Island

 Island

A novel by Aldous Huxley

  This is Huxley’s final novel, so in that way his final word on the human condition in which he found himself in his lifetime.
  It is said to be a utopian novel. In a way it is that.
  We have an outsider, Will Farnaby, from our world shipwrecked on the island nation of Pala. He is a journalist who is looking for a big score to take a year off the grind of the work he has to do for his boss, the industrialist who owns the paper he works for. There are unexplored oil reserves on Pala. That puts Will in a position of manipulating the situation in favor of his boss who is bidding on drilling rights. Except Pala does not want this. They are protective of the culture that they have nurtured over the past 100 years. It is naturally based and protective of that by not permitting the machines of civilization into their island. They have, limited industry, very few cars, no TV, safe from these outside capitalistic corrupting influences. They are passively protective which adds to their vulnerability, but would they be what they are if they fought back?  

  Will is given a book written by one of the long dead influencers of the island. The Notes on What’s What

“Dualism. . .Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.” -Notes on What’s What

    The novel is thin on plot. It is mostly a tour of Pala’s culture and modes of operation as we travel with Will and his local guides. Through this we get the idea of what a mostly equitable, non-dualistic, social structure would look like and how it could be maintained if left alone.
    During Will’s tour his heart is opened to the place so that he rethinks his position of betraying it for his own financial betterment. They use psychedelic mushrooms as a tool toward enlightenment.
Will ultimately takes the mushrooms and we are shown what he sees and feels in the long trip at the end of the book.

  Although the book is somewhat utopian, it is a fragile utopia that is headed for ultimate destruction. The outside threat is far worse than Brave New World, it is militaristic fascism. Pala is only a utopia for the moment. This could be taken as the major theme of the novel. Modern capitalism is on an unstoppable march across the earth. This was clear to Huxley in 1962, the year of the book's publication. What then is the point to the tour through the utopian structure? Perhaps it is that if we can find a space out of the range of interest of modern civilization, then THIS is how it could be structured and maintained. This is how children should be educated and nurtured for connection, non-dualism. But it is very unlikely that we could find that space to live, grow, and play out of the line of fire. In the meantime, which is basically forever in the human condition, we can have another connection to utopia through non-attachment to anything other than THE MOMENT.
  Utopia is in the breath of the HEAR & NOW. All the rest, important as it is on its own level, is a matrix of nostalgia or regret for the past, and dreams, or fear, of the future.
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Mild spoiler:
  It is interesting that the coup occurs during the mushroom trip, complete with assassination. It is a fact that Aldous Huxley was injected with LSD on the day he died of cancer. That was November 22, 1963, and like the book a day of an assassination and what could be seen as a coup d’etat.
He was tripping during the assassination as in the novel.

Daisies (1966)

Written and Directed by Věra Chytilová

This is a wild romp of a movie. Not much plot, but bubbling over with the silly joyous adolescent anti-authoritarian playful naughtiness.

The movie opens with shots taken from an aircraft during a military attack or a few different attacks, this is just the title sequence.

Then we go to a couple of young women (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová) in two-piece bathing suits sitting side by side. These two are the main characters in the movie. We follow them on their adventures and hang out with them in their apartment as they talk.

They go to fancy restaurants, to dinners with old men. Or one is on a date with an old man and the other comes in and crashes the date. They order and consume lots of food, presumably at the old man’s expense. The old men appear well healed so there is not a feeling that they are cheating others in need. The implication is that they are rich horny old men taking a hot too-young date out in hopes of action later. And who has sympathy for men like that? At any rate the girls say, “We are late for the train.” and run off with him to the station. Then one gets on with him and jumps off before the train is out of the station with the old man, dumped and riding away, while the girls giggle. This sort of thing is repeated a couple more times with other distinguished looking older men. 

The movie is non-linear and avant-garde. The visual style goes from B&W to color, to filtered colors, and into moments that can only be called psychedelic.
This is not at all surprising because Czechoslovakia was a major center of manufacture and research on the clinical use of LSD during which many in the artistic community were given LSD. Further reading on that is here:
https://przekroj.pl/en/society/a-communist-lsd-trip-aleksander-kaczorowski?fbclid=IwAR0IA5io0YuC0-9BbyIuniAzn4ou71yR_7WE4zMkHBlzuFANY8EAL14XpiA
The young women end up in a large elegant banquet room which is all set up with a food table as if a large wedding party is about to enter at any moment. They have their destructively naughty glutinous fun in this setting.

This is a really interesting and fun short feature. A high point in 1960 film culture easily rivaling anything produced during the same period in the USA avant-garde in that era.

