Film Adaptations from the fiction of Cornell Woolrich

STREET OF CHANCE, THE LEOPARD MAN, PHANTOM LADY, MARK OF THE WHISTLER, DEADLINE AT DAWN,Fall Guy, THE CHASE, THE GUILTY, BLACK ANGEL, FEAR IN THE NIGHT, I WOULDN’T BE IN YOUR SHOES, NIGHT HAS 100O EYES, THE WINDOW, REAR WINDOW, OBSESSION, NIGHTMARE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Woolrich

http://members.toast.net/woolrich/black.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leopard_Man

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_Lady_(film)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_domain List of films in the public domain

Note this blog tremendous list of noirs covered http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2005/01/noir-of-week-list.html

http://www.answers.com/topic/the-mark-of-the-whistler

Plot
After a fight with his wife, Scott Henderson, a handsome and successful 32-year-old civil engineer, picks up a mysterious woman in a bar and they go out. The woman refuses to exchange names, becoming the phantom lady of the film.
When Henderson returns home, he finds cops waiting to question him because his wife has been murdered with his necktie. Henderson and the cops try to find the phantom lady who can provide him with an alibi but fail. It's up to Carol, Henderson's loyal secretary with a secret to trace the phantom and set Henderson free.
In what may be the film's most famous sequence, rhythmic inter-cutting between Elisha Cook, Jr.'s frantic drumming (dubbed by Gene Krupa) at a seedy night club and the leering responses of sexy secretary Ella Raines climaxes in a heated sexual encounter without actually showing a sex act on the screen.

http://www.answers.com/topic/the-mark-of-the-whistler

PlotThe Whistler, the unseen mystery-story narrator of radio fame, relates another tale that he's gleaned from "walking by night" in Mark of the Whistler. Richard Dix stars as a drifter who poses as the owner of an unclaimed bank account. Dix's new identity brings him nothing but misery as he falls victim to the actual claimant's startling secrets, lost loves and dangerous enemies--including one bent on killing for revenge. The second of Columbia's Whistler series, Mark of the Whistler was an enormous improvement on the first film, with a healthy number of unexpected plot twists within its 60-minute time frame. Mark of the Whistler was based on a story by Cornell Woolrich and directed by future horror specialist William Castle. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_at_Dawn This noir attracted my attention as to the comments on the film Critical reaction
[edit] Plot
Alex Winkley (Bill Williams), a young Navy sailor, wakes up from a night of drinking in New York City and finds he has a wad of cash. His memory is hazy, but he knows he got it from a woman he had visited earlier in the evening, Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane).
With the help of a dance hall girl, June Goth (Susan Hayward), he attempts to return the money, only to find out that the woman from whom he got the cash is now dead. The sailor isn't sure if he's the killer or not. Alex and June, along with a philosophical cabbie (Lukas), stay up all night attempting to solve the murder mystery before the sailor has to catch a bus to the naval base in Norfolk, Virginia in the morning. Their deadline is at dawn.
During the film, there are many false leads and red herrings, involving a blind piano player named Sleepy Parsons (Miller), and a young couple. Bartelli had been in the business of blackmailing men with whom she had had affairs, so there are many possible suspects. The woman's brother Val (Calleia), adds a touch of menace to the plot. The surprise ending resolves all issues, including the relationship between Alex and June.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(1946_film) This noir attracted my attention as to the comments on the film : Critical reactionFilm Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward notes: "Phantom Lady excepted, The Chase is the best cinematic equivalent of the dark, oppressive atmosphere that characterizes most of Cornell Woolrich's best fiction." [1]The film was entered into the 1947 Cannes Film Festival.[

Plot
This dream-like film noir is about Chuck Scott, a World War II vet now a penniless drifter tormented by bizarre dreams, who takes a job as driver to Eddie Roman (Cochran), a vicious gangster. Roman tests his new driver, Scott, by taking control of his car in the back seat, unbeknownst to the driver. Roman has an accelerator in the back seat of his car so that he can "take over" total control whenever he wants. This bizarre trick not only unnerves his new driver but Roman's right hand man, Gino (Lorre). Scott passes the test and gets the job. Things get tough for Scott when he falls in love with the gangsters wife, who has attempted to kill herself. They run off together to Cuba and a bizarre chase begins.

Main cast

Robert Cummings and Michèle Morgan
Robert Cummings as Chuck Scott
Michèle Morgan as Lorna Roman
Steve Cochran as Eddie Roman
Lloyd Corrigan as Emmerich Johnson
Jack Holt as Cmdr. Davidson
Peter Lorre as Gino

Critical reaction
Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward notes: "Phantom Lady excepted, The Chase is the best cinematic equivalent of the dark, oppressive atmosphere that characterizes most of Cornell Woolrich's best fiction." [1]
The film was entered into the 1947 Cannes Film Festival.[

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guilty

Plot
The film tells the story of two roommates. One of the men, who suffered a head injury in battle, meets a girl and starts dating her. When he finds out she's dating other men around town he dumps her and starts dating her sweet twin sister. The sister ends up missing and later is found murdered on an apartment rooftop. Her boyfriend is accused of the crime. [1][2] The film is based on Woolrich's short story "Two Men in a Furnished Room." The film about twin sisters shares a similar plot to The Dark Mirror released a year earlier.
This film was produced by oil millionaire Jack Wrather, who was also married to lead actress Bonita Granville.
[edit] Cast
Bonita Granville as Estelle Mitchell/Linda Mitchell
Don Castle as Mike Carr
Regis Toomey as Detective Heller
John Litel as Alex Tremholt
Wally Cassell as Johnny Dixon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Angel

Black Angel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about the 1946 film.
Directed by
Roy William Neill
Produced by
Tom McKnightRoy William Neill
Written by
Cornell Woolrich (novel)Roy Chanslor
Starring
Dan DuryeaJune VincentPeter LorreBroderick CrawfordConstance DowlingWallace FordJunius Matthews
Distributed by
Universal Pictures
Release date(s)
August 2, 1946 (U.S. release)
Running time
81 min
Language
English
Black Angel is a 1946 black-and-white film noir mystery film based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich. It was directed by Roy William Neill, who directed many of the Sherlock Holmes film series. This was his last film.
Contents[hide]
1 Plot
2 Reaction
3 Main cast
4 Pop culture
5 References
6 External links
//
[edit] Plot
A falsely convicted man's wife, Catherine (June Vincent), and an alcoholic composer and pianist, Martin (Dan Duryea) team up in an attempt to clear her husband of the murder of a blonde singer, who is Martin's wife. Their investigation leads them to face-to-face confrontations with a determined policeman (Broderick Crawford) and a shifty nightclub owner (Peter Lorre), whom Catherine and Martin suspect may be the real killer.
[edit] Reaction
Dark City: The Film Noir, by Spencer Selby, calls Black Angel: "Important, stylish B-noir, featuring Dan Duryea as the ironic central character."
Writer Cornell Woolrich hated this adaption of his story which, aside from the conclusion, differed greatly from his book.
[edit] Main cast
Dan Duryea as Martin Blair
June Vincent as Catherine Bennett
Peter Lorre as Marko
Broderick Crawford as Captain Flood
Constance Dowling as Mavis Marlowe
Wallace Ford as Joe
Junius Matthews as Dr. Courtney

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_in_the_Night

Plot
Bank teller Vince Grayson (DeForest Kelley) dreams that he stabs someone in an octagonal room of mirrors and locks the body in a closet. When he wakes up, he discovers marks on his throat, a strange key and a button in his pocket, and blood on his cuff. Cliff Herlihy (Paul Kelly), his police officer brother-in-law, tries to convince him it was just a dream. Then, one day, while trying to find shelter from the rain, the pair finds themselves taking shelter in the strange house from Vince's dream. After being rescued from an attempted suicide by Cliff, the detective uncovers clues that point to an evil hypnotist (Robert Emmett Keane) manipulating Vince.

http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2006/04/i-wouldnt-be-in-your-shoes-1948.html

A young married couple is living together in a tiny one-room apartment in New York City. They both have dreams of making it big as dancers but lately they haven’t been able to get a break. The wife works at a dancing school at night, where she dances with lonely men for tips. The husband pounds the pavement every day looking for dancing work but not finding any. Making matters worse, the man is worried about his wife staying out all hours of the night with the guys at the dance school. I guess the “Ortiz Dance School” is the 40’s equivalent of a “Gentleman’s Club” today. The woman flirt with the men and the men walk out of the place with a smile on their face, perfume on their clothes, and a pound lighter in the wallet.

Tom gets hotter and hotter as he waits for his wife Ann to return one night. When she finally does, she tells him she stayed to talk to “Santa Claus”’; a man who tips her well at the place. The dancing couple eventually makes up and goes to bed. Just as the lights go out, cats in the alley below begin to howl. Tom, a little drunk, throws his shoes down at them to shut them up. His wife tells him it’s his last pair of shoes – his tap shoes- and that he must go down now and get them. He goes out to get them but doesn’t find the shoes. In the morning, the shoes are at their doorstep. Happy that he can go out with a pair of shoes, the incident is forgotten.This then leads to Tom getting arrested for murder when the cops find a shoe print of his by a recently found dead body.

Tom is tried and convicted. He’s sentenced to death “the Tuesday after Christmas.” So while the rest of the world is celebrating the holiday season, Ann counts down the days to Christmas… and to the day her husband will be killed. Finally, out of desperation Christmas Eve, Ann offers herself to “Santa Claus” – who also turns out to be one of the policemen that arrested her husband- in an attempt to get him to find the real killer. Ann promises to marry Judd if he can get Tom released. They seal the pact with a kiss.

