A Man of Many Parts

 .

 

• REMEMBER •

  

 

 

McCOY: 

He's really not dead. 

As long as we remember him.

 

KIRK: 

'It's a far, far better thing I do 

than I have ever done before. 

...A far better resting place 

that I go to than I have ever known'.

 

CAROL: 

Is that a poem?

 

KIRK: 

No, no. 

 

Something Spock was

trying to tell me. 

 

On my birthday.

 

 

 Buffy blows up The Judge - Buffy the Vampire Slayer

 

 

WILLOW : 

Do you think he's dead?

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer : 

We can't be sure --

Pick up The Pieces and keep 'em seperate.

 

 

 

 

 ANGEL :

It's a Legend. Way before My Time. 

 

Of a demon brought forth to rid The Earth of The Plague of Humanity. 

To separate The Righteous from The Wicked... 

 

And burn The Righteous Down. 

 

They called him The Judge.

 

 

 GILES : 

The Judge? This is he?

 

 ANGEL :

Not all of him.

 

I'm still needing backstory here.

 

 GILES :

Erm... He...

He couldn't be killed, yes?

Erm... An army was sent against him. Most of them died.

But finally they were able to dismember him,

but... not kill him.

 

 ANGEL :

The pieces were scattered,

buried in every corner of The Earth.

 

 

So all these parts are being brought here?

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

By Drusilla.

The vamps outside were Spike's men.

 

 ANGEL :

She's crazy enough to do it.

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

Do what? Reassemble The Judge?

 

 ANGEL :

Bring forth Armageddon.

 

CORDELIA :

Is anybody else gonna have cake?

 

We need to get this out of town.

Angel.

 

 ANGEL :

What?

 

You're the only one that can protect this thing.

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

What about me?

 

You're gonna skip town for a few months?

 

 ANGEL :

I gotta get this to the remotest region possible.

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

But that's not months.

 

 ANGEL :

I can catch a cargo ship to Asia...

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

You know, flying machines are safer than they used to be.

 

 ANGEL :

I can't fly. There's no sure way to guard against the daylight.

I don't like this any more than you do, Buffy.

But there's no other choice.

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

When?

 

 ANGEL :

Tonight. As soon as possible.

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

But it's my birthday.

 

 

We are assembled here today to pay final respects to our honoured dead. 

 

And yet it should be noted that in the midst of our sorrow, this death takes place in the shadow of new life, the sunrise of a new world, a world that our beloved comrade gave his life to protect and nourish. 

 

He did not feel that sacrifice a vain or empty one... 

and we will not debate his profound wisdom at these proceedings. 

 

Of my friend, I can only say this —

Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels....

 

His was the most 

 

...Human.

 

 

SULU : 

Honours, ...hup!

 

(bagpipes play 'Amazing Grace' as the torpedo coffin is fired)

 

[Kirk's quarters]

 

KIRK: 

Come.

 

DAVID: 

I don't mean to intrude.

 

KIRK: 

No, not at all. ...I should be on the bridge.

 

DAVID: Can I talk to you for a minute?

KIRK: I've poured myself a drink. Would you like it?

DAVID: Lieutenant Saavik was right. You never have faced a death.

KIRK: No, not like this. I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I tricked my way out of death ...and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. ...I know nothing.

DAVID: You knew enough to tell Saavik that how we face death is at least as important as how we face life.

KIRK: Just words.

DAVID: But good words. That's where ideas begin. Maybe you should listen to them. I was wrong about you and I'm sorry.

KIRK: Is that what you came here to say?

 

DAVID: 

Mainly. ...And also that I'm ...proud, ...very proud ...to be your son.

 

Captain's log, stardate 8141.6. 

 

Starship Enterprise departing for Ceti Alpha Five to pick up the crew of the U.S.S. Reliant. 

All is well. 

 

And yet I can't help wondering about the friend I leave behind. 

'There are always possibilities' Spock said. 

 

And if Genesis is indeed 'Life from death', 

I must return to this place again.

 

 

[Enterprise bridge]

 

McCOY: 

He's really not dead. 

As long as we remember him.

 

KIRK: 

'It's a far, far better thing I do 

than I have ever done before. 

...A far better resting place 

that I go to than I have ever known'.

 

CAROL: 

Is that a poem?

 

KIRK: 

No, no. 

 

Something Spock was trying to tell me. 

On my birthday.

 

McCOY: 

You okay, Jim? 

How do you feel?

 

KIRK: 

Young. I feel young.

 

(the torpedo coffin lays in a clearing in the new, verdant forest on the Genesis planet)

 

Spock's Voice :

 

Space — The Final Frontier.

