Misc. thots

Dear diary,

You told me that you refuse to use an air conditioner, even in the dead of summer. At first, I was shocked to hear this; but then I remembered that I, too, in my bachelor days, used to sit at my kitchen table in my apartment wearing only a loincloth while reading all day when it was hellishly hot, and I never turned on my A.C. either. . . . I wonder why we both behave this way.

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Nearly all the reasons that things get done in this world (I mean things done by the most powerful people) are decidedly harebrained. It is obvious how harebrained the modern church is, and the economic & political systems that dominate our hemisphere are just as much so.

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Painkillers frighten me almost as much as the pain that they’re supposed to kill, because of the bliss of addiction; I promise that if I ever need to take them, I’ll never stop.

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I just finished reading The Octopus by Frank Norris (a novel about the railroad monopoly).

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People seem to focus mostly on the forthcoming aspect of reincarnation, but I think the bygone aspect is almost more interesting. If it’s true that we’re all destined to live a life after this present one, then it could be that our current existence is likewise the revealed future of past existences – perhaps countless past existences. So, if a soul were to say “I wonder what my future life will be like,” one could reply “You yourself are the living answer – the way that you exist, at this moment, is the revelation of your prior embodiment’s very same wonder: you are now the next life.”

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My sweetheart and I watch a lot of Westerns – the kind with Cowboys & Indians – and it’s remarkable how the representations of events and personal depictions of early U.S. settlers resemble those same aspects of present-day settlers of other places on the globe. I allow myself to confound the two times intentionally while screening the classics, and it enhances my “moviegoing experience.”

Last night we watched Fort Apache (1948) directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda and John Wayne. Here’s an excerpt from Peter Bogdanovich’s book on Ford (it’s from an interview conducted in 1966, long after the film in question had been made) . . .

BOGDANOVICH:
In Fort Apache, do you feel the men were right in obeying Fonda even though it was obvious he was wrong and they were killed because of his error?

FORD:
Yes. He was the Colonel; and what he says, goes. Whether they agree with it or not, it still pertains. In Vietnam today, probably a lot of guys don’t agree with their leader, but they still go ahead and do the job.

I myself strongly disagree with Ford, here, even tho I love the man for his art.

Let me clip one more exchange, for the sake of X. The following is from the interview about The Searchers (1956) – a movie described as “The ten-year search by two men for a little girl kidnapped by Comanches.”

BOGDANOVICH:
The Indians are always given great dignity in your films.

FORD:
It’s probably an unconscious impulse—but they are a very dignified people; even when they were being defeated. Of course, [this view is] not very popular in the United States: the audience likes to see Indians get killed. They don’t consider them as human beings; with a great culture of their own, quite different from ours. If you analyzed the thing carefully, however, you’d find that their religion is very similar to ours.

To kill a man because his culture is different. . . . To refrain from killing a man because his religion is similar to one’s own tribe’s. . . . To belong to a group. . . . To participate in a massacre. . . . To be a bystander at a massacre. . . . To witness the re-enactment of a massacre. . . .

Now I’m thinking about horses. Some died on the battlefield, and some died filming battle scenes in movies.

Whenever anything unpleasant happens in life, I wonder: Did this occur at random, or could there have been some purpose? – My fear is that our every tragedy is an effect (planned or unplanned, it matters not) of an ongoing entertainment being concocted by reckless gods.