Latest / CinemaHounds - A Lorehounds Podcast / Deconstructing the Meaning of "Into the West" w/Marilyn R. Pukkila - Into the West

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Deconstructing the Meaning of "Into the West" w/Marilyn R. Pukkila - Into the West · CinemaHounds - A Lorehounds Podcast

0:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Laura Hounds and our newest podcast into the West.
0:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm David, one of the main hosts at the Laura Hounds with me today are the co-hosts of this podcast.
0:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Red Zippy and Brian 863.
0:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello.
0:31
[SPEAKER_01]: The dynamic sibling duo.
0:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
0:35
[SPEAKER_01]: We need some sort of monitor for you guys.
0:37
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
0:38
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
0:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
0:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
0:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
0:39
[SPEAKER_04]: The sweet little doll.
0:40
[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe I don't know.
0:42
[SPEAKER_01]: That's maybe too much inside.
0:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Very inaccurate.
0:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome.
0:46
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
0:46
[SPEAKER_05]: The super siblings.
0:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Super sister.
0:48
[SPEAKER_01]: There you go.
0:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So, and that, of course, is our favorite Tolkien scholar, Marilyn R. Pequillette, joining us today for a very special episode, which we're going to talk about in just a second, though, Marilyn, how are you doing?
1:02
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm doing very well.
1:03
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you, David.
1:04
[SPEAKER_05]: I've been on a real high from having to seem projectile Mary.
1:07
[SPEAKER_05]: So got it.
1:08
[SPEAKER_05]: That'll lift me up, even talking about, you know, death and breathing and all that kind of stuff.
1:14
[SPEAKER_05]: So yeah, I'm doing very well.
1:16
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you.
1:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Great.
1:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Great.
1:18
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
1:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, this turns out to be, I believe, our second official episode at this point.
1:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
1:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And the way, just because it's still new, we're still doing a little
1:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that into the West is our memoriam podcast.
1:39
[SPEAKER_01]: We are at a time period where many of the great film and TV stars are shuffling off this mortal coil and we were talking about them in one of our subscribe.
1:53
[SPEAKER_01]: various people would pass away and then we would have a film review kind of thing on our subscribers, exclusive shows.
2:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we're like, you know what, we need to actually handle this on a mean show basis in both Ryan and Lisa, sorry, are you're both big film nerds, your family culture is film, especially these era of actors that were a lot that we're discussing.
2:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And so
2:21
[SPEAKER_01]: long and short of the story is, is that a podcast was born?
2:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is this podcast.
2:26
[SPEAKER_01]: However, today we wanted to talk a little bit about what the meaning of the podcast title into the West, where it comes from what it means and sort of what a thoughts and ideas around
2:43
[SPEAKER_01]: death and what different cultures and authors and people's different times have thought about what's beyond the veil and since we are we have roots are podcast community has roots.
3:01
[SPEAKER_01]: in Tolkin into the West, see like a natural podcast title for this for this podcast.
3:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And we said, well, we get talk about into the West without having an opportunity to talk to Maryland about like what all of this could be.
3:16
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, thank you so much.
3:17
[SPEAKER_05]: It's delightful to be here with you all.
3:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so feedback you can email us at into the west at the lorehounds.com.
3:25
[SPEAKER_01]: We have a channel set up dedicated for this show in our discord.
3:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Community discord is open and welcoming to everyone.
3:34
[SPEAKER_01]: We are also independent podcasters and so while add dollars are nice, they are not reliable and they're not as good quality as your subscription dollars.
3:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And how we operate and how we make sure that we share with everyone in our community, we would invite you to subscribe if you are able to do so.
3:57
[SPEAKER_01]: There are links for the discord and the subscription stuff.
4:00
[SPEAKER_01]: All of that is in the show notes for this episode.
4:04
[SPEAKER_01]: You can also get to all of our affiliate podcasts through that.
4:07
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a link tree and there's a page and it's got all kinds of stuff.
4:11
[SPEAKER_01]: So go and do those things in your own time, but they are there for the show notes.
4:18
[SPEAKER_01]: As we were talking, the idea of what into the West means.
4:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And from here, I'm gonna hand back over Brian and Lisa, if either of you has some things that you would like to prep for the episode before we actually get into a fuller discussion with Marilyn.
4:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Toss it over to you, Lisa, anything you wanna reflect on or add, just sort of at a broad context dual level.
4:43
[SPEAKER_04]: I know one of the things that we want to really talk about
4:48
[SPEAKER_04]: And what weighs this time is about celebrating and remembering in a positive, very natural way.
4:57
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not about, you know, oh, that's it, third-ed, you know.
5:02
[SPEAKER_04]: And, you know, so many of these artists that mean so much to Brian and I and we hope our listeners really just wanted to kind of have a really nice conversation about
5:15
[SPEAKER_04]: what passing on means to us and therefore how we want to talk about those that have passed on on the celebrity sphere.
5:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's interesting because in our community one of the things that are
5:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're looking at a lot of speculative fiction titles, books, TV shows, movies, some books that are movies and some movies that are books and some that you've spent off the delusion shows.
5:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm joking, Marilyn, because of Project Calmary is a current controversial conversation, and that is a crossover title.
5:52
[SPEAKER_01]: But we in the best traditions of literature and speculative fiction and all these kinds of things,
6:01
[SPEAKER_01]: examining a title or a movie is a way for us to process the world, but we, the people that I think congregate in this community, it's one of the things that we enjoy is not just reacting to a piece of media going, I liked it, I didn't like it.
6:20
[SPEAKER_01]: understanding why we're moved by something, why something speaks to us, why an actor speaks to us, what their real life in on-screen presence represents to us.
6:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's a way for us to interrogate the world and to understand and engage with the world in this indirect secondary
6:41
[SPEAKER_01]: agreed, couldn't say better.
6:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Brian, God, maybe I should have podcast.
6:47
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, wow.
6:48
[SPEAKER_05]: You really, that was what I go back up from David.
6:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, amazing.
6:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it, you know, I'm one of the things also, I think, as we talk about for tonight and our episodes going forward for into the West, it's also about renewal.
7:08
[SPEAKER_03]: not just death, but we get to revisit these actors and actresses, directors, whoever these artists once again.
7:18
[SPEAKER_03]: So they are in some ways renewed into our minds and our memories.
7:24
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think that is an important part of this kind of process that we're going to be paneling.
7:30
[SPEAKER_01]: That's really
7:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it insightful and helpful comments.
7:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm thinking about the next episode that we need to schedule for, which is our Gene Hackman review.
7:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And we covered the Gene Hackman's life and films to some degree, John, and Alisha and I on the subscriber podcast, Elementsies.
7:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a question, well, why are you redoing G-Hackman?
7:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, well, because Brian and Lisa didn't get a chance to talk about him.
8:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's right.
8:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And he is such an important figure for both of you individually, but also for film in general.
8:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the way it worked, you write it, so for folks who are new to this podcast,
8:18
[SPEAKER_01]: so many passes away.
8:19
[SPEAKER_01]: We do a filmography review that is recorded and then we put up.
8:25
[SPEAKER_01]: We we the three of us choose 10 movies I think it was or four are we doing four or three or four three or four or four or four depending on a filmography yeah okay right and then you the public audience listeners can vote on what movie we end up.