Actors Don Castle and Elyse Knox play Tom and Ann in the film, but the real star is third-billed Regis Toomey as the obsessive Judd. Usually when you see Toomey in a film he plays a straight-as-an-arrow cop, so when he turns out to be Ann’s creepy “Santa Claus” –and later even more- boy was I surprised.This is a treat of a film. The mystery story, at first confusing and unbelievable, turns out to be logical and clever. The film was directed by William Nigh, who knocked out a large amount of films in the 1930s including a handful of Mr. Wong mysteries. Nigh’s direction is stagy but some of the outdoor scenes, especially when Ann meets Judd at night by flashlight, have a shadowy film-noir look.

recently got my hands on “I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes,” another one of Woolrich’s unremitting nightmares turned into a very entertaining B-film. It’s interesting to see how dark this film is, even with an ending that is unsurprisingly upbeat.

In my former post, I presented a bio on Cornell Woolrich and stated that motre films were generated from his crime novels into noir films than perhaps any other writer at6 any time, incluiding the titles above referenced.

Woolrich World was a tenement building where death groaned under the
floorboards (?The Corpse Next Door,? ?The Body Upstairs,? ?The Kid and the
Corpse?). It was a land of derangement (?Walls That Hear You,? ?The Screaming
Laugh,? ?Dark Melody of Madness?), where the body count piled up like garbage
bags on weekends (?Graves for the Living,? ?Preview of Death,? ?Death Sits in
the Dentist?s Chair,? ?Death in the Air,? ?Dead on Her Feet?), and where the
deceased could be you or I (?Through a Dead Man?s Eye,? ?The Death of Me?) — or
the author. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/columnist/corliss/article/0,9565,557218,00.html#ixzz0buUa3IS9

That?s not true of Woolrich?s prime-time crime fiction; his great
decade was the 40s, with 11 novels and dozens of powerful short pieces. But you
don?t read Woolrich for the writing, exactly. You read it for the atmosphere,
the smoky, urban settings that enshroud his helpless or conscienceless
characters. (For a sturdy starter set, pick up ?The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus,? with ?I Married a Dead Man,?
?Waltz into Darkness? and five short stories, including ?Rear Window.?) Woolrich
deals in moral ambiguity on its way to becoming moral invisibility. In Woolrich,
love and death — the act of love and the act of death — can be the same thing.
The author?s triumph is to make the subjects and stories so varied (and thus
suspenseful) while the tone is constantly dark, menacing, inescapable. This
world-view is so consistent, it must be personal. In his fiction, the mystery
man wrote his own autobiography, one page at a time.
And, one frame at a
time, Hollywood put it in the minds of the mass audience. Woolrich fiction
inspired three near-classics of the 40s: ?Phantom Lady,? ?The Window? and ?No
Man of Her Own.? Alfred Hitchcock expanded one Woolrich story, originally called
?Murder from a Fixed Perspective,? into ?Rear Window.? The most recent
adaptation: the 2001 ?Original Sin,? another version of ?Waltz into Darkness,?
with Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie. (I?ll address the Woolrich film oeuvre
in my next column.) Read more: The Woolrich mood translated into other languages. Francois Truffaut
made two Woolrich films, ?The Bride Wore Black? and (from ?Waltz into Darkness?)
?Mississippi Mermaid,? in consecutive years. German wunderbrat Rainer Werner
Fassbinder turned another Woolrich story into the sadomasterpiece ?Martha.?
Japanese melodramas and Italian ?gialli? have turned his fevered words into hot
images. Since the 1940s, his prime crime time, not a decade has passed without
at least one Woolrich movie.
None of this made Woolrich famous, or rich.
Nothing could make him happy. But then, who said that life was going to be fair?
The most one could hope for, in the Woolrich world, was to find meaning in
misery. In his 1943 novel ?Black Angel,? the heroine, whose quest for justice
turns her into an avenging angel, meets a sensitive drunk who falls in love with
her. For that love, he kills himself. The woman feels no guilt, only
satisfaction. ?I gave him something to die for,? she says. ?It?s better to die
for something than to live for nothing.? Read more: http://www/
In 1930, while still in Los Angeles, Woolrich wed Gloria Blackton, a
daughter of movie pioneer J. Stuart Blackton. The marriage was doomed from the
start. In a 1933 story, the Cleveland Plain Dealer described the groom as ?a
precocious, sensitive and strange young man ... who rarely before had been known
to seek the companionship of women.? (Can you read the smirks between the lines
and across the decades?) According to Gloria, Cornell kept his distance at even
the most intimate moments: ?He sat two feet away from me on a couch and asked me
to be his wife.? The marriage was not consummated; as the Plain Dealer
judiciously put it, ?He loved his wife too well to kiss her.?
After two
years he walked out, going back to New York and mother Claire. He left behind a
diary, which Gloria discovered. Woolrich may not have robbed Gloria of her
virginity, but he was not celibate himself. The diary itemized his many
homosexual pickups ?in sordid and dreadful detail,? as Blackton?s sister Marian
told Nevins. Woolrich also wrote that ?it might be a really good joke to marry
this Gloria Blackton.? Humbert Humbert?s diary, detailing his loveless wedlock
with Charlotte Haze and his lust for her daughter Lolita, was no crueler than
Woolrich?s nasty punch line to this prank of a marriage. ?The Bride Wore Black?
was seven years ahead of him, but the discarded diary was Woolrich?s first (as
the French would say) roman noir — black novel. Read more: If Woolrich was brutally indifferent to his wife?s feelings, in his
fiction he could instantly bond with those in desperate need — perhaps because
there was such a person in his own life, one whose hold on him he could not,
would not break. ?I tried to move out,? he recalled late in his life. ? In 1942,
I lived in a hotel room for three weeks and then one night she called me and
said, ?I can?t live without you, I must live with you, I need you,? and I put
down the phone and I packed and I went back to that place for the rest of my
life, I never spent a night away from her, not one. I don?t care what they
thought of me, what they said about me but I just didn?t care. I don?t regret it
and I?ll never regret it as long as I live.?
No surprise ending here. That
person, of course, was Claire Woolrich, his mother. He lived with her until her
death in 1957. Most of him died with her. Read more: The distinguished British film critic Philip French writes admiringly
about ?the hard-boiled novels of writers such as Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich
and David Goodis who never got between hard covers and who went unrecognised in
America until long after they'd appeared in Gallimard?s Serie Noire and been
adapted by the directors of the Nouvelle Vague.?
This is true of Thompson
but not of Goodis, whose early novels (like ?Dark Passage,? made into a Bogart
film) were published by Dutton and Morrow. It is certainly not of Woolrich.
Simon & Schuster issued the first three ?Black? novels. (He left that house
when his sympathetic editor suggested he might want to work on one paragraph.)
So prolific that he needed pseudonyms, he wrote under William Irish for
Lippincott (?Phantom Lady,? ?Deadline at Dawn?) and George Hopley, his middle
names, for Farrar Rinehart (?Night Has a Thousand Eyes?). His six early
?straight? novels had also been published by reputable firms. It?s one thing
that sets him apart from Hammett, Cain and Chandler; they came up through the
pulp magazines.
And unlike Hammett with the Continental Op, Chandler with
Philip Marlowe and, for that matter, Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes,
Woolrich had no continuing characters, no detective-hero whose adventures must
end with him alive. Woolrich?s stand-alone stories necessarily left the reader
in suspense about the ending, which could be happy, tragic or just plain
perplexing. If there was one constant, it was that the anvil of Doom could crush
the hero at any time. To a Woolrich protagonist, then, paranoia is just common
sense.
The flip side of paranoia is persecution, sadism. Woolrich, after
all, thought this stuff up and wrote it down. He devised and used those
instruments of psychological torture — his stories. Read more:
More important than suspense to Woolrich, though, was his characters?
gnawing anguish. Hitchcock dealt in the ?transference of guilt? that allowed an
innocent man to be thought culpable. Woolrich dealt in the escalation of guilt,
where the not-quite-innocent stumbled into traps that punished guilty and
innocent alike. This sounds less like Hitchcock?s thrillers of unease and more
like an even darker Hollywood genre.
Is Cornell Woolrich the godfather of
film noir? Some piquant arguments can be made in support of that proposition.
Consider:
1. Woolrich?s first true crime novel, ?The Bride Wore Black,? was
published in 1940. Thirteen of his novels and short stories had been adapted for
films by the end of the 40s, the decade when the bleak moral and visual tone of
crime melodramas were codified into what eventually became known as film noir.
(But not in Hollywood. Not then. As critic Richard T. Jameson has noted, if
Nicholas Ray ran into Joseph Losey on the RKO lot at the time, he wouldn?t have
said, ?So, you?re working on a film noir??) No 40s masterpieces were spun from
Woolrich?s s oeuvre, but at least three B+ suspensers were: ?Phantom Lady,? ?No
Man of Her Own? (based on the novel ?I Married a Dead Man?) and ?The Window?
(from his story ?Fire Escape,? also known as ?The Boy Cried Murder?). Read more: .More important than suspense to Woolrich, though, was his characters?
gnawing anguish. Hitchcock dealt in the ?transference of guilt? that allowed an
innocent man to be thought culpable. Woolrich dealt in the escalation of guilt,
where the not-quite-innocent stumbled into traps that punished guilty and
innocent alike. This sounds less like Hitchcock?s thrillers of unease and more
like an even darker Hollywood genre.
Is Cornell Woolrich the godfather of
film noir? Some piquant arguments can be made in support of that proposition.
Consider:

