Uncle / Buffalo Joe character
Clique Children's Book
In the delicious nothing that stretches and wraps around, there's a swirling maybe, a there and then essential to the blooming of that which isn't. Theme Park Earth, a chance for the gods to test drive mortality. They visit to experience being, doing, having. They forget themselves utterly to play the human game. Theme Park Earth is where Spirit goes to nap, engaging in delicious dreams of limit, time and duality. Entranced by cycles of frustration and accomplishment, the gods more themselves. Without gentle, steady expansion, divinity would wink out and the delightful sparkling nothing would be flat calm, bereft of ripple or breeze.
In past epochs, gods could come to Theme Park Earth and sleep for thousands of years but nowadays, gods only nap for a hundred or so. Anyway, they eventually exit Theme Park Earth and reemerge into the non physical, where they rave to one another about the wild rides, "Did you see what I did there, wow!"
Exiting Theme Park Earth is no big deal. We've had an excellent expansion. We're done for now, we'll be back. Hop on the monorail to the parking lot. Easy. Feeling happy and satisfied. Wake up from our lovely dream, go find some breakfast.
A tiny minority of gods are insomniacs. Even after arriving at Theme Park Earth, they have trouble sleeping and do not easily forget. They are like a story that words cannot tell, so they toss and turn, thrash about. They are a real pain in the neck.
Ever been to a movie where some punk ass who sat through an earlier screening shouts out the characters' next line? Shut the fuck up, kid! Some sleepless gods are like that, they've got to spoil the surprise for everyone.
Lots of sleep deprived gods leak light. This might manifest as striking beauty, errie and impossible talents, fierce intelligence or perhaps all of the above. Their luminance can disturb other sleepers, wake them up too. If the shine isn't shaded somehow, dense clusters of visitors end up on the monorail back to the parking lot.
Other non sleepers roam the Earth and enjoy adventures and pleasures, building vast empires or revealing the secrets of the stars. Their passage is marked by wonders - citadels, paintings, physicality enhancements, books, inventions. If permitted to persist, these wonders might spark deep memory and inspire fullness too soon, and so they are deleted or stashed away in secure archives.
Still other non sleepers recognize in their own sleeplessness, a sign. Perhaps even a calling. They understand themselves to be the stewards of reality, the imagineers of Theme Park Earth. There could be an efficacy to sleeplessness. They alone have the opportunity, perhaps even the responsibility to tinker with the mechanisms of existence, to improve the cosmos. If Theme Park Earth is about forgetting, then can the mechanisms of forgettery be enhanced? If the dream of limitation gets longer and deeper, perhaps expansion will be expanded. These restless gods tend to gather together and are called the Clique.
Short Version
Many gods come to Theme Park Earth. Pretending mortality, entranced by cycles of frustration and accomplishment, they are the drivers of the divine's constant expansion. They become a being, a doing, a having. They forget themselves utterly to play the human game. They are great spirits sleeping, engaged in a delicious dream of limits, of time, of duality.
However, in every age are born a few who can't forget, and so cannot play the game. They shine with the light of what they really are, which might manifest as striking beauty, eerie talent, and fierce intelligence. Some of these become great saints who attempt to wake a few sleepers. Others roam the Earth, enjoying endless adventures and pleasures, building vast empires or revealing the secrets of the stars. Still others see in their own sleeplessness, a sign. They believe themselves to be the stewards of reality. They manage theme park earth, tinker with the mechanisms of existence, and aspire to improve the cosmos. They are the Clique. They do not know good or evil. They do not fear death, but are very hard to kill. They enjoy fluid physicality, appearing young or old, diseased or healthy. Their vaults contain exquisite works of arts and advanced technology from long vanished civilizations, gifts from extra terrestrials, hints, clues, wonders - pretty much anything that might compromise the forgettery and nap promoting qualities of Theme Park Earth.
An Actor Prepares
Why write a treatment for Uncle Joe / Buffalo Joe? His final scenes are coming up, if I am going to squeak them in before the leaves change and drop, I need to feel his presence more. He is (now) the arc of the movie.
Clarifying and crystalizing the Joe / Clique connection seems crucial for finding out who Joe is, what motivates him, what he cherishes.
How does Joe feel? How do his feelings change?
After saboting the great work - wry humor, amusement, imagining how annoyed the remaining Clique must feel, because if you can annoy a sleepless god, knock them out of alignment then perhaps they weren't so evolved after all and that's a point for you!
On the Big Boat - excitement, seeing his protege, kicking in the next significant step
Riding Away - teaching the poetry, establishing the people, deferring the trauma of world apocalypse as we regress civilization
Wandering the land - mission accomplished, playing wise old wizard, performing the poetry, scratching the performance itch, distracting himself from DOG, possibly his attachment to specific outcomes could mess up the unfolding.
