Arty Farty Friday ~ Going Ape

On our recent wanders around antique and vintage stores in Kansas I found another piece of sculpture by Austin Productions. In an antique mall in Emporia KS, this one came as a surprise. I picked it up for a closer look mainly because I liked the idea it represents; turned it around and was very surprised to see "Austin Productions" carved into the base at the back, dated 1962 - quite an early piece for them. We already have four other Austin Productions pieces (see here, here, here, and here).
I bought the piece at a very reasonable price, much lower than is being asked for similar pieces on E-bay and elsewhere.

I wasn't, originally, aware that it is an "homage" piece, or rough copy, of a famous sculpture by 19th century German sculptor
Wolfgang Hugo Rheinhold
(26 March 1853 – 2 October 1900) who was arguably most famous for his
Affe mit Schädel (Ape with Skull), inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. There have been several variations, copies of, and tributes to Rheinhold's sculpture over the years. Austin Productions was one of the original US manufacturers. The Austin Productions piece differs from Rheinhold's original in fine detail, and in material used.

Track-back Tuesday ~ "some day, mother f......s"

I've been shuffling the January archives again....here's one from January 2010:

In the Right Direction

Reading around various websites and forums recently, I got the feeling that people, in some perverse way, seem to be at best concentrating on negativity, and at worst almost willing on catastrophe and World War III. Heading towards yet more war, especially of the World War variety is not the direction in which the world is supposed to be moving. Later, I read an article by Stephen Gyllenhaal: Peace On Earth, the last paragraph struck a chord, then led me back to something else.

The last para:

I'll take it all and keep right on moving -- one little ant doing his little bit among six billion other ants, because one day, you sons of bitches who talk peace and deliver war, who talk health and deliver illness, who talk good and do bad -- some day, mother f--ckers there will be peace on this planet -- real peace -- because time, real time, is on the side of evolution.

That thought of evolution catapulted me back to a 2007 article which I have mentioned before on this blog, but do not apologise for re-airing: "A History of Violence" by Steven Pinker is interesting and a little uplifiting, though not without its own warning. As a prelude it states:

"In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion."

Steven Pinker goes on to present his theory that, in spite of current world events, in his opinion man has become less violent over the millennia, centuries and decades. The article is well worth reading in full. He finishes with this paragraph:

"But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is."

I want to shout out "Astrological Ages, sir?"

Age of Taurus, Age of Aries - two previous Ages when, in spite of progress in many other areas, violence and inhumanity to man flourished. The Bull and The Ram - neither signifies peace and fellowship, and the history of those Ages broadly matches the symbolism. It wasn't until The Age of Pisces dawned, that there was any sign of a very, very slow movement away from violence - but SO very slow that unless someone like Steven Pinker outlines the stages, and spells it all out, it's impossible to see. If we could have a magical video of the history of man on Earth, fast-forwarded at lightning speed, then it might become clear that we are indeed heading in the right direction, strange as it seems.

Astrologers cannot agree whether we are still in the Age of Pisces or on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius, or have entered it already. Whichever way one prefers to think, neither Pisces nor Aquarius symbolises violence. We must still be working through the dregs of what was left of the Age of Aries, I guess. Perhaps we are nowhere near as far along the astrological age trail as some suspect. But we are moving in a good direction.

Steven Pinker adds

"It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons."

We do have to accept that we live in risky times, of course. To continually focus on that fact, as so many tend to do these days, is not going to make things any less risky. All it does is to spread doom and gloom and take the joy from the life we have.

Variations on a Theme: Mankind's Further Evolution

I've recently read Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End followed immediately by Michael Shaara's The Herald (Michael Shaara was the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Killer Angels adapted for the movie Gettysburg (my post on that movie is linked).

Childhood's End and The Herald can be classed as apocalyptic/dystopian/science fiction novels. Science fiction was right in Arthur C. Clarke's wheelhouse, and though Michael Shaara's most famous book was historical (other end of the scale) he did write some other sci-fi stories and at least one other sci-fi novel - strange combination, history and science fiction!

