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The Watchers
Madness sometimes seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy or more accurately a positive feedback mechanism. You start going a little crazy and people start to look at you a little funny. The more they look at you, the more crazy you get and so on.
The Universe also seems to do its very best to give you what you expect and this includes whatever visual or auditory special effects are required to fit in with your current belief systems, crazy or otherwise. Talking cats? You got it. And once you've experienced 'hallucinations' how can you ever trust your senses again?
Who are the Watchers? They are
the ultimate audience for our little human dramas and comedies. We may
think that we are the audience as we watch the world go by or at least
the television version of it. But at best most of us are merely extras,
understudies or the eternally 'resting'. The Watchers are the gods for
whom we all play, with flair and expertise like the Magus and the Players
or blundering like most of us poor saps. You may, if you are unlucky or
lucky depending on your point of view, find that you have their entire
attention for a time. Remember to smile and try to put on a good show,
there's a good chap.
A friend of mine and I were in the Natural History Museum and she remarked
how animals in safari parks must hate being followed around and spied
on all the time. 'At least if I want to get away, I can go home and shut
my door but what if you can't shut your door?'.
Well, quite.
"Have you ever
been experienced? I have"
Jimi Hendrix
"The sound made me smile;
then I realized its unlikelihood in the New York Public Library. I looked
around...the bubbling laughter continued, even growing louder.
Then surprise: the laughter must be my hallucination.
I sat back in my chair and tried briefly to block it out but the laughter
continued to flow. When I looked up I saw very far away and high up a
fat man shaking with laughter and pointing a finger at me. He seemed to
think that my effort was the play of a silly fool. He also found amusing
my effort to smile at the realization that I was a fool. He thought that
my seeing his laughter at my smiling at his laughter was also funny. When
I finally frowned he laughed even harder. 'Enough,' I said loudly but
began to laugh myself.
My mind was suddenly filled with the vision of thousands of fat men sitting
up there in the fourth dimension, watching the antics of human aspiration
and purpose and laughing - not a single one sober or compassionate or
pitying. Our plans, hopes, expectations and promises and the realities
of the future, which they could also see: only sources of laughter. The
men (they were both men and women actually but all fat) often crowded
together to look at one particular human whose life seemed to evoke special
ironies or humour.
I was laughing again with my fat men but the woman opposite me and the
attendant with a finger to his lips were both hissing violent 'shhhhshes'.
'Look!' I said with a huge smile and pointed off toward the ceiling and
the fourth dimension. 'It's all there', I went on between chuckles.'The
answer - up there'"
Luke Rhineheart, 'The Dice Man'
"There must be some way
to get out of here, said the Joker to the Thief"
Jimi Hendrix, 'All along the Watch Tower'
"Be a clown, be a clown,
be a clown"
Danny Kaye
Sources:
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The Dice Man
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Walking on Glass |
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The Truman Show
|
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Being John Malkovich |
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Don Quixote
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Don Juan de Marco |
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Journey to the East
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The Magus |
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Are You Experienced |
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Ed Wood |
