Speechifying By Andre

so I was originally going to post in this space JFK's 1960 Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to provide a contrast to Mitt's little moment today, but I got bored and frustrated and was a little tired of dealing with politics and religions, so I decided to do this instead, something I've kept in my bag for awhile.

It is is a couple of parts from a movie I enjoy a lot, the delightful My Dinner with Andre (though, not gonna lie, the first time I saw it I had a hard time separating Wallace Shawn from his Princess Bride character, Vizzini, in my mind.)
Anyway two "speeches" by Andre or as I originally subtitled it:
The strangeness of beauty as seen in My Dinner With Andre




We're bored! We're all bored now! But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brain-washing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it's not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say "no"? See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire, he's a Swedish physicist, Gustav Björnstrand? And he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn't read newspapers and he doesn't read magazines. He's completely cut them out of his life, because he really does feel that we're living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot!

And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert, who had devoted his life to saving trees. He just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods? He's eighty-four years old and he always travels with a back-pack 'cause he never knows where he's gonna be tomorrow! And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me: "Where are you from?" And I said: "New York." He said: "Ah, New York! Yes, that's a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do?" And I said: "Oh, yes!" And he said: "Why do you think they don't leave?" I gave him different banal theories. He said: "Oh, I don't think it's that way at all." He said: "I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they've built, they've built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia, where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they've made, or to even see it as a prison. And then he went into his pocket and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said: "This is a pine tree." He put it in my hand and he said: "Escape, before it's too late."

You see, actually, for two or three years now Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. No, we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties? Get out of here! Of course, the problem is where to go, 'cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. You see, I think it's quite possible that the nineteen-sixties represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. And that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that from now on there'll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there'll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts. And that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet!

Now, of course, Björnstrand feels that there's really almost no hope. And that we're probably going back to a very savage, lawless, terrifying period. Findhorn people see it a little differently. They're feeling that there'll be these "pockets of light" springing up in different parts of the world, and that these will be in a way invisible planets on this planet, and that as we, or the world, grow colder, we can take invisible space journeys to these different planets, refuel for what it is we need to do on the planet itself, and come back. And it's their feeling that there have to be centers, now, where people can come and reconstruct a new future for the world. And when I was talking to Gustav Björnstrand, he was saying that actually, these centers are growing up everywhere now! And that what they're trying to do, which is what Findhorn was trying to do, and in a way what I was trying to do...I mean, these things can't be given names, but in a way, these are all attempts at creating a new kind of school, or a new kind of monastery. And Björnstrand talks about the concept of reserves, islands of safety, where history can be remembered, and the human being can continue to function in order to maintain the species through a dark age.

In other words we're talking about an underground, which did exist in a different way during the Dark Ages among the mystical orders of the Church. And the purpose of this underground is to find out how to preserve the light, life, the culture. How to keep things living. You see, I keep thinking that what we need is a new language, a language of the heart, languages in the Polish forest where language wasn't needed. Some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that's the poetry of the dancing bee that tells us where the honey is. And I think that in order to create that language, you're going to have to learn how you can go through a looking glass into another kind of perception, where you have that sense of being united to all things. And suddenly, you understand everything.

and from an earlier point in the movie, but a much better piece of practical advice to leave you with




We were out in the country, and we all went to Christmas mass together, you know, he was all dressed up in his Buddhist finery, you know, it was one of those awful dreary Catholic churches on Long Island where the priest talks about communism and birth control. And as I was sitting there in mass I was wondering: "What in the world is going on? I mean, here I am, I'm a grown man, and there's this strange person living with me in the house, and I'm not working, I mean, you know, I was doing nothing but scribbling a little poetry in my diary. I can't get a job teaching any more, and I dunno what I want to do...." When all of a sudden, a huge creature appeared, looking at the congregation! It was about, I'd say, six foot eight, something like that, you know, and it was half bull, half man, it's skin was blue, it had violets growing out of its eyelids and poppies growing out of its toenails, and it just stood there for the whole mass. I mean, I could not make that creature disappear. You know, I thought: "Oh, well, you know, I'm just seeing this because I'm bored," you know. I could not make that creature go away. Okay, now: I didn't talk with people about it, because they'd think I was weird. But I felt that this creature was somehow coming to comfort me. That somehow he was appearing to say: "Well! You may feel low, and you might not be able to create a play right now. But look what can come to you, on Christmas eve! Hang on, old friend! I may seem weird to you, but on these weird voyages, weird creatures appear! It's part of the journey. You're okay! Hang in there!"

The best advice you can give. I wonder if he got it from the poster...

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