The REAL Monolith

In Nietzsche sprech a Monolith is a "block of rock" that serves to INSPIRE one to see a PATH [as in Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven] that ENABLES the viewer to "Morph" to a higher level of understanding of [to use Col Kurtz's words] "seeing clearly what has to be done, without judgment but using primordial instincts".

Nietzsche uses a character called Zarathustra [from Persian times] to take such a journey [and do a spot of spreching], BUT to get the ball rolling Nietzsche himself needed to be inspired, and that happened in 1880s on a holiday in Switzerland where he looked up from Lake Silvaplana to a pyramid shaped rock and got his inspiration on the spot.

He wrote his book about Zarathustra's journey of discovery at that time and 10 years later Strauss [or one of them] "put it to music".

In 1968 this movie used the Monolith concept to inspire, inter alia, Apes to "improve their lot" - by violence if need be, and also used the "sunrise" movement of the music to make it all "dramatic and mysterious" [and as esoteric as possible so the movie would be considered "gay" - but not the meaning pronked in 1980 to launder the word faggot, rather the Gay Science meaning of the 1800s].

OK, I have gone back to these roots ["rowts" in American, as root means sex and Americans are not allowed to think of sex, as Zarathustra might do - I will return to that!] and combined the original Monolith with the music - please ENJOY.

This video and GoogleEarth photo below are taken from 12,000 feet, whereas Nietzsche was in the lower right of the photo in Surlej, so was looking up at the Monolith some 4,000 feet above, meaning it would have been far more "inspiring".

Don't Ya Hate Always being Right?

I have already remarked that I am like the Rock Star bloke in Jurassic Park, and that was indeed his line when the T-Rex jumped the fence, and by coincidence the reason was the same as here, ie the things of which Friedrich Nietzsche "spake" in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None" ARE the key to this movie.

Honest Injun, when I wrote the rest of this blog I never knew the Strauss-Nietzsche-Zarathustra connection, but it looks like, even without that knowledge, my analysis was in fact fairly spot on, eg see what Nietzsche calls "eternal recurrence" and I had said "circle of existence".

Here is some Google:

"This concept first occurred to Nietzsche while he was walking in Switzerland through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana (close to Surlej); he was inspired by the sight of a gigantic, towering, pyramidal rock. Before Zarathustra, Nietzsche had mentioned the concept in the fourth book of The Gay Science (e.g., sect. 341); this was the first public proclamation of the notion by him. Apart from its salient presence in Zarathustra, it is also echoed throughout Nietzsche's work. At any rate, it is by Zarathustra's transfiguration that he embraces eternity, that he at last ascertains "the supreme will to power"."

Now before you start jumping out of closets dear kiddies, The Gay Science has nothing to do with those light in the loafers.  So GoogleEarth shows us the very "rock" which inspired Nietzsche, per:

Google also says:

"Thus Spoke Zarathustra was conceived while Nietzsche was writing The Gay Science; he made a small note, reading "6,000 feet beyond man and time," as evidence of this. More specifically, this note related to the concept of the eternal recurrence, which is, by Nietzsche's admission, the central idea of Zarathustra; this idea occurred to him by a "pyramidal block of stone" on the shores of Lake Silvaplana in the Upper Engadine, a high alpine region whose valley floor is at 6,000 ft." 

So I don't think ANYONE can be in doubt about the Monolith inspiration/juxtaposition in this movie.

Well GoogleEarth says lake [right beside St Moritz] is 5,878 feet and and this "pyramid" is at 9,729 feet, so if we translate the German from 1882 to modern day American, Nietzsche was saying "if you throw your IPod and BluRay in the river, get off yer arse, stop being a pussy obsessed with closets and do some travel to such places then you TOO may get inspired".

If you think that is a bit nasty, well "you ain't seen nothin yet" as this Nietzsche is a total badass, and to understand where this movie is coming from with HAL and all, you need to understand Kurtz when he said "Horror, horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror or it will truly become your enemy".

Fortunately, to save you a lot of Googling,  John Cleese in making A Fish Called Wanda created the "All American Bullet Headed Saxon Mother's Son" [to quote John Lennon] ex CIA weapons man called Otto, and Otto was a great fan of Nietzsche.  So here is a video highlight of Otto in action, a short and a longer version.

 

The most hilarious Cleese Classic Moment here is the interpretation of Nietzsche's words by Wanda where the expression "You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape", comes out as this:

Otto:  "Apes don't read philosophy"

Wanda:  "Yes they do Otto, they simply don't understand it"

The main concept mentioned above for Zarathustra's "Frodo like quest" was:

"The will to power is the fundamental component of human nature. Everything we do is an expression of the will to power. The will to power is a psychological analysis of all human action and is accentuated by self-overcoming and self-enhancement. Contrasted with living for procreation, pleasure, or happiness, the will to power is the summary of all man's struggle against his surrounding environment as well as his reason for living in it".

So please read Nietzsche yourself or take Otto's word for it, but either way it seems this movie is based entirely on the "sprech" of Nietzsche via his boy Zarathustra - no explanation needed.

