Three things (almost UFO-relevant)

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

Tuesday night (7/9/19) I watched, on TCM, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), one of my two top flying saucer movies, the other being Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World (also 1951).

While it remains, for me, a terrific movie and Christian metaphor, there is a major glitch in it:

When Klaatu takes Bobby’s flashlight to go to his spaceship in the park (mall) to gain entry, he (Klaatu) walks to the park from the boarding house where he’s staying as Major Carpenter, Bobby following him.

But when Klaatu and Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) leave the boarding house to get Klaatu to the ship (park) where Professor Barnhardt has set up a meeting with his fellow scientists to hear what Klaatu has to tell them, Klaatu and Helen get in a cab and drive all over Washington D.C. is seems to get to the meeting.

What was a walk-to earlier turns into a miles-long plot device.

Still, a superb movie.

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The TLS (Times Literary Supplement) for June 28. 2019, has a piece about Norse Myth, the Poetic Edda (from the Codex Regius).

The writer, Carolyne Larrington, Professor of Medieval European Literature at Oxford who has a published translation of the Poetic Edda, just republished, provides readers of TLS a synopsis of The Seeress’s Prophecy from the Codex that presents the concept of ragnarök, the doom of the gods.

Professor Larrington provides a list of works (literary and musical) that derive from The Seeress’s Prophesy, especially the story of the demise of the gods.

Some of you are familiar with Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and/or Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but there are many others, including Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics renditions of the Thor saga, not to mention the Game of Thrones insinuations.

In the Norse myth, Odin presses the Seeress for her knowledge of the past and future, even though he has knowledge of the past and knows how he and his brothers lifted up the Earth from the chaos of Ginnungagap.

And “in their leisure … they played a game board with golden pieces, but with the mysterious arrival of three giant girls, the board was overturned and the golden gaming pieces lost.” [Larrington]

“The seeress relates highlights of divine history …”:

The death of the brightest of the gods, Baldr, the endless Mighty Winter, Loki breaking his bonds, the fire and frost giants advancing, Fenrir the great wolf and his brother, the serpent Midgard will attack, the heroes of Valhalla lose their last battle, Fenrir will devour Odin, ƥórr will fall, poisoned by the serpents spittle, cosmic wolves will swallow the sun and moon, and in a riot of sparks and steam, the Earth will plunge headlong back into the ocean. [From Larrington, Page 13]

This denouement of the gods outdoes any other ending, unrivalled even by the Book of Revelation or Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, but goes to my point, which is this…

                               

In the so-called simulation thesis – the idea that we (humanity and reality) are part of simulated (computer-like) game – this Codex end of life is not unlike some of the games and writings that portend the end of existence.

It’s as if some humans are hard-wired to intuit such an end of life; that is, the Master (God or gods?) who has conceived our reality has endowed a few chosen humans to know, presciently, how this existence ends.

It’s conjecture, of course.

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While listening to Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony, The Titan, today, I think that there could not be any alien (extraterrestrial) species capable of such wondrous sounds.

Even the inhabitants of The Forbidden Planet, the Krell’s sci-fi music hadn’t the magnificence of Mahler (or Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin et al.).

Yes, to an ET’s ears, such music as Mahler’s might be noise, as it is for the philistines of Earth.

But taking harmony as a higher element of hearing, Mahler represents the sound of the gods.

And ET’s, in UFOs or anything else, won’t offer such music, can't offer such music. It’s a unique element of this Earth’s culture, and is without equal anywhere in the cosmos, as I hear it.

RR