 

These, are the continuing voyages of the Starship ‘Enterprise'.

 

Her ongoing mission, to explore strange new worlds…

to seek out new life-forms and new civilisations...

 

To boldly go

Where no man has gone

Before --

It Judges You By The Fact of it’s Existence

Imagine all this Division and Deconstruction was just a corridor we’re passing through. 

All the Fractioning and Separation 

— that’s typical of Horus. 

We can see The Hand of Horus in the Modern-Day tearing down of Monuments and Statues. 

He’s kicking The Fuck out of formerly stable Systems all around The World. 

That’s exactly what you would expect of This Spirit that Crowley said manifested first in 1913. 

But for me, I think he made his presence felt quite clearly on 9/11.

You can easily organize the evidence to suggest that there is an Aeon of Horus occurring now. 

Where Systems are being taken down, where everything’s being Questioned and Audited, and The Past is subject to major revision. 

So, there’s also some fun to be had in thinking 

“Ok, if this is actually playing out in some symbolic fashion, then 

What might The Aeon of Ma’at look like, artistically?’

What advice do you have for the magicians out there who have a story to tell and want to storm the reality studio?

GM: Tell a different story. Tell a fresh story that speaks to its times and the people around you. A story that offers possibilities, exit strategies, rather than apocalypse and ruin. I can’t see that there’s anything else…

In the Wonder Woman book I’m doing, for instance, I’ve actively avoided writing the boy hero story that’s so ubiquitous as to seem inescapable —  the familiar story of the One, the champion, the Joseph Campbell monomyth thing that drives so many Hollywood movies and YA stories. We’ve seen it. The Lion King. The callow youth loses mom or dad, or his comfortable place in the tribe, and he has to fight his way back to save the kingdom from its corrupt old leader, before claiming the captive princess and becoming the new king and… ad infinitum. The Circle of Life if it only applied to boys. I thought, where is the mythic heroine’s story? In Ishtar Rising, Wilson talks about the myth of Inanna, and how she goes down into Hell and has to give up everything of herself to gain the wisdom and experience she can bring back to her tribe. Privileging the network rather than the sovereign individual.

And so, as I thought about the differences between the hero’s and the heroine’s journey, it gave me a bunch of different modes to work in. Finding ways to avoid telling the boy hero story again was quite liberating. It just gave me a bunch of new ideas, an interesting new way of telling stories that didn’t rely on the framework of the hero’s journey that Campbell talks about.

Playing the devil’s advocate here. Today there is a lot of fervor around identity, and there is one strong of thought that people can never truly understand what it is like walking in the shoes of others. Some may ask why a white man would seek to tell the story of a woman, from her perspective, instead of just sticking to what he knows, being a man. 

How authentically real is that character or story, etc.?

GM: It’s important to air These Feelings for debate. I must admit, with all respect, that I COMPLETELY disagree with The Idea That We Cannot Understand One Another.

Firstly, there’s a major obvious problem about coming at things from this perspective — if fundamentally, we cannot TRULY Know or have any Meaningful Opinion on What it Feels Like to be X, then we may as well STOP LISTENING to ANYTHING Anyone Else has to Say about Their Personal Experience, on The Basis That it can only be IRRELEVANT to Our SPECIFIC Lives!

If I can never TRULY Understand You without Walking in Your Shoes and vice versa, WHAT'S THE POINT of Listening or Talking to ANYONE about Our experience? What’s The POINT of Writing Stories, or Protesting, or Making Art if experience cannot by its nature be communicated and understood by ANYONE who has not shared The Experience of The Artist, or The Writer?

I think we all know it doesn’t really work that way in The Real World. We don’t need to BE a thing to have some Understanding of How it Operates. 

People can be great Veterinarians without personally experiencing the day-to-day Inner Lives of Dogs and Cats. 

I can read Solzhenitsyn and shed empathic tears for The Inmates of the Gulag without having to REPRISE their EXACY experience.

To think otherwise might be, I suspect, a Symptom of Narcissism painted into its inevitable corner, its Private Echo Chamber – destructive, divided, atomized, individualistic to the point of self-abnegation – and indicative of Late stage Osiris pathology.

And you know, We actually DO Understand one another in so many ways. 

We can imagine what it’s like to live someone else’s life –— or we can have our imaginations enflamed by well-told tales of other people’s lives and thrill to the ways they resonate exactly with our own lived experience. 

As a Writer, I KNOW This to Be True.

We’ve been observing one another’s behavior and drawing conclusions since The Dawn of Humanity. 

People AREN'T so complicated or new that the basic functions remain a mystery. 

