COLE SMITH
Film Director - Screenwriter
Diary
25 / 2 / 26
Quotes
The more unconscious the whole of a man's personality is and the more germinal his ego, the more his experience of the whole will be projected upon the group.
- Erich Neumann,
The Origins and History of Consciousness
The ego keeps its integrity only if it does not identify with one of the opposites, and if it understands how to hold the balance between them.
This is possible only if it remains conscious of both at once.
However, the necessary insight is made exceedingly difficult not by one's social and political leaders alone, but also by one's religious mentors.
They all want decision in favour of one thing, and therefore the utter identification of the individual with a necessarily one-sided "truth."
Even if it were a question of some great truth, identification with it would still be a catastrophe, as it arrests all further spiritual development.
Instead of knowledge one then has only belief, and sometimes that is more convenient and therefore more attractive.
- C. G. Jung,
The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
In the course of millenia we have succeeded not only in conquering the wild nature all round us, but in subduing our own wilderness—at least temporarily and up to a point.
At all events we have been acquiring "will," i.e., disposable energy, and though it may not amount to much it is nevertheless more than the primitive possesses.
We no longer need magical dances to make us "strong" for whatever we want to do, at least not in ordinary cases.
But when we have to do something that exceeds our own powers, something that might easily go wrong, then we solemnly lay a foundation-stone with the blessing of the Church, or we "christen" a ship as she slips from the docks; in time of war we assure ourselves of the help of a patriotic God, the sweat of fear forcing a fervent prayer from the lips of the stoutest.
So it only needs slightly insecure conditions for the "magical" formalities to be resuscitated in the most natural way.
Through these ceremonies the deeper emotional forces are released; conviction becomes blind auto-suggestion, and the psychic field of vision is narrowed to one fixed point on which the whole weight of the unconscious forces is concentrated.
And it is, indeed, an objective fact that success attends the sure rather than the unsure.
- C. G. Jung,
The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
It has struck me that in many of what are known as "psychological" novels only one person—once again the hero—is described from within.
The author sits in his mind, as it were, and looks at the other characters from outside.
The psychological novel in general no doubt owes its special nature to the inclination of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to personify the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes.
- Sigmund Freud,
Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming
In the act of sacrifice the consciousness gives up its power and possessions in the interests of the unconscious.
This makes possible a union of opposites resulting in a release of energy.
At the same time the act of sacrifice is a fertilization of the mother: the chthonic serpent-demon drinks the blood, i.e., the soul, of the hero.
In this way life becomes immortal, for, like the sun, the hero regenerates himself by his self-sacrifice and re-entry into the mother.
After all this we should have no difficulty in recognising the son's sacrifice to the mother in the Christian mystery.
- C. G. Jung,
Symbols of Transformation
I hate these compromises.
If one can't have the sort of life one wants, one might as well be dead.
- Simone de Bouvoir,
She Came to Stay
There is a secret, inner growth, for years it seems impeded and then, unexpectedly, often set off by something trivial, the veil falls away and there is a branch full of ripe fruit; we had not noticed it flowering, but now we see that without knowing it we had tended a mysterious tree.
Oh that I had never allowed myself to be persuaded that any power outside myself could bring forth that tree, how much misery I would have been spared!
I was sole lord of my destiny and knew it now!
I thought that because I could not alter it by deeds, I was powerless before it.
How often did it not occur to me that to be master of one's own thoughts must also mean to be the all-powerful controller of one's own destiny.
But I always rejected the idea, because my half-hearted attempts never showed immediate results.
I underestimated the magical power of thought and fell back into the old error that has plagued mankind since Adam; to take the deed for a giant and the thought for a mere figment.
Only when you can command light can you also command the shadow and - destiny; anyone who tries to achieve it by his deeds is only a shadow fighting a vain battle with shadows.
But it seems that we must allow life to torture us almost to death before we finally grasp the key.
How often have I tried to help others by explaining this to them; they listen and they nod and they believe, but it all goes in at the right ear and comes out at the left.
Perhaps the truth is too simple for people to understand it straight away.
Or must the 'tree' reach up into the sky before understanding can come?
I sometimes fear that the difference between one person and another is greater than that between a person and a stone.
The whole purpose of our life is to develop a fine sense for what makes the tree flourish and keeps it from withering.
Everything else is merely shovelling dung without knowing the reason why.
But how many are there alive today who understand what I mean?
They would imagine I was talking in images if I were to tell them.
It is the ambiguity of language that separates us.
If I were to publish something about 'inner growth,' people would interpret it as meaning becoming cleverer or better, just as they take philosophy for a theory and not the practice.
Obeying the Commandments alone, even with complete sincerity, is not sufficient to promote inner growth, for it is merely outward form.