Fire message from BOX DOG - wtf?!
Traveling to BOX rendezvous - persistent, practicing ease and joy, curious, intrigued. undercurrent - things have gone horribly amiss, what's the point, I'm getting old, mourning, death of billions catching up, solace in the wilds, becoming wild, unkempt, falling apart, shriving. Two things at once - decisive appreciation in the face of several flavors of terrible contrast.
lots of business here - sobbing on concrete found in the forest, bathing in cow trough, walking under dead canopy, hugging tree and then pan up to dead branches, apples, waking up in flowers, mediatation
Meeting BOX DOG - surprise, kinship, new friend, falling in love. montage - getting to know you, I'm in the mood for love
To Veronique - mind journey, she is half in, half out.
The Clique (first pass)
The Clique are my irreverant riff on Abraham Hicks. The Clique are not duped by religious overlays, they have practiced connecting with their fullness and are flowing from fullness most of the time. They don't have a morality that vilifies death and suffering, for them there is no death, and suffering clarifies desire and drives expansion. They know that we were all eager to come to Theme Park Earth and play at mortality, to be distracted from our divinity and forget what we really are.
The Clique are not traditional antagonists because they actually know more about reality than the main characters, they experience the bigger picture. The Clique are trying to goose the cosmos to facilitate even more expansion, to make the ride more intense for the visitors. We can use them to illustrate common misunderstandings of AH.
The motivation to tinker with reality, to improve the cosmos is playful. The Clique are the sleepless, they have manifested the most outrageous dreams - crazy wealth and vast political power, they can slip between youth and old age effortlessly, they have gathered the cream of art and science from current and forgotten civilizations.
The Clique don't mind dying tho they rarely do, strong desire AND tuning easily to source provide robust and vigorous vitality, and the most efficacious medicines and heath machines are available in their vaults. Most are formidable warriors, and a great way to die is to be cut down after a fierce and prolonged battle. Starting over is no big deal, it's a new ride. They usually respawn with memory fragments and often recall more details as they mature.
What's crucial to convey about the Clique is that there is no good and evil, only alignment and non alignment. Sometimes non alignment corresponds to what The People might think of as evil, but not always. There's only coincidental correspondence between evil and non alignment. More to point when thinking about the Clique, an act inspired by alignment could appear to be totally evil. Like deliberately reducing the population through planned catastrophes.
[Can the Clique be depicted as running rides at an amusement park? Ferris wheel, roller coaster... Grey Clique dolls with claymation rides]
What do we think we know about Joe?
Joe's Clique forte has been as spy master for various flavors of Eastern European dark ops. He's operated in the Russian theater tho his accent is modeled after Andre Codrescue, a Romanian who deliberately foriegnized himself after immigrating to the USA.
Joe's prolly a few centuries old, and has played machiavellian roles in myriad governments and revolutions. Rasputin might have been one of his most renowned performances.
Joe is an odd sort of maverick in that he secretly delights in the status quo and sees infinite possibilities for entertainment and delight in just audaciously playing out his Theme Park Earth persona. He isn't interested in enhancing the mechanisms of divine expansion or yearning to fathom the cosmos as are his peers in the Clique. He can taste the bright tang of his own personal significance with every breath. He marvels at the elegance of duality as an armature for reality. He likens duality to wilderness - a self correcting and innately intelligent tableau best left unmolested.
He loves wearing the mask of divinity, and revels in the subterfuge of being human. He has always been comfortable as a spy, cypher and double agent because these roles are extensions of every mortal's fundamental situation. He considers himself a one man sleeper cell, a trickster and wild card.
Joe runs with the Clique, the secret elite masters, because they offer the richest opportunity for pranks and sabotage. His avid and convincing advocacy for and contribution to their agenda is just excellent trade craft. He enjoys observing others striving for illusory dominance. He dotes on deeply unnecessary byzantine conspiracies. He also loves to thwart carefully laid plans and maximize havoc with subtle and almost invisible interventions.
His wry and offbeat sense of humor is informed by deep involvement with mystical esoterica. He's seen things you people wouldn't believe, but he's not overawed by his vast experience. He appreciates the tight rope walk of mortality, of pretending not to know what one truly is. He has a healthy respect for every individual's latent godhood regardless of how they are showing up in the moment and is especially attentive and even wary of the meek, the downtrodden, and the backward as they are as often as not a powder keg of transformation on a very short fuse.