All our plays, poems, songs and stories are a record of our attempts to understand ourselves and one another. 

The fact that Greek drama or Shakespeare still speaks to us is evidence that basic human nature has remained fairly consistent for thousands of years.

We figured one another out a long, long time ago.

And ultimately, I’ll say again, we are all the same organism. What we’re seeing is ring fingers fighting with thumbs, eyelashes screaming that eyebrows can never understand them! 

To point that out is probably an anathema in this current time of Narcissistic Inflation but it will be understood as a Fact of Nature in The End.

Maybe I’m wrong and we’re all fucked because humans are a kind of cancer-creature and our only purpose is to destroy each other and all other lifeforms on our planet… there’s still time for Agent Smith to be proved right!

I think everyone should have to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. We can all learn from one other but that means communicating; that means starting with the assumption we do have a common basis for genuine understanding even if our specific circumstances can never be repeated or totally understood by anyone other than ourselves. We all hurt, we all feel joy, we all get turned on, or scared. We all experience loss, and lack of self-worth and feel badly treated by the world at times.

And I understand why everyone should talk and tell stories from their own position you know but it’s also very useful – and a major human talent –  to imagine how other people feel and consider how the world might look through their eyes.  

And you do that by staying informed, listening to voices even when you disagree with them –—and by employing empathy and imagination to put yourself in their place as best as you’re able.

These are difficult times. I’m not a guru. I don’t know what to say to make it all better. There’s seven in a half billion people and it often seems they all fucking hate each other! Yet they all want everyone else to agree with their tiny, restricted, localized points of view. And they’ve all got a piece of ground to defend against perceived foes. I get it, but ultimately, we’re all one thing, one massive organism that’s going through difficult growing pains at the moment, so maybe we need to start thinking about what makes us alike, rather than different.

I hope so

GM: Well, this is part of the boiling process. Capitalist Consumer Culture has clearly reached its LIMITS and we either Advance to a More Efficient, Stable, Less-Suicidal and Aggressive Engagement with other people and our environment or we go extinct as a species, taking all the whales and tigers and gorillas with us, before we even figured out how to talk to them and hear their stories! There are few options remaining.

The current questioning, the judgmental audit of where we are and how we got here, is a Horus thing. We can only hope we sublimate from here via Ma’at into something more nurturing and sustainable.

It is a hot moment. Temperatures are rising, Artic ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and people may be unconsciously registering all that, and doing a horrible job at it. Instead of dealing with one’s own sense of panic, constriction, and fear it looks like many people are just running hot.

GM: I feel like every word we say is now a potential indictment, you know. The last malignant thrashing of the passing Aeon of Osiris. 

The Echoes of The Inquisition, accusations of ‘WrongThink’, The Return of Original Sin, The Demonic GLEE taken in any stumble or falter from The Approved Path seems almost mediaeval. 

It’s terrifying. 

The potential for misunderstanding is almost infinite and its almost fated that we will struggle to abide by Rules That Grow ever more Authoritarian and Specific every day. 

Again, all that feels to me like the last ferocious attempts at asserting its fading Power by The Osiris Energy of The Last 2000 years, now gone Rotten and Unsustainable but trying HARDER to Keep Everything and Everybody under Increasingly Deranged levels of Control in every area of our lives.

Writers and artists can find more reasons to stop their expression than ever before it seems. The voice of Criticism and Judgement is easier to find these days, just doom scroll through various social media sites and it’s all over the place.

GM: I regard it all as new input. As tough as it is, there’s an excitement. It’s Making Me Think, it’s making me question myself and my assumptions, it’s making me write different things. I love ideas that Challenge My Thinking — even if I don’t AGREE with them in The End.

The Dad God

“I leave you gentlemen now. And you will now write it. 

You will interpret it. That’s Your Right. 

But as I leave you, I want you to know: 

Just think how much you’re going to be missing. 

You Won’t Have Osiris to Kick Around Anymore. 

Because, gentlemen, this is My Last Press Conference.”

 

So, the next Aeon from Christ onward is The Aeon of Osiris, The Dying and Resurrected God. Osiris is also The Law Giver and He brings with Him The Written Word, so now ideas can be enshrined in books and books can outlast generations and they take on the aura of Gods Themselves.

God Himself is present in the works of the Bible. God Himself is present in the Quran. So certainly, there’s this programming code language, the instructional Dad Language, which can take people over just from reading a book and turn them into Agents of The Dad God’s Expansionist, Controlling Agenda. This is when Nature goes from Provider to something that exists to be tamed and exploited. That’s The Aeon of Osiris.

