Philosophical Fragments by Adam J. Pearson

By Adam J. Pearson

To the eyes of love, the old and dying world looks new,
Fresh, alive, every inch of it grows and glows.
Through love’s lithe lenses, the land of falseness looks true,
Beauteous, glowing, softened by hues of rose.

A heart touched by love
Is resurrected like Lazaraus;
But a moment ago, it was like a corpse,
Cocooned in a coma,
Dead, asleep, lost–
But seconds later,
It pulses with life,
It gasps like a man underwater
When suddenly,
He explodes out of the waves
And his lungs first fill with clean fresh air.
Shocked, he finds himself alive,
Only suddenly seeing
How dead he was before.

When the eyes of love alight on their beloved,
Like butterflies upon soft petals,
Magic rouses into action,
The beloved appears
As if golden and glowing,
Cloaked in wonder,
Coated in light.

Everyone else fades into the background,
But that fair one stands out–
In truth,
It is as if they
And they alone exist;
Their every look entrances,
Their every touch is magic,
Their every word is the word of angels,
And the oracle of gods.

A room without them in it
Is just a room,
But when they walk in,
Colours grow brighter,
Sharper, lighter,
Pulsing, clearer, more intense–
The heart speeds up
Like a sprinter in a hundred meter dash,
The breath comes harder
Like the breath of the runner
And sounds are louder
And aromas more pleasing
And sights more sharp
And everything crescendos–
The whole vast universe arises
Like a giant, perfect wave
And riding its crest,
The one beloved.

So it is, to be gripped by the hands of love,
So it is, to hear the subtle song
That only lovers hear
And only lovers understand.

To everyone else, they seem crazy,
Those lost lovers,
Like fools,
Bewitched,
Caught up in magic and wonder,
And that they are–
But the nonsense of lovers
Is perfect sense to them.
And the chaos of lovers
Is order clear and true.
They say nothing,
But hear a million words,
Sit still,
But their hearts soar high and new.

Some say the eyes of love
See false,
Distorted,
Only what they want and yearn to see.
But those who say such things
Speak only from outside of love,
Not from it’s heart.

The view from inside
Is like an artist’s masterpiece
Ten million colours, it contains,
And depth upon depth forever–
And within this wondrous land,
This landscape of love and liberty,
A truth is seen that cannot be spoken,
Something sacred is touched
And touches,
A truth grows up within
And shines and shines
Like brilliant stars in the dark void of space
And to lovers it is crystal clear–

Somehow it flows
And breathes
And speaks
Through them,
Though they do nothing
But surrender,
Let go,
Give in,
And gently,
They are carried away
By the wave.

By Adam J. Pearson

Carlito’s Way and Scarface are two of the undisputed greatest mafia films of all time. Both films excel in their rich, gritty, realism approach to the mafia genre, their high quality acting, their skilful cultivation of atmosphere, their iconic cinematography, and excellent scriptwriting. The two films also invite comparisons with one another due to their many similarities; both films deal with figures within non-Italian organized crime families in America (Scarface, with a Cuban refugee family and Carlito with a Puerto Rican family), both films were directed by Brian de Palma, both films star Al Pacino as their central protagonist, both films deal with the rise and fall of a mobster, and both films were regarded as controversial for their vivid portrayals of graphic violence.  However, the two films also differ in a variety of interesting and significant ways; together, they present pictures of two very different kinds of mobsters expressed through the theatrical brilliance of Al Pacino.

On the surface, both Scarface’s Cuban refugee Tony Montana (Pacino) and Carlito’s Way’s eponymous former mobster seem to have a number of things in common. Both figures are incredibly charismatic individuals as both films illustrate from their very beginnings: Montana’s interrogation by police officers and Carlito’s opening courtroom speech draw our attention and fascination as audiences. Both figures are skilled shooters with no hesitation in killing when they need to. Both figures had some hand in drug dealing rackets in the past or present. And in the past at least, both figures were driven by a great love of power and wealth achieved at all costs.

However, as the movies progress, the two towering mobsters deviate considerably. Montana, who initially earns our sympathy through his incredible rise through the ranks of the underworld from rags to riches and his commitment to a twisted version of the ‘American Dream’, ends up becoming a drug-ridden, miserable man. As the film progresses, we watch as his charisma is steadily replaced by a kind of pathetic fallenness that alienates him from his once beloved Elvira, who, like him, devolves into an emotional, wary, depressed, and drug-addled fallen version of her former self. In contrast, Carlito is not a figure rising through the ranks of crime; he has already had his rise and done his time for it before the film even began. Instead, what De Palma presents to us over the course of the film in Carlito’s Way is a man who is trying to turn his life around, to leave behind the wiseguy lifestyle he used to lead.

