02-24-07
core / life master / 2007 / february / 2/24/07 (02/24/07)
character, story, creating a memory that serves the same role as myth – story theory
4 days. documentaries vs fiction. yes the truth is stranger than fiction, and i like documentaries very much, to me they are material. what documentaries can’t do is work with people’s thoughts, their emotions unless the subject has kept a diary. of course we can observe them when they are on camera, we can document them having emotions, but it’s one thing to watch another having emotions and to be drawn through those emotions yourself, to be transfigured by those emotions and experiences directly and be remade. i want to pull the audience in and give them a ride, i want the character to be a vehicle for the audience to rediscover themselves, what i am through the character.
i am interested in emotion and learning, in the reality we manufacture through our perception. i guess i am interested in experimenting with cognition still. i like the idea that i can create a memory for someone that serves the same role as myth, that serves the audience in a way that real life history cannot. it’s principles of macolm x that inspire, and if he had survived would he have healed the world? he was hooking up with some effective truth, some universal power. we are left with the template that evolution like malcolms get you snuffed, and that’s neither true nor false, that template tends to dampen ardor and inspiration. what if malcolm weren’t dead? does the manner of his end change the inflection of the message. it takes a shallow, lonely or crazy person to adopt a death wish as their driving force. some folks call that courage, and even i find it enticing. but i question the usefulness of such a motivation for most people. most people have family they love and care for, they like being alive and they might even be satisfied with their moment, not striving to transform it. so when we talk about courage, that’s not something most folks can relate to. to risk it all, for what? well of course this generalization falls apart when i really look around me, there are plenty of friends who are striving to transform, i’d say most of my friends are. what i am trying to express is that courage is a sort of remote and abstract idea, say risking one’s life to change ones life, or the world. i am down with that, if success is likely and i am feeling confident in my abilities, then that’s a go.
the point of all this is to say that i am a myth driven individual. if i look at reality (malcolm x) i can see that there are unseen forces ready to crush the world healer, that to face off against the oppressor will likely result in annihilation. that’s “real life” good folks get shot – ghandi, king, malcolm… so if we look at life (reality) as a model, we might have a tendency to shut down, to go underground or just conform as best we can, hide and console ourselves with dreams and secret plans. the public savior get’s publicly executed. history is a kind of fiction, scripted by an oppressive force that manipulates people and events to de-mythologize our consciousness. to cripple our imagination. history is not mystory, or ourstory. what i am telling with my movies is ourstory, what we might be if we free ourselves within, if we love each other. you look around and see what? things suck, we’re doomed, basically. we’ll that’s just static to kill your joy, all we have to do is open our eyes to each other, to the trees and life around us. to the courage and faith and crazy human humor of being alive to know that what is given to us as reality is bunk a sham, plain old cardboard and paste. there is a brighter future if we choose only to create it and live it. i so chose today.
who needs jesus? jesus wasn’t a christian, he was a fucking rebel, a paradigm buster. he parachuted in and showed us a new dance, then exit stage right. the opportunists fit him into the cultural catechism, they fabricated a religion with him as the head, but he wasn’t here to sell us another metaphor, he was here to drop some freedom on our asses. the kingdom of god is spread upon the earth and man does not see it. that’s not in the bible by the way. world saviors don’t show up in order to establish giant systems of dogma. they are torpedoes sent to sink the metaphors that keep us high and dry. sink with me now into the depths, them very waters of our being!
kingsees, malcolmismos, ghandhistas. the three world saviors of the 20th century, the three wise men. the next 100 years of history never happened, so we must look back for our material. the lesson is, world saviors get wiped out. also world saviors are men, and men are expendable. you don’t shoot a woman and get away with it.
reality is only someone else’s idea of what’s possible
someone else is mytholgizing us and calling it history. history is only a list of surprises – kurt vonnegut