RANT: WAIT! WHA? IS THAT A BIG STEAMING PILE OF HUBRIS I SEE? #1

 

I WAS WATCHING A TV SHOW THE OTHER NIGHT, called Katla, set in Iceland about a group of people living in a remote part of the country, next to an active volcano. When the wind blew, which was most of the time, you could almost taste the ash and burning sulphur. In the nearby town of Vik, they kept their windows closed, using wet towels to seal gaps along the sill, and constantly swept ash from their floors. Their eyes were red-rimmed, everyone coughed, and when anyone went outside, they wore a face mask. The landscape beyond the town was a frozen desert, bleak and covered with drifts of black, volcanic soil. The whole place screamed: “Nuclear Winter!” Dang! if those Icelanders don’t know how to make depressing television!

The town of Vik, (an actual place I sincerely hope is not as it appears in the show) looks like a ghost town; most places are boarded up; most residents have left due to the increasing activity of the volcano. And it’s only a matter of time before last residents will need to evacuate.

The show opens with a mystery. A naked, ash-covered woman is found walking in the back country. She’s brought to the small hospital in Vik in shock and can’t remember anything about what happened to her. Much speculation occurs in town around who she is and where she comes from. As the story progresses, her memory recovers, and she claims she is a Swedish woman who had disappeared from Vik some twenty years earlier!  The kicker is, if it is the Swede, she hasn’t aged!

Of course, the local police chief assumes she’s an imposter and manages to contact the actual woman who had visited Vik two decades earlier, but who’d subsequently returned home to Sweden. In the meantime, a second, naked, ash-covered woman is found near Vik, this one claiming to be the sister of one of the town’s current residents who disappeared over a year ago! Like the other woman, she has the complete memories of who she claims to be, minus the period of her disappearance.  

Next, a boy who died in a car accident, four years earlier, in Reykjavik, a hundred miles away, is found in an abandoned warehouse in Vik. And when the Swedish woman arrives in Iceland to confront her imposter, we learn the young woman looks exactly like she did twenty years earlier. It goes without saying that people returning to life, coupled with the arrival of a doppelganger or two, make for rather uncomfortable gatherings around  kitchen tables.   

 

THE NEXT EVENING, I took in a movie called Clay, set in a small, 1960s seaside town in England. It’s a coming-of-age story I found generally profitable to watch. The main character, a young schoolboy named Davie, is discovering the awkward joys of adolescent love. In addition, he experiences a crisis of faith and must choose what kind of man he’ll become and what path—light or dark—he will take.

When a new boy arrives in the neighbourhood, Davie’s convictions about himself and what is truly possible in life are challenged. Stephen is tall and handsome, charismatic, fiendishly clever and seems to hold secret powers of persuasion and conjuring. As our young hero nervously embarks upon the courtship of a pretty classmate, his path keeps crossing with the new boy’s. We learn that Stephen is cruel and arrogant and seems to have the ability to hypnotize others at will. We watch as he quickly gains the upper hand with his good-hearted, though muddle-headed, foster mother, keeping her bedazzled and subservient to his demands. And he seems to have a talent for sculpture, as well, giving to the local church several small clay statues he carved of important Catholic saints. We soon learn that his charitable donation is a disguise for what he truly intends for his clay-working.

 

AT THE SAME TIME, he seems to need young Davie to join him in his enterprise, which is nothing less than the creation from clay of living beings! He makes small clay sculptures come to life to impress Davie who increasingly falls under the spell of the older boy, eventually helping Stephen bring to life a clay man! This living statue, a golem-like creature, obeys both boys as its master and while Davie is increasingly horrified at what he has done, Stephen is delighted, though, he says, their creation has defects, the most important being that it is not able to commit murder on command. This, Stephen attributes to the “softer”, more humane, qualities the creature absorbed from Davie during its creation. The remainder of the movie revolves around whether Davie will join Stephen in a life of crime, abetted by the older boy’s magical powers, or follow a more life-affirming course.

 

TWO STORIES, QUITE DIFFERENT, YET EACH involves the resurrection or re-creation of life. In Katla, we learn the re-created people have been brought into existence by the presence of an ancient, extrasolar meteorite that lay buried beneath the Katla volcano. The volcano’s activity has dispersed parts of the rock which interact with the nearby humans in a purely organic manner, without a guiding intelligence. This contrasts with Stephen’s magical conjuring that relies upon an intense belief that he can indeed create life from inanimate clay (and from using pieces of the consecrated Eucharist that altar-boy Davie procures for him—the communion host representing another, powerful belief system, of course.)   

