Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Throughout your life, there are people you never meet who nonetheless mold what you think and feel and believe. They are the authors of the books that change your life, the directors whose visions  ignite your imagination, the photographers and artists whose perceptions  influence how you see the world. These are the visionaries whose creative works somehow become landmarks in your own life. Nora Ephron was one of those visionaries.

Do you remember the scene in When Harry Meets Sally where Sally (Meg Ryan) creates the sounds of a woman in the full throes of orgasm? Or what about those words uttered in Sleepless in Seattle: “Destiny is something we’ve invented because we can’t stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental.”

Nora Ephron’s vision was timeless and immortal. This woman didn’t just write and direct movies. She wrote novels. She wrote essays. She was a powerhouse that influenced the way women think of themselves. She wasn’t just some hack in a basement sniffing cocaine and hoping for a big break. She was the big break. Her thumb was always on the pulse of what women feel and think. From Sleepless in Seattle to Julie and Julia, Nora Ephron left her mark, her footprint, and  I hope she’s out there in the universe enjoying herself and planning for the next phase of her existence.

Thanks, Nora, for all the laughs and insights.

When you walk into a Ridley Scott movie – Blade Runner, Alien, Thelma & Louise,  Gladiator –  you never know quite what to expect.  In each of these movies, there is something you don’t see coming, some twist that takes you by surprise. In Scott’s latest movie, Prometheus, there are a number of those moments.

The story is set in 2089. From IMDB: “A team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.” The clue is the discovery of the same image found in caves at archeological digs all over the world, a pictogram of a giant being beckoning toward the stars. As character Elizabeth Shaw says,  the pictogram is “an invitation.” Come find us.

The stunning visuals pull you in immediately. You are there – inside the exploratory vessel known as Prometheus,  on the surface of the strange planet where  Shaw and her partner, Charlie Halloway,  believe these giant beings, these titans, are located. And then you’re inside the hollow sphere of rock where they find answers – and more questions.

Elizabeth Shaw is played by Noomi Rapace, the same young woman who was Lizbeth Salandar in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  She looks so completely different that I didn’t recognize her. I knew I’d seen her somewhere, but had to look her up. Her performance is outstanding. In one particularly harrowing scene, her fear  and horror are so palpable that I was grateful we weren’t watching a 3-D version. Her character is well drawn – it’s her burning desire to  know humanity’s origins that drives the expedition.

In scripts – as in novels, as in most storytelling – there are points where the plot twists. In movies, the first plot point happens about 30 minutes into the story  and the second point occurs about 30 minutes before the end. Both points pivot the plot in new directions. Plot point 1 is when the character Meredith Vickers, (Charlize Theron), informs the two archeologists that even if they find beings here, they are not to engage them in any way. Since a corporation paid the trillion bucks for this expedition, Shaw and Halloway are employees of the corporation and she (Vickers) represents this corporation, so they are to do what she tells them to do. She’s the boss.

Uh-huh, sure. Theron is a plus for any movie, if only because of the way she looks. But in this film, she comes across as more robotic than David (Michael Fassbender), who is the actual robot, immortal, soulless. In terms of plot, David does something to Halloway that is never explained in a satisfactory way, except when he asks Halloway  what he would do, the lengths he would go to, in order to prove that these titan beings exist. Later, David becomes Shaw’s only ally, but I was never really sure what his agenda is.

My only other gripe about this movie – and it’s small, really trivial – has to do with the flashlights. Given all the other stunning visuals and technology, why are the characters using flashlights that most of us have in our homes right now? Haven’t flashlights evolved at all? Despite my nitpicking, I loved the movie and sat there enthralled for more than two hours, alternately riveted, grossed out, and blown away by all of it.

We stopped by our local grocery store afterward to pick up some fish and I was so disoriented by this movie I could barely talk to the guy behind the fish counter. I kept wanting to say, Hey, I just saw Prometheus, and it’s a mind blower. But I didn’t. I didn’t say it not only because I was in a grocery store, but because I would have to start with Blade Runner. Even though that movie initially got lukewarm reviews, it has since been recognized as one of the best sci-fi movies ever made. And that’s the thing with Scott’s films. They grow on you, just like Philip K Dick’s stories (Blade Runner). When you leave the theater, the story and the characters shadow you, follow you home, snuggle into bed with you, infiltrate your dreams.