2. ?The Bride Wore Black? does have a detective-hero on a traditional
quest. He tracks the righteous, serial-killing heroine of the title, who goes
about eliminating five men she blames for the death of her husband on their
wedding day. And, like Hercule Poirot (or Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe), he not
only nabs the murderess but reveals a plot twist that surprises her and the
reader. After that, Woolrich started breaking rules. The detectives or cops in
?Phantom Lady,? ?Fire Escape,? ?I Married a Dead Man? and ?Nightmare? and ?Black
Angel? (two more Woolrich tales filmed in the 40s) usually serve only two minor
functions: to deride or try to block the hero?s quest and, when the mystery is
finally solved, to validate the hero?s initial intuition. In ?Rear Window,? the
police lieutenant played by Wendell Corey has this same drab task. He?s nothing
more than the cop on the beat, telling the hero to move along, then
congratulating him for successfully completing a job the cop should have done.
Read more: 3. Woolrich not only dislodged the detective from his traditional
pedestal — as the solver of the puzzle, the good guy who nabs the bad guy, the
knight on the mean streets, the arbiter of ethics, the reader?s surrogate whose
very presence is a guarantee of narrative clarity and the restoration of order
in the chaotic world of crime — but challenged the very notions of hero and
quest. Now the hero could be the villain, or the dupe; the quest itself could
prove to be deranged, as the moral moorings of standard detective fiction fall
away. That dark view was reflected in the humid nightscapes of film noir
cinematography, just as Woolrich?s tilt of perspective was mirrored in the
movies? oblique camera angles and paranoid worldview.
4. Who done it? Who
cares? (Nevins decides that it?s finally impossible to know who the murderer is
in ?I Married a Dead Man.?) Granted, the identity of killers was not something
every crime writer paid attention to; Raymond Chandler acknowledged that even he
didn?t know who killed the chauffeur in ?The Big Sleep.? But Woolrich pretty
much dispensed altogether with the ratiocination of traditional crime fiction.
The point was to show a web of doom enfolding the fly. The identity of the
spider — best friend? bitter woman? Fate? blind chance? — didn?t matter to him.
It did matter to the film adapters of his work; they often invented other
murderers, different motivations. Read more: 5. The thriller novels that Woolrich published under his own name
beginning in 1940 and continuing through the decade — ?The Bride Wore Black,?
?The Black Curtain,? ?Black Alibi,? ?Black Angel,? ?The Black Path of Fear? and
?Rendezvous in Black? — were known informally as the black series. In French,
serie noire. In 1945 the Paris publisher Gallimard introduced a thriller line,
including many translations of U.S. tough-guy fiction, and dubbed it Serie
Noire. Some Woolrich novels were among the titles issued. The following year, as
Lee Horsley notes in his book ?The Noir Thriller,? ?the French critics Nino
Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier wrote the two earliest essays to identify a
departure in film-making, the American ?film noir.??
6. From that bleak soil
sprang many of the impulses used by French filmmakers of the 40s and their
wayward children, the Cahiers du Cin魡 critics who became New Wave directors.
They revered Hitchcock (Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer all did books
on the director) and plundered American pulp for their movies. Chabrol, who
would build a career on elegant domestic crime films, adapted Stanley Ellin?s
?The Key to Nicholas Street? into ?A Double Tour? / ?Web of Passion? in 1960.
Jean-Luc Godard said he was trying to make ?a normal gangster film? with his
spiky debut feature ?Breathless,? which he dedicated to Monogram, the defunct
U.S. cheapie studio. Godard based ?Band ࠐart? on a Dolores Hitchens crime novel,
and ?Pierrot le Fou? on a Lionel White. Truffaut?s ?Hitchcockian? films were
really esoteric pulp films, from his second feature ?Shoot the Piano Player?
(from the David Goodis novel ?Down There?) to his last, ?Confidentially Yours?
(from Charles Williams? ?The Long Saturday Night?). In 1968-69 he did his two
Woolrich adaptations. Read more: Fredric Dannay, the crime writer (he was half of Ellery Queen) and
editor, and a Woolrich supporter who generously reprinted many of his early
stories and published his later, lamer ones, was obliged to remark on the ?long
march of implausibility? in his friend?s novels. Nevins agrees that, ?As a
technical plot craftsman he is sloppy beyond endurance.? But, trying harder, he
works up a labyrinthine rationale for these strings of coincidences and lapses
of reason. He says that, in the Woolrich universe, life is unfair, death comes
without knocking to the innocent and guilty and alike. Does life outside fairy
tales and detective fiction have happy or even sensible endings? No. Woolrich?s
nightscape is not paranoid; it?s realistic. It?s a place, just like ours, where,
Nevins says, ?logic doesn?t exist.?
Chandler took a middle position. In a
letter to his publisher Blanche Knopf, he declared of ?Phantom Lady? that it
?has one of those artificial trick plots and is full of small but excessive
demands on the Goddess of Chance.? But that ultimately wasn?t crucial to
Chandler. He called the book ?a swell job of writing, one that gives everything
to every character, ever scene and never, like so many of our overrated
novelists, just flushes the highlights and then gets scared and runs. I happen
to admire this kind of writing very much.... it is the pace that counts, not the
logic or the plausibility or the style.? Read more: Woolrich, for all his ingenuity, often dealt from a standard deck of
mystery-novel tropes, like the fatal ace of spades that cues doom in ?Black
Alibi? and ?Waltz into Darkness.? Threatening or dishonest telegrams, or
anonymous notes pushed under the door, set several plots pinwheeling. Innocent
men are convicted and condemned to die with such regularity, you?d think they
were black.
Then there?s the leg-injury motif, which stretched the length of
Woolrich?s career. Alan Walker, the metaphorically-surnamed hero of Woolrich?s
first novel, ?Cover Charge,? is crippled in a car accident on his wedding night.
Pauline Foy, heroine of the 1931 ?The Time of Her Life,? is injured in a car
crash and (Nevins notes) ?undergoes a leg operation with only a cigarette as an
anesthetic.? Jeff Jeffries, hero of the story later known as ?Rear Window,? has
broken a leg and is defenseless against the murderer he has spotted across the
courtyard and who is just this moment entered Jeff?s apartment. I haven?t read
?For the Rest of Her Life,? the last Woolrich story to be published in his
lifetime, but in Fassbinder?s film version, ?Martha,? the main character is
injured in a car accident. In the hospital someone says, ?She?ll never walk
again.?
And now, a last vignette from Woolrich?s gnarled, noirish life...
Read more: In 1967, because of ?an ill-fitting shoe,? he developed gangrene in one
leg. Instead of having it treated, he bore the pain by drinking himself into a
stupor. When he finally sought medical advice, it was too late: the leg had to
be amputated above the knee. He died within the year.
Honestly, what are the
odds? Read more:

Korczak How to Love A Child

http://korczak.com/Biography/kap-10.htm


The backdrop of the first war afforded Korczak time to think and reflect in writing How to Love A Child and perhaps this time served that good end. Hwere are some of my thoughts in reviewing this passage:

• The times of the conflict were horrendous and Orthodox Jewry were certain it bespoke of Gog of Magog and the coming of Messiah.




• The usual chaos and mayhem of war dissheveled Korczak's care and plan for his orphans and Izaak Eliasberg was conscripted and able to raise funds.The number of children increased and needed care and Korczak desperately needed and sought funding and the bank would only lend him half of the 5000 rubles he had in private account.




• He sought out his publisher, Jakub Mortkowicz for the hundred rubles he had left with him for a rainy day and he happily gave him the funds, and offered to look in on his mother.




• Mortkowicz, an assimilated Jew, attracted the finest writers to his firm because of his high standards in publishing. His wife, Janina (as talkative as her husband was taciturn), published Korczak´s stories in the children´s journal, In the Sunshtne, that she edited with Stefania Sempolowska It was a tightly connected literary world, and Mortkowicz, unlike the bank, did not hesitate to give his celebrated author the hundred rubles he needed. He even offered to look in on his mother during his absence His world came tumbling down, the tight literary world of his comfort, and out of that zone he was dislodged.




• While Korczak reassured the orphans, Stefa reassured him, even though she felt overwhelmed at being left with complete responsibility for the children, whose numbers had swelled to one hundred and fifty. A few months before the outbreak of the war, she had fulfilled her dream of sending her beloved Esterka Weintraub to college in Belgium, and she would not consider Korczak´s suggestion that Esterka be asked to return. Stefa's heroic stance for the greater good of the orphans was later displayed after the death of her daughter Esterka from typhus. she managed to even then put that behind her sufficiently to function ,albeit in a reduced emotional capacity for the children, due to her bereavement.




• She stayed at Stefa´s side for the next two years, working night and day under the difficult conditions of the German occupation, even carrying sick children on her back to the hospital. Esterka's heroic stance was evident also as was her unselfishness for the good of the orphans.She died in the typhus epidemic later and that event completely decimated her mother Stefania Sempolowska .




• Korczak's conscription as a doctor in the Czar's imperial army : Korczak was assigned to a divisional field hospital on the Eastern front. This brutal war, through which he slogged in his heavy Russian uniform and high military boots as the armies of Russia and the Austro- Hungarian Empire swept back and forth across the defenseless villages of Eastern Europe, was to impress on him that men march to "a clock with only one hand-the sword." Not even men, but "an orgy of devils in intoxicated procession. " And for what?




• Korczak always saw the world in universals and he saw the whole world as suffering which perhaps created within him an empathy for them and especailly for the for the devils of the orgy he wrote about. "And suffering does not make men noble, not even the Jews."




• The leassons are learned after the events of suffering. Amid this morass of human suffering he began to wite How to Love A Child. He conceived of the work as the " synthesis of the child" gleaned fronm his half year in Paris -his experiences as a pediatrician. Some conclusions he reached were to reverberate even to this days in medical and pyschological practice: 1.How to Love a Child was originally to be only a short pamphlet for parents and teachers, but perhaps because it was a long war the manuscript grew to hundreds of pages. One of its main theses is that you cannot possibly love a child-your own, or another´s -until you see him as a separate being with the inalienable right to grow into the person he was meant to be. You cannot even understand a child until you achieve self- knowledge: "You yourself are the child whom you must learn to know, rear, and above all, enlighten." You are that child and must achieve self-knowledge to even understand the child you are and have reared.

2. You must see the child as a separate being with unalienable rights which Korczak was later to list in a special part of his writings.

