Der «Vater des LSD», Albert Hofmann, ist im Alter von 102 Jahren gestorben...
(The “Father of LSD” has died at the age of 102)
Google's front page today seems almost like an unconscious tribute to Hofmann. The bouquet of metallic flowers is by Jeff Koons and forms part of Google's art season, but if seen as a psychedelic wreath it does seem like the most fitting for Hofmann.
In another curious coincidence, although Hofmann's death is not the lead story in any of the major Swiss papers - the headlines being taken by local politics - the odd one out is the Francophone tabloid Le Matin which leads with a report that ...une société de films pornographiques américaine a annoncé la mise en vente mardi d'un DVD montrant le musicien Jimi Hendrix en train d'avoir des relations sexuelles avec deux femmes, une vidéo amateur datant de 40 ans et acquise auprès d'un collectionneur... or that an American pornographic film company is to release an amateur film of Jimi Hendrix - who did more than a little bit to popularise Albert's discovery - performing live with two women. Sex, drugs and Rock 'n' Roll laughing in the face of Death. I quite like that.
To see a Berlin street artist's tribute, see
http://www.fensterzumhof.eu/102/berlin-friedrichshain-warschauer-strasse-drogen/
and to read Alex Grey on Hofmann:
http://beinart.org/modules/Word-Press/2007/05/10/cosm-journal-alex-grey-on-albert-hofmann/
German language obituaries:
http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/wissenschaft/entdecker_der_droge_lsd_gestorben_1.722874.html
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,550669,00.html
French-Swiss:
http://www.lematin.ch/fr/actu/suisse/le-pere-du-lsd-albert-hofmann-est-mort_9-146061
In English:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1912485/Albert-Hofmann,-LSD-inventor,-dies.html#continue
Wednesday 30 April 2008
Friday 18 April 2008
The Mammal the Monkey, the Monkey the Man
Watching Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) again, on TV last night, after a good many years, I find that my first viewing of it had left such a powerful impression on me that I had forgotten very little of it, but I saw it with new eyes. I had been half aware the first time that it was an amazing mix of mythological allusions Leigh had thrown into it, but now - primed - I saw more... much more. Oh yes, it’s gritty, miserablist drama if you want to read it that way, and it is truthful about trauma and abuse on a level that few films have ever been, but sets out to make the characters mythic emblems too.
I turned to the Internet, expecting to see loads of essays about the hidden meanings in it, comparing it to O Brother Where Art Thou?, but found none. Oh well, I suppose I’ll have to get the ball rolling myself. I am going to wax excessive over this, and be warned there are lots of spoilers for those who have not yet seen it. Beg steal or borrow a copy, watch it, and then read my lengthy, mythological interpretation of this magnificent, profound movie.
Johnny leaves Manchester to ‘escape a beating’ but ends up in London for a worse pounding than he feared at home. Is the opening sex scene a rape, or Johnny’s usual rough sex? Probably the latter, but the rape (or ‘abduction’) of Helen was the starting point for the Trojan war, and it is a personal war that Johnny tries to escape... jumping from the start of the myth right to the very end, changing from Paris to Odysseus, returning to his lost love. All the mythology he has skipped in this leap comes back to haunt him in his journey, however. And a lot of other traditions come into the mix too. Johnny alludes to himself as a ‘monkey’ throughout the film and brings up the history of evolution as his main metaphor for life in general, but blends with the Millennial ranting from the Book Of Revelations. But, although he is not aware of it, he is also bringing in ideas from Gnostic Christianity and from dualist religion in general.
Jeremy, the uptight, aggressive yuppie, is a kind of double for Johnny. Not his shadow, notice. The two of them behave in a very similar way, although from quite different motives. The parallel between Johnny and Jeremy makes sense of an apparently slight bit of business in which Johnny is mistaken for a millionaire by a chauffeur, and invited to step into a Rolls Royce, until his accent gives him away. Johnny thinks nothing of it, but it reveals that he has a twin - a rich and powerful duplicate at large in the world.
Jeremy is the false ‘landlord’ - in other words the devil, the Prince of this World. He, like Johnny, invades the fake paradise of No. 33 (very Masonic!) and takes it over. Only at the end do he and Johnny appear in the same place at the same time, and then there is a very strange encounter between them, Johnny muttering about his mother and his brother, reaching out to touch Jeremy and appearing to give him an electric shock in so doing. This is his symbolic rebirth (‘I’m still wet...’)
