Mindwalk (1990) - full transcript

Hello?

Hello, Tom?

Jack? Jack, it's... What, is there
a red alert on or something?

Am I calling too late?

No, no... It's just that the hours
are too later here...

Are you O.K.?
Is everything all right?

Not really.

I need some help.

You think a speechwriter's going to fix it?
Do you think that's the only problem?

If I did, would I be calling you?

I'm sorry I missed your presidential
campaign. I just thought it was nuts.



It looks like the voters agreed with you.

Maybe it was crazy, anyway,
I'm supposed to be running again...

for the re-election to the Senate,
and people aren't giving any more.

Now, they are giving, but maybe
I just don't want the money.

I don't have anything to say.
I feel tapped out.

Get away from there, it's a snake pit.
It's a hall of mirrors for narcissists.

Get a long way away.

Oh, I wish, but it's impossible right now.

No, come on. It's always like that.
That's always part of the problem.

Are you offering me a place?

Yeah, sure. You could come
over here. Come on over.

It may not be the White House but, you
know, at least here you're wanted.

I'm so glad I came here.

I should not invited him.



Incredible!

Look, there it is again.

The Middle Ages got left behind on
this rock. Time just moved on.

There he goes again.
That's him all right.

Always enthused and always ready,
with the right words for all occasions.

As if everyone was
still waiting for his opinion.

As if life itself was one
giant press conference.

Maybe that's all there is,
this public persona.

Maybe I've been fooling myself
these last 20 years...

always looking for the real guy
behind the facade.

Maybe the facade is the real guy.

This is amazing!

Sure it is.
Everything's always amazing to this guy.

Why am I bitching all the time?

Maybe it's a premonition that
this trip's going to be a disaster.

I can't say that I need Jack's company.
This time of my life I'm residing quite...

contentedly in my own midlife crises,
thank you very much.

This is as far away from Washington
as I could possibly get.

Thank you.

There he goes.

That's why he irritates me,
and that's why I love him, too.

Behind the innocence there may be a
calculating politician...

but behind the politician
there's an innocent.

He's still american enough.
He doesn't lie well at all, he means it.

You want to stop the car and get out?
Take a look around?

There it is.
Mont-Saint-Michel.

What do you think?

Beautiful.

You want to do something different?
You want to walk over there?

Walk across that swamp?

Yeah, just like our ancestors did
centuries and centuries ago.

You're the one who wanted to do all
the walking. Come on, let's go.

Maybe you ancestors used to do this...

but unless my mother
lied to me, I don't...

Thank you.

- So, we're gonna do something today?
- Thought I'd finish my book.

You always have a book to read.
I'm bored.

Where's Roman?

I don't care what Roman's doing.
I wanted to do something with you.

I should not come. I should've
just done something with dad.

Come on, Kit.

You just stay cooped up in this medieval
island, just reading your books.

You're not even aware of
what's going on around you.

You could be anywhere, it wouldn't
even make a difference.

You should go out more.
Meet some people.

I will.

I'm going.

Bye.

Are you moving to France permanently?

What?

I thought you couldn't live
anywhere but in New York.

What about the theater?
Did you give that up for good?

Oh, it may have given me up for good.

I don't think I'm enough involved in
real estate to live in Manhattan...

or any other business.
Some other hustle.

I lived in New York when I was young inside.
My friends and I were more interested...

in our work
than our investments.

We weren't invidious.
We were nurturing.

And then, you know.
Alimony, the IRS...

being denied the right to parent
my own child custody--

They brought reality in,
and hey, who needs it?

When Nixon got on that chopper in 1972
I think the fight went out of all of us.

The big business took
over and set the agenda.

Boy, when you buy into big business,
when you buy into that, man...

you got to emancipate
yourself from your morals...

or you live a life of squeamishness.

Is this our same old argument?
I lost my morals, did I?

Automatically, by going to work
and staying inside the system?

You're taking me a little personally.
I was talking about myself.

I was saying that I got a little
squeamish, you know?

I know people that work a lot crasser
jobs than you, and they're happy.

They're happy, they're healthy,
they're not depressed.

They enjoy the material blessings.
Me? I couldn't handle it.

I couldn't stand it.
I just couldn't...

Confucius say "Of the 39 steps of escape
the best one's flight." So I fled.

Here I am in France where
I can pull down my pants.

I'm enough of a retarded romantic to believe
France is still a place to go and think.