Following Osiris, comes this fiery breakdown, the child Horus is the son of Osiris and he’s every jihadi, every warrior, every rock star reformer, every young man who sees as his sacred mission the tearing down of structures, the questioning of rules. It’s punk rock, “I gotta tear it all down.” But running in tandem with that, according to Kenneth Grant, is the shadow Aeon of Ma’at, Horus’ sister and she’s the goddess of truth and balance and harmony and all that Wonder Woman stuff.

For me, having gone through the Abyss of Da’ath in the Thelema structure of initiation — having undergone that in a really experiential and exhausting way, I found myself in the Qabbalistic sphere of Binah, and The Entire World suddenly looked very different and made sense in different configurations which re-energized the work I’d been doing.  

 

  You remember at the height of The First Lockdown, all the churches were empty, all the sports stadiums were empty, all the mosques were empty, all the temples were empty. 

 

So, The Dad God had nowhere to go.

"I think that Star Wars is a Valid Mythological Perspective.

It shows The State as a Machine and asks:

"Is The Machine going to crush Humanity, or Serve Humanity?"

And Humanity comes not from The Machine, but from The Heart.

DARTH VADER:

Luke. Help me take This Mask off.

LUKE SKYWALKER:

But you’ll die.

 

Cordy: 

I feel a little guilty.

Angel: 

Don't. I mean, $19 for a sashimi couscous appetizer is money well spent. 

How was it anyway? Pretty good? 

I mean, it ought to be pretty...

Cordy: 

It's delicious but that's not what I feel guilty about.

Angel: 

Oh. 

(Sees Wesley looking at him) 

 

I 'm Not Cheap, I-I'm just Old. 

 

(Slipping into a slight Irish accent) 

I-I remember when a few bob got you a good meal, a bottle *and* a Tavern Wench...

...you were saying?

 

"As for Captain America himself,  Steve Rogers, a skinny non-com who volunteered for a military experiment designed to turn an ordinary man into a superwarrior. Like My Dad, or Jack Kirby, Steve just wanted a crack at Hitler. And, like many men in the populations of the Allied nations, he reckoned he could take the scrawny little paperhanger if only there weren’t thousands of miles of occupied territory, barbed wire, soldiers, tanks, and minefields between the sniveling Adolf and the proud fist of retribution.

     Unlike Superman or Batman, Captain America was a soldier with Permission to Kill. Until this point, the superheroes operated on the fringes of The Law, but Captain America’s violent work was endorsed by The Constitution itself! Turned down for the military, Steve applied for an experimental treatment of Super Soldier Serum and Vita-Rays. Before the formula could be mass-produced, its creator was murdered by Nazi agents, leaving a newly brawny and supercharged Steve Rogers as Uncle Sam’s one and only supersoldier.

     Each issue of Captain America was kinetic, brutally overwrought, and sensationalistic. Every cover featured a brand-new tableau of imminent superatrocity: A girl, her blouse ripped to ribbons, writhes on a medieval torture rack while a leering hunchback, preferably sporting swastika tattoos, threatens her cleavage with a glowing poker; Captain America launches himself through a wall on a motorcycle, destroying a portrait of Hitler on the way and simultaneously repelling a hail of bullets with his Stars and Stripes shield, while his faithful teen partner, Bucky, mows down Ratzis with the feral glee of a William S. Burroughs wild boy. There would invariably be some combination of boiling oil, rabid gorillas, vampires, or fiendish snake-fanged Japanese involved. Every square inch of illustration contained a frozen moment of grotesque threat or swashbuckling derring-do.

     Kirby relied on his remarkable drawing skills to provide a living for his family and was serious about selling his books in an overcrowded market. Where Superman had flown the Axis leaders to an international court of law, Captain America took the fantasy to its far more satisfying next level. Kirby knew that wish-fulfillment pictures of American superheroes punching out Hitler’s teeth would sell magazines in a fearful world, and his instincts were right. In Captain America, Simon and Kirby gave America’s troops, in the field or at home, a hero they could call their own."

 

 

Crowley said that the general tenor of the last six thousand years of human civilization could be summed up by the personalities of a family of Egyptian gods. And the first two thousand years up to the birth of Christ, this was the Age of Isis, the Mother Goddess, where people were hunter/gatherers or early agrarians living off the land, relying on ‘Mother Earth’, the seasons and the tides. 

So, the next Aeon from Christ onward is the Aeon of Osiris, The Dying and Resurrected God. Osiris is also The Law Giver and He brings with Him The Written Word, so now Ideas can be enshrined in Books and Books can outlast Generations and they take on The Aura of Gods Themselves.