8:41
[SPEAKER_01]: watching and then reviewing in detail.
8:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the conversation, one for the Gene Hackman review, I had never seen it and yet Gene Hackman is a favorite actor, hugely influential, you know, huge, huge shadows not the right word, but just looms large and in my mind as a great film actor, I'd never seen the conversation before.
9:06
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is my first time and it was like, like you're saying,
9:11
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a renewal.
9:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, oh, this is this actor.
9:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I did not.
9:15
[SPEAKER_01]: It was, it's, it was really profound.
9:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what you're saying is perfectly what is my experience so far in these.
9:24
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, you got to live, you get to live with it again.
9:27
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
9:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Maryland, I see there are rich rich notes in our outline here.
9:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Before we get into that, I didn't know if you wanted to reflect it all in general.
9:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I know we were talking off air a little bit before we hit recording.
9:44
[SPEAKER_01]: We were talking about the process of grief and processing grief and how important it was and we were all joking that this is kind of a podcast where we do that.
9:53
[SPEAKER_01]: But grief is a many layered thing.
9:54
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a straight line, simple thing.
10:01
[SPEAKER_05]: No, no, it isn't.
10:02
[SPEAKER_05]: I think some people have misinterpreted the famous five stages of grieving as a linear process.
10:08
[SPEAKER_07]: Hmm.
10:08
[SPEAKER_05]: I think it's more a question of identifying these are things that you may will find yourself in that various points.
10:16
[SPEAKER_05]: And he may circle around back to anger three or four or five times, and in between have bargaining and all of the things.
10:25
[SPEAKER_05]: So it's important to recognize there is no pattern, there is no right way, wrong way.
10:31
[SPEAKER_05]: We each experience it differently and much depends on who it is that has died, how we are responding.
10:38
[SPEAKER_05]: But also the consequences for us personally, you know.
10:43
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't believe in grief, um, pain Olympics, all right.
10:48
[SPEAKER_05]: So I don't want to say, oh, this kind of death is far worse than this kind of death.
10:53
[SPEAKER_05]: But I have to imagine I've never been a parent.
10:55
[SPEAKER_05]: I am now a grandparent through the grace of my partner.
10:57
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you.
10:59
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, I can't imagine the grief of losing a child, set aside the grief of losing a parent.
11:08
[SPEAKER_05]: Mm-hmm.
11:08
[SPEAKER_05]: And yet,
11:10
[SPEAKER_05]: And I'm also not going to say that somebody can't grieve a loss of a parent as much as they would grieve a loss of a child because it's so individual.
11:20
[SPEAKER_05]: You expect certain things in the pattern of life but when they actually happen, that's when you really find out how you're going to respond.
11:27
[SPEAKER_05]: And you're not the same person you were.
11:30
[SPEAKER_05]: five years ago or that you will be five years from now.
11:33
[SPEAKER_05]: So the best thing is be gentle with yourself and as much as you are able just allow things to wash over you as they come and know wherever you are now, it won't always be this way.
11:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's great, you know, when you, you know, and that's also the experience that you may have for a movie or a TV show.
11:54
[SPEAKER_03]: You may be in your 20s and you watch this show or movie and then 20 years later, you know, this memory, this renewal,
12:03
[SPEAKER_03]: It's, you know, you change and so your perception and experiences change, so what you're seeing on the screen, they also change.
12:12
[SPEAKER_03]: That's not static.
12:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
12:15
[SPEAKER_05]: Unquestionably.
12:15
[SPEAKER_05]: And the same with books.
12:17
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, I go back to Lord of the Rings again and again because every time I read it.
12:21
[SPEAKER_05]: I see something different, experience it differently, you know, my first two decades of reading it, I was more in Bilbo than for me in Frodo shoes.
12:32
[SPEAKER_05]: Now I'm really in Bilbo shoes, because I'm kind of looking for my own Rivendell here, folks, I choose Rivendell Saturday.
12:40
[SPEAKER_05]: There aren't a lot of Rivendell's out there in your local possibilities for provincial, you know.
12:48
[SPEAKER_05]: retirement communities, but it also shows up in literature, because it is the one commonality we all have along with being born.
12:56
[SPEAKER_05]: We're all going to die.
12:58
[SPEAKER_05]: And actually, if people have listened to our most recent Earthsea episode, we talk about that.
13:06
[SPEAKER_05]: And I actually say, on air, you know, I want somebody to read these particular lines from Ursula Caliguin's The Other Wind at my memorial service.
13:16
[SPEAKER_05]: Because this is what I personally believe will happen.
13:19
[SPEAKER_05]: One I die.
13:20
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think it's the sort of thing that as the event comes closer, well, I mean, like, okay, some people will avoid it all the more and others will say, yeah, this is it's part of the whole package.
13:32
[SPEAKER_05]: And different literature, films, poetry, whatever music will offer different ways of understanding it.
13:42
[SPEAKER_05]: But in addition to those two commonalities that we
13:50
[SPEAKER_05]: We all experience the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.
13:55
[SPEAKER_05]: And you might include the exceptions of the Inuit on the Northern Coast of North American continent and the Sami through your Pian continents, because
14:06
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, think about their solar experience, if you will, right?
14:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, that's right.
14:11
[SPEAKER_05]: Several months of darkness, they have several months of light, and I don't, I think the sun kind of spirals around on the solar north, where is east and west in that?
14:22
[SPEAKER_05]: Right?
14:23
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
14:23
[SPEAKER_05]: So the end of it appeared to have no particular associations with any of the four directions.
14:30
[SPEAKER_05]: But the Sami do have some insofar as
14:33
[SPEAKER_05]: not surprisingly the South is considered the place of warm-think-good things and the North is the place of cold and suffering and those are the important directions for them.
14:45
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
14:45
[SPEAKER_05]: So in between these two extremes, if you will, this middle-grounder, the myth and guard or middle-earth, if you like, that's where most of us dwell and we experience the sun rising in the least in setting in the West.
15:01
[SPEAKER_05]: So the association of that with birth and death makes a lot of sense.
15:06
[SPEAKER_05]: But the further most, the sudden most people's I could think of were the Māori, although I'm also familiar with the Māori, to a very tiny degree, so maybe that was part of it too.
15:17
[SPEAKER_05]: But they have their own star compass.
15:18
[SPEAKER_05]: They are fascinating people when it comes to astronomy, because, of course, they came to Aotearoa, New Zealand, through celestial navigation, and knowing the currents and also things like birds and so forth.
15:35
[SPEAKER_05]: But they have a word, did you go ahead, David?
15:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, I just wanted to interject something too very important.
15:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
15:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Thought about what it very, it's not a very important thought.
15:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Is a thought about geography and metaphor?
15:52
[SPEAKER_01]: We talk about a person's life, the spring, the summer, the fall, the winter of a person's life.
16:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And what are you up to?
16:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And my mom, who is a not infrequent listener to these podcasts, she may remember.
16:09
[SPEAKER_01]: She spent some time in East Africa once in Kenya.
16:14
[SPEAKER_01]: They did some volunteering there at a college, and she was teaching some running like a graduate seminar.
16:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And her, a lot of her professional career was as an English literature professor.
16:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And so talking with the students about European literature in the metaphor of seasons to map on people's lives.
16:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were like, we understand what fall is, but we don't have it.
16:46
[SPEAKER_01]: We have short reigns and long reigns.
16:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep,
17:00
[SPEAKER_01]: something in literature and then that literature as a dominant literature and then so metaphor spread.
17:05
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think it's just getting through your notes here.
17:09
[SPEAKER_01]: You are working to include a number of different points of views around this that I think that's helpful and interesting for us to consider.
17:24
[SPEAKER_01]: because I don't know how we process grief in different places and different times.
17:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh gosh, that's one of the podcasts.
17:32
[SPEAKER_05]: Exactly.
17:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
17:34
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that it's been there is something that is within our shared humanity around this.
17:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And so however we describe it or however we put it into whatever sort of framework, it's still something that we all process in some way.
17:51
[SPEAKER_05]: And of course, most listeners will probably have first encounter the phrase into the west from the Jackson films of Order of the Rings.
18:02
[SPEAKER_05]: And the beautiful, beautiful song that any Linux compose and wrote the lyrics for and sang at the end.
18:08
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's, I think, where most people will make this association.
18:13
[SPEAKER_05]: But,
18:14
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, they weren't alone in that.
18:15
[SPEAKER_05]: There's a whole, as you say, David, a lot of different cultures that have that same connection.
18:20
[SPEAKER_05]: But you do write to point out that equatorial communities are not going to know too much from one season to another, because they just don't have a lot of season.
18:29
[SPEAKER_05]: We'll change.
18:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's good thing that we're dealing with a fictional world here.
18:36
[SPEAKER_05]: They still have sun rising in the eastern setting in the west.
18:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, they do.
18:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And Tolkien was still a man of European culture.
18:42
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, yes.
18:42
[SPEAKER_05]: And believe me, I have a whole section on Tolkien.
18:45
[SPEAKER_05]: How's it, I'm not.
18:46
[SPEAKER_05]: But fact in the Mallory, they have.
18:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I just applaud to everybody to win the episode comes out for Project Hail Mary.
18:56
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to tune in because Marilyn brings Tolkien into Project Hail Mary.
19:02
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to listen to get the, uh, how did she fit that those pieces together?
19:06
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, hopefully that will not lead anybody to not listen.
19:12
[SPEAKER_01]: We're self-selecting community.
19:14
[SPEAKER_01]: We're all right.
19:15
[SPEAKER_01]: We're all right.
19:15
[SPEAKER_05]: You don't like talking.
19:16
[SPEAKER_05]: You're going to have a real hard time here.
19:17
[SPEAKER_05]: That's all I can say.
19:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Please continue.
19:20
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
19:21
[SPEAKER_05]: So the Māori have the star compass by which they navigate and they have the word
19:32
[SPEAKER_05]: So your idea of return, Brian, interestingly comes up into somewhat different contexts there.
19:40
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
19:41
[SPEAKER_05]: But more generally, the word refers to a portal of significant entrance or a gateway, which is a place of transition.
19:50
[SPEAKER_05]: From the common world into the world of light.
19:53
[SPEAKER_05]: which I really like because so many of our cultures it considered death to be the land of darkness.
19:59
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, you'll think of the Greek myths and, you know, hateies and, you know, if you're lucky, you get to the Elisine fields, but even there, there's not a whole lot to do, but, you know, this transition into light and the place of return, you know, what are you returning to?
20:17
[SPEAKER_05]: And will you come back from the place of return?
20:21
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, it just raises a number of different.
20:24
[SPEAKER_05]: possible, but in Nauria's autonomy, the West is associated with endings and the completion of the day.
20:33
[SPEAKER_05]: So Toma Congo, as I say, translates to the entrance or the place of return.
20:39
[SPEAKER_05]: Because, again, sunrise is in the east, sets in the west, and wherever else you are in the total circumference of the planet, the day begins in the east and ends in the west.
20:48
[SPEAKER_05]: So it seems quite reasonable that the east be associated with birth and the west with
20:55
[SPEAKER_05]: Many contemporary pagans consider the West to be the place of the ancestors.
21:00
[SPEAKER_05]: And this is very much in line with some Celtic beliefs.
21:05
[SPEAKER_05]: Christian churches, cathedrals, tombs, and graves are frequently on an east-west alignment with the altars in the buildings in the east.
21:17
[SPEAKER_05]: And the grave markers are gonna also face east so that if you envision the bodies lying with their heads against the gravestones
21:26
[SPEAKER_05]: to the east because that is where life returns, the resurrection happens, the sun rises again.
21:33
[SPEAKER_05]: And I don't know how much that is followed these days, but if you travel around in New York for a much, you'll see it's almost universal.
21:42
[SPEAKER_05]: And certainly church altars are still in the east.
21:47
[SPEAKER_05]: This goes back to Egyptian times.
21:50
[SPEAKER_05]: And one source I read said, the practice of bearing the debts of their face would face the rising sun goes back to ancient Egyptian and Greeks who worship the sun God.
22:01
[SPEAKER_05]: According to their beliefs, it was the most appropriate for their debt to face the sun to greet each new day.
22:09
[SPEAKER_05]: The idea that came to represent embracing the next life, and that contributed to its widespread acceptance, especially, of course, in Judeo-Christian societies.
22:19
[SPEAKER_05]: with the beliefs and after life.
22:21
[SPEAKER_01]: So quick shout out.
22:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm trying to see if I can find the episode, but recently I believe it was on an episode of the American public television show called Nova, but I may be wrong.
22:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm trying to find it.
22:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll see if I can put it in the show notes.
22:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, we watch a daughter sometimes will go through different documentaries and things like this and pull up a show.
22:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So we ended up stumbling on to this one and it was about a group of Egyptian Egyptologists who I think it was right around before the pandemic opened up and discovered some new tombs that in some new artifacts that had never been before and they opened up a whole new
23:07
[SPEAKER_01]: where a lot of excavation work hadn't gone yet, but it's interesting that these are Egyptian lead and Egyptian staffed archeological, new, creating new archeological record.
23:23
[SPEAKER_05]: Finally, yeah, finally, for the first time.
23:27
[SPEAKER_05]: And I don't think a lot of people know that for a chunk of time, we'll one generation anyway.
23:34
[SPEAKER_05]: There was one particular Pharaoh whose name escapes to me at all, but one of you will know it who announced that there was only one God and this was the Son God, Amen, Ra.
23:45
[SPEAKER_05]: and he did his best to do a lot of conversion in a very short period of time with new priests and defacing of some religious artifacts and so forth.
23:53
[SPEAKER_05]: It didn't last, didn't last beyond him.
23:58
[SPEAKER_03]: No, Philip Plast did an opera, I believe.
24:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
24:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, of that time period.
24:03
[SPEAKER_05]: Was it up, not in such a thing?
24:05
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, that's it.
24:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
24:06
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm gonna make still serves from time to time.
24:08
[SPEAKER_05]: I was a real jury.
24:10
[SPEAKER_04]: That goes over my head, so that's the part of the brain I share with Brian.
24:15
[SPEAKER_05]: So, so anything else anybody wants to come in on before we move on to Tolkien?
24:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was this acara necropolis, which is near Memphis, that it was the pyramid or the major find was.
24:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I believe it's a Nova episode.
24:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm still trying to find the exact episode.
24:37
[SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, it's a car.
24:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, it shows you kind of it just, you know, listening to Maryland's great notes, just, you know, the geography, the solar, the power of the sun, you know, and giving you birth and rebirth, how anchored these societies were to natural settings that we forget today.
25:04
[SPEAKER_03]: very much so as we live in our homes and electronic devices and what have you.
25:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And unless you're farming or doing some other skill that you have to keep an eye on the land, what the the sun and the weather, it really is a great perspective on this kind of
25:28
[SPEAKER_03]: natural settings, natural things, it literally in our orbit as a planet and how that plays out and how we see the world, how we interact with life and death.
25:43
[SPEAKER_03]: It's great stuff.
25:44
[SPEAKER_05]: And I would be remiss living as I do on
25:50
[SPEAKER_05]: unceded to Wabunaki territory, to not note that the name Wabunaki, which is a collective name for a number of individual tribes in this region, call themselves the people of the darn.
26:06
[SPEAKER_05]: because the magma which you're one of the what we consider the four tribes of what the Wabanaki now the magma live on the furthest east coast of it's probably not the Scotia right that's furthest east of all the maritime's they are the first of all the indigenous peoples in the entire continent to greet the sun.
26:28
[SPEAKER_05]: And they take this very, very seriously to this day, they greet the sun.
26:34
[SPEAKER_05]: And how are you?
26:35
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
26:36
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
26:36
[SPEAKER_05]: That's right.
26:37
[SPEAKER_05]: Those who live tribally in the tribal communities.
26:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, Marilyn.
26:46
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a, you know, ritual plays an important part in our life if you didn't already know.
26:53
[SPEAKER_05]: What an amazing observation, David.
26:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, in my other observation to go with that is, is that you do have a, your own podcast called The Rings and Rituals.
27:02
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, I do.
27:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and someday when you have time, you know, like you can just talk about rituals when the interesting rituals all found all over the world.
27:10
[SPEAKER_05]: All kinds of fun things might happen, huh?
27:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'd say that.
27:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, that's my executive producer's idea.
27:18
[SPEAKER_05]: No, no, I'm happy to have free advertising David.
27:21
[SPEAKER_01]: You go for it.
27:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Someday when we all become famously wealthy from podcasting, we go, I'll just give up our day jobs and podcast all the time.
27:28
[SPEAKER_05]: There you go.
27:29
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm with you.
27:30
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm with you.
27:34
[SPEAKER_05]: So moving on to Tolkien, this is a very timely question
27:41
[SPEAKER_05]: in early March of this year that I read a post on John Garth's study blog, study being the European version of Patreon, but it's also for artists not just strictly for podcasting, right?
27:57
[SPEAKER_05]: I guess Patreon is too.
27:59
[SPEAKER_05]: Anyway, he put in this wonderful article called Tolkians Land of the Dead and Going West in 1914 to 18.
28:10
[SPEAKER_05]: This was the whole question that came around not surprisingly in the first World War.
28:18
[SPEAKER_05]: And during that time, English speakers didn't quote unquote go west when they died.
28:24
[SPEAKER_05]: That was not an English expression at that point.
28:28
[SPEAKER_05]: But apparently, the phrase was introduced by the British Army soldiers from Scotland and the West of Ireland.
28:35
[SPEAKER_05]: who, of course, you know, all these different troops came together in the trenches in one way or another, even though we're separate regimen sooner or later, they all came together.
28:45
[SPEAKER_05]: And there, this was part of the unregarded bedrock of ancient Celtic tradition.
28:52
[SPEAKER_05]: So we were mentioning before tribal cultures and ritual and so forth, in the ancient Celts,
28:58
[SPEAKER_05]: This was a big deal I mentioned earlier that the Calts had the tradition of the West is the place of the ancestors and contemporary pagan practitioners.
29:07
[SPEAKER_05]: If they're calling in the four directions, we'll often refer to the West as the place of the ancestors.
29:13
[SPEAKER_05]: Some talk about the North instead, but you know, different regions, different cultures, different ancestors.
29:19
[SPEAKER_05]: So to go on quoting John Garth here, the Oxford English dictionary declares that this 20th century usage, quote, became common during the Great War, close quote, which of course is World War I.
29:34
[SPEAKER_05]: It first entered print in the times at the end of 1914, when a reporter was asked whether any readers knew the origin of quote, the soldier's curious phrase for death
29:47
[SPEAKER_05]: Peter Gulliver, our inside man of the OAD, has also found an earlier instance from the first weeks of the war.
29:54
[SPEAKER_05]: And here's a quote.
29:56
[SPEAKER_05]: One man was last with a blood of his carmed red, who had been blown in half by piece of shabbyl.
30:01
[SPEAKER_05]: He was glad of his escape, a very near call, but was sorry for the friend who, quote, had gone west, close quote as he called it.
30:11
[SPEAKER_06]: Wow.
30:12
[SPEAKER_05]: So as early as 1914, this was appearing in the Times.
30:16
[SPEAKER_05]: And as Garth points out, they got the Times and the common room of Tolkien's college when he was there as an undergraduate.
30:25
[SPEAKER_05]: He himself fought trench warfare for a period of several months, 1917, 2018, if I remember correctly.
30:36
[SPEAKER_05]: And by November 1914 is, again, I'll pick up with Garth, said he at least perused long-fillus on the Phyowotha, who's here ends by sailing west in this way.
30:48
[SPEAKER_05]: And this is now quoting long-fillum.
30:51
[SPEAKER_05]: In the glory of the sunset, to the islands of the Blessed, to the kingdom of Ponyma, to the land of the hereafter.
30:58
[SPEAKER_05]: Now, I am in no way.
31:01
[SPEAKER_05]: putting out any kind of brief and favor of long fellow's knowledge of the customs of the indigenous peoples that he was supposedly representing in his very romantic 19th century poem.
31:13
[SPEAKER_05]: Nevertheless, there are plenty of tribal nations who consider this to be the case.
31:19
[SPEAKER_05]: Another example with Tolkien is a poem that I really love, but that is not very well known by most people because it only appears in the histories of Middle-Earth
31:32
[SPEAKER_05]: And it refers, it's called Habanun in the West.
31:36
[SPEAKER_05]: Habanun is a place where the soldiers, or the humans gather, because back in the day and his earlier versions of the Summerland, humans might wind up in one of three places.
31:49
[SPEAKER_05]: They might actually have the delightful pleasure of going to what we'd all call Valinore.
31:55
[SPEAKER_05]: They might get booted into Mordgoss camp.
32:00
[SPEAKER_05]: They might go to be judged by this personage called Fui Niana, who was very, very different from the Niana that we see in the published some really, and where she's very much a, our Lady of Sorrow's figure.
32:17
[SPEAKER_05]: But Havana is kind of the almost a purgatory place.
32:20
[SPEAKER_05]: It's kind of gray and shadowy and quiet.
32:23
[SPEAKER_05]: And it is implicitly in the West.
32:26
[SPEAKER_05]: as Garth says.
32:28
[SPEAKER_05]: Prefecturing lines to the poem, call it that region where one draws nigh to the places that are not of men.