So I'll stay, I guess...
or I won't. We'll see.

This place is like a fairy tale.

How did we wind up here?

I'll bet there's some secret
plan of yours behind all this.

I bet I could say the same thing about you.
No, I just thought you'd like to come here.

To discover that precious quality that the
world so desperately lacks.

Ah, yeah. Vision.

Perspective.
Perspective, Jack.

This is where the dead are placed, in the
middle of town among the houses.

Death is a part of life, not separate from it.

There aren't enough graves for all the
generations of Mont-Saint-Michelains.

So every decade or so, the bones are
dug up so new bodies can be buried here.

And since they believed you will need
your bones again on Judgment day...

they placed them nearby
in the charnel house--

- Ucch! That's disgusting.
- I like cemeteries.

And in the back there, in the
church, there is a relic of a saint.

What's a relic?

Oh, maybe a shaving of the saint's
fingernail, or a scrap of the saint's robe.

Tell me Jack, how do you expect
to govern these people?

That's a good question.

There was an italian premier
once, just before Mussolini...

somebody asked him if it
was difficult to govern italians.

He said: "Difficult to govern italians?
No, not difficult. Only useless"

You didn't say that on the 6:00 news.

No, but I thought it night and day.
Maybe that's why I lost.

Anyway, did they really think that their
bones would keep until judgment day?

You got to remember for them
Judgment day was...

right around the corner.
They expected it almost hourly.

Just like us.

I wouldn't say so. Judgment day,
for us is different.

It's an interruption, a violation,
a break in our concept of time--

The bomb, the big one. Judgment day
for them was the ultimate day off.

Not the ultimate off day.

There wasn't mechanical time, time was
season to season, Sabbath to saint day.

And everything led toward Judgment day.
That was the reason everybody was alive.

It was the day of deliverance. Like sunday,
when you get the Times delivered.

Time was sacred.

They'd ring a bell in the morning,
they'd ring a bell in the evening...

and those moments would
change a little. But the...

rhythm of their era was
so different from ours...

that I don't think we
can even imagine it.

I guess we're a little early.

No saint stands alone.

What?

No saint stands alone.

Every time I come here, these lines
comes to me, God knows from where.

Sometimes it takes me weeks, even
years to figure out what they mean.

Did you ever read any
of the books I sent you?

No, not since you stopped thinking
about helping me with speeches.

Did you ever read the
speeches I sent you?

I tried. I mean, the old attention span,
isn't what it used to be.

That's true. Mine neither.

I don't have any attention anymore
for anything that's not specific.

Poetry just confuses me.

Yeah, politics--
Politics confuses everybody.

Including its practitioners.

But I know what
"No saint stands alone" means.

Oh, yeah? What?

It's the essence of my profession.

Because between every politician
and his own point of view...

there's always three fat cats, two
pac lobbyists, half dozen of microphones.

"No man is an island entire of itself.
Every man is a piece of the continent...

part of the main, therefore never send
to know for whom the bell tolls...

it tolls to thee."

Can't you just feel the
place watching you?

- It makes you feel pretty small.
- It was supposed to.

The individual in the human body was
supposed to feel small...

dwarfed, denied all independent existence.

We lost some of the sense of being
all one, but we got our freedom.

That's not a bad trade-off.

I don't know. I still don't know if we
haven't lost more than we've gained.

All I ever hear anybody
talk about today is themselves.

I wrote a poem once. It's titled
"The Stones Speak, I am Silent"

At least you're free to think what
you want and do what you can about it.

Think of the guy who had to carry these
stones up the hell to built this place.

He didn't have any say in life,
or try running for office some day.

Someone else sets the agenda,
someone else sets the schedule.

Somebody else decides what you can
say and what you better not say.

Talk about losing yourself. People have
been known to forget their own names.

Maybe you're too smart to be president.

A television correspondent
told me that once.

What did you say?

I got a little steamed.

I said american voters want their
leaders to be dumber than they are.

They figure they'll do less harm that way.
That is an expensive form of cynicism.

- You said that on TV?
- Yup.

Maybe you're not so smart after all.

We go through here.

What's up here?

After you.

Look at this.
Look at this!

This thing has been functioning
for hundreds of years--

since before the
beginning of modern times.

But this is different from the kind
of time you were talking about before.

Sunrise to Sunset,
Sabbath to Sabbath, isn't it?

This is... mechanical time.

You bet, you bet it is.

