"Nikki, meet Nucky. Nucky, Nikki."

Go North East Jung Man

       

"Teetotaler.  Never touch it."

Enochian Knot Language

1881

Enochian Not Language

8X8

A Serious Man

Rated R

Reish: Process - The Art of Clarification


NUMBER

Two hundred 

Worlds:
The upper limit of poverty - two hundred zuz.
The two hundred lights that shine out of the self.
"The sun is charity."

Souls:
Two hundred heads of the Sanhedrin from the tribe of Issachar.
Time.

Divinity:
The numerical half way point of the alef-beit.
Creation begins from the "middle point" of God’s Infinite Light.
The evolving of the "Kingdom of the Infinite."
The King and His people.

Although the letter reish is situated close to the end of the alef-beit, its primary meaning is "head" or "beginning." There are four "beginnings" in the alef-beit (comparable to the four New Years enumerated in the beginning of the tractate Rosh HaShanah) relative to four different categories of phenomena. The ordinal beginning of the alef-beit is the letter alef. Phonetically, the vapor, the amorphous "matter" from which the pronunciation of every letter is formed, is the secret of the letter hei. In script, every letter begins from a point, the secret of the letter yud. In relation to meaning, cognizant intelligence or wisdom, reish means "beginning." These four letters combine to spell aryeh, "the lion," the first of the four "holy animals" of the Divine chariot of Ezekiel. They further combine to spell yirah, "fear" or "awe."

"The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God." In Chassidut we are taught that the inner experience of the soul which serves as the vessel to arouse and contain ever new flashes of insight, wisdom, is bitul, "selflessness." Fear, the beginning of wisdom, corresponds to the source of this state in the soul. Fear "shocks" ego, breaking the innate coarseness of the heart, that coarseness or egocentricity that prevents one from being truly receptive and perceptive to reality outside oneself in general, and the Divine Essence of all reality in particular.

The two letters that fill the letter reish are yud and shin, spelling yeish, which means "something," in general identified in Chassidut with the consciousness of ego or being a separate, independent entity - a "something." Reish is the only letter "pregnant" with this "filling." In Chassidut we are taught that though the lower "something," the "created something," appears to be totally separate from the consciousness of its Creator and the creative force which continuously brings it into existence, nonetheless its seeming separate "somethingness" serves, in truth, to reflect the Absolute and "True Something" who is truly and uniquely independent, the "Cause of all causes."

The insight of Divine wisdom is the "nothing" between the two states of "something," whose ultimate purpose is to serve to draw the consciousness of the "True Something" into the experience of the lower "something." In the power of the process of rectification, the ego must first be "shaken" by the fear of God, the beginning of wisdom. Thereafter one’s "matter" can be purified and clarified in order to become a fitting "mirror" to reflect the True Something. This process of clarification, dependent upon wisdom and its beginning, fear, is expressed in the verse: "You have made all in wisdom." "Made" refers throughout the Torah to the process of rectification and clarification.  The Zohar paraphrases this verse: "You have clarified them all with wisdom." The "art of clarification" is the "beginning of the end"; the three final letters of the alef-beit, are the beginning, middle, and end of the end, respectively.  Just as the tzadik connects to the kuf in its full spelling, so the "reish" "leads in" to the shin, all the clarifications of wisdom ascending upward to their Divine Source in the flame of the love of God and His people Israel.

FORM

The profile of a head; a bent over head.

Worlds:

A man bent over in poverty and servitude.

Conformity to social norms.

Souls:

The mind "bending over" in order to express itself in speech.

Devoted service to God.

Divinity:

The revelation of God’s thoughts through speech.

The union of Kabbalah and halachah.

The presence of Shabbat in the weekdays.

NAME

Head or beginning; poor man.

Worlds:

The state of poverty of this world.

The experience of poverty prior to it leading to selflessness.

Souls:

The conscious state of mind.

The second day of Rosh HaShanah - conscious beginning.

The power to procreate.

Divinity:

The superconscious state of mind.

"My thoughts are not your thoughts."

The first day of Rosh HaShanah - unconscious beginning.

http://www.inner.org/hebleter/reish.htm

The Big J.C.

88

ΚΕΦΑΛΗ ΠΗ

GOLD BRICKS

Teach us Your secret, Master! yap my Yahoos.

