WEBVTT 00:00:10.740 --> 00:00:13.010 Jim Conrad: Welcome to Conovision. 00:00:13.080 --> 00:00:16.020 I'm your host, Jim "Cono" Conrad. 00:00:16.770 --> 00:00:23.640 On episode 10, we tell stories about the dark side, the dark side of the 00:00:23.640 --> 00:00:31.680 moon, as metaphor for the shadow side of the human psyche, the human soul. 00:00:33.960 --> 00:00:42.629 What demons lurk, what fears lie submerged in the Mariana Trench of our mind. 00:00:45.540 --> 00:00:51.480 We will hear the poems and prose of two literary gods, William Butler 00:00:51.489 --> 00:00:57.300 Yeats and Cormac McCarthy, and their revelations from the Shadowlands. 00:00:59.069 --> 00:01:06.179 But first, a story about the tragic sense of life, the tragic vision, 00:01:06.720 --> 00:01:10.620 as so presciently illuminated in mythology by the ancient Greek 00:01:10.620 --> 00:01:16.949 playwrights and philosophers, and why it matters so much to us now. 00:01:23.670 --> 00:01:29.820 The word tragic, like myth, has been somewhat debased in our modern times. 00:01:30.390 --> 00:01:34.590 It has come to mean something calamitous, something horrible as when 00:01:34.590 --> 00:01:39.925 a television talking head intones, tragedy tonight on the Westside freeway. 00:01:40.554 --> 00:01:43.315 The ancient Greeks did have a word for that. 00:01:44.095 --> 00:01:50.305 It is catastrophe, but we do have much to learn about who we 00:01:50.305 --> 00:01:55.585 really are from recalling what our ancestors intuited 26 centuries ago. 00:01:57.075 --> 00:02:01.585 Their imaginative rendering of the human dilemma, the dialectical 00:02:01.585 --> 00:02:08.130 play of fate, destiny, character, and choice still remains the best 00:02:08.130 --> 00:02:14.250 paradigm for how life's permutations play out on this finite plane. 00:02:15.900 --> 00:02:20.550 Our predecessors discerned that we often intend a certain outcome, work 00:02:20.550 --> 00:02:26.160 diligently towards its achievement, and yet wind up in an entirely different 00:02:26.160 --> 00:02:28.410 place than expected in our lives. 00:02:28.769 --> 00:02:34.200 And most disturbingly, this altered course derives in substantial 00:02:34.200 --> 00:02:39.240 measure from the choices that a presumably conscious being made. 00:02:39.780 --> 00:02:44.490 How could this be that we could be our own enemy? 00:02:45.930 --> 00:02:49.650 The ancient Greeks understood that there were forces in the cosmos to 00:02:49.650 --> 00:02:52.200 which even the gods were subject. 00:02:53.100 --> 00:03:00.870 Those Greek gods being Aphrodite, the goddess of love, sex, and beauty, Athena, 00:03:01.230 --> 00:03:04.500 the goddess of reason, wisdom, and war. 00:03:05.519 --> 00:03:08.670 Artemis was the fleet footed goddess of the hunt. 00:03:09.550 --> 00:03:12.310 Aries was the god of Bloodlust. 00:03:13.120 --> 00:03:16.840 Apollo, who was the twin brother of Artemis, was among the most 00:03:16.900 --> 00:03:19.870 important and feared of the gods. 00:03:20.200 --> 00:03:24.340 Son of Zeus, he disseminated the will of his divine compatriots 00:03:24.340 --> 00:03:26.020 through various means. 00:03:26.140 --> 00:03:28.030 Notably, Oracles. 00:03:28.660 --> 00:03:31.360 The Oracle of Delphi was his mouthpiece. 00:03:32.940 --> 00:03:37.080 Demeter, an agricultural goddess was mother to Persephone, who 00:03:37.080 --> 00:03:40.560 was abducted by the underworld god, Hades, to be his bride. 00:03:41.440 --> 00:03:44.940 Dionysus was a son of Zeus born to a mortal mother. 00:03:45.240 --> 00:03:49.530 The cult of Dionysus revolved around intoxication, sex, 00:03:49.620 --> 00:03:51.690 and savage ritual sacrifice. 00:03:52.755 --> 00:03:56.025 As mentioned, Hades ruled the world of the dead. 00:03:56.955 --> 00:04:02.055 Hera, the queen goddess of Olympus, was both sister and wife to Zeus. 00:04:02.325 --> 00:04:06.495 Though she is often depicted as reserved and austere, she was mercilessly 00:04:06.495 --> 00:04:11.204 vindictive when it came to her husband's many extramarital adventures. 00:04:12.810 --> 00:04:17.849 Like many gods in the Greek pantheon, Hermes presided over multiple spheres. 