Yet this was so long ago. Something so lovely and immediate is now the work of the dead. Věra Chytilová died in 2014, and what has become of these girls 55 years later? They are old women presumably transformed by life into whatever they became after this crazy movie on their youth.
Moving image is so strange. It has captured time and sent it back to us. It was one thing in the 1950s when the cinema of 30 years before was a different thing, sometimes crude and technologically rudimentary, at best a wondrous world of pantomime, yet remote and definitely “then”.  But now in the 21st Century we can see much of the previous century 50, 60, even 75 years ago, looking brand new, not all that distinguishable technologically from the moving images produced today.
The dead regularly perform for us. This is different from reading the words of the dead, these people are really alive talking and moving.
This has never occurred before, this is totally new to the human experience. What does it mean? How does it affect us?

The young women in the film are unquestionably alive, giggling and vital in every way. They are relics of 55 years ago, yet fresh as, well, fresh as Daisies.  

   

The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein: A novel by Theodore Roszak

   This can be viewed as a political novel about the most basic of struggles; The need of humans to own, control, make, and know as opposed to a call-of-the-wild acknowledgement of life and feeling being in everything and humans just a part of it all, more integrated. It is also a psychological study of humans and their interface with the rest of nature. It deals with issues personal and global at the same time, through story, metaphor. Or simply a story about the internal struggle between the thinking self and the feeling self in the individual.
It is the Prometheus story retold from another angle.

To me this is one of these holographic things available on view from varying perspectives. 

 It’s about different starting points of view of humans place in the earth. The notion that human lives were lived differently before beginning the naming, separation, discrimination, quantification of things done with the aim of the betterment, advancement, and expansion of human life separate and over all other earth entities. Dominion of humans over the earth God bestowed on them is basically the notion in vogue. Ownership an idea of accumulating what flies by. As if it is beneficial to keep it, as if it is even possible. Constant anxiety about scarcity.

The novel is set at a point when ancient feminist ritualistic nature-based technology meets with the rise of modern science and logic. Science being associated with the male impulse.

There is a possibility of the marriage of the two, the Mother Nature with the male logic/science. The memoir is a last testament of the nature side, about to be lost, maybe forever. Yet another fall from Eden. 

That’s the big picture overriding the whole thing. Moving in closer there is a young couple that cannot really bond. They cannot bond because he will not bond. He can’t believe, he must know. He can’t imagine, he must fabricate. He goes along up to a point, then withholds. Their ritualized sex is interrupted by his desires, his will.
The novel is written from Elizabeth Frankenstein’s point of view. I have not read Mary Shelley’s book in many years. This novel was therefore taken on its own terms rather than having any personal memory reference to the original material, so I wasn’t upset by anything that might have felt inconsistent with Shelley’s work. 

In close-up, the story is a tragedy, a beautiful romance and marriage that could create a beautiful magical powerful world for them. That can never be. A woman, Elizabeth, is longing and ready to learn to really bond, become one, through alchemical magic ritual, but this cannot happen because of something resistant in the man, Victor. In the beginning of the process he really wants to bond, wants to learn the magic pre-science technologies of witchcraft, but even the times are against this. The flow of interest, at the very end of the 16th Century Europe, is moving toward reason, science, rationality, thought, invention, and dominionism, as it continues to be. There are persecutions elsewhere in Europe referred to, burnings of women going on. 

The book presents this moment of the path of unity diverging into separation and commodification. 

Maybe we are at another fork in the road, or at least we see where this one leads and are looking back to see what happened in search of a direction. The big issues dealt with in the book are now even more with us and feel like they are coming to a head and something must be done. There is a growing number of people interested in more of a connection with something, spirit, nature, something other than the empty competitive consumer world we have inherited from the church of science and religion.

This book was written 25 years ago, but speaks to a counter movement that has grown with the hazards of the domiminist world view.
It turns out that the novel deal with topics and feelings related to the new psychedelic movement which is very much about this attempt to connect to the reality we live in, honoring it’s limits while exploring abandoned paths that could lead (back?) to wonder.

It can be a deep journey to read this beautifully crafted novel. It is a very serious piece within a successfully entertaining structure. 

There is a good deal of magic, wiccan, stuff going on early in the novel. There is even a communicative bird entry friend. 

It’s bold for a male writer to take on a young female first person like this. Although I can’t say I was with this all the way. There were few passages where I wondered what a woman would think of the portrayal of Elizabeth’s erotic thoughts. Maybe women don’t need to read this, only I and my kind, needed to.

I was very set up to enjoy this. I even found similar thematic connections to the book I read before this, Kangaroo by D H Lawrence. Lawrence hungered for the very same sort of thing, a reintegration. But these issues have always been in the background in my life.

Overall, considering the theme, this is one of the best novels I have read. Theodore Roszak is a great novelist. I read the outstanding Flicker this year. But this one even tops that. Pontfex, his first novel is very good but a victim of its setting 1970 type revolution scene and that makes it feel dated which doesn’t help in getting the point across. The point that is not far from this novel. Roszak’s academic field was something called Ecopsychology. Perhaps this is what I read in his novels. He may be teaching me that. I’m happy that there are two more novels of his I have yet to read.