Then for the hardness of their hearts, and for the softness of their heads, I taught them Magick.

But... alas!

Teach us Your real secret, Master! how to become invisible, how to acquire love, and oh! beyond all, how to make gold.

But how much gold will you give me for the Secret of Infinite Riches?

Then said the foremost and most foolish: Master, it is nothing; but here is an hundred thousand pounds.

This did I deign to accept, and whispered in his ear this secret:

A SUCKER IS BORN EVERY MINUTE.

COMMENTARY (ΠΗ)

The term "gold bricks" is borrowed from American finance.

The chapter is a setting of an old story.

A man advertises that he could tell anyone how to make four hundred a year certain, and would do so on receipt of a shilling. To every sender he dispatched a post-card with these words: "Do as I do."

The word "sucker" is borrowed from American finance.

The moral of the chapter is, that it is no good trying to teach people who need to be taught.

The I Reish

9x3 9x3

Blood of the I Reish

Fly Me to the Revolutionary Island of Iron Inception

The Dearly Departed

Visions of Urbana 3.0: Waiting For The Worms

The Book of Abramelin, written by Abraham of Worms (c.1362-c.1468 A.D.) outlines an elaborately disciplined ritual designed to activate the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.  It rose in popularity in the early 20th century due to an English language translation from the French by S.L. MacGregor Mathers of the Golden Dawn.

The operation is an extreme test of discipline, in which the participant must pray before sunrise and sunset, must practice chastity, sobriety, and must remain honest and true within all practices of life.  There is a great deal of silence and solitude within the operation, an operation that lasts 6 months according to Mathers.

In 2006, a new translation from the German version of The Book of Abramelin was released.

The first and most obvious difference between the two texts is the style of the writing itself.  I was delighted how easily and naturally Mr. Guth's translation flowed compared to the formality of Mather's King James style.  This I more or less expected. What I didn't expect was how the text itself differed in content.  First of all, the original book was comprised of four "books" instead of only three that are found in Mathers edition.  Second, we learn that the heroic six-month preparation program that is outlined in Mathers is actually a much more complex ceremony lasting eighteen months.

From Lon Milo Duquette's Forward to The Book of Abramelin: A New Translation
from translator Steven Guth and editor Georg Dehn:  

Also discovered in Book Four is a four letter word square for "traveling in the air on a cloud" that contains the letters NASA.

The Jupiter Mission in 2001: A Space Odyssey satisfies many of the components that are essential to the working of the Abramelin operation.  Chastity, sobriety, disciplined orders of business.  18 months in all.  

Is it possible that the Holy Guardian Angel spoken of in the Abramelin text revealed itself to those on board?  Bowman clearly goes through a transformative experience, but could HAL have inadvertently invoked an artificial Holy Guardian Angel too?  Would the appearance of this True Will within HAL be observable and communicated to those back on Earth?

Visions of Urbana

"We sit here stranded though we all do our best to deny it"

 

"The Ghost of electricity"

open the        e        y        e                                   p        o        d           door HAL

"In this room the heat pipes just cough…"

"And Madonna, she still has not showed

We see this empty cage now corrode

Where her cape of the stage once had flowed

The fiddler, he now steps to the road

He writes every thing's been returned which was owed

On the back of the fish truck that loads

While my conscience explodes"

--Bob Dylan

Overlooking The Perilous Chapel 3: Doc-Man

A Sirius Man Eats Whole Wheat Bread

Samuel Beckett wrote of James Joyce:  "To Joyce reality was a paradigm, an illustration of a perhaps an unstatable rule…It is not a perception of order or of love; more humble than either of these, it is a perception of coincidence."  Before we can comprehend reality, we must perceive it accurately, we must examine closely.

Upon closer examination, the apparent continuity error in the game of chess between HAL and Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey was not an error, it was simply a bluff made by HAL to gauge the perception of Poole.   This truth, although in plain sight, was buried by Kubrick, and would only be discovered by the majority of his audience until many years later.  It appears Kubrick, like HAL, was also bluffing.  Was it for the same reason HAL bluffed Poole?  To gauge the perception of the audience?  Sneaky bastard.

Joel and Ethan Coen are a couple of sneaky bastards too.