3. Korczak, the artist, speaks mystically, comparing the child to a piece of parchment covered with hieroglyphs, only some of which the parents will ever be able to decipher: "Seek in that stranger who is your child the undiscovered part of yourself," The pediatrician urges common sense, warning that a baby´s development cannot be measured like other things in society. "When is the proper time for a child to start walking and talking? When he does. When should his teeth start cutting? When they do. How many hours should a baby sleep? As long as it needs to." Behind all of Korczak"s assertions are the honed reflections of a child psychologist who was one of the first of his time to recognize the importance of infancy in human development. The child he conceives of as a mystical being always developing at his own pace and the child maintains a limited although sufficient control even at these early stages of his self-determination.

4. The temperaments of the child. ." But though their temperaments might be different, each was attempting to prevail over unknown powers, to probe the secret of the mysterious world which was delivering both good and bad messages. "The infant runs its affairs within the scope of its available knowledge and meansboth of which are meager. . . . It does not know yet that the breast, the face, and the hands comprise a unit-the mother."

5. The baby may not have mastered words yet, but it speaks in "the language of facial expressions, the language of images and emotional recollections." Its every new movement is "like that of a pianist for whom the proper frame of mind and absolute self-control are essential to be able to play." The child emerges as both the benefactor and the victim of its mother´s love, with the author intervening like a guardian angel on its behalf He is equally wary of teachers, whom he consoles one moment-"You will always make mistakes because you are a human being, not a machine" -and chastises the next- "Children love laughter, movement, playing tricks. Teacher, if life is a graveyard to you, leave the children free to see it as a pasture."

Note the language of the child as referred to above. The last phrase boldened here is truly a classic phrase.

6. Note his field hospital stay and homesickness at Tarnipol in 1917.

7. Korczak's experience with the boy Stefan. How did he happen to notice Stefan? Perhaps the boy was standing apart from the others. Perhaps their eyes met in an unexpected glance of sympathy. Soon they were deep in conversation. When Stefan mentioned that he would like to learn a craft of some kind, Korczak told him about the carpentry shop in his hospital compound. No sooner had he asked the boy if he would like to come along with him, to learn carpentry and how to read, than he regretted it. He had violated his own dictum that one should never spring anything suddenly on a child This candid revealing of Korzak's regret of springing suddenly learning carpentry and reading ,and that he violated his own dictum would be overcome by his reluctance to frustrate the boy by false hopes.

8. As he had noted in his journal, he was used to working with children in groups of one hundred. His every word influenced a hundred minds, his every step was watched by a hundred pair of vigilant eyes. if he failed with some, there were always a few he had reached. He never had to fear "utter defeat." He used to say that working with only one child was a game not worth the candle; he spoke contemptuously of teachers who left group projects to work privately, dismissing them as being in it only for the money or for better personal conditions..This is the classic dilemma OF total failure with one child is better than limited failure attained with a group of children.

9. Stefan's mother had died when he was seven. He couldn´t even remember her name-only that blood came out of her mouth when she coughed and that she didn´t come back from the hospital. As for his father, he might have been killed in action by now-or he might still be at the front, or in a POW camp. For a while Stefan had lived with his seventeen- year-old brother in Tarnopol, and then with some soldiers until he was taken off to the municipal shelter where Korczak found him. Stefan's story is so typical of many war orphans ending up in the municipal shelter.

10. In the orphanage, sickness often meant extra trouble and could cause tension in the house, but Korczak noted that Stefan's discomfort drew them together, as it does a family. He propped the boy up in bed like the king ofthe roost. To enable Stefan to do his writing exercises, Korczak carefully secured the inkpot in an old can that Walenty had previously converted into an ashtray. Then, balancing the can in a large box that he emptied for this purpose, he put a supporting pillow on one side and another box on the other side. As Stefan thanked him with a smile, it occurred to Korczak that a boarding home could not afford such a luxury. He also realized that when he was with a large group of children, a smile was too subtle a signal to notice. Only now did he see it as an important signal deserving study.

11. As Stefan tried to correct his own sentences>> without quite knowing how to get them right, Korczak was struck with the thought that a child is endowed with a "rammatical conscience" that may be hindered by the teacher´s complex explanations: The child´s mind-a forest in which the tops oftrees gently sway, the branches mingle, and the shivering leaves touch. An adult .even with good intentions may unhinge a child's mind.

12. Stefan's slyness and gliding over his book. Stefan stumbled along awkwardly the first week, but then it was as if he felt the "vibrations." He glided over the book as smoothly as he tobogganed outdoors, negotiating the obstacles with a determination that he had not shown before. He had managed to "transfer the risk of sport to learning." Yet the boy was sly-he knew how to manipulate his mentor. He tried to cheat at checkers, to avoid some of his lessons. He took a cannon shell to the workshop without asking permission and resorted to lying when questioned about it.

13. Chidlren perceive common words with a different meaning than adults.

How to Love a Child
The outbreak of the Great War put an end to the
geranium plan. AllofWarsaw was in a state of chaos that August of 1914: refugees
crowded into the city from outlying areas and people rushed to hoard food and
supplies. The Orthodox Jews at the lower end of Krochmalna were certain that
this was the final battle between Gog and Magog, after which the Messiah would
come. Expressing a secular version of the same sentiment, Korczak hoped that a
pure world would emerge from this conflict. He could not know when he was
conscripted once again for medical duty with the Czar's imperial Army that it
would be four long, bloody years before he would see either a new world or his
orphans again.
It was a tragic war for the Poles. Mobilized by all three
occupying powers-800,000 in the Russian army, 400,000 in the Austrian, and
200,000 in the German-they were put in the intolerable position of fighting
against each other. Even their leaders were divided as to which was the greatest
enemy: Russia, Germany, or Austria. Those who joked cynically that the only way
for Poland to be reunited would be for all three countries to be defeated did
not really believe that this was exactly what would happen.
Korczak rushed
about as frantically as everyone else, trying to make arrangements for Stefa and
the orphans while he was away. Izaak Eliasberg, also conscripted, would not be
there to raise funds. Donations to the home had fallen off while the number of
children needing care had increased. When the bank refused to give him more than
two hundred and fifty of the five thousand rubles in his private account,
Korczak sought out his publisher, Jakub Mortkowicz, for the hundred rubles he
had left with him "for a rainy day" in happier times he had often joined
Warsaw´s cultural elite in the room behind the bookstore in Mortkowicz´s office
and had cappuccino and cream cake with them at the Zemianska, a popular literary
caf‚ which shared the same courtyard on Mazowiecka Street.
Mortkowicz, an
assimilated Jew, attracted the finest writers to his firm because of his high
standards in publishing. His wife, Janina (as talkative as her husband was
taciturn), published Korczak´s stories in the children´s journal, In the
Sunshtne, that she edited with Stefania Sempolowska It was a tightly connected
literary world, and Mortkowicz, unlike the bank, did not hesitate to give his
celebrated author the hundred rubles he needed. He even offered to look in on
his mother during his absence.
Korczak did not find it easy to say goodbye
to the orphans. Until then, it had been they who left him when they were old
enough to go out into the world. He had braced himself for those farewells, and
turned his attention to the newcomers. But now he was the one leaving, and at a
time when they needed him most.
While Korczak reassured the orphans, Stefa
reassured him, even though she felt overwhelmed at being left with complete
responsibility for the children, whose numbers had swelled to one hundred and
fifty. A few months before the outbreak of the war, she had fulfilled her dream
of sending her beloved Esterka Weintraub to college in Belgium, and she would
not consider Korczak´s suggestion that Esterka be asked to return. But before he
left Warsaw, Korczak took it upon himself to write Esterka of his concern about
Stefa. As he hoped, she interrupted her studies to rush back. She stayed at
Stefa´s side for the next two years, working night and day under the difficult
conditions of the German occupation, even carrying sick children on her back to
the hospital. When she caught typhus and died during the epidemic of 1916, Stefa
felt as if she had lost her own daughter. Crazed with grief, she even thought of
giving up her work, but because there were so many children dependent on her,
she forced herself to carry on. But never again would Stefa allow herself to
become so deeply attached to any of the orphans.
Korczak was assigned to a
divisional field hospital on the Eastern front. This brutal war, through which
he slogged in his heavy Russian uniform and high military boots as the armies of
Russia and the Austro- Hungarian Empire swept back and forth across the
defenseless villages of Eastern Europe, was to impress on him that men march to
"a clock with only one hand-the sword." Not even men, but "an orgy of devils in
intoxicated procession. " And for what?
While camping overnight in a
deserted village, he was riveted by the sight of a blind old Jew groping his way
with his stick through the infantry unit's convoy ofhorses and wagons. The
man>>s family and friends had tried to persuade him to leave with them,
but he had insisted on remaining behind to watch over the synagogue and
cemetery. (Twenty- five years later, when Korczak chose to remain in the Warsaw
Ghetto with his orphans, he would liken himself to that blind old Jew.)
Yet
he tried to see everything in universal terms. "It is not only the Jews who
suffer," he wrote. "All the world is submerged in blood and fire, in tears and
mourning. And suffering does not make men noble, not even the Jews."
Perhaps
to keep himself from falling into despair as the field hospital moved back and
forth with the troops across the battlefields of Eastern Europe, he began
writing the book which would become How to Love a Child. It was to be no less
than the " synthesis of the child" he had dreamed of during his half year in
Paris, distilled from his experiences as a pediatrician, camp counselor, and
educator. He wrote in the field station to the deafening cacophony of artillery
fire, on a tree stump in a forest where the troops were resting, in a meadow
under a pine tree. Everything seemed important-he was constantly pausing to jot
things down so that he wouldn´t forget. "It would be an irretrievable loss to
mankind, " he would jest ironically to his orderly.
The orderly, whom we
know only as Walenty, was given the task of typing each day´s segment. He must
have been a long-suffering aide: typing a manuscript on child development is not
the usual military assignment. He rebelled only once during a brief respite in
their schedule: Korczak quotes him fondly as grumbling, "Is it worth it for just
a half hour?" There were times when Korczak would be forced to interrupt his
work on the book for as long as a month. During those periods, he would be
filled with self-doubt. Why make a fool of himself ? "That which is wise is
known to a hundred men."
How to Love a Child was originally to be only a
short pamphlet for parents and teachers, but perhaps because it was a long war
the manuscript grew to hundreds of pages. One of its main theses is that you
cannot possibly love a child-your own, or another´s -until you see him as a
separate being with the inalienable right to grow into the person he was meant
to be. You cannot even understand a child until you achieve self- knowledge:
"You yourself are the child whom you must learn to know, rear, and above all,
enlighten."
Because he was an artist by temperament and not a theorist,
Korczak did not produce a systematic tract, but rather images of the child in
each fleeting time frame of its development. Feigning modesty, he admits that to
most questions the reader may have, he can only answer "I don´t know." (But he
adds slyly that this seemingly empty phrase contains limitless possibilities of
"new breakthroughs.")
"It is impossible to tell parents unknown to me how to
rear a child also unknown to me under conditions unknown to me," he writes. The
mother must learn to trust her own perceptions; no one can know her child as she
does: "To demand that others should provide you textbook prognoses is like
asking a strange woman to give birth to your baby. There are insights that can
be born only of your own pain, and they are the most precious."
Korczak, the
artist, speaks mystically, comparing the child to a piece of parchment covered
with hieroglyphs, only some of which the parents will ever be able to decipher:
"Seek in that stranger who is your child the undiscovered part of yourself," The
pediatrician urges common sense, warning that a baby´s development cannot be
measured like other things in society. "When is the proper time for a child to
start walking and talking? When he does. When should his teeth start cutting?
When they do. How many hours should a baby sleep? As long as it needs to."
Behind all of Korczak"s assertions are the honed reflections of a child
psychologist who was one of the first of his time to recognize the importance of
infancy in human development. While Freud was still gathering information on
childhood from his adult patients, Korczak already understood the necessity for
direct observation of the baby. "Napoleon suffered from tetanus, Bismarck had
rickets, each was an infant before he became a man. Ifwe wish to probe the
source ofthought, emotions, and ambition, we must turn to the infant."
He
found in the infant a "well-defined personality composed of innate temperament,
strength, and intellect." Bending over a hundred cribs, he could pick out the
"trusting and suspicious, the steady and capricious, the cheerful and gloomy,
the wavering, the frightened, and the hostile." But though their temperaments
might be different, each was attempting to prevail over unknown powers, to probe
the secret of the mysterious world which was delivering both good and bad
messages. "The infant runs its affairs within the scope of its available
knowledge and meansboth of which are meager. . . . It does not know yet that the
breast, the face, and the hands comprise a unit-the mother."
The mother has
only to observe her infant selflessly to receive its message, for what is its
intense gaze if not one of inquiry? The baby may not have mastered words yet,
but it speaks in "the language of facial expressions, the language of images and
emotional recollections." Its every new movement is "like that of a pianist for
whom the proper frame of mind and absolute self-control are essential to be able
to play." The child emerges as both the benefactor and the victim of its
mother´s love, with the author intervening like a guardian angel on its behalf
He is equally wary of teachers, whom he consoles one moment-"You will always
make mistakes because you are a human being, not a machine" -and chastises the
next- "Children love laughter, movement, playing tricks. Teacher, if life is a
graveyard to you, leave the children free to see it as a pasture." It was one
thing to write about how to love a child and another not to have a child to
love. When, in February 1917 the field hospital dug in for an indefinite stay on
a hill overlooking the town of Tarnopol in Galicia, Korczak was particularly
vulnerable. it was almost three years since he had left his orphans in Warsaw,
and six months since a short, crumpled letter had somehow got through "the tight
ring of bayonets, censors, and spies." At night, when he was finished with his
duties, he would sit outside the hospital and watch as one by one the lights
went out in the town below. A feeling of homesickness would overwhelm him as he
remembered lights-out at the orphanage and the deep silence that fell over
everything.