00:04:18.029 --> 00:04:22.140 He was a pastoral figure, responsible for protecting livestock, but was 00:04:22.140 --> 00:04:26.580 also associated with fertility, music, luck and deception. 00:04:27.810 --> 00:04:30.575 Poseidon is best known as the Greek sea god. 00:04:30.965 --> 00:04:35.614 But he was also the god of horses and of earthquakes and had some 00:04:35.614 --> 00:04:37.895 seriously strange children. 00:04:38.234 --> 00:04:41.945 Though humanoid, he fathered both the winged horse Pegasus, by 00:04:41.945 --> 00:04:46.565 Medusa no less, and the cyclops, Polyphemus, who is blinded by 00:04:46.565 --> 00:04:49.025 Odysseus and his crew in the Odyssey. 00:04:50.284 --> 00:04:55.474 And finally, with the assistance of Hades and Poseidon, Zeus overthrew his father 00:04:55.479 --> 00:05:01.400 Cronus, king of the Titans and became the chief deity in a new pantheon, comprising 00:05:01.400 --> 00:05:03.619 mostly of his siblings and children. 00:05:04.669 --> 00:05:08.900 The forces of the universe to which these gods were subject were 00:05:08.900 --> 00:05:12.309 named Moirai, or Fate, sophrosyne. 00:05:12.635 --> 00:05:14.735 Or what goes around comes around. 00:05:15.235 --> 00:05:22.055 Diking for justice, nemesis, or consequential retribution, and destiny. 00:05:22.965 --> 00:05:27.995 These forces might be translated by us today as the organizing balancing 00:05:28.055 --> 00:05:30.485 structuring powers of the cosmo. 00:05:31.440 --> 00:05:34.049 A word itself, which means order. 00:05:35.280 --> 00:05:39.690 When we are ignorant of these forces at work, as frequently we will be, 00:05:39.869 --> 00:05:44.039 we most likely will make choices that run counter to the principles and 00:05:44.039 --> 00:05:47.159 energies of our own deepest nature. 00:05:47.909 --> 00:05:53.340 Moreover, our ancestors believed that we often offend the gods. 00:05:54.000 --> 00:05:58.110 That is, violate the energetic designs of which they are the 00:05:58.110 --> 00:06:00.210 dramatized personifications. 00:06:00.960 --> 00:06:05.730 Thus, a wound to Aphrodite will show up in one's intimate relationships, 00:06:06.210 --> 00:06:10.320 or one possessed by Aries will act out of unreasoned anger. 00:06:10.380 --> 00:06:12.540 With all its attendant consequences. 00:06:13.320 --> 00:06:17.550 Accordingly, the ancient Greeks believe that by reading the texture of one's life, 00:06:17.700 --> 00:06:23.219 one can identify the ignored or repressed archetypal powers, the gods offended, 00:06:23.520 --> 00:06:27.719 and offer homage and compensation to them to restore the balance. 00:06:28.590 --> 00:06:32.595 Add to this mix, our predecessors acknowledge the role of individual 00:06:32.595 --> 00:06:36.615 character, which repeatedly plays a role in the creation of our choices 00:06:36.615 --> 00:06:42.285 and patterns, what they called hubris, often translated as pride, might 00:06:42.285 --> 00:06:46.155 more pragmatically be defined as our tendency toward self-deception. 00:06:47.425 --> 00:06:50.844 Especially the delusion that we are in possession of all the facts when we 00:06:50.844 --> 00:06:56.755 make decisions, what they called the hamartia, sometimes translated as the 00:06:56.755 --> 00:07:02.995 tragic flaw or the wounded vision, the inherent biasing of our choices as a 00:07:02.995 --> 00:07:05.935 result of our own psychological history. 00:07:06.885 --> 00:07:12.015 Our tendency toward wrong choice or unintended consequences is 00:07:12.015 --> 00:07:14.055 fueled by these two liabilities. 00:07:14.534 --> 00:07:18.045 The first is our temptation to believe what we wish to believe, 00:07:18.615 --> 00:07:22.664 the assumption that we know all we need to know about ourselves and 00:07:22.664 --> 00:07:25.544 the situation to make wise choices. 00:07:26.175 --> 00:07:30.520 In fact, seldom do we know enough even to know we do not know enough. 00:07:32.055 --> 00:07:36.585 Moreover, there is a second element here, namely the biasing of our vision by the 00:07:36.585 --> 00:07:42.284 profound influence of our personal and cultural histories, our experience subtly, 00:07:42.284 --> 00:07:48.075 alters, even distorts the lens through which we see the world and the choices 00:07:48.075 --> 00:07:50.445 we make are based on that altered vision. 