Wednesday 10 August 2022

The Bad Shepherd




Ygor
No. He cannot be destroyed. 
Cannot Die. 
Your Father made him 
Live for always. Now he is sick
Make him well, Frankenstein!

Baron Wolf von Frankenstein
I don't know whether I...

Ygor
Your Father made him! 
And Heinrich Frankenstein 
was Your Father too.

Baron Wolf von Frankenstein
Do you mean to imply, 
then, that, uh... 
That is My Brother?

 Ygor
But His Mother was Lightning.

Baron Wolf von Frankenstein
Oh, Electricity. We'll see.










If you had come out of Egypt, 

you would have been destroyed in The Desert 

with all those who 

worshipped The Golden Calf!


Danny, Champion 

of The World (Aged 11) :

Then Let Him Destroy Me Now

Go ahead. Kill Me. 

Here I am. Do it. 


Danny. Glad you came back. 

I wanted to take up that discussion we were having. 


Danny, Champion 

of The World :

I can't right now. 


About Abraham and Isaac

You remember what you said…? 

That Isaac actually died 

on Mount Moriah. 

I've been thinking maybe 

you were right about that. 


You remember what you said

That Isaac actually died 

on Mount Moriah. 

I've been thinking, maybe 

you were right about that. 


Died... and then reborn 

in The World to Come. 

You remember what you said…? 

That Isaac actually died 

on Mount Moriah. 


I've been thinking maybe you were right about that. Died... 

and then reborn in 

The World to Come. 


Danny, •STOP•. —

Where do you think 

you're going…


Don't you know?

There's nothing 

up there. 


"...Your Only Son 

whom you love

Isaac, and go unto 

The Land of Moriah 

and offer him there as 

a Sacrifice on a Mountain 

that I will show you.


So... "I will show you.


It was A Test 

of Abraham's Faith

of his Devotion to God. 


Danny, Champion 

of The World :

It's not about 

Abraham's Faith. 

It's about God's Power


Abstraction

They're obsessed 

with Abstraction

"Kill Your Only Son, 

because I'm Everything 

and You're Nothing." 


"You're nothing."

 Jews. Judaism. 


They're still just Jews. 

Differences exist, 

of course. All right? 


But they're irrelevant

'cause for a Jew, 

His Jewishness 

dominates everything


And even the ones 

who renounce it, 

and who hate its strength 

and want to cut it 

out of their hearts...

Monday 8 August 2022

From The Depths





Out of the depths 
I cry to you, sir.
Lord, hear my voice.

Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.

Grant them eternal rest, O Lord.
And let perpetual light shine upon them.

Rest in peace.

Amen








“They WORK, Riley, but they take concentration. Being attuned with the forces of the universe.”

“ Right. You can'tjust go "librum incendere" and expect...”

“…..Xander, Don’t Speak Latin in front of The Books.”




Sunday 7 August 2022

The Seed




[Engineering]

(Khan is working controls and listening to the intercom messages.)
 

SPOCK [OC]
Captain, acknowledge. 
Unable to flood Engineering section. 
I suspect 
—

SCOTT [OC]
This is Scott. Captain's headed 
for the Engineering section. 
I'll follow in case 
—

SPOCK [OC]
Negative. We must retake the vessel while the anesthesia lasts. 
Meet me in the Armoury. 
I'm blowing it clear first. Spock out. 


(Kirk dashes into Engineering and straight into Khan, who easily disarms him then crushes the phaser. Then an alarm beeps.) 


KHAN
If I understood your manuals, 
that's an overload in progress. 
Your Ship flares up like 
an exploding sun within minutes. 


(The two fight. Khan can throw Kirk around with little effort.

KHAN
I have five times your strength. 
You're no match for me.


(But Kirk gets himself a weapon and clubs Khan into unconsciousness before stopping the overload and saving his ship.)

Captain's Log. Stardate 3143.3. 
Control of the Enterprise has been regained. 
I wish my next decisions were no more difficult. 

Khan and his people. 
What a waste to put them in a reorientation centre. 

And what do I do about McGivers?

[Briefing room]
(The senior staff are in dress uniform again.) 


