My main question is actually on something you said a couple lectures ago.
It was something along the lines of uh...
Family...
sorry, I'm
Like god, that's the history of your family
kind of like the sins of your family something like that
Yeah
you... you're facing it all the time.
Yeah.
What's...
Can you expand on that more?
Well there's this idea in the Old Testament that
Your sins might be visited unto your family seven generations down
seems kind of harsh
But you know
When you're confronting, maybe your father's tyrannical
yeah, but you know maybe his father beat the hell out of him
and maybe his father's father was a vicious alcoholic
and he just bloody well don't know how far back that goes
and, and that means also you don't exactly know what you're dealing with
Right, to some degree you're dealing with your father
but only partly what you're dealing with
is the pathological paternal spirit
something like that
and it's better to think about that way
because it becomes an existential issue at that point.
You know so you could say that
well the father has two components
and I mean this psychologically speaking.
There's the Great Father
That's beneficial and protective that, that, that
organized this society and teaches you how to speak
and has produced all these wonderful things
And then there's the tyrannical oppressive part of the Father
Just like there's the terrible part of Mother Nature
that's destructive and the benevolent part of Mother Nature
That's wonderful and productive
and you're stuck with that, right, you're stuck with
Having to mediate between those opposing forces
just like you're stuck with the adversarial part of yourself in the heroic part of yourself
And it's up to you to set those things right
otherwise they propagate into the future
and it isn't it's a straightforward thing to say how to set them right
There's quite a good movie about that...
Magnolia
Which I really love.
It's by Paul Anderson if I remember correctly.
I hope that's right. It's a beautiful movie.
And it's about this, part of it's about this kid
whose father's really pushing them to be a superstar at at a quiz show
right, he's a genius kid he and
The kids studies this guy named Charles Fort.
You don't understand this movie
if you don't know this, because you got to know about Charles fort to understand Magnolia.
Charles fort was this weird old guy who
got rich with an inheritance, when he was like 20 and spent the rest of his life in libraries
looking up impossible things and documenting them.
Impossible things that couldn't happen from a scientific perspective
That were well attested to by multiple observers.
And he produced this news paper called the 14 times which still runs
anyways in Magnolia
Magnolia begins with this guy who falls out of a building
and then is shot by a woman who misses her husband with a rifle as he falls, and I think she's
she's charged with murder
and the street names have something to do with the deaths
and his fall and all of that happened and then
in the movie there's a rain of frogs and
There are rains of frogs from time to time. Sometimes they're frozen.
Sometimes they're rains of fish. Sometimes they're frozen.
It's like what the hell. How it's that happen?
It happens quite frequently as it turns out.
There's a rain of frogs, in the, in the movie Magnolia
and this little kid
see what happened to him is that he's on stage and
He ends up peeing his pants because of the pressure basically and humiliates himself
and then there's this rain of frogs
Which he kind of takes as a sign from God.
And then he goes to his father
even he's like eight years old this kid and he says:
"You have to stop doing this to me" - and he's dead serious about very careful
not being you know what would you call insubordinate nothing like that.
He decides that's coming to the end right now and
You have to make those decisions in your family
because otherwise things propagate down the generations, right
and every family is rife with
pathologies of one form or another and
you can learn from that and refuse to push it forward
and that's part of I think what you do when you when you
when you...
Shoulder your existential burden
because everyone is the beneficiary and the victim of the tyrannical father
Just like everyone is the beneficiary and the victim of mother nature and of themselves
And so you lock horns with out and straighten it out one way or another
and you don't move it forward to the next generation
so, and maybe you detach it a bit from your parents too because
God only knows
What, combination of catastrophes culminated in their particular forms of pathology so
Good enough
[applause]