I sometimes think that this clock,
this machine is what...

...constitutes humanity's first real
break from the world of nature.

Wouldn't you say so?
Hello?

The clock did much more than that.
It became the model of the cosmos.

And then they mistook the
model for the real thing.

People got the idea that
nature was just a giant clock.

Not a living organism, but a machine.

That's exactly what I've been trying to
tell this lunkhead, exactly, word for word.

- What?
- Maybe you recognize him. Jack Edwards.

And you are...?

Sonia Hoffman.
I think I've heard your name somewhere.

Maybe in a couple of
hundred news broadcasts.

He was a candidate for the U.S.
presidency in the primaries.

I vaguely remember.
See? I'm not a voter.

Most americans don't vote either.

I do know who you are.

Me? You know who I am?
I doubt it...

You're Thomas Harriman, the poet.

Yes I am. But wait a minute,
let me get this straight.

You recognize me, a poet whose latest
work sold only 12,000 copies but you...

do not recognize this gentleman, who
was a presidential candidate in America?

My god, woman. What's happened to
your values? What do you do?

I'm a scientist.

And we do occasionally read poetry.

As a matter of fact, I'm doing
a lot of it these days.

I'm on a sort of sabbatical.

I'm an ex-physicist,
an ex-american resident...

- an ex-voter--
- Ex-wife?

This is very upsetting. Why don't intelligent
people like yourself bother to vote?

Forgive me. You politicians make it so hard.

The ideas expressed by
most of you, right or left...

seem to me as antique and
mechanical as that old clock.

What's that supposed to mean?

If I was to explain that, I'd have to
go all the way back to Descartes...

if you remember him.

- Yeah
- "To be or not to be"

- "I Think, therefore, I am."
- Yeah, well. We both went to college.

Descartes was the primary architect of
the view that sees the world as a clock.

A mechanistic view that still
dominates most of the world today...

and it seems to me
specially you politicians.

Mechanistic?
Is that a real word?

Mechanistic, mechanical, mechanics.
Yeah, it's a good word.

Mechanistic.
As if Nature functioned like a clock.

You take it a part, reduce it to a number of
small, simple pieces, easy to understand...

analyze them, put them all back together
and then you understand the whole.

Isn't that what's known as scientific
thinking, Miss Hoffman?

What you call the mechanistic view isn't
that what the scientific method's all about?

Is it?

I don't think so. But I'd like to kind
to hear from the physicist, Jack.

All right, I'm sorry.
Please continue.

Well, you're right in a way, Mr...

Jack, call me Jack.

O.K., Jack.
You're right in a sense.

But it wasn't always so,
not before Descartes.

When he introduced such thinking...

it amounted to a revolutionary
break with the church.

He said "I don't need the Pope to
tell me how the world functions...

I can find that out for myself,
because to me the world is just a machine."

And then he became fascinated
with clockworks...

and made the clock into
his central metaphor.

He said "I consider the human body
as nothing but a machine...

A healthy man is like a well-made clock.
A sick man is like an ill-made clock."

The metaphor seems a little clumsy now.
But it worked, didn't it?

Yes, so successfully, that
scientists came to believe...

that all living things, plants
animals, us, are nothig but machines.

And that's the fallacy. It carried
over into everything, arts, politics...

I don?t know, it seems to me
that most people don't...

even remember
who Descartes was.

- I'm sorry, I guess I just don't follow you.
- But he'd like to.

If you could break it down into 30-second
media bites, that's what he's used to.

Very funny.

What is it that I don't recognize?
What's so bad about Descartes?

But there's nothing bad about Descartes.
In fact, I think Descartes is wonderful.

He was a godsend to the 17th century.
But times have changed since then.

We need a new way
of understanding life.

That pendulum for example, has long since
been replaced by a tiny quartz crystal.

And these magnificent
hand-forged wheels...

turned into microchip
the size of my thumbnail.

That's how far modern science has
left mechanistic thinking behind.

But you politicians seem to have
that clockwork still ticking in your head.

Keep on going, Sonia. Don't stop.

Who knows? You may have that vital
piece of information we pols...

venal and stupid as we are have
been missing out on all along.

There you go, thinking
in terms of pieces.

Pieces are all we get of the
picture, only fragments.

Come on, give some examples.

Well, let's take the population
problem for example.

You can't solve it by looking at different
forms of birth control in isolation.

