So what will I do with the footage? I'm not sure yet.
But if anyone has any ideas I'm willing to hear them out.
2005-12-11 13:15:13
In the beginning
This blog will try to document an impossible journey to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, half way around the world to Sri Lanka. Why Clarke? Why now? Why impossible? These are all great questions. Stick with me and I promise you'll find many more great questions to baffle your sense and dazzle your mind. Oh, along the way, we might stumble on some answers.
My journey has a simple enough goal: to meet Arthur C. Clarke and interview him about our near future, our immediate destiny. Everybody wants to know what will happen tomorrow and Clarke has done a surprisingly good job at foreseeing some of it. The French invented the French Tickler, the Spanish brought us the Spanish fly, and the British gave birth to the Brain Tickler, Mr. Clarke. Inventor of the satellite and forefather of global communications, Clarke always seemed to me to be the ultimate authority on knowledge. Ever since those first TV days of the Mysterious World of Arthur C. Clarke I was both fascinated and terrified by the rotating crystal skull that heralded the beginning of every episode. Ironically, the show that got me into science was really a show about pseudo-science and unexplained phenomena. Maybe that's why, after all those years I am still deadlocked in a battle between total reasoning and pure, even mystical, curiosity. As if no matter what the explanation at hand is, I will always feel like there's a better or higher truth that we can't see just around the corner... As a kid I always had to challenge the world around me. I felt it was my duty to climb everything, touch everything, question everything, and take things apart. Nothing was accepted at face value; national holidays, annual percentage rates, anthills, public phones, record players, my geography teacher, and the stars, consciousness, Death. As far as I was concerned, if this was the work of a higher power "it" certainly had a lot of explaining to do. I guess Clarke embodies this sense of awe in a reassuring way. A relentless pursuit of insight that may start with an innocent question mark but spreads like ripples to everything around it. Whatever it was, it seemed like a good idea for a journey that may produce a film of some sort.
A few months ago, I had a long discussion with my friend Kiam about space-time, dimensions, the teachings of Ha'Ari, the God concept and the purpose of mankind: a typical, run of the mill, Saturday morning melon-scratcher, somewhere between soccer stats, page 6, and the recent wave of terror attacks in Europe. Kiam is a graduate student of music and Jewish philosophy who is a walking orchestra of questioning and harmony. Naturally, no consensus was reached but an important question came out of that particular debate, "will man's invention of god supersede man's invention of the wheel?" Now the question itself is timeless, but the timing was crucial. Will we even survive the debate long enough to have an answer? The good news is that according to the Future Society, the world is constantly, if agonizingly slowly, advancing toward a better quality of life. That's a fact. Somehow, this constant battle between faith and reason is producing some amazing results. The proverbial lab may occasionally blow up but every once in a while a white-robed scientist with dark scorch marks will come running out waving a cure for another ailment. Metaphorically speaking. The cure will be distributed around the world and help another generation of zealots to reach maturity and inflict its doctrine on the world. A seemingly endless circle. But progress is defined by cycles, or more accurately, our ability to synthesize seemingly opposing ends into a complete concept. But that thought is still two years in the future for me. Clarke was our natural first choice to help us wade through this unsettling truism. Clarke never believed in god but he was always interested in Him. Some of his books solve this issue matter of fact while some put it in the forefront of the plot as a prism designed to offer another sliver of evidence to the existence of a higher being, if not to the existence of a higher set of questions... problem was that Clarke has officially disconnected himself from the internet a year or so ago due to an unbearable influx of information, leaving us unanswered and curious than ever.
The search for an avenue to Clarke revealed many important facts. For example, a google search for Jessica Simpson yielded 3.5 million entries while googling Clarke returned only 1.5 million entries. It occurred to us that many people simply didn't know that the powers of observation and extrapolation were the ones actually responsible for man's meteoric rise from the swamp-not the ability to look good behind a camera. Well now, we aim to combine the two into a lethal blow to common conventions about the purpose of mankind and its destiny among the stars. However, the story is much more complicated than it seems. As Clarke once said, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. But first we will need information.
How come this genius is known by so few outside of the sci-fi community? Why won't his agent let us meet him? Is 'thinking' limited to geeks alone? Can faith and logic co-exist? What does Clarke foresee? How come that all of a sudden everyone we meet turns out to know Clarke or to have met him? Coincidence or fate? No one knows for sure what would Clarke want this film to be about. Many possibilities exist but only at the moment of rendezvous will one emerge triumphantly. Our first mission is to bring back Clarke's final "prophecy". The odds are impossible. It's good enough for us. Confused? Good. we are a little confused as well. Off to the 20-hour flight (with connection) to Sr Lanka. Next entry on December 13.