While it’s true that Scott doesn’t answer the ultimate questions – where did we come from?  What happens to us when we die? – it really doesn’t matter. Clint Eastwood didn’t answer that question in his movie Hereafter. Martin Brest didn’t answer that question in Meet Joe Black.  What Dreams May Come came close, but it was way too Catholic/heaven and hell and all that, for me. Movies  tease you with the visuals,  make you think they’ve got the answers, but in the end, they don’t have anything more definitive than any of us do.

In the end, it’s all speculative, maybe this, maybe that. But Scott certainly pushes the envelope by suggesting that Earth was seeded by the stars, that we are the progeny of alien life forms, that we may be, in fact, the end result of some sort of hybrid experimentation somewhere way back when.

Don’t take my word for it. Go see the movie.

This flash mob in the Cayman Islands on Earth Day is joyful and prompts me to believe we are in the paradigm shift tipping point. Note their t-shirts.

It’s been awhile since we posted an historical synchronicity. This one involves a man named Wilmer McLean who, though a civilian, became the unofficial ‘host’ of the American civil war. This post was snatched (and edited) from the archives of Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog.

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Wilmer McLean (1818-1882) was a Virginian farmer and merchant who had the great misfortune to own a farm near Bull Run where, in 1861, the first great battle of the American Civil War took place. In fact, McLean was so close to the action that his house was briefly taken over by the Confederate general Beauregard, who used it as his headquarters: and one of the first Union cannonades went crashing into Wilmer’s kitchen destroying the general’s dinner.

McLean soon after took his family away – wisely given that the territory around Bull Run would continue to be contested. He moved, in fact, to peaceful Appomattox County in the south of the state of Virginia. Anyone who knows anything about the US Civil War will see where the story is headed.

Fast forward four years and in April 1865 the last full-blown battle of the Civil War was fought virtually outside McLean’s new front door, with the weakened Confederate army being beaten into submission. Enter Wilmer again. Colonel Charles Marshall, one of General Lee’s staff, grabbed the ‘veteran’ of Bull Run as McLean walked down the street and asked to use his house for the signing of the surrender.

McLean foolishly agreed. ‘Foolishly’ because his home was subsequently ransacked by Union souvenir hunters who took anything that they could carry: McLean’s table, for example, ended up in the grubby hands of a Major General George Custer. (Custer’s last table?)

And McLean’s consolation? He is quoted as uttering one of the best lines in all American history: ‘the war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlour’.

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The only parallel experience we can think of is storm rather than war-related. In 2005, Hurricane Wilma struck South Florida and some residents drove north to Long Island to stay with relatives. Upon arrival, they were greeted by… Hurricane Wilma, which had turned north.

Here are a few wyrd things to consider.

1) Aliens in MacBeth?

What are these

So wither’d and so wild in their attire,

That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,

And yet are on’t? Live you? or are you aught

That man may question?

–William Shakespeare

Taken out of context, it sounds as if Bill is writing about aliens instead of witches.

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2) What’s the opposite of paranoia?

It’s pronoia or having the sense that there is a conspiracy that exists to help the person. It is also used to describe a philosophy that the world is set up to secretly benefit people.

The writer and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow defined pronoia as “the suspicion the Universe is a conspiracy on your behalf”.^[1] The academic journal “Social Problems” published an article entitled “Pronoia” by Fred H. Goldner in 1982 (vol 30, pp. 82–91). It received a good deal of publicity at the time including references to it in Psychology Today, The New York Daily News, The Wall Street Journal etc. It described a phenomenon that was the opposite from paranoia and provided numerous examples of specific persons who displayed such characteristics.

It was subsequently picked up in England and written about as described below. Wired Magazine published an article in issue 2.05 (May 1994) titled “Zippie!”. The cover of the magazine featured a psychedelic image of a smiling young man with wild hair, a funny hat, and crazy eyeglasses. Written by Jules Marshall, the article announced an organized cultural response to Thatcherism in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The opening paragraphs of the article describe “a new and contagious cultural virus” and refer to pronoia as “the sneaking feeling one has that others are conspiring behind your back to help you.” (Love that quote!)