There is nothing wrong with simply appreciating A Serious Man as a dark comedy, or enjoying 2001: A Space Odyssey as an epic special effects driven science-fiction film.  But the Coen's are, as I said, sneaky bastards.  And like Kubrick, they are offering us something much more profound than just a comedy.

In A Serious Man, Lawrence "Larry" Gopnik and Arthur Gopnik are brothers, who both involve themselves with extremely complex and intellectual exercises.  One embodies the madness of artistic creation, the other the burden of proof.   

The Mentaculus

Arthur is a lonely lumpy soul who spends his time gambling, lurking, and obsessively scribbling into print a work called The Mentaculus, a title that conveys a calculus of mentation.  It is his "probability map of the universe", and is written in a language that seemingly only makes sense to Arthur.  One quick glance and it looks as though poor Arthur is quite ill, mentally.  Yet it reminds me of something else written in a language no one can seemingly understand….

James Joyce, one of the most highly respected artists of the 20th century, spent the last 17 years of his life working on what he called his Work In Progress, which eventually became Finnegans Wake.  Finnegans Wake is a work of literature that makes absolutely no sense to 99% of the people who attempt to read it.  The other 1% claim, rather loudly, that it is a work of genius.  It would be a whole lot easier for the majority to dismiss this book if it weren't for the fact that so many intelligent and respected people populate the 1% who revere Finnegans Wake.  What the hell do they know?  What do they see that the rest of us can’t?

It is possible that The Mentaculus is Arthur’s Work In Progress.  Unfortunately, Arthur is living in Minnesota in the 1960's, and cannot command the kind of audience that Joyce did.  We don't even know if Arthur has ever allowed anyone else to read it.  Ironically, he lives with the one person who might make sense of his masterpiece, his brother Larry.

Schröedinger's Cat

Larry is more successful than Arthur, he has a wife and two children, a career, and a solid social identity.  

Larry is very intelligent, a Professor of Physics, and spends his time lecturing on the laws and theorems  calculated by people even smarter than he, yet he remains the epitome of "those who can, do, those who can't, teach."  Larry is shown lecturing on the Schröedingers Cat thought experiment, and it is a good reflection of Larry's life.  Larry is both Teacher and Student, Married and Alone, Faithful and Faithless, Found and Lost.  It all depends on the observer.

Schröedinger's cat is also a good reflection of the Standard Model of Quantum Physics at the moment, as it remains both Fact and Fiction.  The calculations and equations of quantum physicists promise a unified theory of everything, an explanation for the existence of time, space, and the universe that we live and die in.  The mathematical equations have promised that matter is composed of certain scientifically observable objects, the most important being the top quark, the bottom quark, the tau neutrino, and the Higgs Boson,  So far the bottom quark (1977), the top quark (1995) and the tau neutrino (2000) have been discovered, just like the calculations have promised.  But the Higgs Boson remains the elusive companion of this group, and is still referred to as the Hidden Variable.  We can't claim the Standard Model to be fact until this is finally observed.

"In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork". Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark", as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork". But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau" words in "Through the Looking-Glass". From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark", in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."

 Murray Gell-Mann

Arthur and Larry (Art and Law), two very different brothers, are actually both searching for the same thing, the hidden variable to life, but all they have to show for in their search is loneliness and divorce.  It is said that it is always darkest before the dawn, and for Arthur and Larry, it's getting pretty dark in Room 2³ of the Jolly Roger Motel.  

"Arthur, you've got to pull your self together"

"It's all shit Larry.  It's all shit."

"Arthur don't use that word."

"It's just fucking shit."

"Arthur."

"Look at all that Hashem has given you.  What has he given me?  He hasn't given me shit."

"Arthur, what do I have?  I live at the Jolly Roger"

"You have a family.  You have a job.  Hashem hasn't given me shit.  He hasn't given me bubkes!"

"It's not fair to blame Hashem, Arthur.  Please.  Sometimes….please calm down.  Sometimes you have to help yourself."

"Hashem hasn't given me shit.  Now I can't even play cards."

We have two brothers embracing in the void of an empty swimming pool, lost in a world where Hashem, the divine God they were raised with, has abandoned them.  

There is a message next to Arthur, (a sign?),  that is painted on the concrete, a message that neither are paying attention to.  The audience is most likely not paying attention to it either.  

