiritual values, and the imagery is in anthropomorphic form God and Jesus and the saints and all, in human form.

BILL MOYERS: In human form.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Then we went down to the Lascaux. The images were in animal form. The form is secondary; the message is what’s important

BILL MOYERS: And the message of the cave?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The message of the cave is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place. Now, I tell you, when you’re down in those caves, it’s a strange transformation of consciousness you have. You feel this is the womb, this is the place from which life comes, and that world up there in the sun with all those … that’s a secondary world: this is primary. I mean, this just overcomes you.

BILL MOYERS: You had that feeling when you were there?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I had it every time. Now, what were these caves used for? The speculations that are most common of scholars interested in this, is that they had to do with the initiation of boys into the hunt. You go in there, it’s dangerous, it’s very dangerous. It’s completely dark. It’s cold and dank. You’re banging your head on projections all the time, and it was a place of fear. And the boys were to overcome all that, and go into the womb of the earth. And the shaman, or whoever it was that would be helping you through, would not be making it easy.

BILL MOYERS: And then there was a release, once you got into that vast, torchlit chamber down there. What was the tribe, what was the tradition trying to say to the boy?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That is the womb land from which all the animals come.

BILL MOYERS: I see.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And the rituals down there have to do with the generation of a situation that will be propitious for the hunt. And the boys were to learn not only to hunt, but how to respect the animals and what rituals to perform, and how in their own lives no longer to be little boys but to be men. Because those hunts were very, very dangerous hunts, believe me, and these are the Original men’s rile sanctuaries, when: the boys became no longer their mothers’ sons, but their fathers’ sons.

BILL MOYERS: Don’t you wonder what effect this had on a boy?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, you can go through it today, actually, in cultures that arc still having the initiations with young boys. They give them an ordeal, a terrifying ordeal, that the youngster has to survive, makes a man of him, you know.

BILL MOYERS: What would happen to me as a child, if I went through one of these rites, as far as we can…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, we know what they do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be, you know, a little bit ungovernable, one fine day the men come in, and they’re naked except for stripes of white down that has been stuck on their bodies, and stripes with their men’s blood. They used their own blood for gluing this on. And they’re swinging the bull-roarers, which are the voice of the spirits, and they come as spirits. The boy will try to take refuge with his mother; she’ll pretend to try to protect him. The men just take him away, a mother’s no good from then on, you see, he’s no longer a little boy. He’s in the men’s group, and then they put him really through an ordeal. These are the rites, you know, of circumcision, subincision, and so forth.

BILL MOYERS: And the whole purpose is to…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Tum him into a member of the tribe.

BILL MOYERS: And a hunter.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And a hunter.

BILL MOYERS: Because that was the way of life.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, but most important is to live according to the needs and values of that tribe. He is initiated in a Short period of time into the whole culture context of his people.

BILL MOYERS: So myth relates directly to ceremony and tribal ritual, and the absence of myth can mean the end of ritual.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: A ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.

BILL MOYERS: And what does it mean, do you think, to young boys today. that we are absent these myths?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the confirmation ritual is the counterpart today of these rites. As a little Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you’re going to be confirmed by, and you go up. But instead of having them scarify you, knock your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a mild slap on the cheek. It’s been reduced to that, and nothing’s happened to you. The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah, and whether it works actually to effect a psychological transformation, I suppose, will depend on the individual case. There was no problem in these old days. The boy came out with a different body, and he’d gone through something.

BILL MOYERS: What about the female? I mean, most of the figures in the temple caves arc male. Was this a kind of secret society for males only?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It wasn’t a secret society, it was that the boys had to go through it. Now, we don’t know exactly what happens with the female in this period, because we have very little evidence to tell us. In primary cultures today, the girl becomes a woman with her first menstruation. It happens to her; I mean, nature does it to her. And so she has undergone the transformation, and what is her initiation? Typically it is to sit in a little hut for a certain number of days, and realize what she is.