3) Most of us here know that synchronicity was a term coined by Carl Jung. But when and where did Jung first speak the word in public?

That would be at a memorial address for Richard Wilhelm in 1930. Wihelm was the German translator of the I-Ching. The word was used to explain how the I-Ching achieves its magic. Later Jung worked with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli to develop the idea into a full-blown theory.

Instead of synchronicity, Jung could’ve used called meaningful coincidence “pronoia”, which, as we know, means the positive form of paranoia, meaning that the world isn’t out to get you, it is out to guide you. If that had happened this blog would be called www.pronoia.com/pronoiasecrets. (BTW, it’s available.)

4) What happens when synchronicity meets pronoia?

When Trish and I first met, it was like synchronicity. But not quite. I interviewed Trish, a teacher of English as a second language for a story on Cuban immigration. She went home that day and told her roommate she just met the man she would marry.  I had a deadline to meet, but  had agreed to come back and be a guest speaker at her class. What started out as an interview, ultimately turned into a life-long commitment and two new careers. It was a happy and unexpected outcome – serendipity, which might be viewed as a combination of synchronicity and pronoia.

In our backyard are an avocado tree, several coconut trees, two papaya trees, a grapefruit tree, and three mango trees. The largest mango tree is right outside my office window, where Rob has created a beautiful garden that is shaded by this tree.

We planted a tiny shoot of this tree right after we moved here 12 years ago. It’s a Hatcher mango tree,  and around here, for people who know their mangos, Hatchers are the sweetest, most succulent, biggest and plumpest mangos. Slice a Hatcher in half, and the color is a visual feast, a gorgeous shade of gold. One of these mangos constitutes a meal. Click here for a list of mineral and vitamins that a mango contains. It’s impressive.

Last summer, in July, we started picking the crop off the Hatcher tree. We had so many mangos that we gave away a lot of them, ate several a day, then peeled, sliced, and froze the leftovers. Ever since,  we’ve used the frozen mangos for smoothies.  This year, there’s something off about the mangos – not in taste but in harvest time. That mango in the photo could probably have grown and ripened for a couple more weeks, but was blown off the tree during a thunderstorm. For this time of year, it’s way too huge.

I don’t know if it’s attributable to changes in climate, soil, intensity of sunlight, or something else, but this accelerated growth is not business as usual. I’m not complaining, but this has me wondering if nature is fine tuning herself in some way, compensating for changes in climate and  for catastrophic events.

Today, for instance, I went shopping. At the fish counter, Sal, the gray-haired guy who really knows his fish, said they’d just gotten in some fantastic tuna for a good price and he was thinking of me and here I was. “Atlantic tuna,” he says. “From Costa Rica.”

“Farmed?”

“Nope. Wild. Just got an email this morning from headquarters that we’re no longer carrying any fish from the Pacific. It’s all infused with radiation from the Fukushima nuke disaster.  So if you eat out and order tuna, ask where it’s from.”

Well, I know where my mangos come from. And my avocados. And the veggies Rob grows in the garden. So maybe it’s time to become a real vegetarian and eliminate even fish from my diet. I haven’t eaten beef or pork since 1992, when we listened to Diet for a New America as we drove across the Hopi reservation. In fact, I had my last hamburger right before we started listening to that tape.

After listening to that tape, Rob and I spent several years eating mostly vegetarian meals interspersed with occasional meals of fish. Then my dad moved in with us and asked if we could, please, have chicken and turkey once in a awhile. I don’t miss steak. I don’t miss pork. I didn’t miss chicken during those years we ate just fish. But I would miss tuna, I would miss salmon. Then again, radioactive fish don’t appeal to me in the least.

I wonder if I can survive on just mangos, papaya, grapefruit, avocados, and whatever we grow in the garden. Maybe toss in some sprouted bread. And peanuts, especially almonds. One year, we had a couple of nice cantaloupes, a small crop of cauliflower, and about 4 strawberries which the critters ate. Green peppers do well here, but can I grow potatoes? Radishes? Apples? Probably not. OK, so hit the green markets for those items. Or hey, how about a community garden? There’s a huge swathe of vacant land in our neighborhood that would be perfect for that.

I sense something new is underway here, all because of that big, beautiful mango and this troubling revelation about Pacific fish.