32:36
[SPEAKER_05]: This is closely paraphrased in the Brother Contemporary.
32:38
[SPEAKER_05]: Can you Lexington, Lexington, listen to me?
32:41
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm still back with the American Confucian-
32:45
[SPEAKER_05]: Kenyo lexagon, where Havana is the name and telatga, which is another Elish language or dialect, for a region on the borders of Elinor.
32:57
[SPEAKER_05]: And that is its literal meaning.
32:59
[SPEAKER_05]: So this poem describes men, humans, sitting around a campfire, singing songs in this perpetual dusk.
33:14
[SPEAKER_05]: It's neither the glory of belly nor nor is it the hells of more to go off, it's simply a place to be and I am convinced because when I read of this, I am thinking of Tolkien's experience in the training camps before he crossed over to France.
33:34
[SPEAKER_05]: We're at the end of a long hard day of training.
33:37
[SPEAKER_05]: Some of the soldiers would get out their guitars and they'd sit around the fire and they play.
33:42
[SPEAKER_05]: So, as I say, the first time I read this poem it had deep resonances for me.
33:47
[SPEAKER_05]: And I really believe that it also did for Tolkien, even though haven't done, eventually quietly dropped out of his lexicon.
33:55
[SPEAKER_05]: For listeners who can't really understand the word, it's spelled H-A-B-B-A-N-A-N.
34:01
[SPEAKER_05]: If you want to do some more digging around.
34:04
[SPEAKER_05]: So you look back and you say, okay, Egyptians, Babylonians, Sophocles, Plato, old Irish poems, of like the voyage of Pran, the Greek elicium, the Nordic nations, they all have this concept of the West as the place where the dead go.
34:24
[SPEAKER_05]: Going west, back to Garth Swords again.
34:27
[SPEAKER_05]: the novel soldier idiom for dying, exemplified the interdependence of language and legend, which struck Tolkien in 1914, and which kicked off his myth-making project.
34:40
[SPEAKER_05]: It injected a Celtic tradition into English ways of thinking, as his myth-making would inject Celtic elves and other worlds into a mythology, for England.
34:51
[SPEAKER_05]: And then one last piece, G.B.
34:53
[SPEAKER_05]: Smith,
34:58
[SPEAKER_05]: in this first world war.
35:00
[SPEAKER_05]: He was also a lovely poet if anybody has the time to look up his poetry.
35:08
[SPEAKER_05]: It is available in a publication, Garth has written about it in a lot, but this poem is called Intercessional.
35:16
[SPEAKER_05]: There is a place where voices of great guns do not come, where rifle, mine,
35:26
[SPEAKER_05]: with there is only silence and PC terminal and rest.
35:32
[SPEAKER_05]: Set somewhere in the quiet aisles beyond death's story west.
35:39
[SPEAKER_04]: Nice.
35:41
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
35:41
[SPEAKER_05]: Can I just say that G.B.
35:42
[SPEAKER_05]: Smith died way too soon?
35:45
[SPEAKER_05]: As did so many other soldiers who died in that horrible horrible conflict.
35:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah absolutely.
35:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
35:54
[SPEAKER_05]: So I think this is really, makes a good case for how the whole phrase into the West came into the English British lexicon.
36:04
[SPEAKER_05]: It had been in the Irish for who knows how long and did all the scots in the West who were settled by the Irish, but don't tell the scots they hate that.
36:15
[SPEAKER_05]: That's true.
36:16
[SPEAKER_05]: Sorry.
36:17
[SPEAKER_05]: Sorry.
36:18
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
36:19
[SPEAKER_05]: We've got through a feisty bunch.
36:21
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
36:21
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
36:22
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
36:22
[SPEAKER_05]: One one time.
36:23
[SPEAKER_05]: English captain told me the story about how he'd been teaching history.
36:27
[SPEAKER_05]: To the scots.
36:30
[SPEAKER_05]: and he gave us a little fact to it out, and there was this Scottish sergeant who, just, I didn't believe it, Sarge.
36:39
[SPEAKER_05]: And so he said, soldier, you're ordered to go into look up in the Incyclopedia Botanical, the history of early Scotland.
36:47
[SPEAKER_05]: Next class comes around, soldier comes back and it sits down, and so the captain says, well, soldier, I didn't a catch, Sarge.
36:56
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not on mix, Sarge.
37:04
[SPEAKER_05]: You can tell how much you can convince some new.
37:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, right.
37:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, just it just shows you that.
37:15
[SPEAKER_03]: just illustrate so well by, you know, you see the movies and then the recent film, TV show, look, the brings a power, you know, the two trees, Lord, you know, the land of Eleanor, all that stuff is out west and it's not an accident that he just didn't, he just didn't randomly choose a direction that it was very meaningful to him.
37:44
[SPEAKER_03]: West was very meaningful to him.
37:46
[SPEAKER_03]: It's pretty incredible.
37:48
[SPEAKER_05]: If Tolkien ever did anything randomly or unthinkingly, I would love to see a paper on it.
37:54
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
37:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
37:57
[SPEAKER_05]: It makes us out there somewhere, but it makes us.
37:59
[SPEAKER_05]: I think it was not culturally based.
38:02
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
38:03
[SPEAKER_05]: Whatever culture it was.
38:04
[SPEAKER_05]: Yep.
38:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It was incredible.
38:07
[SPEAKER_05]: He may have gone with the knowledge of the time, quote unquote, but still.
38:37
[SPEAKER_01]: So I see in our outline that there are a whole bunch of other notes, but before we get into to those, I was curious Lisa, if you had any thoughts or reflections about what Marilyn was illuminating for us in that in that last bit of conversation, what thought how what are you reacting to what's what's popping in your mind.
39:05
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, okay, this may sound a little woo-woo, but, um, that loud.
39:11
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, thank you.
39:12
[SPEAKER_04]: Um, that we all are one energy.
39:17
[SPEAKER_04]: you know, and so, yes, because of geography and culture and religion and language, you know, how we interpret or communicate our experiences differ, but it just keeps coming back to me that we are all like one consciousness in a way or something, you know, and so that's what I think about.
39:45
[SPEAKER_05]: And let me assure Lisa, as one who is a Quaker pagan priest is a Persephone, he was strong Buddhist landings.
39:56
[SPEAKER_05]: I am no trouble with Google.
39:59
[SPEAKER_04]: I may not agree with your Google, but you know, it's your Brian and I, Brian and I were raised on Google.
40:06
[SPEAKER_05]: So, yes, with all the advantages and the drawbacks.
40:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
40:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's interesting too.
40:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I was just thinking of what listening to Mary, especially when she's was giving us that last poem from GB Smith, that, you know, for Tolkien, you know,
40:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And so how much is our
40:52
[SPEAKER_01]: are percept, you know, so it just let me down the thought process of, you know, Egyptians, they were very tied into the cycles of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, the river and their planting cycle of the things like this.
41:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And just how connected are points of views are of and after life, if we believe in, you know, a life after of some kind.
41:19
[SPEAKER_01]: how much that is set in our present right and what we're where and who we are now thinking about how important is it for me to think that there's an afterlife?
41:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Do I care if there is one or what does it look like and is it full of you know milk and is it a land of milk and honey or is it a place of quiet and repose how much our point of view is colored by the
41:45
[SPEAKER_01]: circumstances of our our life and our culture and our upbringing and possibly the literature we read and possibly the television shows and movies we watch and the films we see yeah yeah right um any any thoughts from what Marilyn was I think you know one of the things that I reflect on and um
42:15
[SPEAKER_03]: And I remember in undergraduate time where I took philosophy classes, I was a philosophy major.
42:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was very interested in this idea of morality.
42:32
[SPEAKER_03]: And we were going through one class about different areas of,
42:38
[SPEAKER_03]: a moral system.
42:39
[SPEAKER_03]: But I really took home really for the rest of my life.
42:45
[SPEAKER_03]: And as I think this plays into this idea of West, you know, and death and renewal is that I really believe that human beings are in many ways universal.
43:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Right?
43:00
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, there are things that
43:07
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's, you know, I think that this going west, you know, and it's not absolute right and Maryland has said that so well in the beginning it's like some some cultures don't see the solar viewpoint that other other cultures do so it's not absolute, but it's universal, which means there are some exceptions right in this in this meaning of the word universal.
43:33
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just really a great way to find us and I'm hoping as we go through into the West episodes that it will.
43:41
[SPEAKER_01]: One ring brain.
43:42
[SPEAKER_03]: That's right.
43:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
43:44
[SPEAKER_03]: That's right.
43:44
[SPEAKER_05]: Let me try that.
43:46
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
43:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Hey, you brought that up, man.
43:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't.
43:51
[SPEAKER_04]: I've got to walk right into that one, yeah.
43:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, all right, yeah.
43:53
[SPEAKER_03]: But boom, so as we go forward with these episodes, we could chance to kind of bring people in and have conversations as we may have different opinions on a particular artist, but it's universal to stop and to think about and process these lies of these artists, right?
44:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And we were talking before about the idea of grief and how we move with grief, how grief moves with us as we move through time and where we are,
44:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sorry, my brain is doing the tangent thing where I'm like over here and over here.
44:40
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I was just thinking.
44:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I was just thinking that Nicole is big on grief right now if you go over to never mind the music.
44:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I forget which episode is it, but there was something about grief recently.
44:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And so maybe we'll have to, what you just said they're Brian maybe think, oh, maybe we'll have to have Nicole over on into the West podcast.
44:59
[SPEAKER_01]: But we're very rich.
45:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
45:05
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's, you know, this idea that, yeah, there's this tension, so going back to what, Lisa, what you were saying and thinking about, well, how do we affirm the human, in a modern times context, here and now from where we sit, and the people that are going to be listening to this podcast,
45:31
[SPEAKER_01]: a selection of a selection.
45:32
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we, from our point of privilege, how easy it is for us to say, oh, there's a, you know, there's a universality to humanity.
45:46
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is pretty often brought up by a lot of philosophers and thinkers and different leaders over time that there is a human universe and your universality, right?
45:57
[SPEAKER_01]: There is something that is the same about us in time and place.
46:02
[SPEAKER_01]: But how do we do that and then also respect
46:05
[SPEAKER_01]: and honor the traditions of people.
46:07
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a tension there, right?
46:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, oh, well, we're all the same, but then somebody else's culture might be like, no, we're not.
46:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't appreciate you putting that universality upon me or for my culture or at least acknowledging what maybe your culture did, and you know, or didn't do in certain times.
46:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's there's this tension that that exists there.
46:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So how do we, what's the opportunity for us in, like, on this podcast and on the series to be thinking about grief and it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, I don't know if it's a universal, but like, it's commonality, how we,
46:50
[SPEAKER_01]: How we do that, and something I was thinking Brian, you were saying something that you said before, is that in the renewal, well, the renewal doesn't happen on its own.
46:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a, it's not photosynthesis.
47:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Just happens.
47:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
47:04
[SPEAKER_05]: Did you guys have a bit of work?
47:06
[SPEAKER_01]: It happens in community.
47:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
47:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And it happens with intentionality.
47:11
[SPEAKER_01]: 100%.
47:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And it happens in dialogue.
47:17
[SPEAKER_01]: and be that, you know, one to many dialogue going out as a podcast or in conversation, but it doesn't exist without us entering into that space and intentionally bringing it up.
47:31
[SPEAKER_05]: And there are certain, as American, Indigenous cultures who would have a right different view about that.
47:36
[SPEAKER_01]: A hundred percent, right?
47:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know what those would be, but there's like, yeah, I can't imagine that everybody's going to process grief the same way.
47:44
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, and I'm thinking about, you know, the human sacrifice of the, you know, how do you treat the sacrificial human before they are sacrificed and how has that carried over and to contemporary, as American indigenous peoples.
47:59
[SPEAKER_05]: you know.
48:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
48:00
[SPEAKER_05]: How much is Christianity shaped that or not?
48:03
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, there's, yeah, we're still very complex individuals, even if the sun always rises in the East, that's the West.
48:10
[SPEAKER_05]: Almost all of us.
48:11
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
48:13
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I mean, that's what puts, binds our community as well, because
48:17
[SPEAKER_04]: as we're all sitting here processing all of these things and talking as we are this evening, it is through art, it is through literature, through poems, it is through theater, it is through music, you know, and film and television that that universality,
48:35
[SPEAKER_04]: comes together and it really is a great way for all of us to find ways to experience and interpret what is going on in our lives is through art, you know, big art, capital A art, you know, you know, I think the one time now who had known, I think the one generalization I'd become
49:02
[SPEAKER_05]: As far as I know, virtually all human cultures have deep feelings about death.
49:09
[SPEAKER_06]: Mm-hmm.
49:10
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
49:11
[SPEAKER_05]: They may be, um, you know, aversive, they may be attractive, but still affirming or very hard.
49:22
[SPEAKER_05]: But yeah.
49:23
[SPEAKER_05]: It's really hard for human being for human cultures to just ignore death or pass it off as he'll beat you.
49:31
[SPEAKER_01]: There's another thing that I think human beings have big feelings.
49:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe not about, but a way that we process feelings and that's what Lisa's just saying capital A art.
49:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
49:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I don't think human culture can be human culture without self-expression and self-reflection.
49:50
[SPEAKER_01]: We reflect through art, right?
49:53
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the stories that we tell ourselves through dance, through music, through tales around the campfire, banjo, present, or not, right?
50:05
[SPEAKER_01]: But we, as a species, have to self-reflect.
50:09
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, and we're storytellers, humans are storytellers.
50:12
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
50:13
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
50:13
[SPEAKER_05]: We are in the Canada line that hard enough.
50:16
[SPEAKER_05]: And that is also how we pass our culture along the next generation.
50:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and I love, you know, the bits that you were telling us, Marilyn, about talking, you know, listen to the guitar player, you know, it must have been something very special for him being in, you know, in World War, like that, being in a just horrible situations, and you get a moment of
50:43
[SPEAKER_03]: time where you can maybe reflect and listen to the music.
50:49
[SPEAKER_03]: And as you know very well, Marilyn how instrumental poetry and literature was to him, it was really a huge, a huge part of his life.
51:01
[SPEAKER_05]: In fact, he was quoted in several places of saying that it was the experience of war that set the rocket off in story.