__________________________________________________________
As soon as he had a few free hours, Korczak visited a shelter
for homeless children set up in Tarnopol by the municipal authorities. He was
shocked by the conditions there. Rather than serving as sanctuaries´ places like
this were "dustbins into which children were cast as the refuse of war, the
waste products of dysentery, typhoid fever, or cholera that had destroyed their
parents-or rather their mothers. Their fathers were off fighting for a better
world."
How did he happen to notice Stefan? Perhaps the boy was standing
apart from the others. Perhaps their eyes met in an unexpected glance of
sympathy. Soon they were deep in conversation. When Stefan mentioned that he
would like to learn a craft of some kind, Korczak told him about the carpentry
shop in his hospital compound. No sooner had he asked the boy if he would like
to come along with him, to learn carpentry and how to read, than he regretted
it. He had violated his own dictum that one should never spring anything
suddenly on a child. "Not today. I'll come for you on Monday," he quickly added.
" Ask your brother about it. Think it over." As if there was much for a
displaced boy like Stefan Zagrodnik to think over-it was Korczak who had some
thinking to do.
As he had noted in his journal, he was used to working with
children in groups of one hundred. His every word influenced a hundred minds,
his every step was watched by a hundred pair of vigilant eyes. if he failed with
some, there were always a few he had reached. He never had to fear "utter
defeat." He used to say that working with only one child was a game not worth
the candle; he spoke contemptuously of teachers who left group projects to work
privately, dismissing them as being in it only for the money or for better
personal conditions. But now he was about to offer "the hours, the days, and the
months" of his life to one child. Stefan was waiting eagerly when Korczak came
with Walenty and a sledge to pick him up that Monday night. The orderly had been
disgruntled from the moment he heard about the plan. First he had had to take on
typing manuscripts, and now he was expected to cook and clean for some vagrant
Ukrainian boy. To add insult to injury, Stefan was hardly in Walenty' s company
two minutes before he was calling him by his first name. But Stefan was aware
only of his first moonlit ride through the snow as they passed the church, the
railway station, carriages and trucks, and the bridge on their way to the field
hospital.
Korczak asked little of the boy the first few days´ although he
made a mental note to have him address Walenty respectfully. He knew from
similar incidents at the Warsaw orphanage that the janitor, cook, and
washerwoman resented it when the children didn´t give "a handle" to their names.
But he wanted Stefan to have a chance to feel his way around, test the
situation, develop some trust. Stefan's mother had died when he was seven. He
couldn´t even remember her name-only that blood came out of her mouth when she
coughed and that she didn´t come back from the hospital. As for his father, he
might have been killed in action by now-or he might still be at the front, or in
a POW camp. For a while Stefan had lived with his seventeen- year-old brother in
Tarnopol, and then with some soldiers until he was taken off to the municipal
shelter where Korczak found him.

_____________________________________________________________
At first, it looked as if Walenty were right
about his misgivings. Stefan was there only a day when he had a terrible
stomachache, brought on by the combination of cold sausage from the soldiers'
canteen and the jam cakes and candies he had bought with the fifty kopecks his
brother gave him as a send-off.
In the orphanage, sickness often meant extra
trouble and could cause tension in the house, but Korczak noted that Stefan's
discomfort drew them together, as it does a family. He propped the boy up in bed
like the king ofthe roost. To enable Stefan to do his writing exercises, Korczak
carefully secured the inkpot in an old can that Walenty had previously converted
into an ashtray. Then, balancing the can in a large box that he emptied for this
purpose, he put a supporting pillow on one side and another box on the other
side. As Stefan thanked him with a smile, it occurred to Korczak that a boarding
home could not afford such a luxury. He also realized that when he was with a
large group of children, a smile was too subtle a signal to notice. Only now did
he see it as an important signal deserving study.
Korczak held to his
pedagogic intent to teach Stefan to read, re- cording each day>> s
progress in minute detail. it was as if initiating Stefan into the intricacies
of Polish grammar would restore the universe to both of them. As Stefan tried to
correct his own sentences>> without quite knowing how to get them right,
Korczak was struck with the thought that a child is endowed with a "rammatical
conscience" that may be hindered by the teacher´s complex explanations: The
child´s mind-a forest in which the tops oftrees gently sway, the branches
mingle, and the shivering leaves touch. Sometimes a tree grazes its neighbor and
receives the vibrations of a hundred or a thousand trees-of the whole forest.
Whenever any of us says "-right-wrong-pay attention-do it again," it is like a
gust of wind that plays havoc with the child.
Stefan stumbled along
awkwardly the first week, but then it was as if he felt the "vibrations." He
glided over the book as smoothly as he tobogganed outdoors, negotiating the
obstacles with a determination that he had not shown before. He had managed to
"transfer the risk of sport to learning." Yet the boy was sly-he knew how to
manipulate his mentor. He tried to cheat at checkers, to avoid some of his
lessons. He took a cannon shell to the workshop without asking permission and
resorted to lying when questioned about it.
The pedagogue was as defenseless
as any father. He had to be on is bound to creep in. One must fight back, work
toward maintaining authority, by demonstration, without scolding ofany kind." As
ifto further convince himself, he added: "Children like a certain amount of
coercion. it helps them to fight their own inner resistance. it spares them the
intellectual effort of having to make a choice."S tefan worked in the carpentry
shop while Korczak made his rounds among the two hundred and seventeen patients
in the wards, some of them suffering from contagious diseases, others fresh
casualties from the front. When Korczak dropped by the carpentry shop, the
instructor praised the boy, saying he was hardworking. But it was painful for
Korczak to watch Stefan struggling to saw a wobbly plank. He had to force
himself not to warn the boy to be careful of his fingers. Already his
admonitions- "Don´t go out barefoot!" "Don´t drink unboiled water!""Aren´t you
cold?"" Are you sure you don´t have a stomachache?" -were making him sound like
those overanxious mothers he had ridiculed in his books.

