My Dinner with Andre

One of the best reposts I will ever make. The most profoundly truthful scenes in any movie ever made. This is from the early 80s. Just in time for 1984. https://twitter.com/WillingWitness/status/1696202515300458788

We’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare - https://alcva.wordpress.com/2020/06/28/were-living-in-some-kind-of-orwellian-nightmare-2/

My dinner with Andre: a screenplay by Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory

Synopsis: Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, apparently playing themselves, share their lives over the course of an evening meal at a restaurant. Gregory, a theatre director from New York, is the more talkative of the pair. He relates to Shawn his tales of dropping out, travelling around the world and experiencing the variety of ways people live, such as a monk who could balance his entire weight on his fingertips. Shawn listens avidly, but questions the value of Gregory’s seeming abandonment of the pragmatic aspects of life.

I met this man whom I greatly admire. He’s a Swedish physicist. Gustav Bjrnstrand. And he told me that he no longer watches television he doesn’t read newspapers, and he doesn’t read magazines. He’s completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot. And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. Just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods. He’s 84 years old, and he always travels with a backpack ’cause he never knows where he’s gonna be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn, he said to me, "Where are you from?" I said, "New York. "He said," Ah, New York. Yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?" And I said, "Oh, yes. And he said, "Why do you think they don’t leave?" I gave him different banal theories. He said, "Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all." He said, " I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp "where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves "and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built. "They’ve built their own prison. "And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia "where they are both guards and prisoners. "And as a result, they no longer have having been lobotomized "the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or to even see it as a prison." And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree and he said, "This is a pine tree." He put it in my hand and he said, "Escape before it’s too late." See, actually, for two or three years now Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. We really feel like Jews in Germany in the late ’30s. Get out of here. Of course, the problem is where to go. ‘Cause it seems quite obvious that the the whole world is going in the same direction. See, I think it’s quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future, now and that from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there’ll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being with feelings and thoughts and that history and memory are right now being erased and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet. Now, of course, Bjrnstrand feels that there’s really almost no hope and that we’re probably going back to a very savage lawless, terrifying period. Findhorn people see it a little differently. They’re feeling that there’ll be these pockets of light springing up in different parts of the world and that these will be, in a way, invisible planets on this planet and that as we, or the world, grow colder we can take invisible space journeys to these different planets refuel for what it is we need to do on the planet itself and come back. And it’s their feeling that there have to be, centres now where people can come and reconstruct a new future for the world. And when I was talking to, uh, Gustav Bjrnstrand he was saying that actually these centres are growing up everywhere now and that what they’re trying to do, which is what Findhorn was trying to do and, in a way, what I was trying to do I mean, these things can’t be given names but in a way, these are all attempts at creating a new kind of school or a new kind of monastery. And Bjrnstrand talks about the concept of" reserves" islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function in order to maintain the species through a dark age. In other words, we’re talking about an underground which did exist in a different way during the Dark Ages among the mystical orders of the church. And the purpose of this underground is to find out how to preserve the light, life, the culture how to keep things living. You see, I keep thinking that what we need is a new language a language of the heart a language, as in the Polish forest, where the language wasn’t needed. Some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry that’s the poetry of the dancing bee that tells us where the honey is. And I think that in order to create that language you’re going to have to learn how you can go through a looking glass into another kind of perception where you have that sense of being united to all things and suddenly you understand everything.