51:12
[SPEAKER_05]: became a really important tool for him to process what he had been through, to reflect on this horrible human pension for killing each other in particularly gruesome and violent bloody ways, and how people survived that or downed.
51:34
[SPEAKER_05]: Literally and figuratively.
51:36
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't think when it's fair for people to
51:42
[SPEAKER_05]: he didn't really.
51:43
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
51:44
[SPEAKER_05]: It was still alive and walking around.
51:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
51:47
[SPEAKER_05]: But he was not the photo of the Shared before he left.
51:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And we talked a modern conversation is moral injury.
51:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
51:54
[SPEAKER_01]: You're, yes.
51:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Potty maybe whole but morally or gravely wounded.
52:01
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
52:01
[SPEAKER_05]: And then you're into PSD, PSD and all those sorts of things.
52:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah and you're irrevocably changed by
52:12
[SPEAKER_05]: Exactly, David.
52:13
[SPEAKER_05]: A revocable change.
52:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, right.
52:16
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's another good definition for death.
52:19
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
52:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm set up, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
52:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And it makes me, so I was reflecting the other week about something related to death, because I don't think, yeah, we probably thoughts of death probably strayed through all of our minds
52:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was thinking about what I'm not a, I personally do not have a strong need or desire to have a afterlife waiting for me and kind of okay with ambiguity of not having an answer for that.
53:05
[SPEAKER_01]: That's me.
53:07
[SPEAKER_01]: But I was thinking that God, it is kind of a shame to think of like all of these people and all of these stories and all of these experiences and all of these
53:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Cummings together and, you know, moments in life that were like, oh, wow, that was a moment, right, that then they're, they're just those are just gone, right, or those are just not available or they're just not in existence anymore.
53:36
[SPEAKER_01]: What do we, what have we done with the collective.
53:39
[SPEAKER_01]: experiential memory of our species, over millennia, over these millennia.
53:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, I'm a little, I don't know, I'm not, I'm not kind of happy with that idea of like, just all is just, it doesn't mean anything that it doesn't mean anything, right?
53:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just proof, proof.
54:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, oh, hey, I get that, but at the same time, like there's a, you know, think of all the people that we've known and all the cool things that they might have done or seen or places that they've walked or people that they've met or conversations that they had.
54:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And it filmed stars were lucky because we have a remnant of them.
54:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry.
54:18
[SPEAKER_01]: That's great.
54:18
[SPEAKER_04]: No, I mean, and that's why, in my opinion, deaths like Heath Ledger or River Phoenix or Philipsymor Hoffman or others where they were quite young.
54:30
[SPEAKER_04]: And part of the morning process, I know in general, is you are mourning the future of what could have been, you know, the narrative that you had in your mind of what my future is like with this person on.
54:46
[SPEAKER_04]: in my world somehow, you're also grieving the end of that story, because it can't happen.
54:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's definitely a lot of what had not yet come to pass.
54:56
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, exactly.
54:58
[SPEAKER_04]: And so, I was profoundly affected by the death of Heath Ledger and it would only be through conversations like we're having tonight that I could understand something like that.
55:16
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was commenting to Johns wife we were visiting this weekend with them in New York and I see Lisa you're wearing Hamilton t-shirt.
55:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
55:25
[SPEAKER_01]: It turns out that.
55:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, my daughter as people know got really got into Hamilton we're in up and down, you know, it comes and goes kind of thing.
55:34
[SPEAKER_01]: We're in that stage net right now where it comes and goes a little bit.
55:37
[SPEAKER_01]: The obsession is waiting a little bit.
55:41
[SPEAKER_01]: But we were just at Hamilton's house actually in New York City.
55:43
[SPEAKER_01]: We got our passports to the left on the bunch of other stuff anyway.
55:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So we were like, we were talking about it with Jean and his son hadn't seen it.
55:51
[SPEAKER_01]: So we put it on.
55:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And I completely have lost my point of thought now, um, uh, oh, I knew I was going to say good then.
55:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
55:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I was saying to Jones wife, I said, we're reflecting on Hamilton and reflecting on Lin Manuel Miranda.
56:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm touching a lot of wood as I say this.
56:08
[SPEAKER_01]: We're so lucky that Lin Manuel Miranda.
56:11
[SPEAKER_01]: is at still, he hasn't reached the apex of his career yet.
56:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was just thanking the the powers that be that we have him and we have not yet lost him.
56:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that idea of grieving what yet had not come to pass.
56:28
[SPEAKER_01]: That's
56:29
[SPEAKER_04]: I hadn't ever thought of it in that way before you did it's like Jonathan Larson for rent again, me being the theater nerd um you know which rent rent went on to win absolutely everything and touches a millions of people very deeply and the fact that he died during tech rehearsal before it went to Broadway so you never you know I mean it's just yeah so those are
56:54
[SPEAKER_04]: Those are a poignant, yeah, for sure.
56:57
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm trying to think what poet it was who wrote the lines of all the words that have ever been the side of star, it might have been yes.
57:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, yes, yes, yes, that's someone who got me out here.
57:10
[SPEAKER_05]: I was going to, but I thought, yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to break the deal.
57:16
[SPEAKER_01]: But then the other thing is.
57:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Wait, what was that again, Marilyn saddest words, what?
57:21
[SPEAKER_01]: The saddest words.
57:22
[SPEAKER_01]: What might happen?
57:23
[SPEAKER_01]: No, let Google listen.
57:25
[SPEAKER_01]: The Google is giving it to you.
57:26
[SPEAKER_01]: It's for me, feeding it to me.
57:28
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
57:29
[SPEAKER_05]: The others sort of the other direction.
57:31
[SPEAKER_01]: John Greenley, we do.
57:32
[SPEAKER_05]: What do you, of course?
57:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah.
57:35
[SPEAKER_05]: Who wrote a lot of hands, too.
57:37
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know that a week goes by.
57:40
[SPEAKER_05]: Maybe, well, for certain a month doesn't go by.
57:44
[SPEAKER_05]: without my reflecting on any time, I'm trying to remember something from my past or asking a question about my past.
57:52
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think there's no one left alive who can answer this for me.
57:57
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
57:58
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
57:58
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm going through that a lot.
57:59
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm going through that a lot.
58:00
[SPEAKER_05]: The parents have died, I have enough you, but of course, she didn't come into my life until I was 21 and it really wasn't a part of it to be able to answer the kinds of questions that sometimes rise for me.
58:12
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I know that novelists, again, to come back to the whole creative side of things was it was it Fahrenheit for 50 who wrote about everybody everybody for 51 had to memorize a book because and they became the keeper of that book.
58:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, I read that.
58:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't remember reading this.
58:33
[SPEAKER_05]: I know it's not going to result to me.
58:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this is a very interesting question for sure.
58:37
[SPEAKER_01]: For sure, for sure, for sure.
58:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Join if you're listening.
58:39
[SPEAKER_05]: But this idea that you're coming up to this podcast at some point where cultural carriers yes right and again I go back to indigenous people who Lost so many is some a huge gaps in their culture because the elders were the culture keepers and they died for the diseases Yeah, they died from a lung marches and from the stress of light and just the overwhelming grief for back to grief again
59:04
[SPEAKER_05]: being uprooted displaced and seeing their entire world completely altered and how just today I was listening to the radio about somebody talking about a member of a native tribe who had been researching native foods and was making a native meal.
