The Fountain

 

 Finally got round to watching 'The Fountain' last night.

 A dramatic and fabulous meditation  on catholic and mayan images of time, love, infinity, death and rebirth  - I couldn't really ask for more.  The mayan ideas reminded me of ken russels altered states - but the open ended images of this move appealed to me more. Definately plenty of room for a hyper-realist approach - the film made perfect sense to me , as I am sure it did to you - but for entirely different reasons.

 Its always amused me that the west has a teliological obsession with life after death - I for one was always as equally interested in life before birth - or as Jim Morrison described it "doing time in the universal mind". Why in myth is  time recurrently presented as the "weak dimension" - why is it we can imagine the world without it. Our perceptual process is built on time - but what would we see if we took away time ?

 There was a fictional work called flatworld when I was younger that talked about a world in only 2 dimensions. It never really caught on as much as the idea of the timeless and eternal. But it was interesting none the less. I read recently of a fellow William Lane Craig who had been a professor of time. Sounds pretty neat profession.

 Interesting thing in the movie about the tree of good and evil - barth suggested in his work on christian ethics - that his first goal was to remove this distinction.  When I've  read those christian myths I've always thought god hid the tree of life because obtaining it would be to cruel a fate for a race whose mind had already collapsed into the dualisms of this and that. Death might be cruel but at least it returns us to the infinite - as opposed to the finite. There was a early church father who talked about souls moving out of the mind of god into the world of forms only to eventually return rebound into the wholeness of infinity - just to get bored and pop out again in an endless cycle. Origen, he was the one who was posthumously declared a heretic, and yes he cut his willy off.

 My only hyper-realist puzzle is in genesis god says that men would become like the gods if they knew the difference between good and evil. Why would this not be a good thing ? I have an inkling but sometimes I think that it is not that we make forms of this and that - we make symbols - language - pointers to the great unknown - The habitual danger of humankind is that we bind to these symbols. Dense fleshly creatures we destroy ourselves because rather than remembering all our talk is just an echo - we think our distinctions are real and kill ourselves and others in the process. The gods it seems can see good and evil and not be fooled by its folly.

 The only question is are they a reflection of us - or are we a reflection of them - or both ? But be careful we cant ask the second or third question in public anymore.  When was the last time you urinated on a grave ?