George Carlin, the Grammy-Award winning standup comedian and actor who was hailed for his irreverent social commentary, poignant observations of the absurdities of everyday life and language, died in Santa Monica, California, on Sunday, June 22, 2008. He was 71.
I will remember him fondly, many people will.
My good friend D, who sometimes share the same provocative penchant for the irreverent, posted some four years ago, a rather depressing environmental report about plastic, which she impishly introduced with a quote from one of George Carlin's routines, “The Planet is Fine.”
The Planet is Fine was also the title of her post and features in the background a RealAudio file of Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria:
Ave Maria! Ave Maria! maiden mild!
Listen to a maiden's prayer!
Thou canst hear though from the wild,
Thou canst save amid despair.
Safe may we sleep beneath thy care,
Though banish'd, outcast and reviled -
Maiden! hear a maiden's prayer;
Mother, hear a suppliant child!
Ave Maria!
Was that odd eclectic juxtaposition irreverent? Irrelevant…? I don’t know. For some reason, it works (it touches you.) And it feels like it all belongs together, somehow.
Some say that there is only one small step from the sacrilegious to the sublime---and vice-versa. Or, as any philosopher worth his/her salt will tell you, even in the Profane, there is the Sublime, and the opposite is also true (they both stem from the same all-encompassing reality.)
Carlin made no secret that he was an Atheist. And he will still tell you so today. Not in person, of course. Not anymore. But all one has to do is watch one of the re-runs of his routine, "Religion is Bulshit":
There is a definite cry for help (“Save Me”) in most religious calls---except in their more ecstatic manifestation (as found in Sufism) or when they are about surrender (as in the detachment of Buddhism or the pantheistic mysticism of Meister Eckhart.)
The Christian tradition offers many fine examples:
This is, most assuredly, one of the reasons why religion generally does best in troubled times or in Man's darkest hour. It seems pretty much to be part of the luggage that comes along with "sentiency" and the confrontation of "life made sentient" with the vastness and coldness of the universe.
The Neanderthal man, deemed to have lived 50,000 years ago, is thought to have buried his dead with ceremonies that suggest a belief in a life after death. This need for “something above or within” is common not only to Christianity and most religions in general, but it is also a dominant quality of western socio-religious New Age "feel-goodism."
The following quote by Carl Braaten (“Christian Dogmatics”) sums it up and would not be out of place had it been uttered by any number of New Age gurus.
"All the world we see, hear, and touch does indeed pass away. If there is the divine, it must therefore be above or behind or beneath or within the experienced world. It must be the bed of time's river, the foundation of the world's otherwise unstable structure, the track of heaven's hastening lights."
But Carlin's cynicism and Job's despair share some sobering thoughts in common;
From the city the dying groan,
And the throat of the wounded cries for help;
Yet God pays no attention to their prayer.
(Job 24:12)
Nonetheless, there is power in Faith.
It does all come in the end in what beliefs we put our faith into...
I think that Death of Terry Pratchett's Discword got it best:
Death: HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO *BE* HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
Susan: With tooth fairies? Hogfathers?
Death: YES. AS PRACTICE, YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
Susan: So we can believe the big ones?
Death: YES. JUSTICE, MERCY, DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
Susan: They're not the same at all.
Death: YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER, AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE, AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET, YOU TRY TO ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD. AS IF THERE IS SOME, SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE, BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what's the point?
Death: YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?
2 comments:
Terry Pratchett's Discworld can be very endearing. I don't think he expected the series would develop into the kind of phenomenon it has grown into (or even into a series). It's like his universe has taken a life of its own. A lot of fictional works do!
I like Quoth, a Raven, who lived at a wizard's in Quirm. That's Quoth as in 'Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore"' But don't ask him to say "Nevermore" even in jest, unlike Edgar Allan Poe's Raven, Quoth adamently refuses to utter "the N-word."
I was recently reminded (courtesy of David Smith's preoccupations) of Seamus Heaney's comment ("Joy or Night"), in The Redress of Poetry (1995):
"We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. The best it can do is to give us an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering. What is at work … is the mind's capacity to conceive a new plane of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity."
North mythology has it that Odin keeps himself informed about the affairs of the nine worlds with two faithful ravens, Thought and Memory. He sends them out at dawn to gather information and return in the evening. They perch on Odin's shoulders and whisper every scrap of news which they saw or heard tell of into His ears.
Terry Pratchett was diagnosed, last year, with a very rare form of Alzheimer's disease called posterior cortical atrophy, in which areas at the back of the brain begin to shrink and shrivel:
Pratchett appealed to people to "keep things cheerful", and proclaimed that "we are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism." Leading the way, Pratchett stated that he feels he has time for "at least a few more books yet", and added that while he understands the impulse to ask 'is there anything I can do?', in this particular case he will only entertain such offers from "very high-end experts in brain chemistry." Discussing his diagnosis at the Bath Literature Festival, Pratchett revealed that he now found it too difficult to write dedications when signing books.
In March 2008, Pratchett announced he was donating one million US dollars to the Alzheimer's Research Trust, claiming he had spoken to at least 3 brain tumour (cancer) survivors whilst he had spoken to no survivors of Alzheimer's disease, and that he was shocked "to find out that funding for Alzheimer's research is just 3% of that to find cancer cures." Of his donation Mr. Pratchett said: "I am, along with many others, scrabbling to stay ahead long enough to be there when the Cure comes along.” Pratchett's donation inspired an internet campaign where fans hope to 'Match it for Pratchett', by raising another $1 million.
On 8 June 2008, news reports indicated that Pratchett had a strange experience, which he described thusly: "It is just possible that once you have got past all the gods that we have created with big beards and many human traits, just beyond all that, on the other side of physics, there just may be the ordered structure from which everything flows" and "I don’t actually believe in anyone who could have put that in my head".
And so, Hugin and Munin are loosed and fly over Midgard; bearing news and information they have collected to Odin. Hugin is "thought" and Munin is "memory". They are sent out at dawn to gather information and return in the evening. They perch on Odin's shoulders and whisper the news into his ears.
The whole world wide, every day,
fly Hugin and Munin;
I worry lest Hugin should fall in flight,
yet more I fear for Munin.
---Grimnismal
Whatever its source or its reasons, the appeal of the mysterious (the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans) runs deep. People need the presence of the numinous in their life. A sense that something bigger is happening out there than what they can see (God/Gods/a higher power, the supernatural/magic, the sacred/holy, the transcendent, the nagual, signs/omens, synchronicity...). It provides a sense of hope, the need for which becomes indeed increasingly prevalent in times when reasons for despair are many.
"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death."
---Robert Fulghum
"...Last night there was the noise of storm and rain;
I wonder how many blossoms have blown away."
---Meng Hao-jan
"Heaven and Earth are ruthless;
and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs..."
---Lao Tzu
"The wild geese fly across the long sky above.
Their image is reflected upon the chilly water below.
The geese do not mean to cast their image on the water;
Nor does the water mean to hold the image of the geese."
---Anonymous
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