Over to you.

Prophesy #2 - 9/11

Having been awakened from my sci-fi induced slumber by the Y2K bells going off, I was now being hit as if by Air Raid Sirens [npi] saying OMG, OMG this is about 9/11.

That had been alerted to some extent by all the "secret stuff" going down, the goon saying he was "not at liberty ...." and nobody questioning that, etc, but I was now seeing HAL killing off the frozen stiffs ["for the good of America" as in 9/11] and HAL doing a Big Brother, snooping on the boys even though they were in deep cover in their "closet" [an obvious hint they were also up-pronk homophobic, ie internalized].

Here is explanation of pronking:

This suddenly reverberated with the titular 2001 and I was struck by the genius of such a prophesy, like a diamond bullet.  But given Y2K has its own date stamp and was easy to predict, how could the filmmakers be so accurate in predicting 2001 for the 9/11 event?

One explanation says it may have been a chicken and egg situation and that GWB HAL [for want of any other inspiration to stay in office] simply followed this movie, especially after seeing how totally easy it was to pull off Y2K, and I think Michael Moore would have no problems with that scenario.

Whatever, the bits were now falling into place and I was seeing that Ricky Fitts benign force that causes plastic bags to dance, ie at last a feasible [subliminal and monolithic] explanation for the popularity of this movie, particularly after the titular date passed by with the Prophesies being made Flesh.

Prophesy #1 - Y2K

We see that Clarke made some highly accurate predictions back in 1960s about a facility that we would know as the Internet, so it was totally simple for him to put 2 and 2 together and get Y2K.  Spielberg also did it via his nerd creation of Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park but by 1995 the wheels were well in motion for the Fraud, so this movie had to do a far longer range prophesy.

But let me explain that Dennis [Dennis the Menace to Spielberg] is really Larry, ie Loose-Wire Larry and is a very well know person in the Services Industry.  The story says that Larry gets a really great job from his Service Manager - a week on a tropical island servicing the air-con for the luxury resort.  So Larry works in the day and parties at night [all expenses paid] and on last day he loosens a vital terminal in the control circuit, in the very back of the main switchboard.

He is hardly back home before there are big problems with the air-con and the locals have not been able to find the fault so Larry is back for another week in paradise.  If he is not greedy he will get away with it a few times but risks getting blacklisted in the industry and out of a job forever.

But not for Dennis, ie the so called Y2KProfessionals as there ARE no checks and balances in their industry.  The only way to deal with Y2K was litigation but the Y2KProfessionals had money to burn with some $200 Billion defrauded, so they simply paid the lawyers to agree not to disagree.

Spielberg dealt beautifully with all that by having his new prize beasties do a Dr Lecter on Dennis AND the "blood sucking lawyer", so we had a happy ending.

But back to this movie, I made a "monolithic" effort to stay awake in the long boring nerdy parts but sat bolt upright yelling out "Y2K" once we got to the parts where HAL starts to play silly buggers about "false positives" etc, and moreso when the media interviews HAL himself to explain what did or did not go wrong and the reasons behind all that.  That of course was the famous situation with the "marking their own exam papers" interviews of the Y2KProfessionals who simply said they had no idea 2000 would come after 1999, so they did not cater for it.

At last there was some GENUINE prophetic content being made in the movie, but more to come folks.

What is the Monolith?

The monolith is simply the means of spreading HAL's message.

In today's terms, in America, it is the "Presidential Auto-Cue", or as mentioned above for Feminist Takeover it was Greer's book, and 3,500 years ago for Hatshepsut, it was her Obelisks and for Hitler it was the Reichstag from which he screamed his hate.

For any Monolith the message itself does not have to be well understood, but rather it is the reverence TO the Monolith by those [J Doe right now] WANTING to be ruled to make them feel "safe", even though the bearer of the message might be an ignoramous, as with GWB.

And with 9/11 we had a "Monolithic Sacrificial Lamb" where 2 Monolith shaped buildings were sacrificed as being the False Gods of Globalization or Financial Rule which were taking the spotlight away from the VACANT Presidential Auto-Cue.  As Fahrenheit 9/11 shows, GWB only ever "Thus Spake" to change feet and had to be sent by HAL on a permanent vacation, or Carefully Teaching stories about goats to school kiddies "before they are 6 or 7 or 8" [South Pacific 1958].  So once the 9/11 dust cleared it was back to business as normal, but with a shiny new Monolith to "Thus SPRECH" of Unknown Unknown Terrorrrrrr [the Horror, the Horror - Apocalypse Now 1979].

As Justice Janning testified at Nuremberg about Adolph:

"We had a democracy, yes, but it was torn by elements within. Above all, there was fear, fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that can you understand what Hitler meant to us, because he said to us: 'Lift your heads! Be proud to be German! There are devils among us, communists, liberals, Jews, gypsies. Once these devils will be destroyed, your misery will be destroyed.' It was the old, old story of the sacrificial lamb.
 