Like Montana, Carlito is pursuing a dream, but it is not a dream of wealth acquired through crime, but of a respectable, legal lifestyle as a used car salesman.  Montana’s dream of love, power, and criminally acquired wealth alienates him from his beloved; Carlito’s dream of a crime-free paradise with his beloved brings him closer to his own love. Whereas Montana and Elvira get to be together and fall together, Carlito is always working towards a moment of freedom from his criminal past and its seedy underworld, a vision of ‘paradise’–itself a significant motif throughout Carlito’s Way–that he can share with Gail.  The central figures in both films ultimately meet an untimely end as a result of consequences set in motion by their own past actions, but when they do, Tony dies with Elvira very far away and Carlito, with Gail very much by his side.  The moving end credits to Carlito’s Way visually capture this motivating force of the dream of a crime-free paradise as Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful” movingly plays on in the background.  The sight of a poster of a tropical paradise into which Carlito projects Gail dancing is his last image on this Earth and De Palma brilliantly draws us into his final vision, the dream he worked so hard to achieve, but tragically lost when it was only moments away from him.

Carlito and Gail in “Carlito’s Way”

In these two films, Pacino presents us different visions of the archetypal figure of ‘the gangster,’ ‘the wiseguy,’ or ‘the mobster.’ The wiseguy tends to be, as his name suggests, highly intelligent and educated in the underworld spaces through which he moves.  He knows the complex codes that govern mafia life–though Tony violates them by pursuing his boss’s girlfriend and Carlito stands by them almost to the end–and understands the subtle games that gangsters play with one another.  As an archetype, the mobster is often referred to as ‘the badguy,’ but Pacino’s portrayals in these two films complicate this simple designation.

Tony Montana is doubtless a bad guy in many ways by the conventional definition of the term; he kills without hesitation, he makes his living off of the drug addictions of others, and he lies, cheats and steals repeatedly, but he has sympathetic moments of basic humanity and caring as well. Montana strikes us as less a heartless psychopath than an overly bold, desperate, wary, cynical, and disillusioned man trying to make his way in the criminal underworld. Carlito was once like Tony Montana in living the gangster life and pursuing wealth and power through racketeering, but in the film, we meet him at a time when he is a badguy trying to be good, a man trying to ‘break good’ in contrast with Breaking Bad’s Walter’s transition into badness.  Throughout Scarface, Montana is ever getting himself into bad situations by pushing forward and causing many of the conflicts he faces. Carlito, in contrast, does everything he can to avoid such scenarios, but tragically finds his past continually sucking him back into the seedy, dangerous world he tries to escape.

Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather

If Montana is the mobster at the height of the gangster lifestyle, both loving and hating it at the same time, Carlito is the man of the street who is trying to move from gangster to former-gangster, from criminal to straight-shooter.  If we feel some sympathy for Montana, when he goes out in a bang in Scarface‘s climactic final scene, we feel genuine sadness for Carlito, who despite all of his best efforts, fails to achieve his sincerely well-intended dream. If Montana is an ambiguous antihero or even, arguably, a villain, Carlito is a tragic hero; his own underworld values, especially his misplaced loyalty to his lawyer Kleinman (Sean Penn) are the tragic flaws that bring about his downfall. It is truly disheartening when Carlito falls out of loyalty to Kleinman, who does not deserve it either by the code of the law–because he is a crooked lawyer who bribes juries, works for the mafia, and gets hard criminals off–or the code of the street--because he betrays Carlito and even frames him to the FBI. Loyalty is Carlito’s tragic flaw; if Montana is a tragic hero in any sense of the world, his central flaw is his arrogant greed, his lust for power and wealth at all costs, which ends up destroying him.

In addition, Pacino has not only represented different facets of the archetype of the gangster, the organized criminal, in these two films; he also given us striking visions of the mobster in the Godfather trilogy and Donnie Brasco. In The Godfather Pacino incarnates Michael Corleone, the new ‘Godfather’ to replace his fallen father, Vito. Michael is a shrewd, streetwise, and highly intelligent man who gives up trying to resist his family’s criminal ways and ends up taking out all of the other bosses of the fictionalized Five Families. This scene, in which murders of the bosses are juxtaposed with a Christian communion while Michael prays along with the priest, wonderfully illustrates the strange fusion of Christian values and values that would, from that same perspective, be regarded as Satanic and ‘deadly sins.’ Michael Corleone is a man at the height of his power and the top of the mafia hierarchy as a boss with a consiglieri reigning over multiple capos (captains) each with their own soldiers and connected and associated guys beneath them.  In the Godfather Parts I and II in particular, Corleone’s intelligence, wisdom in the ways of the street and the politics of the mafia, leads him to prosper as a towering figure of underworld power.

