Word: zen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...when El Topo (played by Jodorowsky) leaves his son in the village and rides off for a series of gun battles with four holy men, the film turns diffuse and flirts with total disintegration. After a series of opaque symbolic adventures, El Topo is reborn as a kind of Zen saint who performs mummery for money in a Western town that serves as a crude mock-up of contemporary America. Eventually he is killed by his son, now fully grown, who rides off into the sunset with El Topo's dwarf wife and her newborn son, an image that...
...acts as if the disintegration of "communal ties" were a problem invented by 19th century America. He is guilty of a crime of his own: thesis protecting. He neglects to point out that Emerson's "imperial self" was bred, after all, with the help of German philosophy. Every Zen trender can spot for himself the Oriental mysticism in Whitman, but as far as Anderson is concerned, it all comes f.o.b. Brooklyn and New Jersey...
...village outside Tokyo, a German Jesuit priest builds a Zen monastery -with the blessing of the Vatican. Two Canadian Protestants arrive in the Black African enclave of Swaziland to set up a 100,000-watt radio transmitter. Farther north in Tanzania, Maryknoll priests and nuns work side by side in the fields with peasants, then help train native leaders for the new communal villages of President Julius Nyerere's socialist state. Wycliffe Bible Translators in South Viet Nam, who lived in Montagnard villages well before American G.I.s came, produce nine new written languages from the native dialects, with more...
...loss of innocence. I came here, very naively, to find a glittering community of moral (though perhaps misguided) men and women. I found a cesspool of egomaniacs who are far more interested in themselves, Art, Science, Zen, Catholicism or marijuana than they are in stopping the slaughter we are committing over there. And I found that I was one of them. I came to the right place. Not better or worse than other places, perhaps, but cosmically bigger. Other places aspire to produce Henry Kissingers...
...caption under the picture is taken from Ginsberg's writing, dated September 9, 1955: "... a bearded interesting Berkeley cat name of Snyder, I met him yesterday (via Rextoyh suggestion) who is studying oriental and leaving in a few months on some privately put up funds to go be a Zen monk (a real one). He's a head, peyotlist, laconist, but warmhearted, nice looking with a little beard, thin, blond, rides a bicycle in Berkeley in red corduroy and levis and hungup on Indians... Interesting person...