The message is never revealed completely, but common sense tells us that 3 FT NO DIVING is painted on the concrete as a warning to those who would jump into the shallow pool.  Nothing profound.  But a knowledge of James Joyce and quantum physics is not a common sense, it is a rather uncommon sense, and in this scene, seen through a lens informed by Joyce and quantum physics, the perception of a very curious coincidence occurs.

James Joyce uses the symbol "Ǝ" in the architecture of Finnegans Wake to represent what the Buddhists call "void" and the Taoists call "wu-hsin" or NO MIND.  This NO MIND represents the "class of all possible minds", meaning the aggregation of all possible minds.  This mind does and does not exist, like that damn cat, and is best expressed in the paradoxical language of mystics and the mathematical equations of quantum physics.  Robert Anton Wilson in his brilliant essays on Joyce equates Joyce's Ǝ with the Hidden Variable of quantum physics.

If we allow ourselves to fill in the missing letters through this lens, this message, written on the edge of a void, might be trying to say:

Ǝ

NO 

DIVINE

WHY?  Well, we have two brothers embracing each other, one a poor man's James Joyce, the other a poor man's Schröedinger, and both are lamenting their relationship to the divine.  The message is both pessimistic (NO DIVINE = NO GOD) as well as optimistic ( Ǝ NO DIVINE =  the Hidden Variable, the class of all things Divine is right by you!).  The Coen's have planted a message that seemingly embraces both the pinnacles of artistic and mathematical expression, a message buried as deep as the bluff of HAL.

But do the Coen's believe that the message is the pessimistic one or the optimistic one?  

There is a clue, another message buried somewhere else in the film, one that is more explicit even though it only appears for a brief second of screen time.  If you are paying very close attention, I think the Coen's are very clear as to their answer, because it seems that the elusive companion of the quarks, the Hidden Variable of the Standard Model of quantum physics is as close to Arthur and Larry as the coincidental message painted in black by the side of the pool.  It's right there in The Mentaculus.

Watching The Detectives

Do you see the Celebrity or do you see the Student?  Do you know the Answers or do you ask the Questions?

"Sometimes - well, let's say all times - things are changing. We are judged as human beings on how we treat our fellow human beings. How do you treat your fellow human beings? At night, just before sleep, as you lay by yourself in the dark, how do you feel about yourself? Are you proud of your behavior? Are you ashamed of your behavior? You know in your heart if you have hurt someone - you know. If you have hurt someone, don't wait another day before making things right. The world could break apart with sadness in the meantime."

A Really Big Shew Pt. 4: The Other Side

In film, a continuity error is a mistake that eludes the careful eye of the director.  Even after watching a scene dozens of times, these errors often go unnoticed for years.


Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist as a person, as a chess player, and most famously, as a film director.    So why are there so many continuity errors in his film The Shining?  Many of these errors are well documented here, here, and here.


There are many theories as to why such a well known perfectionist allowed so many imperfections in The Shining, and I agree with those theories that contend that these continuity errors are not in fact errors, and should not be considered imperfections.   They are deliberate choices by the director.  I call these deliberate choices chickens.


It has been established that Stanley Kubrick incorporated his understanding of the writings of Marshall McLuhan into 2001: A Space Odyssey, so it is no leap of faith to suggest that Kubrick, the obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, read The Gutenberg Galaxy cover to cover several times.  I believe he knew about the magical chicken that, in only one second of screen time, helped to illuminate the divide between how literate man and non literate man experience film.


The appearance of this chicken can be considered a type of continuity error, an unintentional element that became part of the film without the intention of the filmmaker.  Remember, the literate man literally could not see the chicken, and had to watch the film frame by frame to be convinced that it was there.


But to the non literate man, the chicken was the star of the show.


I believe that Kubrick understood this and began to recognize that his audience was comprised of the "literate" and the "non literate", and started experimenting with a kind of intentional continuity error, a deliberate chicken, that was obvious to some and invisible to others.


Kubrick makes use of the chicken during this scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey:

Let's call those that have little or no knowledge of the game of chess "non literate" and those with a deep knowledge of the game of chess "literate", and assemble an audience of both to watch 2001.  If we were to stop the film at the end of this chess scene, and ask the audience what they saw, we would find the a similar result of the study in Africa.  The "literate" man would mention the flaw in the winning move, a “chicken” unnoticed by "non literate" man. 