BILL MOYERS: How does she do that?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: She sits there. She’s now a woman. And what is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of life, and life has overtaken her. She is a vehicle now of life. A woman’s what it’s all about; the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment. She’s identical with the earth goddess in her powers, and she’s got to realize that about herself. The boy does not have a happening of that kind. He has to be turned into a man, and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself. The woman becomes the vehicle of nature; the man becomes the vehicle of the society, the social order and the social purpose.

BILL MOYERS: So what happens when a society no longer embraces powerful mythology?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: What we’ve got on our hands. As I say, if you want to find what it means not to have a society without any rituals, read The New York Times.

BILL MOYERS: And you’d find?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the news of the day.

BILL MOYERS: Wars…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilized society. Half the…I imagine that 50% of the crime is by young people in their 20s and early 30s that just behave like barbarians.

BILL MOYERS: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: None. There’s been a reduction, a reduction, a reduction of ritual. Even in the Roman Catholic Church, my God, they’ve translated the Mass out of the ritual language into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. So that, I mean, every time now that I read tile Latin of the Mass, I get that pitch again that it’s supposed to give, a language that throws you out of the field of your domesticity, you know. The altar is turned so that the priest, his back is to you, and with him you address yourself outward like that. Now they’ve turned the altar around, looks like Julia Child giving a demonstration, and it’s all homey and cozy.

BILL MOYERS: And they play a guitar.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: They play a guitar. Listen, they’ve forgotten what the function of a ritual is, is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.

BILL MOYERS: So ritual that once conveyed an inner reality is now merely form, and that’s true in the rituals of society, and the personal rituals of marriage and religion.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, with respect to ritual, it must be kept alive. And so much of our ritual is dead.

PONY

" No Child is awake enough 

to Appoint A Mentor, 

you take what you are given; 

it isn’t until adolescence that we grope beyond the boundaries of Mum & Dad, or whoever was doing that job. 

Some BOYS give that job to PEERS IN GANGS, some GIRLS give it to PONIES but, for all of us, 

beyond these narrow roles are scores of Ben Kenobis and Maya Angelous 

just dying to pass on 

A Lifetime of Twinkling Wisdom. 

Worth noting that if the teen craving for an idol is soaked up by vapid consumerism, all that hormonal good intent could get splurged on a digital Kardashian or wrung out on a beatboxing pipkin in a backward baseball cap. 

Yes, yes, the adolescent wants coitus, 

But what does 

The Wanting want? "

PETER's apartment

DANA, LOUIS and JANINE watch TV.

JANINE

Is, like, she The Killer or what?

LOUIS

No. That's Rita Hayworth. 

She was married to Citizen Kane while they were doing this thing. 

Then right after they finished, she dumped him for some polo player. 

I don't why beautiful girls love horses so much.

 Do you love horses?

JANINE

No.

DELUGE

Spike:

I want to Save The World.

 

Buffy:

You do remember that you're a vampire, right?

 

Spike:

We like to talk big — Vampires do. 

"I'm going to Destroy The World." 

That's just tough guy talk. 

Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. 

 

The Truth is, I like This World. 

You've got... dog racing,

Manchester United. 

 

And then you've got People.

 

Billions of people, walking around

like Happy Meals with legs. 

 

It's alright Here. 

 

But then, someone comes along with a vision,

with a real... passion for Destruction. 

 

Angel could pull it off.

 

Goodbye, Piccadilly.

Farewell, Leicester bloody Square. 

You know what I'm saying?

 

Older Than Television:

In the 1933 film Deluge, New York City is flooded.

The Empire State Building is knocked down by the wall of water,

but the Statue of Liberty remains standing.

 

Played straight in The Day After Tomorrow, where pretty much every New York City landmark survives the flooding of the city and the subsequent hard freeze.

 

Roland Emmerich confided that the Statue of Liberty would be turned over by the force of the massive amount of water flowing around it but said he wanted to create

a symbol of American values that stood up to the forces.

 

 

In the movie version of Logan's Run,

when Logan 5 and Jessica 6 reach the ruined city, we know its Washington DC

because the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and National Archives are still standing.