God Himself is present in the works of The Bible. God Himself is present in The Quran. So certainly, there’s this programming code language, the instructional Dad language, which can take people over just from reading a book and turn them into agents of The Dad God’s Expansionist, Controlling Agenda. This is when Nature goes from Provider to something that exists to be Tamed and Exploited. That’s The Aeon of Osiris.

Following Osiris, comes this fiery breakdown, the child Horus is the son of Osiris and he’s every jihadi, every warrior, every rock star reformer, every young man who sees as his sacred mission the tearing down of structures, the questioning of rules. It’s punk rock, “I gotta tear it all down.” But running in tandem with that, according to Kenneth Grant, is the shadow Aeon of Ma’at, Horus’ sister and she’s the goddess of truth and balance and harmony and all that Wonder Woman stuff.

For me, having gone through the Abyss of Daath in the Thelema structure of initiation — having undergone that in a really experiential and exhausting way, I found myself in the Qabbalistic sphere of Binah, and the entire world suddenly looked very different and made sense in different configurations which re-energized the work I’d been doing.  

So, I decided to accept that the Aeon of Ma’at was coming down fast and I tried to align all my thinking with that, which provided me with a new bunch of metaphors and ways of framing the world. Imagine all this division and deconstruction was just a corridor we’re passing through. All the fractioning and separation —that’s typical of Horus. We can see the hand of Horus in the modern-day tearing down of monuments and statues. He’s kicking the fuck out of formerly stable systems all around the world. That’s exactly what you would expect of this spirit that Crowley said manifested first in 1913. But for me, I think he made his presence felt quite clearly on 9/11.

You can easily organize the evidence to suggest that there is an Aeon of Horus occurring now. Where systems are being taken down, where everything’s being questioned and audited, and the past is subject to major revision. So, there’s also some fun to be had in thinking “Ok, if this is actually playing out in some symbolic fashion, then what might The Aeon of Ma’at look like, artistically?’

And to me it looks like the rise of marginalized voices, it looks like more women coming into the discourse. It looks like trans people coming into the discourse. It looks like all the opportunities for groups who were disempowered by The Patriarchy, who couldn’t speak before to have their say.

Ma’at – what would her signature disease be? Well it might be a distributed network, a viral malady that could attack all of humanity. What would happen if she emptied the houses of the old gods as a show of possibility? You remember at the height of the first lockdown, all the churches were empty, all the sports stadiums were empty, all the mosques were empty, all the temples were empty. 

 

So, The Dad God had nowhere to go.

 

 

  

It is a hot moment. Temperatures are rising, Artic ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and people may be unconsciously registering all that, and doing a horrible job at it. Instead of dealing with one’s own sense of panic, constriction, and fear it looks like many people are just running hot.

GM: I feel like every word we say is now a potential indictment, you know. The last malignant thrashing of the passing Aeon of Osiris. 

The Echoes of The Inquisition, accusations of ‘WrongThink’, The Return of Original Sin, The Demonic GLEE taken in any stumble or falter from The Approved Path seems almost mediaeval. 

It’s terrifying. 

The potential for misunderstanding is almost infinite and its almost fated that we will struggle to abide by Rules That Grow ever more Authoritarian and Specific every day. 

Again, all that feels to me like the last ferocious attempts at asserting its fading Power by The Osiris Energy of The Last 2000 years, now gone Rotten and Unsustainable but trying HARDER to Keep Everything and Everybody under Increasingly Deranged levels of Control in every area of our lives.

 

WHY Did Set Kill Osiris?

“Crowley said that the general tenor of the last six thousand years of human civilization could be summed up by the personalities of a family of Egyptian Gods. 

So, the next Aeon from Christ onward is The Aeon of Osiris, The Dying and Resurrected God. 

Osiris is also The Law Giver and He brings with Him The Written Word, so now ideas can be enshrined in books and books can outlast generations and they take on the aura of Gods Themselves.


God Himself is present in the works of the Bible. God Himself is present in the Quran. So certainly, there’s this programming code language, the instructional Dad Language, which can take people over just from reading a book and turn them into Agents of The Dad God’s Expansionist, Controlling Agenda. This is when Nature goes from Provider to something that exists to be tamed and exploited. That’s The Aeon of Osiris.



Following Osiris, comes this fiery breakdown, the child Horus is the son of Osiris and he’s every jihadi, every warrior, every rock star reformer, every young man who sees as his sacred mission the tearing down of structures, the questioning of rules. It’s punk rock, “I gotta tear it all down.” 

