miscellaneous postings by Lawrence R. Spencer
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The main protagonist of this short, surreal film is a man obsessed with control. In an automated world drained of all emotion, he is tortured by vague longings. Will he transcend his obsessions, fears and mortality?
How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels by Craig Welch
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(image: Shizaru by Ewelina Koszykowska)
COGITANT ~ from Latin, Present participle of cogitare. “to think”
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“Exploring this unlighted lane in Shakespeare’s life means, first, looking at the crucial document. “Be it known,” the Latin text begins,
The 1596 writ charging Shakespeare with making death threats, discovered in Britain’s National Archives by the Canadian scholar Leslie Hotson in 1931. The second of the four entries is the one relating to the playwright.
that William Wayte craves sureties [guarantees] of the peace against William Shakspere, Francis Langley, Dorothy Soer wife of John Soer, and Anne Lee, for fear of death, and so forth. Writ of attachment issued by the sheriff of Surrey, returnable on the eighteenth of St Martin [November 29, 1596].
A few pages away in the same collection of documents, there is a second writ, issued by Francis Langley and making similar charges against William Wayte.
Who are these people, each alleging the other was issuing death threats? The scholar who unearthed the document—an indefatigable Canadian by the name of Leslie Hotson, best remembered today as the man who first stumbled across the records of the inquest into the highly mysterious murder of Shakespeare’s fellow playwright, Christopher Marlowe—uncovered a squalid tale of gangland rivalries in the theatrical underworld of Queen Elizabeth’s day.
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE ON SMITHSONIAN.COM:
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Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) was a French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist, and philosopher, described as the ″James Dean of philosophy″. Throughout his life, Camus spoke out against and actively opposed Totalitarianism in its many forms. Early on, Camus was active within the French Resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II, even directing the famous Resistance journal, Combat. On the French collaboration with Nazi occupiers he wrote: “Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judging the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people.”
Camus presents the reader with dualisms such as happiness and sadness, dark and light, life and death, etc. He emphasizes the fact that happiness is fleeting and that the human condition is one of mortality; for Camus, this is cause for a greater appreciation for life and happiness. In Le Mythe, dualism becomes a paradox: we value our own lives in spite of our mortality and in spite of the universe’s silence. While we can live with a dualism (I can accept periods of unhappiness, because I know I will also experience happiness to come), we cannot live with the paradox (I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless). In Le Mythe, Camus investigates our experience of the Absurd and asks how we live with it. Our life must have meaning for us to value it. If we accept that life has no meaning and therefore no value, should we kill ourselves?
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Here is a film published by Arthur Twogood, Associate professor of Vocational Education at Iowa State College just before the the US entered World War Two in 1940. It’s a fascinating illustration of how dramatically the illusion of an “American Dream” has dissolved during the past 72 years. The film demonstrates that there was once a sincere interest on the part of “public education” to provide guidance and education, although heavily influenced by Big Brother “double-speak” about the unspoken “class system” that the financially “elite” have been indoctrinating into the “peasants” for thousands of years. The “dumbing down” of Americans has been going on for decades. However, it has become more aggressive since the advent of the microchip, which didn’t exist in 1940. Tragically, the “career opportunities” suggested in this film don’t exist any longer. High school kids today have been born into an “electronic society” (like those described dystopian fiction like 1984 ) that produced mindless automatons much more efficiently than less technically “advanced” societies. This film does offer a very interesting contrast between the economic paradigm of 1940 with the reality faced by high school students in 2012.