___________________________________________________________
Even Walenty (who
still muttered about all the trouble and that no good would come of all this)
was growing protective of Stefan. He went outside more than once to call the boy
in from tobogganing when he was late for his evening lesson-"as in a family."
Korczak hoped that Stefan would see the child in the man who sided with him,
but he knew that the boy saw a balding thirty-nine-year-old medical officer who,
in his eyes, was old. Yet Stefan admired him. "I´d like to write the letter K
like you do," he said. It reminded Korczak of how the orphans used to copy the
way he wrote the letters of the alphabet. And of how long it had taken him to
master writing the capital W like his father.
Trying to follow the logic
ofmany ofStefan"s questions forced Korczak to consider how differently children
perceive things from adults. When Stefan asked: "What is a poppy seed made of?"
"Why is it black? ""Can you get enough poppy seeds from one garden to fill a
plate?" Korczak realized that the boy´s conception of a garden covered four,
perhaps five, ideas, while his own covered a hundred, even a thousand. "The roots of many seemingly illogical questions asked by children are to be found here, " he noted."We have difficulty finding a common language with children because even though they use the same words we do, they fill them with an entirely different content. >Garden,<, >father<, >death<>

Korczak's Little Republic and the evil whisper of anti-semitism

http://korczak.com/Biography/kap-9.htm

1. Outbursts of anti-semitism while the home was under construction:

A. Politicians like Roman Dmowski

B. Jews a foreign element and unsympathetic to National Liberation

C. "Your virtues are a death sentence to us."

D. Reasoned words and Korczak's article "Three Currents".
2. But then there was the third current, whose members had always declared: "We are sons of the same clay. Ages of mutual suffering and success link us on the same chain. The same sun shines upon us, the same hail destroys our fields, the same earth hides the bones of our ancestors. There have been more tears than smiles in our history, but that was neither of our faults. Let us light a common fire together . . ." He ended the article with his own personal avowal: "I am in the third current."

3. Russian laborers and a pending pogrom. The orphanage entered in 1912.

4. The Beilis trial and blood libel.

5. Herman Cohen's visit to the orphanage-his impressions.

6. Red geraniums blazing in the sun. Orphans' aid society bought 200 pots of flowers foer the children to distribute to their neighbors.

When news of the progressive Warsaw orphanage experimenting with
self-government spread beyond Poland to other countries, Korczak found that,
along with everything else, he bad to cope with a constant parade of foreign
officials and educators, including a team of Russian architects who spent days
copying the layout of the house. Yet, despite its fame, the little republic was
not immune to the "evil whisper of the street seeping in under the door."
In
1910, while the home was under construction, there had been explosive outbursts
of anti-Semitism. fueled by politicians like Roman Dmowski, the leader of the
right-wing national democratic movement. "There is not room for two races on the
banks of the Vistula," Dmowski preached, alluding to the fact that Warsaw´s
three hundred thousand Jews made up one-third of the city´s population. The Jews
were a foreign element in Polish society, Dmowski contended, and unsympathetic
to national liberation. A militant nationalist told Korczak in a despairing tone
over coffee: "Tell me, what is one to do? The Jews are digging our grave." And
another Polish acquaintance lamented: "Your virtues are a death sentence to us."
As if reasoned words might have the power to stem the tide of rising
anti-Semitism, Korczak wrote an article, "Three Currents," for a major Polish
journal. Acknowledging that a complex relationship had always existed between
the Poles and the Jews, and that the antagonisms came from both sides, he called
for faith in the shared history that bound them together.
There were three
distinct currents running through Polish society, he pointed out. The first one,
made up of aristocratic Poles whose names ended in "-ski and -icz," had always
wanted to live separately from those whose names ended in "-berg, -sohn, and
-stein." The second current, made up of "the heirs of Solomon, David, Isaiah,
the Maccabees, the Halevis and Spinozas-lawgivers, thinkers, poets the oldest
aristocracy in Europe, with the Ten Commandments as their coat of arms," also
preferred to live apart.
But then there was the third current, whose members
had always declared: "We are sons of the same clay. Ages of mutual suffering and
success link us on the same chain. The same sun shines upon us, the same hail
destroys our fields, the same earth hides the bones of our ancestors. There have
been more tears than smiles in our history, but that was neither of our faults.
Let us light a common fire together . . ." He ended the article with his own
personal avowal: "I am in the third current."
Anti-Semitism continued to
grow like a fungus in the shadow of Polish nationalism. Shortly after Korczak
and Stefa moved the children into the orphanage in 1912, there were rumors that
a group of Russian laborers working on the bridges over the Vistula would start
a pogrom. The lights in the Jewish quarter would be knocked out, and the
Russians would come disguised in old Jewish robes, which, it was said, they were
busily procuring from second-hand dealers. Korczak kept the small gate in the
side wall unlocked for a fast exit should there be any violence.
In 1913,
anti-Semitic hysteria was kindled further by the Beilis trial then in progress
in Kiev. Mendel Beilis, a minor clerk, was accused of killing a Christian in
order to use his blood for a Passover ceremony. Similar accusations had been
leveled at Jews for centuries in Eastern and Central Europe, but word of this
one spread across Poland like brushfire. Grigori Schmukler remembers that some
children threw stones at him and other orphans as they went to and from school,
shouting: "Beilis! Beilis!" Even when Beilis was acquitted by the Kiev jury, the
children continued their taunts: "Set the dogs on the Jews!"
Korczak tried
to keep good relations with the neighboring children by inviting them over to
play after school with his orphans. The eminent German philosopher Hermann
Cohen, paying a visit on the last stop.of his tour of East European Jewish
communities in 1914, was amazed at what was being accomplished at the orphanage
in such trying conditions. Unlike other assimilated Western Jews who looked with
condescension on their Eastern brethren as being scarcely out of the Dark Ages,
Cohen wrote glowingly in Martin Buber´s newspaper Der Jude: "I was deeply moved by my visits to exemplary orphan asylums, especially the one directed with
ineffable love and modern understanding by Dr. Goldszmit of Warsaw."
As
rumors of impending war filled the cafés that spring and summer, Korczak tried a
new kind of diplomacy. He persuaded the Orphans Aid Society to buy two hundred
pots of flowers for the children to distribute to their neighbors. The rest of
Warsaw might be preoccupied with the possibility of world conflict, but up and
down their end of Krochmalna red geraniums would blaze in the sun.

AMIA Massacre and its overtones

http://blog.z-word.com/2010/01/judeosphere-returns/
http://blog.z-word.com/2009/07/amia-suspect-gets-top-cop-job/


Israeli Embassy Controls Buenos Aires City Hall
Published
by
Eamonn McDonagh
on December 27, 2009
in AMIA massacre, Argentina, Iran, Z word blog, anti-Zionism, antisemitism and bad journalism.

Can a Jew initiate anti semitism out of his own mouth? The new brand of anti-semitism reeks of a blasting approach of mentioning Israel indiscriminately with any wrong doing just as Cato the Elder did and it's an automatic association with world corruption and the "Jewish conspiracy" whether the reference is justified or not. The ultimate anti-semitism! Condemnation by worthless and unsubstantiated charges.

Israeli Embassy Controls Buenos Aires City
Hall
1.
Readers with good memories will recall the appointment of Jorge Palacios, a disgraced former Federal
Police officer to head the city of Buenos Aires’s first autonomous police force.
To put it mildly, it wasn’t an idea that prospered. Palacios was obliged to
resign when indicted on charges of being involved in the cover up of the AMIA
massacre and is now in prison while being investigated on charges of
organizing illegal wiretaps. Among those who had their phone conversations
illicitly listened in on was Sergio Burstein, a well known campaigner for
justice for the families of the survivors of the AMIA attack.
2.
Horacio
Verbitsky is a prominent Argentine journalist and impassioned supporter of the
government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. He’s also the president of CELS, a prominent
human rights NGO. In this interview he attributes the appointment to the influence
of the DEA, the American Embassy and, wait for it, the Embassy of Israel. Here
are the key quotes:
When he [Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri] explains why
he appointed him [Palacios] he says he asked the DEA, the American Embassy and
the Israeli Embassy for a candidate.
When he [Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio
Macri] created the Metropolitan Police he went to the DEA and Embassy of Israel
to look for a boss for it.
3.
So now you know, the mayor of one of the
largest cities in South America was looking for a chief for a new police force
and one of the places he went looking for a good candidate was the Israeli
Embassy. And the Israelis, in their infinite cunning, suggested someone who was
then on the point being indicted for covering up the massacre of a large number
of Jews and has since been charged with tapping the phone of Sergio Burstein, a
Jew who has publicly pointed his finger at Iran and its local lackeys with
regard to AMIA massacre.
4.
And no, there’s not a hint of antisemitism in
this. There can’t be because Verbitsky himself is Jewish and, therefore, nothing
he says can be so construed.

Response to “Israeli Embassy Controls Buenos Aires City Hall”
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1 Noga
Dec 27th, 2009 at 11:35 am
The Roman statesman Cato the Elder would always end his speeches with some variation of “Carthago delenda est” even if he had not been discussing Carthage in the speech. It seems to me that the same rationale applies in the case of Israel. Just mention it in any discussion of corruption or wrong doing,or just anything negative, whether it makes sense or not is of little significance.

Can human nature be changed?

