Where there is a will there is a way

Friday, June 4, 2010

Genesis the documentary (2004)


This documentary had important seeds of wisdom which I want to condense and share, for those with less time. I wrote down all the subtitles in a few areas, not all of the subtitles, just the most meaningful parts - they are in the same order as they appeared in the documentary. The headings are my headings. Screenshots are all from Genesis.

Words: Claude Nuridsany, and Marie PĂ©rennou
Narrator: Sotigui Kouyate, as ancient storyteller



INSIDE & OUT

Matter attempted a new way of existing
that resists the devastating power of Time:
tiny closed-in, self-contained bubbles
created the notion of inside and out,
like so many hermetic worlds,
tinier than grains of sand.
These were the first offspring of Life.




UNDERSTANDING LIFE

If you add a drop of milk to water
for a moment you will see regular shapes appear
that seem to be alive.
But this is not life.
The shapes gradually break up
And chaos prevails.
Even smoke can create shapes.
They vanish as quickly as they are born.





Life is a form that endures.
A form fighting against time.
A form that continues despite the universal law
that drives all organized things towards disorder and chaos.
Stranger still: a shape that remains the same
whereas the matter it is made of is constantly renewed.
My tongue, my lips which speak to you now
have constantly renewed their cells since my life began.
Every hour of every day billions of them die
and are replaced in my body.
Yet I am still me
like a river remains a river even though fresh water runs in its bed.
We are not beings of matter.
We are forms irrigated by matter,
living rivers that snake their way through time.

Life is a vortex that sustains its own motion, over and over again.





HOME TERRITORY

The world is a great labyrinth
full of mysteries and perils.
Lost in this vastness,
Each living being raises an invisible barrier around itself.
Inside this magic circle,
in this familiar space
in which it knows every corner,
it feels safe.





ON LOVE

1 + 1 = 3.
Yes, life has an interesting way of counting.
That is how it has spawned masses, and fabricated multitudes.
But, before making 3, one must unite with one.
Like two magnets, these islands of form unite and merge into one another.
And so, love was born.




We are all born of love.
Born of this rule in the game of life that declares it takes two entities to produce a third.
Each of us possesses only half of what is required to create another.
There is only one way to attract the second half: to seduce it.
Seduction is a power that operates at a distance.
Like the attraction of bodies.
It's a beckoning -- overpowering, insistent.
Never has a beauty put up with an impatient suitor.
In love, the shortest path, is always the most sinuous.






IN THE WOMB

Love is what drew me from nothingness.
Then I had two lives.
One in which I lived in my mother’s womb.
The other in which I lived in the great wide world.

From the time I was conceive to the moment I was born,
I lived a condensed version of Genesis.
In the beginning, I was a sea creature.
The water pocket replaced
the primeval sea of the world’s beginning.

At this time when I was no bigger than a bean
I had a striking resemblance with animals.
In that age in which our bodies are slowly conceived and kneaded,
we are all spitting images of one another.
For we are like rivulets of water surging up from the same source.
Like the veins of the same leaf,
the branch of the same tree.
We are members of the same tribe,
The great tribe of the Living.
And so I was part fish and part frog while still living in my mother’s womb,
with gills in my throat
and fins on my sides,
swimming between two seas
in my round, elastic aquarium.





NATURE OF LIFE

Matter moves toward chaos
like the river flows down to the sea.
We, the living, are like canoes
Beating against the currents of time.
We cheat with time.
And time knows only one road, runs down only one slope,
That which leads to decay.






CANNIBALISM OF LIFE

We preserve our living form
by destroying other living beings.
Our existence is always
the consequence of plunder.
For life is cannibalistic.
Life devours life.

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