00:07:53.534 --> 00:07:58.365 At birth, each of us is handed a lens by our family of origin and our 00:07:58.365 --> 00:08:01.034 culture through which to see the world. 00:08:01.905 --> 00:08:05.925 As it is the only lens we have ever known, we will presume we see 00:08:05.925 --> 00:08:10.695 reality directly, even as we are seeing it colored and distorted. 00:08:11.565 --> 00:08:17.775 How could we ever choose wisely when our information is biased, even inaccurate. 00:08:18.705 --> 00:08:22.305 Only the corrections of others or the corrections from our violated 00:08:22.305 --> 00:08:26.474 psyche may oblige us to consider that our fundamental way of seeing 00:08:26.474 --> 00:08:29.354 and understanding is suspect. 00:08:30.914 --> 00:08:36.704 From this encounter with our limitations, the wisdom of humility comes to know that 00:08:36.704 --> 00:08:39.000 we do not even know what we do not know. 00:08:39.750 --> 00:08:43.830 And that what we do not know will often make the choices for us. 00:08:45.540 --> 00:08:49.680 Our lives begin and end with loss. 00:08:51.000 --> 00:08:55.590 We lose the safest, least demanding place we will ever inhabit with all our 00:08:55.590 --> 00:09:01.199 needs met and are forcefully extracted into a world of peril and contingency. 00:09:02.640 --> 00:09:06.930 And we end our journey with the loss of our mortal state. 00:09:08.385 --> 00:09:14.385 Natural as it is to seek to hang on the inevitability of loss rather asks that 00:09:14.385 --> 00:09:20.564 we treasure what we have appreciated for its precious, momentary presence in 00:09:20.564 --> 00:09:26.925 our lives and know that its gift to us is found precisely in its impermanence. 00:09:28.365 --> 00:09:31.245 What would be ours in perpetuity is less treasured. 00:09:31.785 --> 00:09:34.665 What is fleetingly here is most dear. 00:09:35.550 --> 00:09:39.449 The Greek myth of immortal Tithonus relates how he found his life 00:09:39.449 --> 00:09:41.880 meaningless because of his immortality. 00:09:41.880 --> 00:09:47.670 Every choice this hour could be reversed in another, and so he petitioned the 00:09:47.670 --> 00:09:54.360 gods to grant him mortality so that his life through his now risky choices 00:09:54.870 --> 00:09:57.120 could be experienced as meaningful. 00:09:58.050 --> 00:09:59.640 The god's blessed Tithonus. 00:10:03.735 --> 00:10:07.515 We live today in the age of anxiety. 00:10:07.935 --> 00:10:10.365 We would rather be ruined than changed. 00:10:10.785 --> 00:10:14.925 We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the 00:10:14.925 --> 00:10:19.035 present and let our illusions die. 00:10:20.325 --> 00:10:25.005 This excerpt from WH Auden's poem, The Age of Anxiety, captures the 00:10:25.005 --> 00:10:27.855 existential angst of being human. 00:10:28.425 --> 00:10:32.180 At the turn of the last century, Sigmund Freud published a book titled 00:10:32.359 --> 00:10:35.810 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, where he noted that one does not 00:10:35.810 --> 00:10:40.729 have to visit a mental asylum in order to observe psychopathology. 00:10:40.969 --> 00:10:44.630 One can observe the machinations of the divided soul in the 00:10:44.630 --> 00:10:46.579 mechanics of ordinary life. 00:10:47.790 --> 00:10:51.480 In his book, Freud detailed the implicit motives walled off from 00:10:51.480 --> 00:10:57.000 consciousness that interfere with the ego's choices, and behaviors producing 00:10:57.180 --> 00:11:01.920 namesake slips, forgetfulness, and camouflaging of dangerous feelings 00:11:01.920 --> 00:11:04.350 through acceptable disguises. 00:11:05.400 --> 00:11:10.710 Freud, along with Carl Gustav Jung helped our age find a new vocabulary. 00:11:11.025 --> 00:11:15.225 Observed meaningful motives in the confounding of consciousness and in 00:11:15.225 --> 00:11:17.985 short helped us become psychological. 00:11:19.185 --> 00:11:23.625 Now, in this new century, we are driven to psychological inquiry. 