But running in tandem with that, according to Kenneth Grant, is the shadow Aeon of Ma’at, Horus’ sister and she’s the goddess of truth and balance and harmony and all that Wonder Woman stuff.


WHY Did Set Kill Osiris?

Murder. ... Seth, the god of disorder, murdered his brother Osiris, the God of Order. Seth was furious because His Wife, Nepthys, had conceived a child, named Anubis, by Osiris. 

And THAT’S Why He Cuts His Dick Off — 

and fed it to a Crab.

The murder happened at a banquet when Seth invited guests to lie down in a coffin he had made for The King.

After Horus was thrown into exile, Gods who stood in Set's way were killed or presumably enslaved. Set confronted Nephthys who tried using her wings to fly away but Set grabbed on to Nephthys' wing and threw her to the ground. Set cut off her wings and PRESUMABLY killed her.

Nephthys was not only a Goddess of Death, Decay, and Darkness but also a Magician with great healing powers. Nephthys has a central role in the popular myths of Osiris; it is HER magical powers that helps to resurrect his body, as well as to protect and nurture Horus while he is a child.

Nephthys helped Isis bring Osiris back to life after he was killed by Seth, so she is often depicted in tombs and on coffins as a protector of the dead, specifically associated with the organs placed in canopic jars. Nephthys and Isis look very similar and can only be differentiated by their headdresses.

PASSPORTS

They have every man in a straitjacket and without a passport he can’t move a toe.

But if you will allow me to finish…

If a free world they violate the natural rights of every citizen.

But you don’t let me fully…

They have become the weapons of political despots.

Yes but may I…

And if you don’t think as they think, you deprived of your passport.

But, will you allow me…

To leave a country is like breaking out of jail, and to enter a country is like going through an eye of a needle.

But…

Am I free to travel?

Of course, you are free to travel!

Only with a passport!

Will you allow me to say some…

Only with a passport!

Ba…

Do animals need passport?

Ae...ae. Are you finished?

It’s incorrigible that in this atomic age of speed we are shut in and shut out by passport.

Gandhi: 

I want to welcome you all.

 Every one of you.  

We have no secrets.

Let us begin by being clear about General Smuts' new law : 

All Indians must now be fingerprinted, like criminals, 

men and women.

No marriage, other than a Christian marriage, is considered valid. 

Under this Act, our wives and mothers are whores, 

and every man here is a bastard.

Kahn: 

He has become quite good at this.

 

Gandhi: 

And our Policemen, passing an Indian dwelling -- I will not call them homes -- may enter and demand the card of any Indian woman whose dwelling it is.

Understand, he does not have to stand at The Door.

He may enter.

Audience Member #1: 

I will not allow it.

Audience Member #2: 

I swear to Allah: I'll kill the man who offers that insult to my Home and my Wife. And, let them hang me.

 

Audience Member #3:

I say, talk means nothing! Kill a few officials before they disgrace one Indian woman! 

Then, they might think twice about such laws!

Audience Member #4: 

In that cause, I would be willing to die!!

Gandhi: 

I praise such courage. 

I need such courage because in this cause I, too, am prepared to die. 

But, my friend, there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill. 

Whatever they do to us, we will attack no one, kill no one, 

but we will not give our fingerprints -- not one of us.  

They will imprison us, and they will fine us. 

They will seize our possessions, but they cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them.

Audience Member #5: 

Have you been to prison?! They beat us and torture us! I say that we should --

Gandhi: 

I am asking you to fight! 

To fight against their anger, not to provoke it.

We will not strike a blow, but we will receive them. 

And through our pain we will make them see their injustice, and it will hurt -- as all fighting hurts. 

But we cannot lose. We cannot. 

They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. 

Then, they will have my dead body -- not my obedience.

We are Hindu and Muslim, children of God, each one of us.

Let us take a solemn oath, in His name, that come what may we will not submit to this law.

I Could Not Have Let That Young Man Go

“Say, for instance… most of us here are mostly pretty counter-culture types – y’know, we like our drugs, we like this and that; we like breaking a few rules. 

But we don’t like The Police, in general. 

Who here loves The Police? Hands up.

Nice one! Coz I’m gonna teach you to LOVE The Police.....”

“ARE WE DOING TOO MUCH OR TOO LITTLE?” 

Wonder Woman asked, cradling a dying bird in a dust-bowl landscape. 

“WHEN DOES INTERVENTION BECOME DOMINATION?”

“I CAN ONLY TELL YOU WHAT I BELIEVE, DIANA,” 

Superman replied. 

“HUMANKIND HAS TO BE ALLOWED TO CLIMB TO ITS OWN DESTINY. 