59:26
[SPEAKER_05]: for his community.
59:28
[SPEAKER_05]: And he noticed that one of the elders was crying and he went over his auntie, what's wrong, what's wrong, and she said, I'm tasting our people food again.
59:38
[SPEAKER_05]: The first time.
59:40
[SPEAKER_05]: And I know I see over there is a child who is tasting our people's food.
59:47
[SPEAKER_05]: And so they a piece of our culture has come back.
59:52
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's got to be so profound.
59:54
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's the sadness that you were talking about, he says, knowing that the particular cultures of these artists and creatives, that's done.
1:00:04
[SPEAKER_05]: We have the record, we have the legacy.
1:00:07
[SPEAKER_05]: So we can go back and revisit.
1:00:10
[SPEAKER_05]: But,
1:00:12
[SPEAKER_05]: What we have is is what we have if we're just going to have another one.
1:00:15
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, Tolkien's never going to write another book.
1:00:17
[SPEAKER_05]: No, make Christopher digital's best.
1:00:20
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
1:00:20
[SPEAKER_05]: That's right.
1:00:21
[SPEAKER_05]: I got for that.
1:00:22
[SPEAKER_05]: But still, you know, which makes what we do have all the more precious.
1:00:27
[SPEAKER_05]: And therefore, worthy of being memorialized, remembered and talked about.
1:00:32
[SPEAKER_05]: And the shared grief, but also the shared joy and the pleasure of what they bring us.
1:00:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
1:00:39
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
1:00:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:00:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So I see that there's a few notes in here.
1:00:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if everyone's gotten a few things that they wanted.
1:00:48
[SPEAKER_01]: But I feel like we're coming to, I feel like the sun is setting on this conversation.
1:00:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry.
1:00:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sorry.
1:00:54
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, we don't hear about the duot and it's a joke.
1:00:58
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
1:00:58
[SPEAKER_05]: Cool.
1:00:58
[SPEAKER_05]: What is it?
1:00:59
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, I felt bad that I left out the Asia almost entirely.
1:01:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:01:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:01:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Another podcast.
1:01:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:01:06
[SPEAKER_01]: You do some more research.
1:01:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean.
1:01:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:01:09
[SPEAKER_05]: Or just do a part two of this one?
1:01:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's possible.
1:01:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the conversations can just continue to carry forward.
1:01:17
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
1:01:17
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think we've done a really good job in Maryland, too, in summarizing across culture.
1:01:24
[SPEAKER_04]: Obviously, grief and death, but the east and the west of it all, that we see in ancient Greece and Chinese Buddhism and then the Aztecs and so forth.
1:01:36
[SPEAKER_04]: And how that's carried over to modern western culture.
1:01:38
[SPEAKER_04]: you know, with our Cowboys writing into the West, or, you know, any of those themes and motifs that we see in our, you know, modern literature and, and, and certain person call, yeah.
1:01:52
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, thank you for raising that because I'm seeing this final couple of sentences and I want whoever wrote them down to read them because I think it's a great way to end.
1:02:02
[SPEAKER_03]: So the related to the Cowboys writing into the West is a right Maryland.
1:02:10
[SPEAKER_03]: It's geography, but it's also symbolizes both an ending and a new beginning.
1:02:16
[SPEAKER_03]: It is a setting sun, the sea passage, the minimal horizon between what is known and what is beyond.
1:02:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
1:02:26
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.
1:02:26
[SPEAKER_03]: You're welcome.
1:02:27
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, like drop.
1:02:29
[SPEAKER_01]: There you go, all right.
1:02:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you all so very much.
1:02:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll do some show notes post recording here.
1:02:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Throw some stuff on the end.
1:02:42
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what?
1:02:42
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I think we're just going to leave it here.
1:02:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it's fair to leave it here.
1:02:48
[SPEAKER_01]: There's always an admin to do in a podcast and there's always another podcast where we can cover that.
1:02:53
[SPEAKER_04]: Indeed.
1:02:54
[SPEAKER_04]: It will come up as we talk about these different artists and their films and their rich.
1:02:58
[SPEAKER_04]: There was a lot of opportunity to continue the conversation that we just began and just started tonight.
1:03:04
[SPEAKER_04]: Exactly.
1:03:05
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, I just want to thank you for including me in the conversation.
1:03:08
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm so glad to meet you.
1:03:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I know.
1:03:12
[SPEAKER_04]: Can you just get a bit on a podcast?
1:03:15
[SPEAKER_04]: No.
1:03:15
[SPEAKER_04]: No.
1:03:15
[SPEAKER_04]: No.
1:03:15
[SPEAKER_04]: I have no.
1:03:17
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
1:03:17
[SPEAKER_04]: I was so stoked.
1:03:19
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
1:03:21
[SPEAKER_04]: My best friend is token.
1:03:24
[SPEAKER_04]: You know.
1:03:26
[SPEAKER_04]: Not would love the the token part of this podcast, but she I was going to ask you, but she did study under John Garth and Oxford.
1:03:33
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, yeah, she did.
1:03:35
[SPEAKER_04]: I want to set a turkey.
1:03:36
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
1:03:37
[SPEAKER_04]: She does those summer, you know, where she spent a week.
1:03:41
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, so not like she has a degree in this or anything, but you know, in her more leisure time now, she's definitely going back to John Garth and Oxford and learning as much as she can.
1:03:52
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, some summer, I am going to do that.
1:03:54
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know when that there was seems to be something else that gets in the way.
1:03:59
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
1:04:00
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, just having the two weeks Oxford experience to add on John Garth and Tolkien over that is like, yeah, that's it.
1:04:09
[SPEAKER_05]: I can die that.
1:04:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, well, have a moment.
1:04:16
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll tell you guys.
1:04:18
[SPEAKER_05]: So I start sending my notes down.
1:04:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Very good.
1:04:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you all Maryland.
1:04:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for making the time as always.
1:04:31
[SPEAKER_05]: The pleasure is on mine.
1:04:32
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you for including me.
1:04:33
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll talk again soon Lisa Brian.
1:04:36
[SPEAKER_01]: We will get on the scheduling for the conversation podcast and we will get that recorded and out before long and then after that I believe it's not a hair pattern.
1:04:50
[UNKNOWN]: Yes.
1:04:51
[SPEAKER_01]: which is how to use laughter.
1:04:53
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.
1:04:54
[SPEAKER_04]: Exactly.
1:04:55
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you so much for doing this work, folks, because, you know, it's sad, it's hard.
1:04:59
[SPEAKER_05]: There's feelings involved, and it's lovely that you've taken it on and give everybody else who listens a chance to.
1:05:08
[SPEAKER_01]: What was cool was the way that it was created totally organically and that's the best Yeah, right within the community totally on that scored just Yep, yeah, that's the best mission.
1:05:22
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, that's the best projects.
1:05:24
[SPEAKER_01]: So Alright, well, let's wrap it up there and we will all talk again very soon.
1:05:29
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay
1:05:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
1:05:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Get early and add free access to all lorhounds podcast at patreon.com.
1:05:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Any opinions stated are ours personally and do not reflect the opinion of or belong to any employers or other entities.
1:05:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.