The two, Johnny and Jeremy, are twin aspects of the same personality... one from the north and one from the south; one dark and the other darker. Seth and Osiris, the ill triumphant while the relative good is broken and wounded. Yet it is Jeremy who is threatened with Osiris-style castration by Louise, who is both Penelope and Isis. They also recall Gilgamesh and Enkidu - Johnny being much closer to Enkidu on many occasions (“Monkey see, monkey do...”), but also mirroring some of their myth too, especially with the older woman in the upper room where he rejects her advances as Gilgamesh did the Goddess Ishtar.
Is all this coincidental? Hardly. Johnny makes constant references to religion, calling Archie ‘Bodhidharma’, asking Maggie if she believes in the devil, questioning Sandra’s Buddhist figures, asking why there are Greek images in the cafe girl’s house (‘Who lives here? Zeus?] and even picking up a copy of The Odyssey at one point, thrusting it at the camera, showing it to us as a concrete symbol of the myth he is in. Yet he fails to be Odysseus. The cafe girl (Calypso, effectively) throws him out after he says he does not like dogs. Only Odysseus’ dog recognised him when he returned, and if Johnny is not a dog-man, he cannot have the return of Odysseus. He endures many other aspects of the Odyssey, though.
His bag is stolen, and after this the true conflict begins for him, just as it is for Odysseus when his sailors untie the bag Aeolus gave him and release the winds. The storm is released for Johnny once his bag is taken away.
Brian the night-watchman is, on one level, the Cyclops, Polyphemus. He takes Johnny/Odysseus prisoner, because although he offers him sanctuary, he locks the doors and shuts him in. Brian is obsessed with not being seen, but he watches the woman across the street through a large, round window, like a great, single eye, like that of Polyphemus. Yet Johnny does not (as he did with Sophie) pretend to have no name. Instead he raises many religious themes with him. As Brian scans the mechanical ‘eye’ of his employer, Johnny asks if it is a ‘dadaist nun’.
Johnny makes Brian confront the idea that the Creator is the devil, that the real God is a universal truth beyond time and space... beyond the end of the world that Johnny expects. We shall only understand it when we evolve into something more advanced than humanity, something that can connect with the divine wisdom and recognise it for what it is.
Sophie is also part of the dualist symbolism. Sophia, the source of divine wisdom, is tattooed with an ‘ornithological mutilation’, a bird - the sign of the Holy Spirit. She is abused by both man (the monkey) and the devil, and withdraws from the false paradise, taking her silver ‘S’ sign with her.
Sandra (S[eth]-and-Ra) is the embodiment of the solar principle - returning early in the morning - but not on the Sunday (Sun’s day) when she was expected. She is the counterpart of Jeremy, and seems to be an ex-lover of his, coming out of Africa to bring order to her house once again; healing Johnny’s broken body but not healing any psychological rifts in the house since these are beyond her comprehension. Only life and death are her concern, as they are for Jeremy, who intends to kill himself rather than become old. In Egyptian Gnosticism, Seth was often referred to as Seth-and-Ra or Seth-Beloved-of-Ra, and Sandra is this figure, embracing all human religions (Catholicism and Buddhism) .
There’s a tiny bit of what looks like irrelevant banter about a firescreen at the very end. We see, briefly, a twin sun motif. ‘It’s something my dad...’ she says. As Seth-and-Ra, her dad is Father Nun, perhaps even the dadaist nun itself! Sophie, in turning the screen to the wall, neither banishing nor negating, as Johnny interprets, but reversing the influence of the creators of light and darkness, turning them back against the hidden fire of divine knowledge.
At the very end, Johnny is Achilles (wounded in his ankle) but still alive and still moving. He becomes Jason, the man with one shoe, who is destined to fulfill the prophecy and claim the Golden Fleece, but he is also Oedipus (the ‘swell-footed’ limping man) on his way to the next stage of his myth, killing his father and facing the Sphinx. Bereft of Odysseus’ symbols, Johnny now possesses the black eye of Horus. Like Adam, Johnny is cast out of the garden, and No. 33 is a green and leafy place. Notice how the first thing Sandra does on her return is tend to her plants, of which she has many!
Resurrected, like Osiris, like Horus, like Jesus, like Odin (who also suffered eye damage during his harrowing) Johnny hobbles away, beginning another cycle, another myth, destined to collide with more lives in chaos. He is rejecting the promised return to Manchester - the ‘city of man’, venturing instead into the city of destruction, seeking the city of God, or perhaps the Fleece, yet, significantly, he advances in the opposite direction to Sophie. The monkey-man has not yet evolved far enough to rejoin her.
