"The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least
was the one that had attracted the greatest interest - and the
greatest alarm. This was the team working on ‘total identification’.
The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions.
First, sound, then colour, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama,
had made the old ‘moving pictures’ more and more like reality
itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage
would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience,
and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve
stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but
many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained,
there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience.
A man could become - for a while, at least - any other person,
and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or
imaginary. He could even be plant or animal, if it proved possible
to capture and record the sense impressions of other living
creatures. And when the ‘programme’ was over, he would have
acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life
indeed, indistinguishable from reality itself.
The prospect was dazzling. Many also found it terrifying
and hoped that the enterprise would fail. But they knew in
their hearts that once science had declared a thing possible,
there was no escape from its eventual realization..."
There Is Pleasure In The Pathless Woods (from Childe Harold) by Lord Byron
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
"The Erinyes [called the Furies in Ancient Rome] were the punishers of sinners, called 'those who walk in darkness.' Weeping tears of blood and hissing with hair of vipers, they would descend like a storm. As long as there was sin in the world, they could not be banished." ~ Aeschylus
The Curse by John Berryman
Cedars and the westward sun.
The darkening sky. A man alone
Watches beside the fallen wall
The evening multitudes of sin
Crowd in upon us all.
For when the light fails they begin
Nocturnal sabotage among
The outcast and the loose of tongue,
The lax in walk, the murderers:
Our twilight universal curse.
Children are faultless in the wood,
Untouched. If they are later made
Scandal and index to their time,
It is that twilight brings for bread
The faculty of crime.
Only the idiot and the dead
Stand by, while who were young before
Wage insolent and guilty war
By night within that ancient house,
Immense, black, damned, anonymous.
I re-watched The Grifters for the first time in a decade this weekend. What a film. Frears, Scorsese, Thompson & Westlake combine together to form a perfect creative storm in this excellent crime thriller. Time well spent.