00:11:23.955 --> 00:11:27.945 In large part because our social and religious institutions, as well as 00:11:27.945 --> 00:11:32.925 our great educational, technological, scientific, artistic, and humanistic 00:11:32.925 --> 00:11:39.380 accomplishments have failed to prevent the slaughter and madness of the 20th century. 00:11:40.280 --> 00:11:44.990 The great Crystal Palace in London, which in 1851 housed the first 00:11:44.990 --> 00:11:50.180 international celebration of the newly divine trinity of progress machinery 00:11:50.390 --> 00:11:56.390 and materialism was by the next century a glass and steel Hulk used by the 00:11:56.390 --> 00:12:02.090 Nazi Luftwaffe as a navigational point on their bombing runs over London. 00:12:05.069 --> 00:12:11.579 It seems that not only minor interferences of consciousness, but madness itself, 00:12:11.869 --> 00:12:15.390 lurks beneath the veneer of civilization. 00:12:16.020 --> 00:12:19.230 How else can we look at a world where we are bombarded by 00:12:19.230 --> 00:12:24.270 sensations, driven by addictions, medicated beyond accountability, 00:12:24.630 --> 00:12:29.850 agitated into constant motion, and further from ourselves than ever. 00:12:30.584 --> 00:12:35.714 Unless we begin to look psychologically, unless we begin to consider, 00:12:35.714 --> 00:12:38.415 there may be a deeper meaning. 00:12:38.745 --> 00:12:39.704 After all, 00:12:43.305 --> 00:12:47.084 Carl Gustav Jung added the thought that the spiritually charged images 00:12:47.084 --> 00:12:52.245 that once linked humanity to nature and to the gods had eroded with the 00:12:52.245 --> 00:12:55.905 waning powers of tribal mythologies and sanctified institutions. 00:12:56.910 --> 00:13:00.900 If points of spiritual reference had disappeared for most, the modern 00:13:00.900 --> 00:13:05.670 sensibility had to look within in order to find the place where those 00:13:05.699 --> 00:13:07.949 collective images were generated. 00:13:09.030 --> 00:13:13.410 Jung wrote, we think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached 00:13:13.469 --> 00:13:18.120 such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal 00:13:18.150 --> 00:13:23.800 gods far behind, but what we have left behind are only verbal specters. 00:13:24.165 --> 00:13:28.875 Not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. 00:13:29.715 --> 00:13:33.855 We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic 00:13:33.855 --> 00:13:36.615 contents as if they were Olympians. 00:13:37.035 --> 00:13:40.185 Today they are called phobias and obsessions. 00:13:40.605 --> 00:13:42.915 In a word, neurotic symptoms. 00:13:44.140 --> 00:13:46.695 The gods have become diseases. 00:13:47.220 --> 00:13:52.410 Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but rather the solar plexus and produces 00:13:52.410 --> 00:13:56.580 curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room, or disorders, 00:13:56.580 --> 00:14:00.750 the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let 00:14:00.750 --> 00:14:04.440 loose psychic epidemics on the world. 00:14:05.880 --> 00:14:09.090 The implications of Jung's observations reverberate through 00:14:09.090 --> 00:14:11.370 our culture and our personal lives. 00:14:11.850 --> 00:14:20.190 In examining that seeming oxymoron, that a god, an eternal one may die, he explains 00:14:20.400 --> 00:14:25.290 that the name attached to a form may fade, but the energy behind it has only 00:14:25.290 --> 00:14:28.950 been transformed and reappears elsewhere. 00:14:30.570 --> 00:14:32.340 Where did the gods go then? 00:14:33.180 --> 00:14:38.010 The primal energies that gave rise to the ancient gods have not gone away. 00:14:38.580 --> 00:14:44.010 They have gone underground and become unconscious, have a spectral 00:14:44.010 --> 00:14:47.190 influence, even greater than when they were embodied as gods. 00:14:48.015 --> 00:14:52.905 The spiritual powers that the gods embodied, the invisible world made 00:14:52.905 --> 00:14:58.725 visible for a while, fall back into the human psyche, and oblige 00:14:58.725 --> 00:15:04.275 humankind to suffer separation alienation and estrangement from them. 00:15:09.345 --> 00:15:13.425 The most recent millennia began with so much hope for progress, for 00:15:13.425 --> 00:15:17.985 healing, for the solution of the ancient scourges of mankind, became 00:15:17.985 --> 00:15:20.085 the bloodiest in all of history. 