'Doc, that's some catch...' - J. Heller

Philip Dick, Science Fiction writer, famous amphetimine addict, once remarked,'you are the authority.' This seems sort of banal, obvious, and oh so true, but it's amazing how many people give up their authority to: god, religion, nation, party, company, family, etc. We are amazingly heirarchical creatures, willing to 'give it up,' to any power or movement that will have us. We seem to be incredible 'joiners,' afraid to be alone in the world. We are alone, and anytime we begin to think of ourselves and others in a 'general,' way, I believe we lose our uniqueness, our essential humaness, our identity. We get lost in the generality. Our empowerment is only to be found in the specific: I am this entity, this being, with these feelings, thoughts, fears; in a world of other unique entities, similiar, but essentially different too. We must recognize our shared humaness, but we must see and celebrate the differences too. To give up our identity to any higher or lower authority, is an abdication of our responsibilty, the responsibility of seeing and being alive in the world.

The filmmaker, John Cassevetes got me thinking along these lines, his films, are always very specific: these particular people, in these particular times; no movie cliches, no shorthand for understanding human experience. His whole film technique is directed to opening our eyes to the human experience; showing the love, the anger, the joy, the pain of a human, a very human, heart. We spend so much of our time on irrelavencies, for instance, the biggest time-wasters, the biggest soul-killers: Religion and Politics. We are looking for answers, some kind of permanancy, this is a sideshow,(Buddha - remember him? KILL THE BUDDHA!), this is delusion.

So we are left with our own instrument: this body, these feelings, these thoughts, this energy, this life. It's all we have, (plus a million questions, and no definitive answers) it is... it must be... enough.