Friday, August 31, 2007

The Lathe of Heaven


quote from wiki...

[Quoting Chuang Tse.]
George Orr: Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.

Quote from the movie, The Lathe of Heaven, from the book by Ursula Le Guin

Well, CNN has a doc on called The Anvil of God and it’s about the battle for Fallujah in Iraq, and the title they chose reminded me of The Lathe of Heaven… and now they repeat it back to back...

I saw the movie once, and I think I read the book. Le Guin found a really cool old Chinese poet to use for the idea of the book.

The tale goes that Chuang Tse was dreaming he was a butterfly, woke up, and wondered if he was a butterfly dreaming of Chuang Tse.

The movie, if I remember right, has the hero surviving a nuclear war by going back in time and creating a different reality. He has a girlfriend, and spends a lot of time in a doctor's office trying to convince the doctor he can alter reality. It’s kindof a ground hog day problem, and a painting on the doctor's wall keeps changing with each visit..and the doctor finally catches on.

Wikipedia sites are kinda like the painting…

And that’s what I was thinking about today. There IS a collective consciousness now, the web, and individual experiences and thoughts are indeed remembered by it. And the web, like the moon, has no atmosphere, and there’s now “footprints” everywhere.

In the movie, as the shifting realities of Orr evolve, aliens show up.

I thought of a cool “photoshop”-- cut and paste some small versions of the footprints of the monster in the movie Forbidden Planet beside the footprint on the moon pic of yesterday! For another "time"...

The Krell, of course, pursued a reality of pure mentation, until the “monsters from the id” did them in. That movie ends on a very Chuang Tse note…

Quote
Alta, about a million years from now the human race...will have crawled up
to where the Krell stood...in their great moment of triumph and tragedy. And your father's name will shine again...
like a beacon in the galaxy.
It's true, it will remind us...that we are, after all, not God.

Unquote
For it's time, to see the notion of a "million year future", in a movie was unheard of-- SF books readers were familiar with the stretch of time, but this was a first for Hollywood. Compare this to the ending note of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Disney's movie version...and now that I think of that...add Donald in Mathamagic Land's last note...I collect this stuff...:)
And, dare I say, ancient Asia, and middle eastern Asia especially, is just rife with this virtual reality stuff...
"...it was a nightmare..."CNN, The Anvil of God


DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
August 31, 2007.

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