00:15:20.985 --> 00:15:25.245 The neuroses of individual politicians embodied and channeled the unconscious 00:15:25.245 --> 00:15:29.475 dynamics of the populace and led to more murderous possession than that 00:15:29.475 --> 00:15:32.055 ascribed to Satan during the Middle Ages. 00:15:33.165 --> 00:15:37.515 The distractions and enticements of popular media, newspapers, magazines, 00:15:37.515 --> 00:15:43.125 film, and most of all social media and television, delivered much information, 00:15:43.455 --> 00:15:48.135 but in a deadly mix of popular fantasy, collective projections, wishful 00:15:48.135 --> 00:15:54.825 thinking, obscure motives, and shadowy agendas that only dazzled intelligence. 00:15:55.995 --> 00:15:58.365 What fills this existential void? 00:15:58.725 --> 00:15:59.835 This meaning gap? 00:16:00.195 --> 00:16:04.785 this time between the gods who have vanished and the gods not yet arrived, 00:16:05.085 --> 00:16:07.305 is the stuff of our daily life. 00:16:07.845 --> 00:16:11.025 Where our ancestors had living mythologies, we believe that 00:16:11.025 --> 00:16:16.335 we have transcended such a need and therefore stand naked and 00:16:16.335 --> 00:16:22.120 vulnerable before the raw, sometimes destructive powers of our nature. 00:16:24.195 --> 00:16:28.635 Our hubristic belief that we are in control of ourselves and nature 00:16:28.965 --> 00:16:32.125 only makes us more unconscious of what is at work within us. 00:16:33.360 --> 00:16:37.200 Our ancestors could seek the relief of their personal and tribal problems by 00:16:37.200 --> 00:16:42.120 asking which god had been offended, and then offering propitiation to reestablish 00:16:42.120 --> 00:16:44.010 right relationship with that god. 00:16:44.250 --> 00:16:49.980 To say that one has been offended by Aphrodite today would be thought mad. 00:16:51.595 --> 00:16:54.450 And what about the culture of sensation? 00:16:54.870 --> 00:16:56.820 We are wrapped around by pop culture. 00:16:57.345 --> 00:17:02.295 News that runs 24 hours creates info junkies, local newscasts find the 00:17:02.295 --> 00:17:06.525 glorious accident, the most salacious scandal, the most paranoia, stirring 00:17:06.525 --> 00:17:10.754 threats to public health, to serve up for breakfast, for dinner, and to send 00:17:10.754 --> 00:17:13.935 us toward turbulent slumber at bedtime. 00:17:15.194 --> 00:17:19.780 Transient non-entities are catapulted to fame, followed by cameras 00:17:19.780 --> 00:17:23.595 throughout the course of their ordinary days, and described with hyped 00:17:23.595 --> 00:17:25.665 banalities of the unexamined life. 00:17:26.370 --> 00:17:31.890 Romances, survival contests, sensationalized disease reports, corporate 00:17:31.890 --> 00:17:37.800 greed, political greed, all feed the ever increasing lust for sensation. 00:17:39.120 --> 00:17:43.200 Apparently, where one has no personal life, no depth of character, one 00:17:43.200 --> 00:17:48.630 must have an artificial life, an avatar with someone else's values. 00:17:49.680 --> 00:17:53.070 A life or a culture based on sensation has no choice but to 00:17:53.070 --> 00:17:55.410 continually escalate the sensations. 00:17:55.860 --> 00:17:59.700 For we quickly grow desensitized to their incessant drumbeat 00:17:59.850 --> 00:18:01.320 and their failed promise. 00:18:02.730 --> 00:18:05.310 A modern Dante descent into hell. 00:18:05.370 --> 00:18:11.310 Might be defined as taking a good thing, asking way too much of it, exhausting 00:18:11.310 --> 00:18:16.260 it, and then being left with only it. 00:18:19.229 --> 00:18:24.120 Beware The Ides of March is a famous warning from William Shakespeare's play, 00:18:24.120 --> 00:18:30.010 Julius Caeser spoken by a soothsayer to Caesar foretelling his assassination. 00:18:30.370 --> 00:18:35.590 The phrase symbolizes a foreshadowing of tragedy and a fatal arrogance, 00:18:35.740 --> 00:18:39.820 as Caesar dismisses the warning as the words of a dreamer. 