2005-12-13 11:38:02
Day 1
Peddy and I land safely in Colombo. Peddy is my partner in film. My editor, my good rock.
Checked into the Taj Samudra. While we get our bearings and figure out the best strategy, here's a recap for those of you who don't know the story-of-everything that happened so far and how we ended up on a small island 20 hours away from NY.
It all started with a simple enough question, "Will man's invention of god supersede man's invention of the wheel?" Put another way, will religious fervor conquer the science of reason? Can you separate faith from organized religion and have it co-exist with rational thinking or must one destroy the other? And how, by the way, is our future looking like 10 to 50 years from now? On thinking of ways to settle this debate one name came immediately to mind. Unfortunately, when we tried to reach Sir Arthur C. Clarke by email we received a curious auto reply saying that due to an influx of information Mr. Clarke is regretting to announce that he has disconnected himself from the Internet and had stopped answering emails. The message said that all inquiries should be sent to his agent. Agent? The man is turning 88! by the time his agent will answer my email he could already be on his way to the stars... This will not do. Being the conquistador Israelis that we are, we immediately set out in (a vain) search of alternative ways to reach him online. The search mainly revealed a lot of interesting stories and the fact that very few filmed projects exist about the man. In the process we took the time to read all of the existing biographies and watch all existing documentaries. We decided that the story of Clarke deserves a better representation on film. It all started with a simple enough question.
I wrote to the ACC Foundation. Wrote to the Clarkives. Wrote to my lawyer. Wrote to the agent.
Gave 3 reasons to make the film: nobody knows him; his final prophecy may become a priceless legacy for mankind; nobody from Hollywood is knocking on your door.
No game. Made a proposal: we'll go to Sri Lanka. Spend three days with the man and get an interview. We'll try to sell the film this way. If we fail you keep the tapes. If you succeed just reimburse us for the travel expenses. The bottom line was no.
But Karma was already working with or without us.
We met with documentarist Ilan Ziv. My wife works with him. He liked the idea: "art meets science meets religion go diving and find the answer to all of human kind's questions." We have a backer. Distribution on BBC and ARTE. Tsunami hits Sri Lanka, Clarke announces he is all right. Scary moment there. Later we feel that this particular backer might actually settle for something more "Fog of War" and less "Life and Death of Peter Sellers". It had to be accessible to most not to some. It means we have to get the interview to get a shot at the big picture. Talked to Bobby J., a long time New York Comedian friend. Turns out he knows of Clarke and that they spoke over the phone in 1989 while a civil war was raging in Sri Lanka. Clarke had to cut it short because they were shooting all around him.
Met Sunil R. in focus groups in Pheonix. He was born across the road form Clarke. Got Clarke's home phone number. Apparently many of Sunil's classmates used to hang out in Clarke's pool and play table tennis. Will try to arrange an unofficial get together through Sunil's brother who still lives on the island. Most likely we will need to get a diving lesson from Clarke's life long partner Hector Ekanayake.
Went to a party at Montezinos, Fashion Photographer. Friend. Turns out he also spoke to Clarke after a lecture he delivered in Princeton. Weird. If you think it's not, try this: my good friend Pavel offered to introduce me to his British neighbor upstate since he was born in Sri Lanka. Imagine our surprise when it turned out that said neighbor actually interviewed Clarke in 1978 for the first edition of Omni Magazine. What you may call a small world.
Going to go there on his birthday and pose him a series of fundamental questions. About religion and science, about transportation and water, about education and money, about medicine and politics, about earth and space, about communications and astral projections, about drugs and consciousness, about fatherhood and our place in the universe, about why he's so damn hard to reach.
2005-12-13 22:42:07 This is an unedited list of the questions I plan to ask Clarke over the course of the next several weeks.