Breaking the Commandments is often a better hot-bed, but we keep the Commandments when we should break them and break them when we should keep them.
Because saints only perform good deeds, people imagine that by performing good deeds they can become saints.
They follow that path and believe they will be counted among the just; but they are following a false belief in God and it will lead them to the abyss.
They are blinded by mistaken humility, so that they start back in horror, like children at their own image in the mirror, and fear that they are going mad when the times comes when they shall see His face.
- Gustav Meyrink,
The Green Face
Gradually, as if a whispering voice were letting the words drop syllable by syllable into his ear, it became clear to him that this feeling of terror was nothing other than his old dull, stifling fear of some shadowy horror, a sudden recognition of mankind's headlong rush towards the abyss.
- Gustav Meyrink,
The Green Face
It is evident from the ethnological and historical material that the soul is a content that belongs partly to the subject and partly to the world of spirits, i.e., the unconscious.
Hence the soul always has an earthly as well as a rather ghostly quality.
It is the same with magical power, the divine force of primitives, whereas on the higher levels of culture God is entirely separate from man and is exalted to the heights of pure ideality.
But the soul never loses its intermediate position.
It must therefore be regarded as a function of relation between the subject and the inaccessible depths of the unconscious.
The determining force (God) operating from these depths is reflected by the soul, that is, it creates symbols and images, and is itself only an image.
By means of these images the soul conveys the forces of the unconscious to consciousness; it is both receiver and transmitter, an organ for perceiving unconscious contents.
What it perceives are symbols.
But symbols are shaped energies, determining ideas whose affective power is just as great as their spiritual value.
When, says Eckhart, the soul is in God it is not "blissful," for when this organ of perception is overwhelmed by the divine dynamis it is by no means a happy state.
But when God is in the soul, i.e., when the soul becomes a vessel for the unconscious and makes itself an image or symbol of it, this is a truly happy state.
The happy state is a creative state.
- C. G. Jung,
Psychological Types
From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled.
This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me.
I did not have this certainty, it had me.
Nobody could rob me of the conviction that it was enjoined upon me to do what God wanted and not what I wanted.
That gave me the strength to go my own way.
Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among men, but was alone with God.
And when I was "there," where I was no longer alone, I was outside time; I belonged to the centuries; and He who then gave answer was He who always is was there.
These talks with the "Other" were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstacy.
Naturally, I could not talk with anyone about these things.
I know of no one to whom I might have communicated them except, possibly, my mother.
She seemed to think along somewhat similar lines as myself.
But I soon noticed that in conversation she was not adequate for me.
Her attitude towards me was above all one of admiration, and that was not good for me.
And so I remained alone with my thoughts.
On the whole, I liked that best, I played alone, daydreamed or strolled in the woods alone, and had a secret world of my own.
- C. G. Jung,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities in life, they ultimately mean very little.
- C. G. Jung,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
[...] excessive pleasure breaks down one's control just as much as excessive pain.
- Plato,
The Republic
Love is such a priceless treasure that the whole world may be purchased with it.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov
Levin was saying what of late he had really been thinking.
He saw death and the approach of death in everything; but the work he had begun interested him all the more.
After all, he had to live his life somehow, till death came.
Everything for him was wrapped in darkness; but just because of the darkness, feeling his work to be the only thread to guide him through the darkness, he seized upon it and clung to it with all his might.
- Leo Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina
And what were they so afraid of?
A child can be told everything—everything.
I was always struck by the thought of how poorly grown-ups know children, even fathers and mothers their own children.
Nothing should be concealed from children on the pretext that they're little and it's too early for them to know.
What a sad and unfortunate idea!
And how well children themselves can see that their fathers consider them too little and unable to understand everything.
Grown-ups don't know that a child can give extremely important advice even in the most difficult matters.
Oh, God! when this pretty little bird looks at you trustingly and happily, it's such a shame for you to deceive it!
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Idiot
[...] the richest source of the unique satisfaction in the photoplay is probably that esthetic feeling which is significant for the new art and which we have understood from its psychological conditions.
The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness.
The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones.
It is a superb enjoyment which no other art can furnish us.
- Hugo Münsterberg,
The Photoplay
What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs.
By its very nature it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon.
Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces only a feeling of lukewarm comfort; we are so constituted that we gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
Hence, our prospects of happiness are already restricted by our constitution.
- Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and its Discontents
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.
- Daphne du Maurier,
Rebecca
Art is not the reflection of a reality; it is the reality of that reflection.
- Jean-Luc Godard,
La Chinoise
The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs.
In unison, the nooses were placed around their necks.
"Long live liberty!" shouted the two men.
But the boy was silent.
"Where is merciful God, where is He?" someone behind me was asking.
At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over.