Research has proven that the
most effective form of birth control...

is not a pill, it's economic
and social gains...

which will reduce the
desire for large families.

That's true.

Did you know that in our world
every day 40,000 children die...

from malnutrition and
preventable diseases?

That's every other second.

That's now...

and now... and now...

But the short lives of these children
cannot be seen in isolation...

they're part of the whole system,
involving the economics...

involving the environment,
and more specifically...

- involving high levels of third-world debt.
- How's that?

The burden of frenzied borrowing is not
falling on those with foreign banks...

...accounts, nor on those
who created the imbalance.

The burden's falling on
the already deprived.

Three years ago, president
Nyerere asked the question:

"Must we starve our
children to pay our debts?"

That question has been
answered in practice...

...and the answer has been YES...

...because since he asked, hundreds
and thousands of little children...

...in the third world have given their
lives to pay their country's debts.

And millions more are still paying interest
with their malnourished minds and bodies.

Take Brazil.

Do you know that they are destroying
their Amazon rain forests...

...at the rate of one football
field a second?

Now, now, now.

Why? They're trying to pay their national
debt with cattle and land speculation.

They don't even have
time to sell the timber...

...so they're setting
fire to the woods.

And our barren forests are one of the
main causes of the global warming...

...the green house effect.

And in the meantime, we are pouring
our money into the arms race.

You cannot look at one single of our
global problems in isolation...

...trying to understand it and solve it.

You can fix a fragment of a piece,
but it will deteriorate a second later...

because what it was
connected to has been ignored.

We have to change everything
together at the same time.

- The ideals, the institutions, the values--
- All of this sounds kind of familiar.

Do you two know each other?
Is this a setup?

Well, all right.
What do I think about this?

The problems are complex but you're
looking at the dark side, because us...

...are capacity to response, isn't it?
Communications, databanks, technology--

We already have the tools to deal
with a lot of these problems...

- ...even if they are more complex.
- Candide himself, the eternal optimist.

But don't you see?
There are all these new technologies...

...they're causing more
problems that they solve.

In medicine for example, there's been
an overwhelming increase in technology...

...but the costs have spiraled concurrently.

It's become medicine for the rich and public
health hasn't improved significantly...

...although public health would
improve dramatically if we...

...just changed our eating
habits, for example.

But instead the experts are occupied
with making artificial hearts.

If our agribusiness had fed us better
instead of chopping down the rain forests...

...in order to make cattle ranches in order
to produce more and more red meat...

...which is one of the diary
causes of heart attacks...

...then maybe we would not to spend so
much of our money on artificial hearts...

...and so on, and so on. This is all
examples of interconnectedness.

But, Sonia... All right
supposing that you're right...

...and everything's connected
to everything else as you say...

...still you've got to start
somewhere, don't you?

That's the real political question here.
Where do you start?

By changing the way
we're seeing the world.

You're still searching for the
right piece to fix first.

You don't see that all the problems
simply are fragments of one single crisis.

- A crisis of perception.
- Oh, good.

The world's coming to an end and you
say it's a crisis of perception.

I'm sorry, that's a
little abstract for me.

And all this stuff about modern
medicine, all your criticisms...

I may be a doctor's son,
but you have to admit that...

...this mechanistic medicine
has been pretty successful.

Well... up to a point.

But simply by blocking the
mechanisms of a disease...

...doesn't mean healing it.

I mean, it's like in politics, it's just
shifting the problem to another sphere.

Are you going to leave me stranded
out here in this argument by myself?

I'm going to leave you stranded.

O.K... A person goes to a
doctor today with recurring...

...attacks of gallstones and the
doctor takes the gallbladder out.

And low and behold
the pain goes away.

You could say the doctor's working from
a poor perceptual model, that he just...

...concentrated on a part of the clock
that wasn't working and removed it.

But the fact is the patient
is out of his pain.

He's feeling better and
the clock is ticking again.

His perceptual model worked.

But is everything that works
good for the system?

That's disingenuous and not
useful when applied to politics...

...which is, after all, a system
that is based on people.

It's the art of bringing people to agree
on a certain course of action.

If that course of action succeeds,
the people are satisfied...

...if not, they're not.

It's as simple as that.
If it works, it's good.

Isn't that what you said why
politics doesn't work...

...that politics needed to become
the art of the impossible?

Whose side are you on?

Hers, obviously.
She's intelligent, gracious...

...and she's more attractive.