I turned to the Internet, expecting to see loads of essays about the hidden meanings in it, comparing it to O Brother Where Art Thou?, but found none. Oh well, I suppose I’ll have to get the ball rolling myself. I am going to wax excessive over this, and be warned there are lots of spoilers for those who have not yet seen it. Beg steal or borrow a copy, watch it, and then read my lengthy, mythological interpretation of this magnificent, profound movie.
Johnny leaves Manchester to ‘escape a beating’ but ends up in London for a worse pounding than he feared at home. Is the opening sex scene a rape, or Johnny’s usual rough sex? Probably the latter, but the rape (or ‘abduction’) of Helen was the starting point for the Trojan war, and it is a personal war that Johnny tries to escape... jumping from the start of the myth right to the very end, changing from Paris to Odysseus, returning to his lost love. All the mythology he has skipped in this leap comes back to haunt him in his journey, however. And a lot of other traditions come into the mix too. Johnny alludes to himself as a ‘monkey’ throughout the film and brings up the history of evolution as his main metaphor for life in general, but blends with the Millennial ranting from the Book Of Revelations. But, although he is not aware of it, he is also bringing in ideas from Gnostic Christianity and from dualist religion in general.
Jeremy, the uptight, aggressive yuppie, is a kind of double for Johnny. Not his shadow, notice. The two of them behave in a very similar way, although from quite different motives. The parallel between Johnny and Jeremy makes sense of an apparently slight bit of business in which Johnny is mistaken for a millionaire by a chauffeur, and invited to step into a Rolls Royce, until his accent gives him away. Johnny thinks nothing of it, but it reveals that he has a twin - a rich and powerful duplicate at large in the world.
Jeremy is the false ‘landlord’ - in other words the devil, the Prince of this World. He, like Johnny, invades the fake paradise of No. 33 (very Masonic!) and takes it over. Only at the end do he and Johnny appear in the same place at the same time, and then there is a very strange encounter between them, Johnny muttering about his mother and his brother, reaching out to touch Jeremy and appearing to give him an electric shock in so doing. This is his symbolic rebirth (‘I’m still wet...’)
The two, Johnny and Jeremy, are twin aspects of the same personality... one from the north and one from the south; one dark and the other darker. Seth and Osiris, the ill triumphant while the relative good is broken and wounded. Yet it is Jeremy who is threatened with Osiris-style castration by Louise, who is both Penelope and Isis. They also recall Gilgamesh and Enkidu - Johnny being much closer to Enkidu on many occasions (“Monkey see, monkey do...”), but also mirroring some of their myth too, especially with the older woman in the upper room where he rejects her advances as Gilgamesh did the Goddess Ishtar.
Is all this coincidental? Hardly. Johnny makes constant references to religion, calling Archie ‘Bodhidharma’, asking Maggie if she believes in the devil, questioning Sandra’s Buddhist figures, asking why there are Greek images in the cafe girl’s house (‘Who lives here? Zeus?] and even picking up a copy of The Odyssey at one point, thrusting it at the camera, showing it to us as a concrete symbol of the myth he is in. Yet he fails to be Odysseus. The cafe girl (Calypso, effectively) throws him out after he says he does not like dogs. Only Odysseus’ dog recognised him when he returned, and if Johnny is not a dog-man, he cannot have the return of Odysseus. He endures many other aspects of the Odyssey, though.
His bag is stolen, and after this the true conflict begins for him, just as it is for Odysseus when his sailors untie the bag Aeolus gave him and release the winds. The storm is released for Johnny once his bag is taken away.
Brian the night-watchman is, on one level, the Cyclops, Polyphemus. He takes Johnny/Odysseus prisoner, because although he offers him sanctuary, he locks the doors and shuts him in. Brian is obsessed with not being seen, but he watches the woman across the street through a large, round window, like a great, single eye, like that of Polyphemus. Yet Johnny does not (as he did with Sophie) pretend to have no name. Instead he raises many religious themes with him. As Brian scans the mechanical ‘eye’ of his employer, Johnny asks if it is a ‘dadaist nun’.
Johnny makes Brian confront the idea that the Creator is the devil, that the real God is a universal truth beyond time and space... beyond the end of the world that Johnny expects. We shall only understand it when we evolve into something more advanced than humanity, something that can connect with the divine wisdom and recognise it for what it is.
Sophie is also part of the dualist symbolism. Sophia, the source of divine wisdom, is tattooed with an ‘ornithological mutilation’, a bird - the sign of the Holy Spirit. She is abused by both man (the monkey) and the devil, and withdraws from the false paradise, taking her silver ‘S’ sign with her.