WE CAN’T CARRY THEM THERE.”

Then the Flash countered with: 

“BUT THAT’S WHAT SHE’S SAYING. 

WHAT’S THE POINT? 

WHY SHOULD THEY NEED US AT ALL?”

“TO CATCH THEM IF THEY FALL,” 

said Superman, gazing nobly at the sky. 

Issue no. 1 of the relaunched Justice League of America in 1987 had depicted its characters from an overhead perspective, giving the reader an elevated position that allowed us to look down on a newly humanized and relatable group of individuals.

At my request, Howard Porter drew our first cover shot of the JLA from below, endowing them with the majesty of towering statues on Mount Olympus, putting readers at the level of children gazing up at adults. JLA was a superhero title kids could read to feel grown-up and adults could read to feel young again.”

“Just beyond the railing that keeps cars from rolling over, a Young Man actually clearly about to jump and preparing himself to jump. 

The Police car stopped. 

The Policeman on the right jumps out to grab The Boy, and grabs him just as he jumped and was himself being pulled over, and would have gone over if The Second Cop hadn’t gotten around, grabbed him and pull the two of them back. 

And The Policeman was asked, 

“Why didn’t you let go? 

I mean, you would have lost your life?” 

And you see what had happened to that man, 

this is what’s known as one pointed meditation 

Everything Else in His Life dropped off. 

His Duty to His Family

His Duty to His Job

His Duty to His Own Career

All of his Wishes and Hopes for Life, 

just disappeared and he was about to go. 

And his answer was, 

“I couldn’t let go.

If I had let that Young Man go, 

I could not have lived another Day of My Life.”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

The God of Death is The Lord of Sex at the same time.

BILL MOYERS: 

What do you mean?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

It’s a marvelous thing. 

One after another, you can see these gods Ghede, The Death God of the Haitian voodoo, is also The Sex God. 

Wotan had one eye covered and the other uncovered, do you see, and at the same time was The Lord of Life.

Osiris, The Lord of Death and The Lord of The Generation of Life. 

It’s a basic theme: That Which Dies is Born. 

You have to have Death in order to have Life.

Now, this is the origin thought really of the head hunt, in Southeast Asia and particularly in the Indonesian zone. 

The head hunt, right up to now, has been a sacred act, 

it’s a sacred killing: 

Unless there is Death, there cannot be Birth, and a Young Man, before he can be permitted to Marry and Become a Father, must have gone forth and had his kill.

BILL MOYERS: 

What does that say to you?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, that every generation has to die in order that the next generation should come. 

As soon as you beget or give birth to a child, you are the dead one; the child is the new life and you are simply the protector of that new life.

BILL MOYERS: 

Your time has come and you know it.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Yeah, well, that’s why there is this deep psychological association of begetting and dying.

BILL MOYERS: 

Isn’t there some relationship between what you’re saying and this fact, 

that a father will give his life for his son, 

a mother will give her life for her child?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

There’s a wonderful paper. 

I don’t whether you knew it that I would love to talk to this point there’s a wonderful paper by Schopenhauer, who’s one of my three favorite philosophers, called 

“The Foundation of Morality.”

There he asks exactly the question that you’ve asked. 

How is it that a human being can so participate in the peril or pain of another, that without thought, spontaneously, he sacrifices his own life to the other? 

How can this happen? 

That what we normally think of as the first law of nature, namely self-preservation, is suddenly dissolved, there’s a breakthrough.

In Hawaii, some four or five years ago, there was an extraordinary adventure that represents this problem. 

There’s a place there called the Pali, where the winds from the north, the trade winds from the north, come breaking through a great ridge of rocks and of mountain, and they come through with a great blast of wind. 

The people like to go up there to get their hair blown around and so forth, or to commit suicide, you know, like jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. 

Well, a police car was on its way up early, a little road that used to go up there, and they saw just beyond the railing that keeps cars from rolling over, a young man actually clearly about to jump and prepare himself to jump. 

The police car stopped. 

The policeman on the right jumps out to grab the boy, and grabs him just as he jumped and was himself being pulled over, and would have gone over if the second cop hadn’t gotten around, grabbed him and pull the two of them back. 

There was a long description of this, it was a marvelous thing, in the newspapers at that time.

And the policeman was asked, “Why didn’t you let go? I mean, you would have lost your life?” 

And you see what had happened to that man, this is what’s known as one pointed meditation everything else in his life dropped off. His duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own career, all of his wishes and hopes for life, just disappeared and he was about to go. And his answer was, “I couldn’t let go. If I had,” and I’m quoting almost word for word, “if I’d let that young man go, I could not have lived another day of my life.”