Listen, Jack. I'd like to get
back to the systems.

-You know, you called me dishonest.
-Oh, no, no, no...

Let's talk about the gallbladder again.

Let's say the gallbladder's out
and the pain is gone...

...but what about the stress that
might have caused the illness?

If that stress persists he's probably
going to get sick again.

Or let's say he had
changed his nutrition...

...much earlier, and
done some exercise.

He may never have developed
the gallstones in the first place.

A little health education
might have been...

...much cheaper that the operation,
a lot less painful, too.

But our system doesn't
encourage prevention...

...it encourages intervention.

O.K. You're not disingenuous, but to
blame all this on french philosopher...

...who's been dead 300 years, isn't
that a little out of proportion...

...maybe even all a little eccentric?

No. Not if I'm right.

See, my point isn't to
condemn Descartes' thinking.

It's simply to recognize its limitations.

It might have been extremely
useful to perceive the world...

...as a machine for 300 years
but that perception today...

...is not only inaccurate,
it's actually harmful.

We need a new vision of the world.

What's that quotation?

"It's foolish for a society to try to
cling to its old ideas in new times...

...just as it's foolish for a grown
man to try to squeeze...

...into the coat that fit him in his youth."
Something like that...

Thomas Jefferson.

Maybe you're not crazy.

I don't know, Sonia. This new
vision of the world might just be...

...some sort of millennium madness
as we approach the year 2000.

Oh, everybody's aware now.

We can make ourselves extinct
at the press of a button.

We're soiling every square
foot of land, sea and air.

That water looks clean
but it's not, is it?

Nothing is.

The English Channel is one of the most
polluted bodies of water in the world...

...and the oysters around here are famous.

Soon they'll be unsafe to eat.

Not only that. This water is radioactive...

...contaminated by a nuclear
plant a few miles from here.

Yeah, I read about that too.

Politicians can read.
We know all about these things.

Some of us think about
them every day. I do.

But we have to deal with a
different set of constraints...

...different kinds of interdependence
that those you discuss.

Let's say it turns out to be true,
that what you say is true.

Cattle are brutally treated,
loaded with chemicals...

...too much red meat is bad for you...

...and the landscape's
being wrecked by overgrazing.

Let's say all that's turn to be true.

So for health and a hundred
other reasons, I help enact a tax...

...on the consumption of red meat,
the way we tax tobacco...

...to making people think twice
about that kind of consumption.

What a wonderful idea!

We could do cancer and heart
research for the revenue.

And I have 50 lobbyists
pounding on my door...

...while a hundred different
meat producers political action...

...committees poured money
into my opponent's campaign...

...and my switchboard was lit up
all day with calls from senators...

...and representatives and governors
of all the meat-producing states.

But O.K., Sonia, just for you,
let's say I take all that on.

As Sam Rayburn said "Every once
in a while a man ought to do...

...something just because it's right."

But if on top of that, I come out
against a few weapons programs...

...and try to do something about acid
rain and sponsor a bill supporting...

...increased funding for solar energy,
you know what?

By the next election anybody
who would run against me...

...and I mean anybody, would have the
combined funds of all those people...

...to defeat me, and he would too.

Because when you're that
far ahead of public opinion...

...that's the way they let you know.

I do what everybody else does, from the
lowliest congressman to the president...

...I pick a few crucial issues that I
think are crucial, a part of your whole...

...and I persist until I get
somewhere if I'm lucky.

For the rest, I mark time, I wait.

I go along, I... I trade off.

This is why I don't vote.
It's what we've been talking about.

You get people to eat less red meat,
and then you do something like...

...paying off the farmers, buying up
surplus butter and subsidizing its price.

If we don't get a heart attack
one way, you'll find another way.

Well, I agree with you.
We wouldn't contradict ourselves...

...so much if we didn't
do things piecemeal.

But you know, there's something a
little scary, maybe something...

...even a little cruel about
your theoretical exigency.

I mean, are you going to be the one who
tells everyone what's good for them?

Are you gonna tell the farmer
something's wrong with the goals his...

...family has pursued for generations
then just shut them down?

Maybe we're beaten up all
day by private interests...

...but at least our government
now stays close to what people...

...perceive to be their needs.

Look, the world changes faster
than people's perception of it.

Wouldn't be challenge for a
great political leader to bridge...

...the gap, to inform, to allow
us to feel responsibility?

Anyway, the people don't
trust you politicians anymore.

