the urge to watch
2001:
a space odyssey.
Just the thought of it brought me right back to the first time I viewed the flick, in the movie theater when it came out. Quite young was I, and as I look back I realize that I didn't get many of the movie's subtle, or perhaps not so subtle, messages. I liked it tho, it's unique combination of technology and eccentricity seemed an interesting and appealing combination of ideas.
We seem, in today's modern pop culture, to like absorbing things in single chunks - one idea at a time, which is where you get celebrity. Single ideas beget large crowds of like minded people, the concept of popularity, of fad and of craze - these are static elements. A combination of ideas can have a larger effect - it can move you through time and space, bring you back to the past, and more than likely into the future. Omnipresence is not merely being everywhere, it's being in every time, place, circumstance, possibility and purpose. The feeling that I felt as I
indulged this sudden urge was not one of remembrance but more like a feeling of being two places at once, or two times perhaps .. and I had the realization that the right combination of ideas can cause the times of your life to fold back in on themselves, and act like a temporal wormhole .. One who could become master this phenomenon might find the ability to freely flow about thru the different times of his/her life, experiencing, re-experiencing, and even reinventing circumstance, thereby escaping the linear constraints of existence, and achieve
immortality.
So
I put the movie on, listened to the song and watched the sun rise
.... I'm sure many of you know the movie's opening scene,
but I'm going to describe it anyway.
"A tale worth being told is worth being retold"
"A tale worth being told is worth being retold"
as my grand-pa used to say.
It begins with a group of monkey types, eight or so hanging out in a harsh barren land. Although they aren't acting in a manner that is, what you could call, organized, there is a sense of community among them, a tolerance of existence as they sit around, grunting and snorting, sometimes at each other, some times just for the sake of it, when suddenly there suddenly strikes a leopard, taking one down. The others flee, leaving behind the one who will, presumably, be killed and
consumed. We are spared the details of this and in the next scene we find the reamaining bunch gathered around a waterhole - a puddle, basically, idly drinking and bathing, when from up over a hill behind them comes another group of ape-type thingies. The waterclan rises up in arms, the hillclan responding as they descend and soon the two are showing down to one another, screeching and yowling, chest thumping, foot stomping and arms awaving across the small lakelet... The hill clan, not to be intimidated, advances thru the splash, shuning the waterboys into the neighboring caves, and settles onto their newly acquired turf.
Now, it occurred to me in this latest viewing, that the reason the watermonks didn't put up an ardent fight might be that they simply weren't thirsty anymore, and that, due to the fact of their primitive minds being incapable of grasping something as broad as "the future", figured that, in that moment of time, it wasn't worth dying for. Thus, if one assumes that to be true, the waterclan would go off and hang in the caves until they got thirsty again, and returning to the hole,
would ostracize the hillgroup for the exact same reason. And what would ensue could be seen as nature's perfect pendulum-swing of the self-perpetuating biological system. It could go on forever ...
Well . . . there's always the leopard..
We next find our waterclan waking to the
first rays of dawn
thru the opening of their cave, and they emerge to find ...
the monolith.
They gaze inquisitively, begin to yell, wax threatening, punch and kick it. After having no effect, they fall into a state of indifference, and resume another idle day of survival in the harsh world. One of them comes upon the bleached white bones of a once living thing - looking not just a little like the skeleton of an ass. He fiddles with some of the smaller bones and then takes what appears to be a thighbone into his hand - he feels it's weight and substance and then lowers it blithely to the ground. One or two of the smaller bones jump. He sees this and repeats the process each time harder, noticing how with each harder hit the small bones fly higher up into the air. In triumph at his discovery, he brings the thigh bone down with one great thundering blow, onto the skull of the bygone beast, shattering it to dust. This stops him dead in his tracks, and we leave him pondering ...
Then comes the inevitable - the waterloo apes descend upon the hilldwellers, still holding their liquid turf, each armed in one form or other with some type of club. One of them brings his down on the head of a rival member, dropping him to the ground. Another blow and he's still. As the other bone bearers follow suit, this is clearly enough to drive their enemies back to the hills from whence they came, reconquering their territory.
They have discovered "want".
Eden is purged.
Eden is purged.
I have come to the conclusion that "want" is the source of all the imperfection in the universe. It's really quite a simple fact the universe in which we choose to reside is a bipolar in nature. Everything can be reduced to pairs of opposite extremes ... Love hate, life death, black white, colour no-colour, nothing everything.
'Nothing' is the only singularity, if you add 'something', even if it's 'everything', 'nothing' is always there.
The "nothing everything" dichotomy is a static system. Their balance is both perfect and absolute. Add a third thing and all chaos breaks loose. Because by adding the third thing you instantly create the possibility of all the things that fall between nothing and everything , and you get a chain reaction that becomes ... existence.
That's my version of the big-bang theory.
'Everything' is intrinsically spherical and infinite, at whose core lies the 'nothing singularity'. In a perfect existence we would disregard the nothing singularity, and live happily in our universe of everything, free from want. But we are compelled to analyze and hypothesize as to why this nothing can't be made a part of our everything universe. And we build our energy flows around the desire to fill this single piece of emptiness, and thus, we want.
Upon taking stock the waterhole raid's outcome, the thighbone bearer throws his weapon up into the air, and as we follow it's flight, it is clumsily morphed into a vessel traveling thru the the black nothing of space ...
The evolution of the tool.
I think it's interesting to note the the
morph takes place
on the airborn trajectory's descent, not on it's rise ....
on the airborn trajectory's descent, not on it's rise ....