Sandra (S[eth]-and-Ra) is the embodiment of the solar principle - returning early in the morning - but not on the Sunday (Sun’s day) when she was expected. She is the counterpart of Jeremy, and seems to be an ex-lover of his, coming out of Africa to bring order to her house once again; healing Johnny’s broken body but not healing any psychological rifts in the house since these are beyond her comprehension. Only life and death are her concern, as they are for Jeremy, who intends to kill himself rather than become old. In Egyptian Gnosticism, Seth was often referred to as Seth-and-Ra or Seth-Beloved-of-Ra, and Sandra is this figure, embracing all human religions (Catholicism and Buddhism) .
There’s a tiny bit of what looks like irrelevant banter about a firescreen at the very end. We see, briefly, a twin sun motif. ‘It’s something my dad...’ she says. As Seth-and-Ra, her dad is Father Nun, perhaps even the dadaist nun itself! Sophie, in turning the screen to the wall, neither banishing nor negating, as Johnny interprets, but reversing the influence of the creators of light and darkness, turning them back against the hidden fire of divine knowledge.
At the very end, Johnny is Achilles (wounded in his ankle) but still alive and still moving. He becomes Jason, the man with one shoe, who is destined to fulfill the prophecy and claim the Golden Fleece, but he is also Oedipus (the ‘swell-footed’ limping man) on his way to the next stage of his myth, killing his father and facing the Sphinx. Bereft of Odysseus’ symbols, Johnny now possesses the black eye of Horus. Like Adam, Johnny is cast out of the garden, and No. 33 is a green and leafy place. Notice how the first thing Sandra does on her return is tend to her plants, of which she has many!Resurrected, like Osiris, like Horus, like Jesus, like Odin (who also suffered eye damage during his harrowing) Johnny hobbles away, beginning another cycle, another myth, destined to collide with more lives in chaos. He is rejecting the promised return to Manchester - the ‘city of man’, venturing instead into the city of destruction, seeking the city of God, or perhaps the Fleece, yet, significantly, he advances in the opposite direction to Sophie. The monkey-man has not yet evolved far enough to rejoin her.
Friday 11 April 2008
The Game's Up
‘You must write about this on your blog,’ said a friend. ‘You’d be so funny about it.’
I could be I suppose, but not as funny as he had already been, pointing out that however serious the protest, the attempt to put out the Olympic flame with a fire extinguisher was pure Harry Hill-type slapstick (“Who‘s tougher? Free Tibet protesters or Chinese Olympic flame protectors? Only one way to find out... FIIIIGHT!”) But faced with the whole Olympic thing all over again I cannot rustle up much humour. I feel more like Steve Bell during the worst excesses of Thatcherism, writing under his daily strip “No apologies for the absence of jokes this week.” Of course, the airwaves are full of concerned former medalists defending the IOC, all of them sounding unnervingly similar to former Olympic silver medallist Denver Mills in Little Britain and all of them singing the same tune: sport has nothing to do with politics.
Is that so? That must be why they have all those militaristic parades with flags of every nation at the start of the games, then, and why they play national anthems every time someone wins a medal, and have league tables of nations who've won the most, yes? That's just how to keep politics out of sport, eh?
The thing about the Olympics is that it is something from another era... indeed from the age before WWI, when the Edwardians thought a fine, macho, nationalistic sporting and winning jamboree was the perfect way to foster good relations between greedy, aggressive European empires. Or not, as it turned out.
To be fair to them, the IOC had given the games to Weimar Germany, not anticipating that Hitler would end up hosting them, but you know that supposedly non-existent political angle to the Games? He did, sort of, manage to find that, didn’t he?
So, a competition that got the Hitler seal of approval... and the Brezhnev thumbs up, and now Chinese Communist delight... I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with the Olympics, I suppose, if you’re really into sports and enjoy spending thirty years paying off ruinous debt for stadiums that will never be used again, but there is something badly awry with the way it‘s packaged. If the Denver Millses of the world want to have games that are free of politics, fine. Take the bloody politics out of them, then! Get rid of the flags and the anthems. If you won’t, that’s your call. But if you insist on being as naive as a Mitford sister at a Berchtesgaden tea party, don’t blub when people lay into your choice of friends.
I have been amused by the sticker-joker (allegedly Newcastle footie-fan ‘fatty Phil’) who has recrafted the London Olympic Logo as above and stuck it up all along Piccadilly. I predict that his version of the symbol will be seen more and more often in the run-up to the doomed 2012 Dome-a-thon.