I enjoy apocalyptic/dystopian novels and some sci-fi, though not all. Enjoying tales of dystopia is perverse of me I guess. I've tried to work out why, but can't quite unravel it. These stories don't scare me at all, or give me bad dreams as reading horror tales of zombies, werewolves or blood-sucking vampires might. The novels sell well, many from decades past have come to be called classics (think:Fahrenheit 451, 1984 The Handmaid's Tale).

I wasn't aware of it when I started reading, but Childhood's End and The Herald have loosely similar themes (apart from straightforward dystopia) : the improvement and further evolution of man, albeit by different means.

BEWARE SPOILERS.

The Herald (1981) was later re-titled The Noah Conspiracy and had a revised ending (I don't yet know how it differs from the original, but can hazard a guess). Storyline: a scientist plans to create an improved version of the human race, which will involve killing millions of people. The tale unfolds gradually, starting with the pilot of a private aircraft flying into a small US airport and finding it deserted. The reader is left, for much of the book, with the pilot attempting to find out exactly what's going on. We discover, eventually, a genetic scientist’s plan to create a "better" human race, eliminating negative traits which threaten, over time, to cause the death of the whole species. His plan will involve the mass killing of many millions of people, but will ensure survival of the race.

I found the novel a very easy read and a book I could not put down. I read most of it in one sitting (unusual for me), only stopped because it was dinner time.

The original title of the novel The Herald refers to words of
Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher, poet etc. An extract from his Thus Spoke Zarathustra by explanation:

Zarathustra’s Prologue:
When Zarathustra arrived at the edge of the forest, he came upon a town. Many people had gathered there in the marketplace to see a tightrope walker who had promised a performance. The crowd, believing that Zarathustra was the ringmaster come to introduce the tightrope walker, gathered around to listen. And Zarathustra spoke to the people:

I teach you the Overman! Mankind is something to be overcome. What have you done to overcome mankind?

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves. Do you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and revert back to the beast rather than overcome mankind? What is the ape to a man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just so shall a man be to the Overman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Even the wisest among you is only a confusion and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I ask you to become phantoms or plants?

Behold, I teach you the Overman! The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beg of you my brothers, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them! ........................................Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the Overman!"

Childhood's End first published in 1953 wasn't such an easy read, but still enjoyable. I balked a bit when the author changed his cast of characters a third of the way through the novel.

The story is told in three parts, spanning the period roughly mid-20th century to 2075. The author could have been echoing or projecting, via analogy, the troubled situation around the time of the story's conception: cold war, segregation, possibility of nuclear annihilation, uneasy years when the horrors of World War 2 were still fresh in memory.

Standard sci-fi ingredients begin the novel: huge space ships positioned over the world's major cities, ships populated by a race known as The Overlords, who never show themselves to humans, but communicate with human representatives. The Overlords were not here to take over the planet for our gold or other reserves, or to enslave the human race. Instead they seemed to be intent on saving us from ourselves. Over time they solve our major troubles: war, famine, segregation, crime and poverty become things of the past. Any resistance is quashed by direct application of CIA-style "soft power". Utopia is born. Whether that was a Good Thing is a matter for philosophical perusal - maybe a bit of astrological perusal also. Would it be possible to erase our natural instincts of aggression, greed, lust (drawn from the planetary position of Earth)? And would it be A Good Thing to deny us the ability to choose for ourselves, to choose wrong decisions, create destructive items, wreak havoc, jump to mistaken conclusions, but also to attempt to create solutions to overcome what our weaknesses had wrought?

We begin to see the outcome in the remaining two phases of the story, set in the following 100 or so years. The Overlords revealed themselves. Humans were horrified to find the alien beings looked incredibly like illustrations encountered somewhere long ago, in a far less benign role! They tell humans that their purpose is to protect them from "powers and forces that lie among the stars – forces beyond anything that you can ever imagine…. ‘It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man."