Vine-covered and weathered, but still standing.

 

In Resident Evil: Extinction,

Las Vegas is buried in sand, but the monuments of the strip are still there and 

 

Downplayed example in 1983's The Day After.

Towards the end, Dr. Oakes is wandering the ruins of what was Kansas City,

and finds the stump of the Liberty Memorial tower;

some of words on the monument are still visible even though the tower itself is gone.

 

Independence Day creates a "Funny Aneurysm" Moment at one point in a shot of a devastated New York City.

The World Trade Center is still standing, with only a few large chunks ripped out of it here and there.

 

Also, most everything in Los Angeles is reduced to rubble except the scorched and battered but still recognisable palm trees.

Note: Less silly than it sounds: They evolved to stand up to regular hurricanes, after all.

To let you know that yes, that was Los Angeles.

 

Soup

KERRY  LOUDERMILK : 

You look ridiculous.

CARY LOUDERMILK :

I'm reconstructing what happened on the hill from available sensor data.

KERRY  LOUDERMILK :

Did I tell you I cut off the head of a Minotaur? 

CARY LOUDERMILK :

Yes, you did.

In graphic detail.

KERRY  LOUDERMILK :

Do you know what its blood smelled like? 

CARY LOUDERMILK :

Oh, please, Kerry — Okay, this is weird.

KERRY  LOUDERMILK :

You remember those, like, beef bouillon cubes - from when we were kids? 

CARY LOUDERMILK :

Stop.

KERRY  LOUDERMILK :

The kind that you would pour boiling water onto? 

CARY LOUDERMILK :

Stop.

KERRY  LOUDERMILK :

It didn't taste like that, though.

[BEEPING, STATIC.]

CARY LOUDERMILK :

Oh, no.

KERRY  LOUDERMILK :

What? 

CARY LOUDERMILK :

It's Treachery.

The Shadow King :

You ever make soup? 

Cut up the meat, vegetables, add broth, cook it for a couple hours.

You ever try to unmake soup? 

I'm part of him.

And the only way you're gonna get me out without killing him 

is if I decide to leave on my own.

There it is.

Now you see.

LEGION :

Okay.

I think I understand.

It's not about being alone, or about being in love.

It's about the things you survived.

And as it's written, 

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, 

some are strong at the broken places." 

Syd Barrett :

Go on.

[SIGHS.]

LEGION :

It's not the story of a little girl whose mommy couldn't hug her 

who grew up wishing a prince's kiss could erase all her damage.

It's about the damage itself, and how it makes us strong, not weak.

You survived the bullies and the way they made you feel.

You cut yourself with the dullest blade 'cause it felt the worst.

I know that life, 'cause I lived it, too.

I know.

And then I met you, and it was true love.

Like in a fairy tale.

Syd Barrett :

This isn't a fairy tale.

LEGION :

[DAVID CHUCKLES.]

It is for me.

Syd Barrett :

Do you know what love is? It's a hot bath.

What happens to things when you leave them in a bath for too long? 

Huh? They get soft.

Fall apart.

LEGION :

[EXHALES SHARPLY.]

I read that story collection.

The one in your book.

At first, I was confused, you know —

Why is she carrying around this sordid tale of sex clubs and drug addicts and —

And then I read this :

"Junkies and masochists and hookers, 

and those who have squandered everything 

are the ring of brightest angels around heaven." 

Syd Barrett :

It's a War, baby, This Life.

The things we endure.

You said you saw The Future, and it's an Apocalypse.

Who survives that? 

The Lovers or The Fighters? 

They sell us this lie that Love's gonna save us.

All it does is make us stupid and weak.

LEGION :

[SCOFFS.]

Thanks.

Syd Barrett :

Look at me.

Love isn't gonna save us.

It's what we have to save.

Pain makes us strong enough to do it.

All our scars, our anger, our despair It's armor.

Baby, God loves The Sinners best 'cause our fire burns bright, bright, bright.

Burn with me.

[EXHALES.]