As for re-packaging the Games... well, look no further than visionary Nigel Kneale, who saw their future. The Year of the Sex Olympics... now I would love to see Britain and France going, er, head to head on that one.By the way, while I was searching for an appropriate image of Kneale’s Sex Olympics I stumbled on this very fine blog, an assembly point for lots of weird and wonderful things, including a YouTube clip of a Korean Anime version of Rugrats, in which it is made abundantly clear that distributing submachine guns to toddlers is an unwise idea. Mind you, the lead story isn't as up to date as he thinks - surfing the trains was old news in Hamburg even when I was there.
Sunday 6 April 2008
Goodbye to All That... and to all this. Oh, and to everything else too
I heard a troubling discussion on the Today programme the other day. It seems that someone is trying to take out an injunction to halt the new Hadron Collider at CERN. Apparently there are fears that if it were to be activated, a kind of micro-Black Hole may be created in the planned collisions. This would be a Health and Safety hazard as it would consume the whole of the Earth, reducing it to a mere teaspoonful of neutron-density matter in a fraction of a second. I can see why this would be inconvenient, but luckily a cheery British scientist was on hand to mock the protesters' ignorance and reassure the public that the chances of this happening were “negligible.” So, that’s all right then.
Hang on a second. No, it's not all right. “Negligible” does not mean “zero”. It means that there is a finite probability that this will happen. In fact, if I understand Quantum Mechanics aright, since it holds that every possible outcome of every possible quantum experiment actually does obtain, then “negligible” means that in some parallel universe, the Earth is guaranteed to be destroyed. And how are they so certain that that universe is not this one? I'm now more worried than I was, not less.
I think this is the result of no longer teaching would-be scientists the Philosophy of Science any more. Louis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins hate the idea of the Philosophy of Science, of course, because it means thinking about the consequences of your actions, and, since we scientists are God, we shouldn’t be made to. Because we have decided that the risk of oblivion is low, we don’t have to listen to a lot of stupid people who are worried that we might be wrong. The swine! We’re always right!
It also troubles me that the precautionary principle seems to have gone out of the window. A good many scientists these days keep coming up with this same retort, namely that, because there is no actual proof that something is dangerous, then it must be safe. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It may be dangerous - you just don’t know yet.
The assessment of risk also depends upon just how much potential damage could result from your being wrong. In this case, the potential damage is the loss of the whole world in the blink of an eye, so I would have said that a few blithe assurances from the physicists involved that they think Stephen Hawking’s untested hypothesis about the instant evaporation of micro-Black Holes is probably right - in spite of his having had to revise his opinions on Black Holes in general quite recently - isn’t really good enough, not given the somewhat high costs if he proves to be wrong.
In a sublimely Tralfamadorian moment, in which the button has always been pressed and always will be pressed, they are happy to sacrifice us all to their inevitable. I just hope this Hadron Collider of theirs has been better designed than Heathrow’s Terminal Five.
(Previously published at astvinr.livejournal.com)
Hang on a second. No, it's not all right. “Negligible” does not mean “zero”. It means that there is a finite probability that this will happen. In fact, if I understand Quantum Mechanics aright, since it holds that every possible outcome of every possible quantum experiment actually does obtain, then “negligible” means that in some parallel universe, the Earth is guaranteed to be destroyed. And how are they so certain that that universe is not this one? I'm now more worried than I was, not less.
I think this is the result of no longer teaching would-be scientists the Philosophy of Science any more. Louis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins hate the idea of the Philosophy of Science, of course, because it means thinking about the consequences of your actions, and, since we scientists are God, we shouldn’t be made to. Because we have decided that the risk of oblivion is low, we don’t have to listen to a lot of stupid people who are worried that we might be wrong. The swine! We’re always right!
It also troubles me that the precautionary principle seems to have gone out of the window. A good many scientists these days keep coming up with this same retort, namely that, because there is no actual proof that something is dangerous, then it must be safe. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It may be dangerous - you just don’t know yet.
The assessment of risk also depends upon just how much potential damage could result from your being wrong. In this case, the potential damage is the loss of the whole world in the blink of an eye, so I would have said that a few blithe assurances from the physicists involved that they think Stephen Hawking’s untested hypothesis about the instant evaporation of micro-Black Holes is probably right - in spite of his having had to revise his opinions on Black Holes in general quite recently - isn’t really good enough, not given the somewhat high costs if he proves to be wrong.
In a sublimely Tralfamadorian moment, in which the button has always been pressed and always will be pressed, they are happy to sacrifice us all to their inevitable. I just hope this Hadron Collider of theirs has been better designed than Heathrow’s Terminal Five.
(Previously published at astvinr.livejournal.com)
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