uu

Jeremy
, ,
1

Troubling to say the least

I worked with many smart, talented improvisers during my time with The Spin, a political improv show I was part of last year. One of them, a particularly incisive and well-informed gentleman, produced a documentary about the origins and consequences of global poverty entitled The End of Poverty?. It was a selection at the Cannes Film Festival for Critics Week. Cannes is not known for accepting documentaries. My friend Matt (the producer) traveled there to show the film, and generate some more attention for what I imagined to be a hard to sell documentary.

I got a chance to see The End of Poverty? on Sunday at BAM, one of two screenings (the other is tonight). It is, as I expected from knowing Matt and the sort of documentary he was likely to attach his name to, a difficult and challenging documentary. I won’t pretend to be nearly as educated on the situation as the many experts who spoke about poverty during the film, but needless to say, many third world countries are stuck in a financial situation that was set in to motion hundreds of years ago. Instead of being alleviated over time, it’s, if anything, gotten worst for most of these countries as they are slowly tapped for resources by the first world.

If you didn’t already dislike multinationals like Bechtel and Halliburton, you certainly will after this film. It’s hard to come out of the documentary feeling good about globalization and indeed the US’s own policies over the last 50 years or so. I suppose the question I was left with afterwards was: If rampart poverty and the attendant suffering it causes are the end result of capitalism and setting policies in place that benefit business over all else, is it power that corrupts or do only the corrupt seek power? Either way it’s worrying.

I’ve emailed with Matt over some of the meatier issues discussed in the film and by myself afterward. Our joint conclusion seems to be that things this large are hard to do much about, other than talking about them and making people aware and what’s more, making sure you yourself are aware of them. I’ve fallen on my usual Vonnegut-paraphrasing belief of trying to be a good person without any expectation of a reward after I’m dead. It, at the very least, ensures I can look myself in the eye when necessary.

Go see The End of Poverty?, because in our Internet Age, it is information that becomes the most contagious. Hopefully we are approaching a time where accountability and transparency in government cannot be avoided. Documentaries like this are doing their part to get us there. Nice work, Matt.

Jeremy
,
1

More Quotations

I can’t stop quoting Joseph Campbell, but apparently he can’t stop being incredibly insightful.

Mythology is defeated when the mind rests solemnly with its favorite or traditional images, defending them as though they themselves were the message that they communicate.

Jeremy
, ,
0

More Excerpts

From Hero With A Thousand Faces:

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended upon the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.

To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.

Bam. J. Campbell just served you, fundamentalists. If you have any interest in the spiritual traditions of the entire planet, you are doing yourself a disservice by not reading this book.

Jeremy
, ,
0

The Myths Just Keep On Coming

More great stuff from The Power of Myth:

Campbell: There are some teachers who decide they won’t teach at all because of what society will do with what they’ve found.

Moyers: What if the hero returns from his ordeal, and the world doesn’t want what he brings back?

Campbell: That, of course, is a normal experience.

Endlessly fascinating, this book. I think Campbell’s first sentence perfectly mirrors what Einstein says about wishing he had become a watchmaker, and the second puts me in mind of Galileo. Except this was a discussion about myths that were thousands of years old. Another gem, especially from an improv perspective:

Campbell: There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the “love of your fate,” which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing.

Gives a lot more weight to denials, right? You have to accept your life holistically or you have not accepted it all.

Jeremy
, ,
1

Power of Myth

I’m reading Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, and it is blowing my mind. So much basic, simple stuff that feels so relevant. All these primitive cultures sharing the same stories despite being geographically isolated from each other because they’re trying to describe the same realities in their day to day existence.

– Man is forced to kill to survive, be it plant or animal. What happens to the living thing that we kill to eat? How do we honor the sacrifice of that being? An eternal dilemma for early societies.

– Duality is a by-product of being bound to the physical world. Man, woman; good, evil; past, present. When you transcend these things and commune with God, you see that all are the same and there is only the One.

– In times of danger, man forgets his separation between himself and others. A police officer in Hawaii rushed to save a man about to commit suicide by leaping from a cliff, only to find himself being dragged down as well until both are saved by another police officer. Why did the first officer rush to save the man? Because his instinct tells him that he and this man are the same and to let him die is to die himself.

I am totally buying the bejeezus out of The Hero with 1,000 Faces after this.