Dead or alive
Wednesday, 19 September 2007
One of the reasons that I write is that I want toexpress my enthusiasm for art, in all its forms. Music is my first love, but if I had to choose between music and writing, I wouldn’t know what to choose. And then there is so much more! Last night I saw the movie eXistenZ, which impressed me quite a bit, and this morning I read the newspaper and saw these illustrations:
They are made by Tim Biskup and published in the third volume of compilations with his drawings (Dark Horse Books).I had never heard of Tim Biskup, but wow, what a beautiful illustrations! I cut them out and they are now hanging on my computer, for inspiration.
In the time is left between family, work and whatever happens, I love to mess around with all the beautiful things that I find around me. I am not a collector. I just love to play with pen, paper, scissors and glue. All my life I have been making scrap books of whatever I like. That is still one of my favourite activities. I find pleasure in selecting and combining stuff, to create my own little paper Utopia.
I got the eXistenZ-DVD from Bert Kiekens, who invited me to dinner last night. Bert is a physicist and he doesn’t mind answering my often stupid questions and explaining me the basic ideas of modern physics. Last night I got a glimpse of the concept of superposition, which I find very interesting.
I told Bert about an idea that I have not done anything with yet. The idea is to explain complex and difficult ideas (not only from physics, but also from psychology and esoterics) by using movies, because movies are visualisations of ideas. For example: for ages the idea of awakening has been said impossible to explain, but anybody who has seen The Matrix understands it immediately. To understand superposition, Groundhog Day could be a great help: the different possibilities are shown in a linear way in the movie, but I think it does give an insight in what superposition means. Anybody who has seen Being John Malkovicz will have no problem understanding the idea that the mind is a collection of “I’s”: our personality is made up of the people that have impressed us. In the movie the words “I” and “eye” have been taken literally as the same thing, which I think is a brilliant idea. And there are dozens of movies that can be used to demonstrate ideas that are hard to explain in words.
Bert seemed not very enthusiast about this idea, so I maybe it is not such a good idea after all.
I had never seen eXistenZ before. I knew that it is a reality-shift movie, and I heard that some people liked it even better than The Matrix. One of the things that I liked about the movie is that it shows how difficult it is to remember oneself : every time the actors move into another reality they tend to forget the previous “reality”, and most of all they forget the real world. And the same goes for the people who watch this movie: I found it very difficult to both watch the movie and meanwhile remember the various layers of reality which the actors had gone through.
I think I like The Matrix better, because it has a hero and a more happy ending. When eXistenZ ended I felt pretty uncomfortable. “Are we still in the game?”
Here is a recording from the radio show Coast to Coast, in which the caller tries to explain a difficult idea to the host, who doesn’t get it. It is the idea that is perfectly visualised in the movie Sixth sense. In the movie only the main character is dead, but how about the idea that we are all dead without realising it?