What the @!#? Do I Know?


After seeing "What The #!*# Do We Know," which curiously enough hasn't opened yet in San Francisco, I wanted to take my daughter to see it, so I saw it two days in a row. The film is on three levels, sort of in the style of Dennis Potter's television work.

In Potter's, "The Singing Detective," he used the institutional, or most ordered, level, then dropped down to the hallucinatory level of the patient, where he imposed his creative process on the otherwise normal practice of medicine. Beneath that was the imagination turning the personal history to fiction. In the climax they ended up in the same room and there was a shootout. The patient was killed, and reborn as the character he had imagined himself to be.

In "What the bleep Do We Know" there is a similar institutional level on top, in the form of interviews with quantum scientists and doctors and theology professors about what reality is, and what it is not.

The next layer down is an actress playing a photographer on a personal transformation journey. And beneath that, animated sequences showing what is going on in the brain and the cell receptors to drive the behaviors at the surface. The thesis is that we can use our thoughts to change our bodies, and that "good" thoughts make positive changes and "bad" thoughts make negative changes.

Then at the end of the film, the wrap-up was that there is nothing that is good or bad, except we make it so. And I wondered if some New Age termite had gotten into the film and eaten some of its credibility as objective science. There were two places that had problematic information claims. One was the photographs of water that were supposed to turn to beautiful mandalas when you say something nice, and erratic black holes when you say something nasty.

Not only when you say something nasty ... You can just stick a note on the water and remind it -- it has to get it's waterglasses to check it out -- that your intentions are pure, and they float into heaven on emotion that is equally pure. Linda checked it out on the Internet and concluded that the impression is given that the water was in liquid form and changed. It seems instead that the water was frozen with these notes on it. Freezing water creates geometric forms, and they are typically beautiful. She and I are both left with the feeling that this was possibly giving a false impression about the behavior of the water. We want to believe it is true but that isn't the same thing as surrendering our critical faculties.

The other thing that bothered me as being presented as historical fact was the story about Columbus and his ships off the coast of someplace or other, and how the natives could not see the ships because they have no receptors for them. It's a great story. The first time I heard it, it was Magellan off of Terra Del Fuego, and the next time I heard it, it was Darwin's ship, the Beagle, and the selectively blinded were from the Galapagos. It might be a true story and it might be an anthropological myth. Of course all three stories might be true. But that's all speculation.

"Can you see our ships?"

"I have no idea what you just said."

"My God, Beavers, I think he said they don't see any ships."

"Do you see the ships!" Speaking more loudly and enunciating carefully.

"I don't know. About six o'clock."

But these were about the only places where it slid into New Age "in with the good air and out with the bad air" mind yoga. The movie can't have it both ways. If the thesis we are given is that we have to break out of this mindset of good and bad, then we can't simultaneously be presented with a picture of the Virgin smiling when we are nice to the other children and having a nervous breakdown if we have a bad day.

Conscious evolution is the Singing Detective emerging like a snake shedding old skin from the dead past. He has moved from instinctual level to conscious existence, putting his energy into what he himself created as a holder for it. The ultimate creative act is to create oneself in the future, and consciously evolve toward what is held in intention.

William S. Burroughs, on this subject:

"We can create a land of dreams.

"But how can we make it solid?

"We don't. That is precisely the error of the mummies. They made spirit solid. When you do this, it ceases to be spirit. We will make ourselves less solid.

"Well, that's what art is about, isn't it? All creative thought, actually. A bid for immortality. So long as sloppy, stupid, so-called democracies live, the ghosts of various boring people who escape my mind still stalk about in the mess they have made.

"We poets and writers are tidier, fade out in firefly evenings, a Prom and a distant train whistle, we live in a maid opening a boiled egg for a long ago convalescent. We live in the snow on Michael's grave falling softly like the descent of their last end on all the living and the dead, we live in the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, in the last and greatest of human dreams ..."

Posted: Mon - June 7, 2004 at 02:26 PM