• The theme from Perry Mason. I grew up listening to this mixture of the bluesy and the sinister and it has haunted me ever since, that trombone at the beginning of the end credits climbing the scales and then that tremolo from a flute. Eerie and foreboding. I’ll often switch over to the last few minutes of an episode when it’s shown on Me-TV just to hear it again. It’s actually a composition called “Park Avenue Beat” composed by a man named Fred Steiner. I looked it up.
• One of the things about The Mummy (1932), a movie that continues to hold a spell over me, is the fact that the movie itself, like Imhotep, seems as dry as dust. This was not intended by the filmmakers, I’m sure. It’s simply that, for us, the picture is nearly a century old. The quality of its film making for its time was as up to date as it could be. But from the first time I saw it, as a kid, it has evoked the dry antiquity of tombs, with its black-and-white photography, its slow progression, the makeup of Boris Karloff, the crackling of the soundtrack like the creaking of reanimated bones after thousands of years of being locked away…the spell it casts over me is complete.
• I have no eyes and I must read.
I have no arms and I must hug.
I have no hands and I must hold a hamster.
I have no bones and I must sit.
I have no eyes and I must read.
I have no teeth and I must chew.
I have no books and I must read.
I have no ice and I must slip and fall.
I have no wolves and I must run.
I have no ham and I need eggs.
• We had a guy a couple of years ago, a handyman, who came by over the course of a few days to do some fix-up work around the house. I am not handy, so we hired this man. Over the course of those few days he and I would chat, and I came to learn that he believed some interesting things. For instance, he felt that the earth was flat. He was convinced of this because when airliners fly across the country, they fly flat, in a straight line. If the earth was a globe, they’d have to curve as they maneuver, right? and we’d experience that bending force. The earth being flat also means that our sky is actually the inside of a big dome. The stars are lights hanging there, and the moon and the sun. What I found most amusing was that he believed a lot of the technology we now have came from extraterrestrials, except that he pronounced the word “extratessicles” or maybe “extratesticles.” I don’t know…if they are extraterrestrials, maybe they do have extra testicles. But how could they be extraterrestrials if the earth is flat and the sky is a dome with lights? We never crossed that line, never got into that.
• I am deeply troubled when I consider individuals who have some inherent intelligence but otherwise are quite stupid. By stupid, I mean these people lack a moral center; their view of the world is that things are to be regarded as strictly one thing or the other, two-sided, black or white, no nuance, no shadings, no empathy, just two blocks of wood standing there facing each other. Carried to the extreme, this outlook results in evil. These people seem willfully blind to me. Or perhaps it is not willful, their own choice, but something genetic. In any event, such absolutism is childish, not a trait of fully integrated adults, to my mind.
But it reminds me that the Gnostics considered that there are three sorts of people. The lowest are the hylics, who are purely material, wholly physical with nothing spiritual to them, and destined to go to dust when they die. The second are the psychics, who have souls and spiritual awareness and are religious but who haven’t yet achieved the full spiritual insight or completeness of pneumatics, the highest class. Perhaps the people I consider overeducated blockheads, or what we used to call educated fools, are psychics. They overthink and get in their own way a lot of the time. The pneumatics, the highest order, have direct knowledge, or gnosis, of divinity. I suppose in one sense this hierarchy explains certain people for me, the stupid, but it still seems like a terrible waste of life to be as simple-minded and unimaginative as so many people are. But then, what am I? A psychic, a highly educated fool, in my own head most of the time? Very likely. Certainly not pneumatic but not a hylic, I don’t think.