Aldous Huxley, Altered States, Amanda Feilding, Bart Huges, Beckley Foundation, brain science, brainwave, cognitive enhancement, Consciousness, drugs, Evolution, Joe Mellen, neural activity, Science, social commentary, Trepanation

http://www.brainwaving.com/2009/12/30/can-human-nature-be-changed/

ADVANTAGES OF THE TRANSCENDENT STATE -QUOTE FROM ALDOUS HUXLEY'S AFTER MANY A SUMMER:

• “He had come to this bench under the eucalyptus tree in order to recollect himself, in order to realize for a moment the existence of that other consciousness behind his private thoughts and feelings, that free, pure power greater than his own. He had come for this; but memories had slipped in while he was off his guard; speculations had started up, cloud upon cloud ……. Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance; and he had failed to be vigilant. It wasn’t a case, he reflected ruefully, of the spirit being willing and the flesh weak. That was altogether the wrong antithesis. The spirit is always willing, but the person, who is a mind as well as a body, is always unwilling – and the person, incidentally, is not weak but extremely strong.”


• The above quote contains many truisms we all too conveniently shelve and ignore. The other cionsciousness if handled aright is free unfettered and pure , greater than this transitory and sorry state lived by us and clutched onto by us for "dear life". Personality is a bondage will fight to keep and the personality is strong on this battle. Bondage is usually retained with clever resourcefulness and extreme cunning. The battle always has been to transcend the ego.We are so enslaved to this ego, that we most often work against our better self interest which is transcendance.


• The true good, the animal level and the level of eternity: The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people, in a word – they are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.”“Then where ought we to fight for good?”“Where good is.”“But where is it?”“On the level below the human and on the level above. On the animal level and on the level … well, you can take your choice of names: the level of eternity; the level, if you don’t object, of God; the level of spirit – only that happens to be about the most ambiguous word in the language. On the lower level, good exists as the proper functioning of the organism in accordance with the laws of its own being. On the higher level, it exists in the form of a knowledge of the world without desire or aversion; it exists as the experience of eternity, as the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego. Strictly human activities are activities that prevent the manifestations of good on the other two levels. For, in so far as we’re human, we’re obsessed with time, we’re passionately concerned with our personalities and with those magnified projections of our personalities which we call our policies, our ideals, our religions. And what are the results? Being obsessed with time and our egos, we are for ever craving and worrying. But nothing impairs the normal functioning of the organism like craving and revulsion, like greed and fear and worry. Directly or indirectly, most of our physical ailments and disabilities are due to worry and craving. We worry and crave ourselves into high blood-pressure, heart disease, tuberculosis, peptic ulcer, low resistance to infection, neurasthenia, sexual aberrations, insanity, suicide. Not to mention all the rest.”


• Our ideals are merely like chimaera: extensions of our ego.
• Act of transcendence steps of climbing: Saints fast for days on end to achieve a state of enlightenment. By doing without the most obvious physical need, for food, they endure the temptations of St Anthony to reach the goal of disinterested awareness. In an enlightened vision the individual’s needs and desires are subsumed in a common, categorical view of those of the species as a whole. A feeling of indivisibility with all of life infuses the mind, an exalted feeling of being at one with the whole of existence. In mystical traditions, such as the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life, there are various stages of development through which the individual can ascend. The lowest is the material level, the level of the body, then comes the level of personality, including the moral sphere, and the highest is the level of the spirit, the transcendent state of mind.
• The meaning of words and language relative to ecstatic states of consciousness assumes an intuive and direct character as opposed to intellectual comprehension of meaning.
  But that which surrounded the words was the awareness itself; for this vigilance which was now an effortless awareness – what was it but an aspect, a partial expression, of that impersonal and untroubled consciousness into which the words had been dropped and through which they were slowly sinking? And, as they sank they took a new significance for the awareness that was following them down into the depths of itself – a significance new not in respect to the entities connoted by the words, but rather in the mode of their comprehension, which, from being intellectual in character, had become intuitive and direct, so that the nature of man in his potentiality and of God in actuality were realized.
• ...unmediated participation. .....for the blissful freedom from personality …”
• What he is saying is that the only ideal worth pursuing is the ideal of liberation from personality. All other ideals are merely projections, on an enormously enlarged scale, of one or another aspect of personality, be it the artist’s ideal of beauty, the scientists’s ideal of truth, the humanitarian ideal of “goodness”, the political ideal of social justice or the chivalrous ideal of romantic love. What is commonly called self-sacrifice is the sacrifice of one part of the ego to another part, one set of personal feelings and passions for another set.
• The formation of self bondages are deceptive and look very alluring at first glance.The fanatic may be completely devoted, but in the final analysis his devotion turns out to be directed towards another aspect of his personality. His apparent selflessness is not really a liberation from the ego, but merely another form of bondage.
• The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people, in a word – they are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.” Th curse those bring upon mankind with their "noble ideals".
• The fight for good : where good resides.“Where good is.” “But where is it?” “On the level below the human and on the level above. On the animal level and on the level … well, you can take your choice of names: the level of eternity; the level, if you don’t object, of God; the level of spirit – only that happens to be about the most ambiguous word in the language. On the lower level, good exists as the proper functioning of the organism in accordance with the laws of its own being. On the higher level, it exists in the form of a knowledge of the world without desire or aversion; it exists as the experience of eternity, as the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego. Strictly human activities are activities that prevent the manifestations of good on the other two levels. For, in so far as we’re human, we’re obsessed with time, we’re passionately concerned with our personalities and with those magnified projections of our personalities which we call our policies, our ideals, our religions. And what are the results? Being obsessed with time and our egos, we are for ever craving and worrying. But nothing impairs the normal functioning of the organism like craving and revulsion, like greed and fear and worry. Directly or indirectly, most of our physical ailments and disabilities are due to worry and craving. We worry and crave ourselves into high blood-pressure, heart disease, tuberculosis, peptic ulcer, low resistance to infection, neurasthenia, sexual aberrations, insanity, suicide. Not to mention all the rest.”
• We crave ourslves into addictive ailments of the worst kind one can imagine when the real good is sought on two simple levels, on the level below man, the animal, and the level above commonly called the mystical or ecstatic.
• Huxley writing in the 30's the remarkable book and the methods of attaining to ecstasy .There is just one thing missing in Huxley’s vision – he says that humans have it in their power to transcend personality and reach the level of “God”, but he doesn’t say how … only suggests that it can happen spontaneously on occasions – alternatively it takes a disciplined life of asceticism and contemplation to reach that level, which pretty well precludes the normal life of child-raising and money making … of course the book was written in the thirties, before Huxley had taken psychedelics, so it was fairly remarkable … The mystics had a built in mechanism , a yearning that worked spontaneously usually with out entheogens that indigenous peoples had been using since time immemorial both for healing and visions. AFTER MANY A SUMMER... A remarkable book, anticipating the age of psychedelics.
• The elite of the mystical initiate has a preponderance since the time of the ancients.Exclusively in the hands of th esoteric elite who guarded their secrets zealously.Because they are all stuck in one of these ego-traps which Huxley has so elegantly described in the above excerpts and they don’t want to be “released”, or, to put it another way, to admit the folly of their ways or the fault-lines in their belief-systems – it is an almost insuperable problem in fact … Huxley’s brilliant prose paints a good picture of the transcendent state, but it is a poetic description, as it were. What Bart Huges did was explain the experience in physiological terms. He provided a scientific explanation of the mystical experience, thus bringing within reach of the common man what had previously been a secret guarded by the esoteric elite, the priests and shamans, who protected the sacraments for the exclusive use of initiates I will try and explain Bart’s discoveries. I believe that they provide the answer to this all too human predicament of ours, how to transcend the Ego. I believe that expanded consciousness is the central religious experience. Bart’s explanation of it is an advance on all previous explanations. It explains what is happening in the brain – not that previously religions have stated that as their purpose, but still the concept of God, as expressed by Huxley in the excerpts above, and as expounded by the mystics of all religions, the state of mind in which union with God is experienced, is just that, a state of mind – and Bart’s discoveries explain that in materialistic terms – so it is a big advance on the mystics’ poetic gropings in the dark.