Total silence in the camp.
On the horizon, the sun was setting.
"Caps off!" screamed the Lagerälteste.
His voice quivered.
As for the rest of us, we were weeping.
"Cover your heads!"
Then came the march past the victims.
The two men were no longer alive.
Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish.
But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing . . .
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.
And we were forced to look at him at close range.
He was still alive when I passed him.
His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
"For God's sake, where is God?"
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
"Where is He? This is where—hanging here from this gallows . . ."
- Elie Wiesel,
Night
In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information.
In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.
We just don't know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues.
In ancient times having power meant having access to data.
Today having power means knowing what to ignore.
- Yuval Noah Harari,
Homo Deus
Modernity is a deal.
All of us sign up to this deal on the day we are born, and it regulates our lives until the day we die.
Very few of us can ever rescind or transcend this deal.
It shapes our food, our jobs and our dreams, and it decides where we dwell, whom we love and how we pass away.
At first sight modernity looks like an extremely complicated deal, hence few try to understand what they have signed up for.
Like when you download some software and are asked to sign an accompanying contract that consists of dozens of pages of legalese—you take one look at it, immediately scroll to the last page, tick 'I agree' and forget about it.
Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal.
The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.
- Yuval Noah Harari,
Homo Deus
The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.
- Yuval Noah Harari,
Sapiens
The artist must be blind to distinctions between "recognised" and "unrecognised" conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teachings and demands of his particular age.
He must watch only the trend of the inner need, and hearken to its words alone.
Then he will with safety employ means both sanctioned and forbidden by his contemporaries.
All means are sacred which are called for by the inner need.
All means are sinful which obscure that inner need.
- Wassily Kandinsky,
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
No, no, Lou was not such a fool as she looked, in his eyes anyhow.
She knew what she wanted.
She wanted relief from the nervous tension and irritation of her life, she wanted to escape from the friction which is the whole stimulus in modern social life.
She wanted to be still: only that, to be very, very still, and recover her own soul.
- D.H. Lawrence,
St. Mawr
Indeed, it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains, to strive to stand on ever higher ground to gaze farther into the distance.
It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival.
Had you, for example, only been concerned with staying alive, you would have fled from this mountain as fast and as far away as you could.
Instead, you chose to climb it.
The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than mere base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose.
Mountains are universal, and we are all standing at the foot of mountains.
- Cixin Liu,
Mountain
I asked him if he could turn off one of the lights. The glare on the white walls was making me drowsy.
He said he couldn't.
That was how they'd been wired: it was all or nothing.
- Albert Camus,
The Stranger
[...] all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine.
You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it.
You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true.
You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases.
At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-coloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron.
All this is good and I wait for you to continue.
But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus.
You explain this world to me with an image.
I realise then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.
Have I the time to become indignant?
You have already changed theories.
So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.
What need had I of so many efforts?
The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more.
I have returned to my beginning.
I realise that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot for all that apprehend the world.
Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more.
And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure.
A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing
to know and live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?
To will is to stir up paradoxes.
Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart or fatal renunciations.
- Albert Camus,
The Myth of Sisyphus
[...] what could be more disillusioned than such sayings as “Charity begins at home” or “Promote a rogue and he’ll sue you for damage, knock him down and he’ll do you homage”?
We all know how many common sayings can be quoted to this effect, and they all mean much the same – that you must not oppose the powers that be; that you must not fight against superior force; must not meddle in matters that are above your station.
Or that any action not in accordance with some tradition is mere romanticism; or that any undertaking which has not the support of proven experience is foredoomed to frustration; and that since experience has shown men to be invariably inclined to evil, there must be firm rules to restrain them, otherwise we shall have anarchy.
It is, however, the people who are forever mouthing these dismal proverbs and, whenever they are told of some more or less repulsive action, say “How like human nature!” – it is these very people, always harping upon realism, who complain that existentialism is too gloomy a view of things.
Indeed their excessive protests make me suspect that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism, but, much more likely, our optimism.
For at bottom, what is alarming in the doctrine that I am about to try to explain to you is – is it not? – that it confronts man with a possibility of choice.
- Jean-Paul Sartre,
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Is there ever going to be a way to combine the structure of the silent movie with the quick presentation of a TV commercial?
Somewhere, somebody has to be able to take the wonderful ecomonic structural possibilities of the silent movie with the tremendous power that a good TV commercial can generate on a topic in 30 seconds.
I think this would be the most exciting thing that happened since whoever it was cut the two first pieces of film together and realised you could have 'editing.'
It really needs, sort of like, an editing of the mind—which hasn't happened—to just tell the story in a different way.
The real explosion will come when someone finally liberates the narrative structure.
- Stanley Kubrick,
A Voix Nue
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