00:18:41.290 --> 00:18:44.844 And finally, a friend in recovery once told me that when he was 00:18:44.844 --> 00:18:49.975 drinking, he always had this strange feeling of impending doom. 00:18:51.175 --> 00:18:54.895 And then when he got sober, he realized what it was. 00:18:55.375 --> 00:18:56.395 I asked him, what was it? 00:18:56.725 --> 00:19:01.165 And he replied, impending doom. 00:19:02.844 --> 00:19:06.625 Recall the words of Cassius from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. 00:19:07.225 --> 00:19:10.260 Men at some time are masters of their fates. 00:19:11.325 --> 00:19:18.285 The fault dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves 00:19:20.055 --> 00:19:22.510 that we are underlings. 00:19:37.365 --> 00:19:40.045 The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats. 00:19:51.645 --> 00:19:58.285 Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. 00:19:59.605 --> 00:20:01.615 Things fall apart. 00:20:02.065 --> 00:20:04.525 The center cannot hold. 00:20:05.545 --> 00:20:08.995 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. 00:20:09.895 --> 00:20:16.435 The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony 00:20:16.465 --> 00:20:19.645 of innocence is drowned. 00:20:20.755 --> 00:20:23.460 The best lack all convictions. 00:20:23.879 --> 00:20:28.770 While the worst are full of passionate intensity. 00:20:38.820 --> 00:20:42.420 Surely some revelation is at hand. 00:20:43.170 --> 00:20:47.790 Surely the second coming is at hand. 00:20:48.090 --> 00:20:49.830 The second coming. 00:20:51.000 --> 00:20:55.470 Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of spiritus 00:20:55.470 --> 00:20:58.169 mundi troubles my sight. 00:20:59.429 --> 00:21:06.940 Somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of 00:21:06.940 --> 00:21:16.810 a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs. 00:21:17.380 --> 00:21:21.970 While all about it, real shadows of the indignant desert birds, 00:21:23.410 --> 00:21:26.140 the darkness drops again. 00:21:27.400 --> 00:21:36.040 But now I know that 20th centuries of stony sleep were vexed to 00:21:36.040 --> 00:21:38.590 nightmare by a rocking cradle. 00:21:39.250 --> 00:21:46.420 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches 00:21:46.630 --> 00:21:50.950 towards Bethlehem to be born. 00:22:07.740 --> 00:22:08.590 They road on 00:22:11.665 --> 00:22:15.835 and the sun and the east flushed pale streaks of light, and 00:22:15.835 --> 00:22:17.245 then a deeper run of color. 00:22:18.360 --> 00:22:24.360 Like blood seeping up in sudden reaches, flaring plane wise, and 00:22:24.360 --> 00:22:29.160 where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation, the 00:22:29.160 --> 00:22:32.250 top of the sun rose out of nothing. 00:22:33.270 --> 00:22:41.640 Like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat 00:22:41.910 --> 00:22:44.400 and pulsing and malevolent behind them. 00:22:47.160 --> 00:22:52.620 The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand 00:22:53.100 --> 00:22:56.880 and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them, 00:22:56.880 --> 00:23:01.290 like strands of the night from which they'd ridden, like tentacles to bind 00:23:01.290 --> 00:23:03.360 them to the darkness yet to come. 00:23:04.560 --> 00:23:09.930 They rode on with their heads down, faceless under their hats 00:23:10.200 --> 00:23:12.270 like an army asleep on the march. 00:23:12.930 --> 00:23:17.350 By mid-morning, another man had died and they lifted him from the wagon where 00:23:17.350 --> 00:23:22.410 he'd stay in the sacks he'd laid among and buried him also, then they rode on. 00:23:24.750 --> 00:23:30.749 Now wolves had come to follow them, great pale lobos with yellow eyes that 00:23:30.750 --> 00:23:35.400 trotted neat of foot were squatted in the shimmering heat to watch them 00:23:35.400 --> 00:23:37.020 where they made their noon halt. 00:23:38.060 --> 00:23:43.669 Moving on again, loping, sidling, ambling with their long noses to the ground. 00:23:43.909 --> 00:23:47.060 In the evening, their eyes shifted and winked out there 00:23:47.060 --> 00:23:48.620 on the edge of the firelight. 00:23:49.370 --> 00:23:53.719 And in the morning when the riders rode out in the cool dark, they 00:23:53.719 --> 00:23:57.830 could hear the snarling and pop of their mouths behind them as they 00:23:57.939 --> 00:23:59.659 sacked the camp from meat scraps. 