Can Human Nature Be Changed?Health & Happiness — POSTED BY Joe Mellen on December
30, 2009 at 5:57 pm
An introduction to the discoveries of Bart Huges
relating to the economics of the blood supply in the brain, consciousness, LSD,
and trepanation – something new…
Life is a struggle for survival. For plant
or animal of any kind that is an unescapable fact. It is true for each
individual human being, as it is true for the human race. In the course of our
evolution we have become social animals. In society a balance has to be
maintained between the needs of the individual and the group. Individuals must
sacrifice their personal interests to a certain degree for the interests of the
group as a whole. This is ultimately in the best interests of both; it is
entirely reasonable and uncontestable.
Ever since man became a thinking
animal, with the invention of speech, the best minds have been applied to
finding a way to transcend the ego.
The question then arises, how come we
have arrived at the present state of chaos, with human activities threatening
our very survival as a species? The answer to this is actually well known; it is
a result of the struggle between egotism and altruism, in which egotism usually
wins. In an imperfect world the individual puts his own interests ahead of the
group’s.
This is not altogether surprising, because the bottom line is that
nobody else is responsible for your life. There are exceptions to this rule.
People will sacrifice their lives for other people if they are driven by love or
loyalty. Mothers will die protecting their children, so will fathers perhaps,
soldiers will risk their lives to save comrades in arms etc, but in the general
course of life, when push comes to shove, most people will save their own skin.
It is human nature.
Having more blood in the capillaries means there is more
available for the brain cells to use, so more brain cells than normal can
produce consciousness and the total amount of consciousness is
increased.
But, whilst in matters of life and death, it is understandable
that individuals should put their own interests ahead of the group’s, in other
matters that are less extreme, it is less understandable. In fact it is often
short-sighted and counter-productive, the result of stupidity and
wrong-thinking, an inability to see clearly what course of action is really in a
person’s best interests in the long run.
This may be true, but the fact is
that it happens and it is widespread. Unfortunately human behaviour is dominated
by the ego. What can we do about it?
There is no short term answer to this
question. Ever since man became a thinking animal, with the invention of speech,
the best minds have been applied to finding a way to transcend the ego. In the
past this has led to the creation of religions, in which a higher purpose than
personal gain is proposed and the reward of a place amongst the blessed offered
for the postponement of immediate gratification. This has had limited success
and has often led to the establishment of ecclesiastical hierarchies as
tyrannical as the temporal ones they attempt to transcend.
Now the question
arises again – how to persuade people to transcend the ego in their own
interests? Why is it so difficult? Because they are all stuck in one of these
ego-traps which Huxley has so elegantly described in the above excerpts and they
don’t want to be “released”
The very act of transcendence implies a climbing
above. A transcendent state is one on a higher level than the one transcended.
What does this “higher” in fact mean? Some people use the word “spiritual” to
describe this level, implying that it is above the material level. Saints fast
for days on end to achieve a state of enlightenment. By doing without the most
obvious physical need, for food, they endure the temptations of St Anthony to
reach the goal of disinterested awareness. In an enlightened vision the
individual’s needs and desires are subsumed in a common, categorical view of
those of the species as a whole. A feeling of indivisibility with all of life
infuses the mind, an exalted feeling of being at one with the whole of
existence.
In mystical traditions, such as the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life, there
are various stages of development through which the individual can ascend. The
lowest is the material level, the level of the body, then comes the level of
personality, including the moral sphere, and the highest is the level of the
spirit, the transcendent state of mind.
Aldous Huxley wrote a lot about the
idea of transcending the ego and was a pioneer in the taking of LSD. In his book
“After Many a Summer”, written in 1939, his character William Propter expounds
his philosophy. Here are some excerpts from that book, which put in words
exactly the advantages of the transcendent state that I would propose offer the
best chance of overcoming the inbuilt disadvantages of our ego-dominated
existence:
“He had come to this bench under the eucalyptus tree in order to
recollect himself, in order to realize for a moment the existence of that other
consciousness behind his private thoughts and feelings, that free, pure power
greater than his own. He had come for this; but memories had slipped in while he
was off his guard; speculations had started up, cloud upon cloud ……. Bondage is
the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with
tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. The price of freedom is
eternal vigilance; and he had failed to be vigilant. It wasn’t a case, he
reflected ruefully, of the spirit being willing and the flesh weak. That was
altogether the wrong antithesis. The spirit is always willing, but the person,
who is a mind as well as a body, is always unwilling – and the person,
incidentally, is not weak but extremely strong.”

____________________________________________________________

“For little by little these thoughts and wishes and feelings had settled like a muddy sediment in a jar of water, and as they settled, his vigilance was free to transform itself into a kind of effortless unattached awareness, at once intense and still, alert and passive – an awareness whose object was the words he had spoken and at the same time that which surrounded the words. But that which surrounded the words was the awareness itself; for this vigilance which was now an effortless awareness – what was it but an aspect, a partial expression, of that impersonal and untroubled consciousness into which the words had been dropped and through which they were slowly sinking? And, as they sank they took a new significance for the awareness that was following them down into the depths of itself – a significance new not in respect to the entities connoted by the words, but rather in the mode of their comprehension, which, from being intellectual in character, had become intuitive and direct, so that the nature of man in his potentiality and of God in actuality were realized by an analogue of sensuous experience, by a kind of unmediated participation.
The busy nothingness of his being experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsion and desires, for the blissful freedom from personality …”
What he is saying is that the only ideal worth pursuing is the ideal of liberation from personality. All other ideals are merely projections, on an enormously enlarged scale, of one or another aspect of personality, be it the artist’s ideal of beauty, the scientists’s ideal of truth, the humanitarian ideal of “goodness”, the political ideal of social justice or the chivalrous ideal of romantic love. What is commonly called self-sacrifice is the sacrifice of one part of the ego to another part, one set of personal feelings and passions for another set. For example the feelings connected with money or sex may be sacrificed so that the ego may have the feelings of superiority, solidarity and hatred which are associated with patriotism or some political or religious fanaticism. The fanatic may be completely devoted, but in the final analysis his devotion turns out to be directed towards another aspect of his personality. His apparent selflessness is not really a liberation from the ego, but merely another form of bondage.
In discussing these things with the young man Pete, the old man (Father William) tells him:
“Scribes and Pharisees aren’t any better, in the last analysis, than publicans and sinners. Indeed they’re often much worse. For several reasons. Being well thought of by others, they think well of themselves; and nothing so confirms an egotism as thinking well of oneself.
……………………………….
The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people, in a word – they are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.”
“Then where ought we to fight for good?”
“Where good is.”
“But where is it?”
“On the level below the human and on the level above. On the animal level and on the level … well, you can take your choice of names: the level of eternity; the level, if you don’t object, of God; the level of spirit – only that happens to be about the most ambiguous word in the language. On the lower level, good exists as the proper functioning of the organism in accordance with the laws of its own being. On the higher level, it exists in the form of a knowledge of the world without desire or aversion; it exists as the experience of eternity, as the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego. Strictly human activities are activities that prevent the manifestations of good on the other two levels. For, in so far as we’re human, we’re obsessed with time, we’re passionately concerned with our personalities and with those magnified projections of our personalities which we call our policies, our ideals, our religions. And what are the results? Being obsessed with time and our egos, we are for ever craving and worrying. But nothing impairs the normal functioning of the organism like craving and revulsion, like greed and fear and worry. Directly or indirectly, most of our physical ailments and disabilities are due to worry and craving. We worry and crave ourselves into high blood-pressure, heart disease, tuberculosis, peptic ulcer, low resistance to infection, neurasthenia, sexual aberrations, insanity, suicide. Not to mention all the rest.”

____________________________________________________________

Now of course this is all very true, but in everyday life, with children and the need to earn a living etc, it is not so easy to avoid the worry and craving – it is easier if you can lead the life of a contemplative! Still, that is the way … and taking acid regularly keeps you in touch both with the animal and “God” …
There is just one thing missing in Huxley’s vision – he says that humans have it in their power to transcend personality and reach the level of “God”, but he doesn’t say how … only suggests that it can happen spontaneously on occasions – alternatively it takes a disciplined life of asceticism and contemplation to reach that level, which pretty well precludes the normal life of child-raising and money making … of course the book was written in the thirties, before Huxley had taken psychedelics, so it was fairly remarkable …
Now the question arises again – how to persuade people to transcend the ego in their own interests? Why is it so difficult? Because they are all stuck in one of these ego-traps which Huxley has so elegantly described in the above excerpts and they don’t want to be “released”, or, to put it another way, to admit the folly of their ways or the fault-lines in their belief-systems – it is an almost insuperable problem in fact …
Huxley’s brilliant prose paints a good picture of the transcendent state, but it is a poetic description, as it were. What Bart Huges did was explain the experience in physiological terms. He provided a scientific explanation of the mystical experience, thus bringing within reach of the common man what had previously been a secret guarded by the esoteric elite, the priests and shamans, who protected the sacraments for the exclusive use of initiates.
In giving an explanation of expanded consciousness and also the Ego’s domination of behaviour, Bart opened the way to a reappraisal of the advantages and disadvantages of the particular adaptation that homo sapiens has made use of to arrive at his present position in evolution, standing in the upright position and talking. It should be said that the explanation flies in the face of a lot of received wisdom.
I will try and explain Bart’s discoveries. I believe that they provide the answer to this all too human predicament of ours, how to transcend the Ego. I believe that expanded consciousness is the central religious experience. Bart’s explanation of it is an advance on all previous explanations. It explains what is happening in the brain – not that previously religions have stated that as their purpose, but still the concept of God, as expressed by Huxley in the excerpts above, and as expounded by the mystics of all religions, the state of mind in which union with God is experienced, is just that, a state of mind – and Bart’s discoveries explain that in materialistic terms – so it is a big advance on the mystics’ poetic gropings in the dark.

Archaic Mark a fake

http://www.realitysandwich.com/archaic_mark_proved_fake

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091211203717.htm The scientific process of ms analysis is alluded to in this article and it has been bookmarked on my Google account.

For diverse motives many manuscripts and texts of the gospels and other sectarian and religious documents have been forged or falsified as to what they purport to represent. The methods to detect manuscript forgery as in this instant case can prove most enlightening in diverse aras of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

• Mark is considered the first of the canonical gospels.
• Goodspeed acquired this fake ms and apparently was deceived as to its authenticity . The authenticity of text was questioned a short year later.
• The ms included 16 colorful illustrations often the hallmark of medieval copyists and medieval texts and ms per se.
• This turned out to be a modern forgery, and not a witness to the early text.
• It embraced deades of speculation before the following tests were applied to draw the conclusion of forgery:polarized light, energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, Fourier Transform infrared spectroscopy, and Raman spectroscopy
• February 2010 Novum Testamentum The detailed findings will be presented.

'Archaic Mark' Proved Fake
Kyle
Davis

The Gospel of Mark narrates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth and
focuses primarily on the last week of his life. In this book, Jesus is portrayed
as a man of action--a healer and a miracle worker. It is considered by most
temporary scholars to be the first Gospel written. Recently, a prized copy of
this text, known as the "Archaic Mark" was revealed as fake.
Edgar J. Goodspeed of the University of Chicago acquired the Archaic Mark in
1937, and just one year later, the book’s authenticity was under question.
Opinion was divided on whether the manuscript, which also includes 16 colorful
illustrations, was an important witness to the early text of the gospel or a
modern forgery, said Margaret M. Mitchell, Professor of New
Testament and Early Christian Literature. After decades of speculation, experts
in mico-chemical analyst and medieval book making have concluded that it's a
forgery from the late 1800’s. Samples of parchment, ink, and paint
underwent a wide variety of tests, including polarized light,
energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, Fourier Transform
infrared spectroscopy, and Raman spectroscopy. The book has been determined to
be created no earlier then 1874. There will be a detailed paper of the findings
in this February’s publication of Novum Testamentum.
12-22-09
Kyle
Davis's blog
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