At your last election only 50%
of them even bothered to vote.

Getting them back would really
require a politics of the impossible.

What a great campaign slogan.
Where were you when I needed you?

I'd vote for it.

Oh, good. I'd get the poet vote.

Politics of the impossible.
You might get my vote too.

Oh, great! Add to that the
support of all well-informed...

...but nonparticipating-women
living on medieval islands.

That's no victory.

Why does that make me angry?

Probably because they don't
want have anything to do with us.

They don't believe in us.

There isn't any reason they should,
except their own eventual aging.

They don't even notice where they are.

They think this is the movies, but
this room is absolutely contemporary.

Everybody's got a torture chamber now.
They don't even notice them.

Are you going to say this is part
of your crisis of perception, too?

Maybe we're all led a little towards
death, like wolves to the weak.

Or maybe people are just shits, hmm?

You'd like blame this on Descartes.
I'd like blame it on anybody.

But it's such a part of human history, I...

Well, I don't know about Descartes,
but I know Francis Bacon presided...

...over the witch trials of king James I
at a time when millions of women were...

...tortured or burned for practicing
folk medicine or worshiping...

...pre-Christian goddesses or simply
because they were unusual.

I would probably have ended
up on the stake myself.

I don't believe it was a metaphor
when Francis Bacon wrote...

...that Nature had to be
hounded in her wandering...

...bound into service, made a slave.

He even said that scientists with
their new mechanical devices...

...had to torture Nature's
secrets out of her.

Did you notice how he uses "her"
when describing Mother Nature?

As if Nature was nothing but a witch?

Yes. It's actually fair to
say that this room...

...represents a crisis of perception.

But this room was here for a long
time before Descartes and Bacon.

Violence goes on no matter how mankind
understands the world, doesn't it?

An exploitation... Of course, we'd all
like to think it would be different...

...if we saw things differently.

But hasn't modern science, technology,
business done exactly what...

...Francis Bacon preached:
tortured our planet?

Didn't we just implement the old
patriarchal idea about man dominating all?

I don't know, Sonia. Let me be the
devil's advocate for a minute.

How much have we really tortured
and hounded the planet?

You could say not much...

...compared to what the ice ages
did to the world, for example.

And who sais that nature can't cope?

We're scared to death about
the disappearing ozone layer...

...but we only started studying
ozone levels about 10 years ago.

It could be that these so-called
holes in the atmosphere...

...have been appearing and
the disappearing again...

...since time's beginning.
Couldn't it?

It could be that Nature has a healing
mechanism we don't even know about.

It could be this hysteria
about ultraviolet rays...

...is nothing more than that,
just hysteria.

That's what they said about the
German forests and look at them now.

More than half the trees in the
black forest are dying.

We can't explain it anyway.
We simply cannot take the risk.

Right here around this island the tides are
slowing down, maybe because of silt...

...building up from garbage dumped in the
bay or from the overuse of fertilizers.

Lakes can die, entire
oceans become polluted...

...topsoil, forests, water,
poisoned, dead.

Things can change so
fast at the hands of man.

Nature becomes fragile,
rain becomes acid.

I agree with everything you said.
But why this patriarchal fixation?

Those women witches were
betrayed by other women.

Phyllis Schlafly, a woman, has
written that God's...

...greatest gift to mankind
was the atom bomb.

These are women. Why not just
say what's patriarchal...

...is what's evil in both
men and women?

There's plenty to go around
unless you happen to believe...

...these women were brainwashed
by men, like Patty Hearst.

Why are you so scornful?

Look, there are two great principles
functioning in this entire...

...living world: the male
principle, pick the adjective...

...aggressive, dominating, whatever;
and the female principle...

...nurturing, caretaking,
gentle, whatever...

What I'm saying is that these 2 principles
may have been in a rough balance.

But now the men and yes,
I do think IT IS the men...

...have created the tools,
the weapons both intellectually...

...and physically to bring these two
principles way out of balance.

We've been placing mechanistic tools in the
hands of power-oriented patriarchal people.

I'm saying you men are out of control now
and I, you, we... all we are the victims.

So what's the risk?

What's wrong with giving the
female principle an opportunity?

And I say let's get out of this room.

It's having a torturous
effect on our relationship.

Look, Sonia. I'm sorry if I ruffled
your feathers down there.

I just, um... you know...
I'm a failed husband.

I'm a little too sensitive
about all that stuff.