UHURA
Record tapes engaged and ready, Captain. 


KIRK
This hearing is now in session. 
Under The Authority vested in me 
by Starfleet Command, 
I declare all charges and specifications 
in this matter have been dropped. 


MCCOY
Jim. Agreed, you have 
The Authority 
—

KIRK
Mister Spock, our heading takes us 
near the Ceti Alpha star system. 


SPOCK
Quite correct, Captain. 
Planet number five there is habitable, although a bit savage, somewhat inhospitable. 


KIRK
But no more than Australia's Botany Bay colony was at The Beginning. 
Those men went on to tame a continent, Mister Khan. Can you tame a world? 


KHAN
Have you ever read 
Milton, Captain? 


KIRK
Yes. I understand. 
Lieutenant Marla McGivers :
Given a choice of court martial or accompanying them there. 


KHAN
(gazing into her eyes) 
It will be difficult
A struggle at first even 
to stay alive, to find food. 


MARLA
I'll go with him, sir. 


KHAN
A superior woman. I will take her. 
And I've gotten something else I wanted. 
A world to win, an empire to build. 


KIRK
This hearing is closed. 


(Khan and McGivers are escorted out.)


SCOTT
It's a shame for a good Scotsman to admit it, but I'm not up on Milton. 


KIRK
The statement Lucifer made when he fell into the pit. 
'It is better to rule in Hell 
than serve in Heaven.' 


SPOCK
It would be interesting, Captain, 
to return to that world 
in a hundred years 
and to learn 
what crop has sprung 
from the seed you 
planted today. 


KIRK
Yes, Mister Spock, 
it would indeed.

Acts of Savagery


  



[Daystrom conference room]
 
(Around a round table.)
 
MARCUS
Thank you for convening on such short notice. Be seated.
By now, some of you have heard what happened in London.
The target was a Starfleet data archive.
Now it's a damned hole in the ground.
 
Forty two men and women are dead. 
 
One hour ago, I received a message from a Starfleet officer
who confessed to carrying out this attack,
that he was being forced to do it by this man,
Commander John Harrison. 
 
He's one of our own.
And he is the man responsible
for this Act of Savagery.
 
For unknown reasons, John Harrison has just
declared a one man war against Starfleet.
And under no circumstances are we to
allow this man to escape Federation space.
 
You here tonight represent the senior command
of all the vessels in the region.
And in the name of those we lost,
you will run this bastard down.
 
This is a manhunt, pure and simple,
so let's get to work.
 
Earth's perimeter sensors have not detected
any warp signatures leaving the system,
so we know he can't be far.
 
You will park your ships in a blockade formation
then deploy search vehicles and landing parties
to run down every lead.
 
(Kirk is studying images from the bombing. He finds Harrison holding a case.)
 
MARCUS:
This man has shown willingness to kill innocent people,
so the rules of engagement are simple :
If you come across this man and fear for your life
or the lives of those nearby, you 
are authorised to use
deadly force on sight.
 
KIRK:
What's in The Bag?
 
PIKE:
James, not now.
 
KIRK:
It doesn't seem odd to you
that he'd target an archive?
 
It's like bombing a library.
 
MARCUS:
Chris, everything okay there?
 
PIKE:
Yes, sir. Mister Kirk is just acclimating
to his new position as First Officer.
 
MARCUS:
You got something to say, Kirk, say it.
Tomorrow's too late.
 
KIRK:
I'm fine, sir. My apologies.
 
MARCUS:
Spit it out, son. Don't be shy.
 
KIRK:
Why the archive? All that information is public record,
and if he really wanted to damage Starfleet,
this could just be The Beginning.
 
MARCUS:
The beginning of what, Mister Kirk?
 
KIRK:
Sir, in the event of an attack,
protocol mandates that senior command
gather captains and first officers
at Starfleet HQ, right here --
In this room.
 
SPOCK:
It is curious Harrison would commandeer
a jumpship without warp capabilities
 
(A bright light appears outside.)
 
KIRK:
Clear the room!
 

Saturday 6 August 2022

How Do You Dance with The Devil?



You wanna have 
a better life than 
The Old Man's? 

Take care of The People Who Love You

Or Don't
It's Your Choice.
















