Tonight I went to the Armer Theater at CSUN to see "Pan's Labyrinth". I'd forgotten what a dark and brutal film it is. I guess the fantasy sequences are what stuck in my memory, and they are so full of magic that they offset the horrific main story. I am assuming you have seen the movie, so I don't feel the need to describe it, but I will say that upon seeing it a second time - and for the first time on on a movie screen - I think that the character of The Captain is one of the most evil portrayals of a villain that I've ever seen. He dominated so much of the film; it took the combined effort of every other character in the film to offset his wickedness, but a high commendation must be given to the actor Sergi Lopez for making him come to life in such an overpowering way.
I was surprised to see the 2006 copyright roll by at the end of the credits. I had thought the film to be more recent, say 2012 or so. But I know I first saw it when it came out on dvd, so that must have been twelve years ago now. I will have to check my movie lists (I write down every one that I watch), but once again the notion of the passage of time, and the very strange way in which it works in our memories and the emotions connected with the time period of those memories, never fails to leave me in a state of contemplation. How can One Thing that happened a dozen years ago feel more recent, and Another Thing that happened 30 or 40 years ago feel like yesterday, but A Third Thing that happened just five years ago feel like ancient history?
I have noted in the past that once you hit 40, it's like the years shift into high gear. They start to seem like they are going by faster and faster. But when you take them cumulatively, as in one big scope of memory from age 40 to 59, it seems like a very long time indeed, and it's really weird.
The Elasticity of Time is something I could talk about all day, just like with the subject of drawing as I mentioned the other night. I like to draw and I like to reminisce, to jump around in memory from year to year, and to associate memories with markers like songs, or locations or just abstract feelings of heart or mind that I let go without trying to define. I guess it kind of blew my mind that twelve years had passed since I first saw "Pan's Labyrinth", because I associated it as being much more recent. At any rate, I think it is a masterpiece, even though very violent and hard to watch in spots. ////
I am reading my books about Hugh Everett and Schopenhauer. In the former, I am still processing what is meant by the "wave collapse" in quantum theory, and also the "superposition principle". For the last few years I have taken to reading about physics as a hobby, simply because I was a good math student up to eighth grade and a part of me, now that I am older, wishes I had taken it farther. So I am very much enjoying books such as the biography of Paul Dirac from last year or the Everett book I am currently working on. These guys spent all their time thinking about what matter is, what particles break down to, how they behave and how the behavior of the smallest particles and the systems in which they move differ from the fixed reality that we see. For me it has taken several years and many books on the overall subject to begin to digest what is being talked about.
Schopenhauer is much more of what you might call "slow going", because he is a philosopher and not a scientist who has experimental results from which he can draw his conclusions. I am not well studied in philosophy, but from what I can discern from the first couple of chapters of Schopenhauer, these guys are interested in mental minutia that is much more broken down to it's basics than even the smallest particles of the physicists. Schopenhauer begins his philosophy by postulating that the truths, and ultimate Truth, of human experience can only be gleaned through explanation. For instance, a person is told, as an explanation, that what he is looking at is a mountain. Or the color red. Or he is told that two plus two equals four. Schopenhauer then goes on to deconstruct the validity of explanations - any explanation - as revealing truth, because he says that any explanation is subject to a further explanation and therefore does not close the subject.
"You say the color is red. Well, what is red? What is color? Could you please explain"? And if the explainer were to remark that the color red is a visual reception in the brain, then the questioner could ask for yet another explanation of what is meant by that statement and it's separate subjective breakdowns.
So here I am, reading this, and I am thinking that Schopenhauer could have more easily described it in child's terms by describing the original and simplistic "Question of 'Why' ". You probably know what I mean, the child's proverbial, if annoying, question : "Daddy, why is the sky blue"? "Well, because son, the refraction of the sunlight, blah blah....", and then the child asks why to that explanation and what is refraction, etc. And the child continues asking "why" to Daddy's further explanations until Dad either tells him to go to sleep or he falls asleep on his own.
Therefore, according to Schopenhauer, no truth can be proclaimed from any explanation because an observation is not a fact. Red is only red because we agree on it and assume we are seeing the same thing.
Okay, this is Ad here, your blogger. I am telling you all of this as a way of describing the slog of reading through a philosophical text. I was not aware that these guys were this bogged down in the hair splitting of basic thought. I have never studied philosophy, and only became aware of Schopenhauer, and interested in reading more about him, through Bryan Magee's book on Wagner that I recently finished. But man, it's a lot of work, getting through the heavily worded details of explaining things I, and most of us, instinctively understood as infants.
I already knew about "why, why why" when I was two years old, haha.
To be fair to Schopenhauer, this is only the very beginning of his philosophy, when he says that no truth can be gained from any explanation. He promises (or author Magee does) that he will work through the entire experience of Mankind to come to his final conclusions as to whether any such thing as truth is possible to be understood.
It is gonna take me a while to make it through this book, just because of the nature of the arguments. I am much more an intuitive person, not interested in arguing logic or the microscopic details of what constitutes reality. I do like the interpretations of the physicists, like Hugh Everett, but even he was only guessing, even if he was backed by solid mathematics.
The truth is that no one knows what reality is or what we are doing here. That's why I like to listen to the birds chirp. They may know something we don't, or it may be just a lot of gibberish, but it sounds really nice when you are taking a walk in the sunshine. The birds sound like real life. And Magee says that Schopenhauer liked to go for two hour walks. So go figure.
Me, I am all done thinking and talking for the evening. See you in the morning. Don't forget to Google Schopenhauer's picture. :)
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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