"To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium."

The general consensus of the "non literate" audience would be that Frank and HAL were killing time on the ship playing a game of chess, a game which Frank loses.


A "literate" audience would have more to say.  They would mention that the game of chess depicted between Frank and HAL does not follow the established rules of chess, a fact unnoticed  and unmentioned by the "non literate" audience.  This is our chicken.


If we believe that HAL’s bluff is an accident, a continuity error, then it does nothing to further the narrative of 2001.
If we believe the bluff is not an accident, and is in fact intentional, the chicken opens the doorway into a mystery, and the narrative of 2001 comes alive.  This hyper-literate chicken in 2001 was no without purpose.  In fact, it convoluted McLuhan’s non-literate chicken.


Kubrick was an above average chess player with a very deep knowledge of the game.  The game depicted is the master game Roesch vs. Schlage from 1910 which is documented and published.     There is a 0% chance that the inaccuracy of the chess game was a continuity error or that it eluded Kubrick.  


In fact, the comprehension of 2001 depends completely on the bluff.  And yet, it is hidden from the majority of the audience.  Why?  If The Shining is loaded with these hidden chickens, how are they important to the comprehension of the film? 

A Really Big Shew Pt. 3: Chicken of the See

Why Are There So Many Chickens In The Shining?

In the previous post I discussed the "Film Literacy in Africa" study that Marshall McLuhan references in The Gutenberg Galaxy.  At the center of the study was a short film shown to non-literate tribal natives in Africa.  The film was designed to demonstrate the proper techniques for removing standing water, and actors were filmed doing so in a very slow and deliberate fashion.  When asked what the natives had seen in the film, they quickly responded that they had seen a chicken.  With further questioning they mentioned that they had seen a man as well, but they had not processed what the man was doing.  They hadn't "made a whole story out of it" and, to the surprise of the researchers, were unable to see the film in a three-dimensional perspective.   Much has been made out of the inability of the native to process the film, but there is another angle to this that I want to focus on.

When the natives mentioned that they had seen a chicken, the filmmakers were baffled.  They had not, to their knowledge, filmed a chicken.  It wasn't until they watched the film frame by frame that they eventually saw that there actually was a chicken in the film, for about one second of screen time at the bottom right of the screen.

We have two radically different reviews for the same film.  This is not a subjective argument about how funny or entertaining the film is.  Both reviewers see something objective that the other cannot.

                    The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & when separated
                    From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio
                    Of the Things of Memory, It thence frames Laws & Moralities
                    To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars.
                                                                                 

                                                                                 William Blake, Jerusalem 1804

McLuhan argues the same idea as Blake, that any time a bodily or mental function is extended into a new technology, sense ratios are changed, and when the sense ratios of man are changed, the man changes.

The film study in Africa explicitly demonstrates this.  Let's say that literate man sees Film A and non literate man sees Film B.  Film A and Film B are not subjectively different, they are objectively different.  And neither can capture the completeness of the film on their own.   When analyzed through the lens of both perspectives, we reveal Film AB, which captures more information than is contained separately in Film A or Film B .  This is not to say that Film AB offers the complete film.  The complete film may only exist conceptually.  For now, lets refer to this concept of the complete film as just FILM.  


Obviously, non literate man is capable of developing the lens of the literate man, but is literate man capable of resurrecting the lens of non literate man?  Can man also have access to BOTH lenses, and if so, can these lenses coexist?  Do they work separately, at the same time, or both?

The Great Artificial Barrier

“2001 is a non-verbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only less than 40 minutes of dialogue. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalised pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconsciousness with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to ‘explain’ a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation.”

                                                                                                                                                                                               Stanley Kubrick,  Playboy 1968

convolute 

       A.  (transitive) To make unnecessarily complex.
       B.  (transitive) To fold or coil into numerous overlapping layers.

Did Stanley Kubrick mean Convolute A or Convolute B?  Or a combination of both, Convolute AB?  Or did he mean CONVOLUTE?  And why did he say "message is the medium" instead of "medium is the message" as McLuhan had originally written it?  


If I attempt to "explain" Kubrick, am I also guilty of "emasculating" and "erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation"?  Probably, but my goal is to "tear down the wall" after I'm through.