Old Chum






chum (n.1)
"friend, intimate companion," 1680s, originally university slang for "roommate," an alternative spelling of cham, short for chamber(mate); the formation is typical of the late-17c. fondness for clipped words. 

Among derived forms used 19c. were chumship; chummery "shared BACHELOR quarters," chummage "system of quartering more than one to a room."

chum (n.2)
"FISH BAIT" consisting usually of pieces of some OTHER fish, 1857, perhaps from Scottish chum "food."

I Can Do Anything.





DHARMA (n.) :








Martin hates boats
Martin hates water
Martin sits in his car when we go 
on the ferry to the mainland. 
I guess it's a childhood thing. 
There's a clinical name for it, isn't there? 

Drowning


The Chief
Is it True that most people get attacked by sharks in three feet of water, about 10 feet from The Beach…? 
And that before people started to swim for recreation,  I mean before The Sharks knew what they were missing, that a lot of these attacks weren't reported? 

Hooper
That's right. 

The Chief
Now, this shark 
that swims ALONE, 
what's it called…? 

Hooper :
 ‘Rogue’. 

The Chief :
‘Rogue’, yeah…

Now, this guy, he keeps swimmin' around 
in a place where The Feeding is Good
until The Food Supply is Gone. Right? 

Hooper
That's called ‘Territoriality’ — 
It’s just A Theory,  
that I happen to agree with.


The Chief
Then why don't we have ONE more drink 
and go down and CUT That Shark OPEN? 

The Wife
Martin? Can you DO that? 

The Chief :  
I can Do Anything
I'm The Chief of Police.

Zorro in Astria

 














That’s the basic idea, that through the ritual, that dimension is struck
which transcends temporality and out of which
life comes and back into which it goes.
 
BILL MOYERS:
And it goes back to this whole idea of death, burial
and resurrection, not only for human beings, but for…
 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
But for the animals, too.
 
BILL MOYERS:
So the story of the buffalo’s wife
was told to confirm the reverence.
 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
That’s right.
 
BILL MOYERS:
What happened when the white man came
and slaughtered this animal of reverence?
 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
That was a sacramental violation.
I mean, in the eighties, when the buffalo hunt
was undertaken, you know, with Kit Carson…
 
BILL MOYERS:
The 1880s, a hundred years ago.
 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
— and Buffalo Bill and so forth.
When I was a boy, whenever we went
for sleigh rides we had a buffalo robe.
 
Buffalo, buffalo, buffalo robes all over the place.
This was the sacred animal to The Indians.
 
These hunters go out with repeating rifles,
and then shoot down the whole herd
and leave it there.
 
Take the skin to sell and the body’s left to rot.
This is a sacrilege, and it really is a sacrilege.
 
BILL MOYERS:
It turned the buffalo from a “Thou-”
 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
To an “it.”
 
BILL MOYERS:
The Indians addressed the buffalo as “Thou.”
 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
As a “Thou”.
 
BILL MOYERS:
As an object of reverence.
 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
The Indians addressed Life as a “Thou,”
I mean, trees and stones, everything else.
 
You can address anything as a “Thou”,
and you can feel the change in your psychology as you do it.
 
The ego that sees a “Thou” is not the same ego that sees an “it.”
 
Your whole psychology changes
when you address things as an “it.”
 
And when you go to war with a people,
the problem of the newspapers
is to turn those people into its,
so that they’re not “Thous.”
 
BILL MOYERS:
That was an incredible moment in
The Evolution of American Society,
when the buffalo were slaughtered.
 
That was the final exclamation point
behind the destruction
of the Indian civilization,
because you were destroying…
 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Can you imagine what the experience must have been
for a people within 10 years to lose their environment,
to lose their food supply, to lose the object of the…
the central object of their ritual life?
 
BILL MOYERS:
So it is in your belief that it was in this period of hunting man and woman,
the time of hunting man, that human beings begin to sense
a stirring of the mythic imagination, the wonder of things that they didn’t know.
 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
There is this burst of magnificent art and
all the evidence you need of
a mythic imagination in full career.
 
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 Eilean 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 are 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
Turn 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.