00:24:00.620 --> 00:24:06.889 The wagons drew so dry, they slouched from side to side like dogs, and the sand was. 00:24:07.100 --> 00:24:12.949 Grinding them away, the wheels shrank, and the spokes reeled in their hubs 00:24:12.949 --> 00:24:15.020 and plattered like loom shafts. 00:24:15.199 --> 00:24:19.639 And at night they drive false spokes into the mortises and tie them down 00:24:19.639 --> 00:24:24.020 with strips of green hide and they drive wedges between the iron of the 00:24:24.020 --> 00:24:26.719 tires and the sun cracked fellows. 00:24:27.050 --> 00:24:28.280 They wobbled on. 00:24:28.550 --> 00:24:34.250 The trace of their untrue laborers like side winder tracks in the sand. 00:24:34.280 --> 00:24:37.100 The duledge pegs worked loose and dropped behind. 00:24:37.429 --> 00:24:39.080 Wheels began to break up. 00:24:40.580 --> 00:24:43.310 10 days out with four men dead. 00:24:43.669 --> 00:24:49.669 They started across a plane of pure pumice where there grew no shrub, 00:24:49.760 --> 00:24:52.730 no weed as far as the eye could see. 00:24:53.480 --> 00:24:57.560 The captain called the halt and he called up the Mexican who served as guide. 00:24:57.889 --> 00:25:01.129 They talked and the Mexican gestured and the captain gestured, and 00:25:01.129 --> 00:25:02.990 after a while they moved on again. 00:25:03.590 --> 00:25:08.689 A man from the ranks said, this looks like the higher road to hell to me. 00:25:10.399 --> 00:25:14.570 In two days, they began to come upon bones and cast off apparel. 00:25:14.750 --> 00:25:19.340 They saw half buried skeletons of mules with the bones so wiped and 00:25:19.340 --> 00:25:24.230 polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat. 00:25:25.159 --> 00:25:29.929 And they saw panniers and pack saddles and the bones of men, and 00:25:29.929 --> 00:25:35.120 they saw a mule and tire that dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. 00:25:37.020 --> 00:25:37.939 They rode on. 00:25:39.230 --> 00:25:45.500 The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale 00:25:45.500 --> 00:25:50.149 they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. 00:25:51.500 --> 00:25:55.070 The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted 00:25:55.070 --> 00:25:56.870 their leans snouts on the air. 00:25:57.919 --> 00:26:03.800 At night, the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. 00:26:04.095 --> 00:26:05.775 There was no more sickness. 00:26:06.735 --> 00:26:12.285 The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watch the white 00:26:12.285 --> 00:26:15.495 hot stars go rifling down the dark. 00:26:16.515 --> 00:26:23.325 Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon 00:26:23.355 --> 00:26:29.145 the face of the planet Anareta clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. 00:26:31.395 --> 00:26:32.265 They moved on. 00:26:33.225 --> 00:26:33.465 And they. 00:26:33.855 --> 00:26:34.875 Iron of a wagon. 00:26:34.875 --> 00:26:37.925 Tires group polished brightest chrome in the pumice. 00:26:38.835 --> 00:26:43.995 To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image 00:26:43.995 --> 00:26:48.195 on the sand, like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now. 00:26:48.195 --> 00:26:54.720 They took to rioting by night, silent jornadas saved for the trembling of the 00:26:54.720 --> 00:26:56.940 wagons and the wheeze of the animals. 00:26:58.020 --> 00:27:04.440 Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick 00:27:04.440 --> 00:27:06.540 on their mustaches and their eyebrows. 00:27:08.160 --> 00:27:09.060 They rode on. 00:27:10.425 --> 00:27:15.480 And the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died 00:27:15.480 --> 00:27:17.640 beyond the ink black mountains. 00:27:18.570 --> 00:27:20.940 They came to know the night skies well. 00:27:21.870 --> 00:27:26.250 Western skies that read more geometric constructions than 00:27:26.250 --> 00:27:28.860 those names given by the ancients. 