During the story's final phase, ten years later, Earth's children discover paranormal skills, fall into catatonia after strange dreams, and eventually withdraw from contact with parents. Overlords reveal that their job as servants of The Overmind, is to shepherd humanity into its next stage of development, though The Overlords, for unexplained reasons, cannot progress. Humanity in its current form has reached the end of its existence; the newly cultivated species will join The Overmind, Earth will be no more.

I was particularly taken by a very clever twist - the explanation of the Overlord's physical appearance.

The book can be read as a straightforward sci-fi tale, or can also be seen as a network of analogies, some more obvious than others, and, it must be remembered, seen from the viewpoint of the author in the early 1950s.

The huge spaceships forever hovering over all major cities = a world state fostering social justice. Add some prescience on the part of Arthur C. Clarke and translate them as super-sized corporations, enforcing sterility via their own opaque motivations. Interwoven, too is the ancient vision of of angels/demons hovering over mankind.

Astrologers believe that our individuality is defined, in part, by the position of the Sun, Moon and planets at the exact time and in the exact place where we were born. Whether that individuality could be so easily stripped from us, as a race, by benign means, is something this book might be asking us to consider. What did Arthur C. Clarke think of astrology? Not a lot, it seems. And that's a pity. See HERE

As far as I know, early sci-fi authors, while envisioning flying cars, alien beings and inter-galactic flight, didn't ever mention something as wildly unbelievable as The Internet, smart phones, i-pods, Facebook, Twitter. Already I'm beginning to feel that today's young generation belong to a subtly different race from the one to which I belong myself. This type of feeling can only spread, even to those many years my junior, in coming years. Perhaps this is the "shift in consciousness" some seem to expect....beginning with the end of the current cycle in the Mayan calendar?

Movie Remakes, Evolution, Cycles.....

I can often be heard complaining, "Why do they produce so many movie remakes? A blindfolded person could go into any library, pick out four books at random and find four new plots for movies. Why are we subjected to remakes, sometimes even more than one remake?"

My most recent complaint came up as I looked at our cinema's current listings:

"3:10 to Yuma - For Pete's sake! That was a crusty old western. Why did they need to remake that one? And Russell Crowe is nobody's idea of a character from the old west....(grumble grumble).....His face is too podgy. The old west needs craggy, lean and mean, they didn't have McDonald's and high fructose corn syrup in those days!"

HeWhoKnows sighs patiently and says, "$$$$$$$."

"But.....but..."

I decided to ask Google, who landed me upon a site which had nothing to do with Hollywood.
Science Daily. Extract from "Life - the Remake".

"If the history of life were to play out again from the beginning, it would have a similar plot and outcomes, although with a different cast and timing, argues UC Davis paleontologist Geerat Vermeij in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Evolution at this level, like the rest of history, is predictable, perhaps more predictable than people want to imagine," Vermeij said. "Many traits are so advantageous under so many circumstances that you are likely to see the same things again and again..........Vermeij argues that some innovations, such as photosynthesis, plant seeds, mineralized bones and even human language are just such good ideas that they would reappear, although at different times and in somewhat different forms."

After reading this, I started thinking about astrology, then I managed to answer my own question.

We are made up of cycles, here on Earth. Everything is a cycle. I ought not to be surprised about remakes. They will be as inevitable a part of life on Earth as the turning of the clock or the seasons, or the Moon's waxing and waning. Hollywood moguls probably don't realise exactly why, of course, all they care about are the $$$$$.

Planetary cycles often bring with them a remake of our own life story, especially in the case of Saturn, Uranus and Pluto cycles. Our lifestyles can be remade, our life stories re-written - different cast, different setting, variations in plot, but with us always in the starring role.

To be fair, some movie remakes, like some planetary cycles, have been worth sitting through. Bringing a classic story such as "Ben Hur" up to date for a new generation, with modern technology, bigger screen, and technicolor was well worthwhile, back in the early 1960s. I'd feel pretty annoyed though if they tried to produce yet another version of it.

I'd be miffed to have to live through another Pluto to Venus transit, too!

Enough is enough, after all.