In striking contrast, Pacino’s portrayal of Lefty “Guns” Ruggiero in Donnie Brasco could not be father from Michael Corleone. Based on the true Lefty Ruggiero from the Bonanno crime family that was courageously infiltrated by FBI Agent Joe Pistone, Pacino’s Lefty is nearly powerless compared with the towering Corleone family boss. Lefty is a made man with many mafia hits under his belt, but he remains at the bottom of the mafia hierarchy; he is not a boss, not an underboss, not even a capo. All of his life’s dedication and illegal earnings for the family come to nothing while the much younger Sonny Black rises up through his family’s ranks. If Michael Corleone is the monumental mafia boss, Lefty is the lowly soldier, hustling on the frontlines.

Al Pacino as Lefty “Guns” Ruggiero (far right) in Donnie Brasco.

In conclusion, in Scarface, Carlito’s Way, The Godfather, and Donnie Brasco, Al Pacino presents us the many faces of the complex figure known as the mobster, a figure of admirable intelligence and questionable means to power. Pacino embodies the high boss (the Godfather), the fallen drug kingpin (Scarface), the lowly soldier (Donnie Brasco), and the former mobster seeking the straight and narrow his own Way (Carlito’s Way). Indeed, Carlito’s “Way” is his “way out” of the criminal underworld and into a happy, loving, legal lifestyle; unfortunately, in the end, he is swallowed up by the very world he attempts to escape.

All of Pacino’s wiseguys have their sympathetic aspects and their faults; never do we get the sense that they are straightforwardly despicable figures. Pacino never plays them that easy. Even when they do hateful things, his characters remain strangely charming, sympathetic, even lovable, largely due to Pacino’s brilliance as an actor. In a similar way, Breaking Bad‘s Walter teeters on the border between despicable and sympathetic, one minute earning our sympathy, and the next minute, losing it.  Pacino’s mobsters eembody vast opposites: virtues such as loyalty, courage, and intelligence and vices such as murderousness, deceptiveness, and thievery; success and failure; old age and youth; good intentions and bad ones.  If these diverse portraits teach us anything, it is that the mobster is a complex figure that eludes facile judgments, a multifaceted human being who lives in a world where smiles hide daggers, crime pays, and graves and jail cells are only one bad move away.

Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) American ethnobotanist, philosopher, psychonaut, researcher, teacher, lecturer, and writer.

By Adam J. Pearson

“Do not confuse the moon with the finger pointing at the moon” –Zen Proverb

“The food is not the menu” –Huston Smith

“The map is not the territory” –Alfred Korzybski

***

Terrence McKenna once claimed that “the syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” I am a big fan of McKenna’s insights in general, but I wonder if this statement goes a little too far.  I feel he is being a little mystical here, and maybe speaking about a spiritual language to the world, perhaps something along the lines of the Jewish Kabbalah or Hermetic Qabalah. However, I find that these words can shed some interesting light on the way language shapes our experience of the world if we interpret it a little differently, that is, as a description of how we can play with the structure of the world as processed through concepts simply by altering those very concepts.

To begin, both McKenna and French philosopher Jacques Derrida are keen on their insistence of the importance of signifiers, of symbols and words, in ‘mediating’ our experience of the world.  By ‘mediating,’ I mean giving us terms through which to make sense of what we see, hear, taste, etc. Certainly words are central to the way human beings experience the world; we don’t simply see a dog; we immediately label it “a dog” – we associate a name and a word with the sensory images we see. But I feel that if we reduce the nature of physical reality to words, we are making a vital error.  The dog is much more than its name, whether we call it ‘dog,’ ‘chien,’ ‘canis,’ or ‘inu’; it is a living, breathing creature, fully alive and vibrant and with its own being prior to it being called anything at all.