What about those of us who knew better, we who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country. What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. Hitler himself will be discarded - sooner or later. 'The country is in danger.' We will 'march out of the shadows!' We will 'go forward.' Forward is the great password.
 
And history tells how well we succeeded, Your Honor. We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. The very elements of hate and power about Hitler that mesmerized Germany, mesmerized the world! We found ourselves with sudden powerful allies. Things that had been denied to us as a democracy were open to us now. The world said, 'Go ahead. Take it. Take it! Take Sudetenland! Take the Rhineland! Re-militarize it! Take all of Austria! Take it!'
 
And then one day, we looked around and found that we were in an even more terrible danger. The ritual begun in this courtroom swept over the land like a raging, roaring disease. What was going to be a 'passing phase' had become the way of life."

So at the start of this movie the apes simply touch the Monolith and seemingly get morphed into similar apes but with clothes.  Then the movie itself serves as a Monolith to the many adoring fans who fantasize about the "visual effects and meanings" without ever being able to explain them in American, let alone in English.

Who is HAL?

In simple terms of today, HAL is Big Brother, a sort of invisible "benign force" [to use Ricky's plasic bag example] that "keeps the whole deal ticking", always has and always will.  Conspiracy theorists might say he is the CIA etc in American situation, but he really is a combination Known Known [because he IS us] and Unknown Unknown because he moves in mysterious ways, and THAT is just the MALE version, God forbid that we might dare to open Bob Dylan's Gates of Eden.

As we saw HAL can be killed but he simply morphs into another HAL, and life goes on [eg after Hitler or Hatshepsut].  But he is most devious and justifies killing his flock, as we saw in the movie, by claiming he did it "for our own good", AND, as we see from the Forums, nobody even mentions that, let alone complains.  But as an engineer I think like the rock star in Jurassic Park, so Man creates HAL, HAL kills Man, Man kills HAL, HAL clones to HAL and "and so it goes, goes round again" [Joe Jackson].

In American Beauty we see HAL in Her most lethal form, murdering the nuclear family concept upon which McCarthy HAL had based the Beauty - or "someone left the [American] Pie out in the rain and nobody thought to keep the recipe" - the McCarthy [sic] Park version.  But I don't think this movie 2001 attempts to make prophesy of the 1970 feminist takeover via the Monolith of Germain Greer's book The Female Eunuch, as by 1968 the writing was on the wall for anyone actually looking, although the women don't appear to be as stupid as the men in the movie so I may be wrong.

But to better explain about he IS us, that is no more complex than the saying that a community gets the newspapers it wants, or as John Lennon said "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together".

Or better still as explained by Buffy Sainte-Marie in Universal Soldier as "his orders come from far away no more, they come from him and you and me and brother don't you see, this is not the way to put the end to war".

In other words, just like newspapers we get the HAL we want and he is really just a clone of US, because we want to feel secure, but we then trust HAL to do as he pleases, and the cycle goes on and on and on, just like the apes in the movie never really got smarter as they became man, they just got more "stuff", then the stuff killed them.

Summary

Apologies that the guy in the spaceship looks more like Kenny than HAL, but them's the breaks folks - OMG HAL's killed Kenny!

As a kid in 1950s I saw The Living Desert which used a device called a camera to show us [documentary style as for Fahrenheit 9/11] the "Unknown Unknown" wonders of a typical desert from season to season.  It was said to be "good for its time", but was soon forgotten.

Some 60 years later I saw Avatar which was a Yippee [BlockBuster] for Sci-Fi freaks and used a device called CGI to show us the "Unknown Unknowns" of life after TEOTWAWKI on Earth.  It was said to be good for its time, but as soon as CGI blue pussycats are replaced by CGI orange pandas it will be forgotten, without a sequel.

In between sits this movie, and on the surface there is little one can say about it, and even the "cool techy terms" like Stargate were simply pinched from Dr Who's phonebox, so the whole movie is simply Gay.

However, after a slow start, it has gained a huge following, for reasons that appear to be Unknown Unknowns.  But having said that, the answer seems to REVOLVE around that very piece of WMD space junk from Don Rumsfeld, and for those that don't know [or do not WANT to know], it goes like this:

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.

— United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

The above statement was made by Rumsfeld on February 12, 2002 at a press briefing where he addressed the absence of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.

So my overall take on movie is a PROPHETIC documentary on the exponential growth in technology AND deception from 1968 to 2001, only outstripped by the growth of apathy.

Of course that is simply the time honored mantra of Hitler, then adopted by America, of "It is most fortunate for governments that the people do not think".

So when I read the Forums for this movie it reads as an example of "The Great God Gun" where the posters, mostly young but not all, are totally mesmerized by the technology side, to the point of actually believing that prophesy as 100% fact, but in total denial of any credence at all in the deception or apathy prophesies, or in most cases no recognition that those issues were even IN the movie.

On the other hand I simply see the technology aspects as a "smokescreen" as if this WAS Dr Who, but the deception, apathy AND associated symbolism stand out like the proverbial dog's balls.

So having cleared the air I will now detail the elements of this "Circle of Existence".