 

That “Clay”, the eponymously named clay creature made by Stephen and Davie, is conflicted, and seemingly tormented by its dual nature and the opposing choices its two masters demand of it, in the end is seen more like an object of pity than one to be feared as a monster. It is Stephen, who knowingly, happily, abuses both inanimate and animate alike, who has earned that label.

Interestingly, the boys’ creation was only a bit more talkative that Boris Karloff’s creature in the horror-movie classic, Frankenstein*, with their clay man lurching robotically around town on its rough-formed legs, much like the creature from the 1931 Hollywood production.

By contrast, the ash-covered life-forms in Katla are identical to their human models, created by a process that somehow, and from somewhere, acquires the information to perfectly recreate the dead humans—not just physically—but incorporating their memories and experiences, down to the molecular level of their DNA. Where does such a psychic store of information come from? Is there a psychic repository somewhere?

 

Does it surround our world, like Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere”⁺? Finally, how is it that a meteorite from a distant star can access this psychic realm and realize its transformations in our world? But such is meat for another post, I think. 

Though it calls into question our definitions of “living” and “non-living”, and where the line separating the two—if they are, in fact, separate—exists.

WHAT I MEAN TO (LONG-WINDILY) SAY IS that both videos depict the inanimate (meteoritic rocks, clay) being used to create life. And in the movie version of Frankenstein, dead organic matter (body parts) is used by Doctor Frankenstein and Igor for the same purpose.  But the idea that dead or inanimate matter can be used to create life is kind of weird when you think about it. It doesn’t make sense. How can a negative create a positive? Something from nothing—how does that work? Going back several billions of years when the earth was little more than a cooling ball of rock, what brings about life? Where’s the spark? How can it come from supposedly inanimate rocks? Or was there a program for life coded into the mantle, a rocky DNA of sorts, like that found in the meteorite beneath Katla, albeit not with quite so dramatic results? Was life always there? Just add water, stir, and simmer for a couple of eons? Maybe there’s more to our planet’s rocky crust than we currently understand. Gaia is the whole of our world, after all.

AND PERHAPS all that energy, from the first pulse of microbial life to the trillions upon trillions of living animals (and plants, why not?) around today—perhaps all that psychic energy never goes away, or else it’s translated onto other planes of existence, like the noosphere, perhaps? It would be rather random for all of it to go to waste. Just where does our thinking go? (And our feelings, sensations, our dreams?) Perhaps they’re all put into storage and saved for another day? 

 

Strange thoughts and a lot of perhaps-ing. But it’s grey and overcast outside and I can’t catch a glimpse of the noosphere, anywhere. Oh well, that’s enough for today.

 

Cheers, Jake.

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* In Mary Shelley’s book of the same name, we never learn how Victor Frankenstein (alone BTW, sans Igor) accomplished his task of "creating life". Victor, tells his story to Robert Walton, the captain of a ship exploring the ice-laden waters of the North Atlantic that he fortuitously comes upon, but he does not give details as to how he animated his “creature”, lest others be tempted, by their own hubris, to follow in his footsteps. Victor confesses to Robert that he profoundly regrets his decision to “act as God” in creating life, both for the effrontery it gave to nature and also for how his actions have wrecked his own life, and the lives of all those he loved. 

[Hmmm? GMOs, anyone? "gain-of-function" viral research? CRISPER gene-editing? Artificial Intelligence? Monetizing Nature? (My personal fav!) Dare I go on?]

Shortly after completing his memoir, Victor dies, and his creature, boarding Robert's ship and learning it has arrived too late to beg Victor's forgiveness for its having destroyed his family and friends (long backstory), is inconsolable. It swiftly runs from the ship onto the flowing ice, and to its watery grave.

 

⁺ “Noosphere” was a word I also overheard this week, and yes, while watching another movie. This one was about an ancient evil entity inculcating itself into the world to create chaos and mayhem. (Sounds like a virus!) And this evil ur-being contacted and controlled its disciples via the "noosphere". And if you haven’t had your booster shot of apocalyptic horror movies yet, The Empty Man is for you (not me). And I figure if the noosphere can host implacably evil psychic energy, then it can host merciful good psychic energy, as well.

  

 

 

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