In short, I think we can distinguish between the world in two senses: (1) the preverbal or preconceptual world  and (2) the verbal or conceptual world. By the ‘preverbal or preconceptual world,’ I mean physical reality before it has been translated into labels, words, or concepts.  I mean the physical world before it is thought or spoken about, before we attach labels or words to it. When we are experiencing–seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching–the preverbal world, we have no idea what we are seeing; no names come to mind. Our mind is blank and there is nothing there but the object in front of us, just as it is, naked and bare of concepts or labels. It is this nonverbal or preconceptual experience that Zen invites us to recapture by silently sitting in meditation or practicing mindfulness; it is the same experience we first have when we are born into this world as infants.  Seeing without labeling or giving rise to concepts is the most direct experience of ‘physical reality’ that we can possibly have. The minute we start thinking and labeling, we have moved into what I call the ‘verbal or conceptual world.’

Rene Magritte’s famous painting, “The Treachery of Things” illustrates the point that the preverbal world is different from the verbal world. The pipe is not the same as our mental model or this painted picture of it; it has a reality of its own, a physical existence, that is prior to our names, concepts, and images of it. The being of a thing comes before its name; the preverbal world comes before the verbal world.

By the term ‘verbal or conceptual world,’ I mean the world as processed through language and concepts.  The views, opinions, thoughts, and concepts we hold in our minds change the way we see the world; they change the way that we perceive the bare sensations of the preconceptual world by giving them names and labels and telling us what they ‘mean.’  The words and concepts ‘mediate’ our experience of the world; it follows, therefore, that if we change the words and concepts we use, or the larger belief systems or paradigms that are built up out of them, we change the mediated world we experience. This is partly why the beliefs we hold and the breadth of our vocabulary are so important; they literally shape our perception of the world.

If we return to McKenna’s quotation, then, the term ‘syntactical nature of reality’ only seems to make sense if applied to the conceptual or verbal world.  It cannot be applied to the preverbal world. Why? Because the preverbal world is prior to or before words or their combinations into phrases and sentences (syntax) even arises.  The moment we start to use words, we are dealing with the conceptual world.  We are mediating and processing reality through concepts and language.  However, it makes sense to say that the conceptual or verbal world has a ‘syntactical’ nature; we could also say it has a ‘verbal’ or a ‘conceptual’ nature.  It is basically composed of the words and concepts we use to make meaning out of the preverbal world. Differently stated, it is made up of the mental representations or ‘signifiers’ we use to symbolize and think about and speak about the world prior to concepts.

To reiterate, as I see the matter, the words we use don’t create the world we live in; they mediate it. They build up a cognitive framework that we use to navigate through the world in a way that supports our survival. If we didn’t have this cognitive or linguistic framework, we would have no way to label ‘poison’ as distinct from ‘healthy food,’ for example. Such distinctions are, to say the least, terribly important. They keep us alive. If we want to experience the preverbal world, we cannot invoke a single word or concept. We must sit in silence, just as Zen practitioners do in zazen or seated meditation. When we are present with the preverbal world, when we are ‘there,’ we have no idea what we’re seeing or experiencing. The moment we know what you’re experiencing, the moment we invoke the names of things, we’re  mediating the preconceptual world with concepts and words again. We’ve moved back into the verbal world.

The way I interpret the second part of McKenna’s statement, namely, that ”the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish,” is that it refers to our power or ability to ‘play’ with the structure of the conceptual world.  If we work with the words and concepts we use to mediate our reality, we change our perception of reality because the preverbal world is experienced through the interpretive matrix or cognitive ‘filter’ of language.  Once we understand how concepts, paradigms, and words shape our experience of the world, we can play around with these intermediaries of our experience to transform that experience, in effect, to modify the ‘world as experienced,’ the conceptual world.

Our words and concepts form our ‘map’ of the territory
of the preverbal world. By changing our map, we change
our experience of the territory. In this way, by playing with
words, concepts, and paradigms, we can play with the
very structure of the conceptual world — the world as
experienced through language.

The modern occult tradition of chaos magic championed by philosophers such as A.O. Spare and Peter Carroll exploits this insight to maximum effect; practitioners of the tradition play with and ‘swap’ paradigms (sets of beliefs and terminology) freely to change their perception of the world as well.  While astronauts explore space, these ‘psychonauts’ play with and reshape the structure of the conceptual world by playing with the concepts used to navigate it.  In closing, their message for humanity and general, and I would argue, McKenna’s as well, is that the words and concepts we use to make meaning out of the world are crucially important; they not only shape our perception but can potentially give us the power to modify our perception and the world we experience (conceptual world) at will.  To restate McKenna, if we know the words that our world is made of, then we can make of it whatever we wish.