00:27:29.880 --> 00:27:31.590 Tethered to the pole star. 00:27:32.070 --> 00:27:36.690 They rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest 00:27:36.930 --> 00:27:38.940 like a great electric kite. 00:27:40.410 --> 00:27:46.230 The sand laid blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among 00:27:46.230 --> 00:27:50.880 the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly 00:27:50.880 --> 00:27:57.150 and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes, and the polished shoes of 00:27:57.150 --> 00:28:02.520 the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. 00:28:04.050 --> 00:28:08.070 They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard. 00:28:09.420 --> 00:28:14.130 The silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine 00:28:14.130 --> 00:28:17.610 of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. 00:28:18.150 --> 00:28:23.040 They saw wild horses racing on a plane, pounding their shadows down the night and 00:28:23.040 --> 00:28:29.160 leaving in the moonlight of vaporous dust, like the palest stain of their passing. 00:28:30.210 --> 00:28:36.750 All night, the wind blew and the fine dust set their teeth on edge, sand 00:28:37.230 --> 00:28:39.990 in everything, grit in all they ate. 00:28:40.800 --> 00:28:46.710 In the morning a urine colored sun rose blearly through panes of dust 00:28:46.710 --> 00:28:49.200 in a dim world and without feature. 00:28:50.010 --> 00:28:51.900 The animals were failing. 00:28:53.160 --> 00:28:58.620 They halted and made a dry camp without wood or water, and the wretched ponies 00:28:58.710 --> 00:29:00.900 huddled and whimpered like dogs. 00:29:02.130 --> 00:29:08.460 That night, they rode through a region electric and wild, where strange 00:29:08.460 --> 00:29:13.140 shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horse's trappings and 00:29:13.140 --> 00:29:17.910 the wagon wheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue 00:29:17.910 --> 00:29:22.260 light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. 00:29:23.010 --> 00:29:26.910 All night sheet, lightning quaked sourceless of the west, beyond the 00:29:26.910 --> 00:29:30.870 midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, 00:29:31.080 --> 00:29:35.850 the mountains on the southern skyline stark and black and livid, like a land 00:29:35.850 --> 00:29:42.030 of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. 00:29:44.250 --> 00:29:47.400 The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit 00:29:47.400 --> 00:29:48.690 that does it all about them. 00:29:49.080 --> 00:29:50.430 Blue and barren. 00:29:50.880 --> 00:29:55.620 Great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon 00:29:55.680 --> 00:30:02.190 kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave 00:30:02.190 --> 00:30:13.410 them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream. 00:30:16.680 --> 00:30:17.595 They rode on. 00:30:24.330 --> 00:30:30.750 An excerpt from the novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness 00:30:30.780 --> 00:30:33.720 in The West, by Cormac McCarthy. 00:30:48.750 --> 00:30:53.760 Tales told by shadowy elders around ancient campfires offered 00:30:53.760 --> 00:30:56.160 both explanation and comfort. 00:30:57.660 --> 00:30:59.129 Life hasn't changed that much. 00:30:59.485 --> 00:31:05.065 Our dependence on explanation and comfort still lies just under our 00:31:05.095 --> 00:31:08.115 busy ambition and constant yearning. 00:31:09.945 --> 00:31:14.475 This has been episode 10 of Conovision, the spirit of storytelling. 00:31:16.185 --> 00:31:20.415 We began with the words and wisdom of Dr. James Hollis from his book, 00:31:20.715 --> 00:31:26.564 finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, or how to finally really grow up? 00:31:27.689 --> 00:31:31.155 Asking the eternal question, where did the gods go? 00:31:32.534 --> 00:31:34.965 Plus the literary Olympians. 00:31:35.370 --> 00:31:38.460 William Butler Yeats and Cormac McCarthy. 00:31:39.120 --> 00:31:45.720 I urge you to find every word they wrote and read it slowly, please. 00:31:49.200 --> 00:31:50.129 I'm Jim Conrad. 00:31:50.670 --> 00:31:51.450 Thanks for listening. 00:31:51.870 --> 00:31:56.015 And as always, remember, we are all stories to be told.