How come? 

Schopenhauer’s answer is, this is the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization that you and the other are one. 

And that the separateness is only an effect of the temporal forms of sensibility of time and space. 

And a true reality is in that unity with all life. 

It is a metaphysical truth that becomes spontaneously realized, because it’s the real truth of your life. 

Now, you might say the hero is the one who has given his physical life, you might say, to some order of realization of that truth. 

It may appear that I’m one with my tribe, or I’m one with people of a certain kind, or I’m one with life. 

This is not a concept; this is a realization, do you see what I mean?

BILL MOYERS: 

No, explain it.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

And the concepts of love your neighbor and all are to put you in tune with that fact, but whether you love your neighbor or not, bing, the thing grabs you and you do this thing. 

You don’t even know who it is. 

That policeman didn’t know who that young man was. 

And Schopenhauer says in small ways you can see this happening every day all the time. 

This is a theme that can be seen moving life in the world, people doing nice things for each other.

BILL MOYERS: 

What do you think has happened to this mythic idea of the hero in our culture today?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

It comes up in an experience. 

I think, I remember during the Vietnam war, seeing on the television the young men in helicopters going out to rescue one of their companions at great risk to themselves. 

They didn’t have to rescue that young man; that’s the same thing working. 

It puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. 

Going to the office every day, you don’t get that experience, but suddenly you’re ripped out into being alive. 

And life is pain and life is suffering and life is horror, but by God, you’re alive and it’s spectacular. And this is a case of being alive, rescuing that young man.

BILL MOYERS: 

But I also know a man who said once, after years of standing on the platform of the subway, 

“I die a little bit down there every day, but I know I’m doing so for my family.” 

There are small acts of heroism that occur without regard to the nobility or the notoriety that you attract for it.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

That’s right, that’s right.

BILL MOYERS: 

And the mother does it by the isolation she endures in behalf of the family, of raising…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Motherhood is a sacrifice. 

On our veranda in Hawaii, there are little birds that come that Jean likes to feed. 

And each year there have been one or two mothers, mother birds. 

And if you’ve ever seen a mother bird plagued by her progeny for food, that the mother should regurgitate their meal to them, and the two of them, or five of them in one case, flopping all over this poor little mother, they bigger than she in some cases, you just think, well, this is the symbol of motherhood. 

This is just giving of your substance, every thing, to this progeny.

There should be it in marriage. 

A marriage is a relationship. 

When you make a sacrifice in marriage, you’re not sacrificing to The Other, you’re sacrificing to The Eelationship. 

And this is symbolised, for example, in that Chinese image of the tai chi, the tao, you know, with the dark and the light interacting, it’s a well-known sign. 

That is the relationship of yang and yin, male and female, which is what a marriage is. 

And that’s what you are, you’re no longer This, 

you’re The Relationship. 

And so marriage, I would say, 

is not a love affair, it’s An Ordeal.

BILL MOYERS: 

An ordeal?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

The ordeal is sacrifice of ego to the relationship, of a two-ness which now becomes the one.

BILL MOYERS: 

One not only biologically but spiritually, 

and primarily spiritually.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Primarily spiritually.

BILL MOYERS: 

But the necessary function of marriage, in order to create our own images and perpetuate ourselves in children, but it’s not the primary one, as you say.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

No, that’s really just the elementary aspect of marriage. 

There are two completely different stages of marriage. 

First is the youthful marriage, following the wonderful impulse, you know, that nature has given us, in the interplay of the sexes biologically. 

And in the reproduction of children. 

But there comes a time when the child graduates from the family, and the family is left. 

I’ve been amazed at the number of my friends who in their forties or fifties go apart, who have had a perfectly decent life together with the child, but they interpreted their union in terms of relationship through the child. 

They did not interpret it in terms of their own personal relationship to each other.

BILL MOYERS: 

Utterly incompatible with the idea of 'Doing One’s Own Thing'?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

It’s not one’s own thing, you see. 

It is in a sense one’s own thing, 

but the one isn’t just you, it’s the two together. 

And that’s a purely mythological image, of the sacrifice of the visible entity for a transcendent unit, cracking eggs to make an omelet, you know? 

And by marrying The Right Person, 

we reconstruct the image of the incarnate god, 

and that’s what marriage is.

BILL MOYERS: 

The right person. How does one choose the right person?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Your heart tells you; it ought to.

BILL MOYERS: 

Your inner being.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

That’s the mystery.

BILL MOYERS: 

You recognize your other self.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, I don’t know, but there’s a flash that comes and something in you knows that this is the one.