I’m working on a longer piece that will be out sometime next week.
But consistency appears to be the key to creating, and since we don’t often get to talk about what we want to discuss when we see each other in public, here are five works that somehow affected how I saw life over the past month.
1. Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Boy, did this one hit. It took me the better part of a year to go through this whole book, but I’m glad I made it to the end.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but so much of what gets discussed in this book feels particularly relevant to the present. You have a crumbling empire with atheism, socialism, and communism on the rise, forcing everyone we meet to cobble together their own morality based on new and old ideas. In this chaos, people who consider themselves good commit terrible acts and then tear themselves apart for it, while many who consider themselves evil are surprised by the kindness and compassion they weren’t aware they possessed.
And through it all, you have Alyosha, a man who seeks not to judge but to understand, for understanding is the path to forgiveness. He is one of three brothers, each of whom roughly embodies an element of the human psyche, while their reprehensible rogue of a father might be compared to the get-rich-quick swindlers who feature so prominently in the public eye nowadays.
The book is full of situations that I found utterly compelling. Towards the end, a friend I was reading this with and I both found ourselves a little anxious at the prospect of having to say goodbye to characters we had gotten to know so well. Nonetheless, we are better for having met them.
A word of advice for anyone who wants to tackle a massive classic like this one—do it with a friend.
Every week, we’d check in to get each other’s thoughts on the latest chapters we’d read, what we thought of various characters, and fill in any gaps we might have around references found in the book. We liked this approach so much that we’re continuing, perhaps tackling the Book of Acts in the Bible next.
2. The Original Zatoichi Films
Blind swordsman, gambler, masseuse, and Yakuza. The movies work the way Westerns do, with a loose plot containing situations for the mythical Ichi (Zato means “blind masseur” in Japanese) to demonstrate his badassery.
The fights are fun, sure. But I don’t think anybody with even a cursory understanding of swordsmanship can really believe in the effectiveness of Ichi’s reverse sword grip, let alone his ability to cut through everything with it so fast he can’t be seen.
Instead, the real draw is Shintaro Katsu’s portrayal of the funny little blind man everyone underestimates until he does the impossible. A harbinger of the doom that befalls those who would trample on the meek and exploit the vulnerable.
A note on his blindness: it’s left to interpretation from film to film just how blind Zatoichi really is. In some episodes, it almost feels like he’s some bodhisattva using blindness as a mask to exact karma on the good, bad, and ugly. One of the beautifully tragic themes that runs through them all is the irony of Zatoichi, whose blindness puts him lowest in society, seeing the perils that the gangsters and generals too caught up in their schemes cannot, and yet still being powerless to stop what must unfold.
I don’t know how I fell into these movies or why I hadn’t seen one sooner (the Beat Takeshi remake doesn’t count). But you must watch these gems if you are into Westerns, martial arts, or Chanbara films. Start with this list of Top 10 Most Essential Zatoichi Films.
3. The New Guard, Mikey Musumeci documentary
Even though my style is nothing like this legendary Jiu Jitsu phenom who eats nothing but pizza and pasta and trains 12 hours a day, watching the film somehow made my Jiu Jitsu better.
Why?
I suspect it has something to do with the tale it tells. We are all driven by stories, and this one was about a young competitor who went from extreme anxiety over his performance and what his audience thought of him to someone who just wanted to show his art to the world.
4. The Quest for the Holy Grail
Fascinating breakdown of one of the foundational archetypes of the West and what it says about who we are today.
If you’ve ever wondered why Jung somehow left such a crucial part of the cultural psyche out of his writings, this video has the answer.
5. Son of Mercury / Galahad Eridanus
Admittedly, I’m slightly uncomfortable posting this but works like these have led me to realizations in the past.
The man is either a true mystic, unwell, or trolling all of us. I’m inclined to believe it’s the former, given how accurate many of his observations are, but the frightening thing is, if he is telling the truth, then the world is far stranger than most of us take for granted.
Either way, hey, you wanted to expand your mind, right? Well, it must be real open to entertain some of this stuff. If you’d like the Philip K Dickian Valis gnostic testimony replete with stunning visuals, I recommend you check out his Youtube channel. Otherwise, the analysis of symbols and deep dives into the deeper meaning of our current global panopticon culture is best ingested via his Substack.
That’s it for this week. Drop me a line if you have any thoughts or just want to say hi.