I'm also a starving poet
and a bad teacher...

...and Jack's another midlife
casualty, except his wife's...

...still around. May be there's a
connection in there somewhere for you.

What do you do? What brings
you to this remote place?

Well, let's see...

I'm a scientist still, even though
I'm on a semi permanent sabbatical.

How come?

I got tired of seeing my work fed
to the U. S. Defense Department.

I'm a physicist, the only woman
in my graduate department...

...the first in Norway doing quantum
field theory. My specialty was lasers.

At that time, the challenge was to design
lasers of ever-shorter wavelengths.

The shorter the wavelength,
the more powerful the laser.

Our ultimate goal was to
create an x-ray laser.

One day I hit upon an unusual
idea which, as it turned out...

...led to a major advance
in that x-ray laser.

Well, when you do something like that,
science treats you very well.

I got many attractive offers...

First from Paris and then from
the States and I took them.

Finally working quite happily
in Boston until one day...

I discovered, totally unexpectedly,
that my work was being perverted.

I had always looked at the medical
applications of my work of using...

...this laser to provide holographic
images of cells or even molecules.

It could have helped us solve so many
puzzles, even the formation of cancer cells.

But what really happened was that a more
sophisticated version of my idea was...

...being used in the star wars
program, and it blew my mind.

It... it made me re-evaluate
my whole profession.

Anyway, to cut it short...

...in the midst of other events
I just got up and left.

What were the other
events, if I may ask?

Experiences not all that different
from yours, I suppose.

I left Boston and
eventually I came here.

I just came one day from Paris
and the place took hold of me.

I kept coming back.

There were weeks when the
storms chased the tourists away...

...and I had this place all to myself.

I started to look at how my special
knowledge of subatomic physics...

...relates to the way I
perceive the world at large.

I don't know, but I think that I'll have
something to say after my time here.

I don't know yet if it will fit
into a coherent whole.

But it's what I ponder when I
take my morning walks, which...

...today, for some reason,
brought me to you two.

See, every morning, I walk
across the island regardless...

...of the weather trying to
understand its other language.

The stones speak, and I'm silent.

Something like that, yes.
That's from a poem, isn't it?

Well, maybe, I don't know. Do you ever
write down any of your thoughts?

Oh, yes, all the time.

I'd like to combine my notes
into a book and call it...

...Ecological Thinking, as
opposed to Cartesian Thinking.

Cartesian?

Yeah, Descartes wrote in latin. His latin
name was Cartesius, hence Cartesian.

Really? I thought it meant
map-like, like a map.

- You thought it meant like "a la carte".
- Yes, like a menu.

Then his name would
have been Menusian.

I'd like to offer this ecological way of
thinking as a new way of looking at things.

Help us overcome this
crisis of perception.

See, what I've found here is that
to think in an ecological way...

...simply makes more sense of everything.

It gives me a much firmer grasp
of reality. It gives me strength.

Knowledge is power?

Yes, but in the sense of
personal empowerment.

Not that old male urge
for power over others.

Descartes' evil empire again?

Descartes had a dream.

It was really Isaac Newton who
made that dream come true.

Who transformed it into
scientific theory, into power.

"May God us keep from single vision
and Newton's sleep." William Blake.

- I'm very impressed.
- You two would have a lot in common.

He was writing in poetry 200 years ago
what you're saying today in prose.

He hated Newton's
concept of single vision.

He dedicated his entire life to making
art that denied single vision.

Of course, the people of his
time thought he was a crank.

Whereas they revered
Newton almost as a god.

By reducing all physical phenomena
to the motion of material particles...

...a motion caused by the force of gravity,
he was able to describe the exact...

...effect of gravity on any object
with precise mathematical equations.

We call it Newton's laws of motion...

...really, the great achievement
of 17th century science.

You mean all that stuff I slept through
in high school, that square root of...

...the hypotenuse divided
by a pinch of magnesium?

Well, in the right hands, or
should I say, aroused minds...

...these equations seems
to work beautifully.

I could use Newton's equations
to calculate and explain...

...every motion of that throw, from the
ballistic curve to the ripples in the water.

This was a feat so impressive
for the time that Newton's...

...mathematical system
immediately established itself as...

...The correct theory of reality,
the ultimate laws of nature.

Descartes' dream of the world
as a perfect machine...

...was now an established fact.

It brought with it such a
wealth of benefits for people.