As Clique he's on the inside track, but bored by their consensual agenda, the obsession with enhancing the mechanisms of expansion, taking responsibility to steward and improve upon the cosmos. For Joe, those who act for any reason other than pure fun are misguided, doofuses. He's preparing a sabot to toss into the precision cogs of the Great Plan, sabots within sabots. He offers a credible scenario of withdrawal and capitulation with a credible amount of low level interference for ferreting out by other Clique, but his true plan is unknowable even to him.
Differing opinions
Joe detects a fundamental confusion in Clique reasoning. They intend to improve Theme Park Earth so that divine expansion will be expanded... made to happen faster, be bigger? How would the Clique determine whether their tinkering effected expansion? Rates of expansion can't be measured, because measurement implies time and space which is what the divine is outside of. Since rates can't be determined, let alone changes in rates, improvements are impossible.
Joe covered his incredulity with a pre-emptive strike, proposing that a working group be formed to report on efficacy of the Clique's cosmic enhancements, pointing out that since measurements of divinity were innately impossible, perhaps recording trends in the variability of physicality's so called constants - like fluctuations in the speed of light - could offer some insight into how changes in Theme Park Earth were influencing the divine's influence over Theme Park Earth. This was enthusiastically agreed to and consequently produced a steady flow of gorgeous charts and graphs. Joe sidestepped participating in this group by saying he was just an idea guy and too impatient to implement anything more complicated than a cheese and onion omelette.
The oversight from Joe's perspective is that Clique are seeking a more satisfying future by tweaking circumstance, when the now is as amazing as we choose to feel it, without anything having to change. He is conservative in this way, opining that Theme Park Earth as currently configured is perfectly adequate for expansion and needs no improvement. So he's a maverick in totally enjoying the status quo, and happy to play his chosen persona. A fundamentalist sticking to first principles.
What is the believable scenario he offers the Clique? Whatever he comes up with reveals his character. The other members of the Clique are sharp and would catch most subterfuge unless it was virtuosically crafted. The Clique feel that they are motivated by a flavor of joy - the exhilaration of competence, of taking full responsibility for self creation, of decisive improvement. Combining the intensified forgettery for a concentrated population of the People combined with the Clique's unlimited manifestation from nearly perfect (unconflicted) desire is for them a significant upgrade, which in their bright imagining feels phenomenal. Heaven on Earth.
Joe doesn't think an expansion of expansion is even parsible, let alone doable, but since this is an attraction based universe, rather than try and resist their plan, he helps it along and tacks on his own secret super fun variation.
What I can't forgive the Clique for is their insistence on a boring mythology that generates even more boring stories. Their forgetery protocols require a stale rehash of the conflict between good and evil, which has worn pretty thin over recent millennia for the obvious reason that there is no good and evil, much less a conflict. Take for example Oedipus. Now it's no big deal to sleep with your mom or your son if everyone's of age and consenting, am I right? I mean, in the late 21st century there were whole porn sites dedicated to that theme. But back in ancient Greece sleeping with your mother or your son was a big taboo, so if you knowingly did you'd be a piece of shit. The story of Oedipus has a great premise, these two sleep together but with zero awareness that they are mom and son. No harm no foul, or so you'd think. All this potential for interesting plot twists but nope, good and evil... so they both have to freak out and kill and maim themselves.
I get that good and evil are a convenient shorthand for our grand and glorious duality, but after graduating from kindergarten, I think people are generally able to handle a few shades of gray.
Rasputin - influential in the Tsar's court, rumored to be a healer and involved in orgies, possible British influence in assignation.
Joe as Clique, what makes him different
Joe is Clique, how is he different? He is more childlike in the sense that he still finds wonder in the old ways, he'd rather play mini-golf at the vintage course with the painted cinder blocks and hanging cedar post than newish the one with the fake waterfall. He likes the cosmos just the way it is and is suspicious of improvement, development. He likes the paradigm of wilderness, inately intelligent, leave it alone. Plus someone has to fuck with the fuckers, if not him, who?
He also feels with the People and leans more towards compassion than intensity.
Actor mode - who is Uncle Joe, who is Buffalo Joe, what's his transformation and what are his motivations?
Birth, childhood, early life. What we know is that Joe showed up on Earth with a fairly solid idea about how the cosmos worked and what fun felt like for him. The fundamental cosmic game is hide and seek, divinity pretending to be mortal, the forgetting of fullness for few centuries. Joe decided to become an exemplary player of hide and seek.
Based on early observation, Joe guessed at the existence of the Clique, discovered their lairs, learned their ways and created a niche for himself.
He is in fact self made facilitator of disguised divinity, as is the case with all the DOG mothers he's got out there, freaks and misfits every one.
What is Joe's conflict, how does he change? Come back around?
The People are just being People, they are optimal in their forgetery. The other members of the Clique have some fundamental misunderstandings about the cosmos, they are each examples of the misunderstandings that even those who know about infinite intelligence have.