On religion and spirituality 1 You said that you don't believe in "God" but that you are very interested in him, or her. What have you found? On intelligence 1 Can all the advancements in science and art be directly attributed to intelligence? On science and technology 1 Will man's invention of "God" supersede man's invention of the wheel? On dimensions 1 How do extra dimensions fit into the picture? On society and culture 1 Can marriage, as we know it, exist without religion? is it vital to our society? Can mini-societies become the alternative instead? On life in space 1 If we had to leave the Earth tomorrow how will we sustain life? Where will we go? On serendipity 1 Sri Lanka appears in your writings directly and indirectly many times. Besides being sacred to several world religions, Sri Lanka is also a destination for Yogis to come and transcend time through meditation. Is this a coincidence? What part will Sri Lanka play in mankind's future? On your personal philosophy 1 What would you tell a 10-year-old Arthur Clarke if you could meet him today? 20, 40, 60? 2005-12-14 16:11:34 The day started with a simple enough tour to the Buddha temple in the middle of Colombo. We played the tourist part and let ourselves fall victim to a local charlatan offering cheap thrills, the safest tuk-tuk ride, and all the Buddhist festivities we can take. It turned out that there were no festivities, the tuk-tuk was simply driven by the man's cohort, and the would-be thrills turned out to be expensive and pointless. By the time our driver dropped us off in the middle of Colombo's largest park, we were $40 lighter and completely parched. We discovered that the Sri Lankan favorite pastime is making out in the park. No joke. I can only assume that being watched by other couples in the park offers more privacy than being hassled by fussy family members in your own house. We slowly made our way in a direction where we thought we might find some water when we realized that we are very close to Barnes Place-Clarke's home. Our destination was nestled comfortably between the Swedish embassy and the Iraqi embassy. We decided to spontaneously storm the castle, which also housed the diving shop, and discuss a possible scuba lesson in the hope of meeting Hector and getting a feel for the challenge ahead. It was a funny feeling. After months of planning this meeting we were standing only a few meters from our destination. Our destination had absolutely no knowledge of our existence. No idea that across the globe a dedicated group of curious individuals was dying to meet him. The moment was upon us. We shyly rang the front gate bell and moments later we were escorted to the main office of Underwater Safaris, located on the ground floor of Barnes Place. Hector sat with his back to us and immediately rose to greet us. Hector is a seasoned Sri Lankan beach boy. Sporting a smooth tan and a white goatee. His eyes were kind but seemed to posses the ability to look at Peddy and me simultaneously. His office was simple but on the wall behind his desk was a large poster of planet earth seen from space- from three different angles and a huge picture of Arthur. As I examined the office more closely I noticed more and more Clarkian trinkets decorating the desk and the other wall. I could feel the man's presence. We asked Hector about diving. When he said that diving conditions were not great due to the Tsunami, I confessed to him that we actually came to meet Clarke and while diving is very dear to us, it was Clarke whom we really wanted to see. Hector's jovial response was short, "you want to meet Clarke? Come on upstairs." Surely this was a weird dream sequence. Without too much fanfare we were rushed to Clarke's office on the second floor of the east wing. Months of intricate contact strategies collapsed into a clear inevitability. We felt we were drawn into Clarke's home and that whatever we planned was worth nothing in the face of such series of events. Rohan, Clarke's personal assistant, seated us in the lower part of a two level office. It was sparsely decorated but did have a majestic G5 in one corner that shared a small table with Clarke's biography, several of his books, and "First on the Moon" book series by Neil Armstrong et al. on a far wall was a dedicated picture of the earth shot from the moon and underneath it a dedicated picture of NASA's entire Voyager crew. Rohan said that Clarke was resting and that if we weren't in a hurry they will wake him up and we could meet him. In the meantime, we surveyed the far walls of the upper office level that displayed an impressive array of certificates, letters and dedications. Clarke was important and almost ominous even without this overbearing wall of acknowledgements. If we needed another reassurance to the magnitude of our journey it was right there on that wall. Rohan let us read a printed bulletin that summed up Clarke's views on religion. One axiom stood out in particular. It read, "The best definition of faith: believing what you know isn't true." Well, everything we knew wasn't true. With that thought we were informed that Clarke was up and ready to see us in his study. As simple as that, two guys from the Fertile Crescent were about to meet the man who sent mankind to the moon… Article continues next week, Saturday April 26, 2008, we'll gave Part II!
The questions
2 Intelligence and faith, reason and religion. Can they co-exist? Should they? What's the alternative?
3 Can religion exist in an individual state or does it only work in a group? Can there be a substitution to institutionalized religion?
4 Do you think faith belongs only in the lab where conjectures are made or is it something to live by?
5 What is the importance of religious rituals in the future of mankind?
6 What have you learned from religion? From religious philosophies?
7 Olaf Stapledon's "Last and first men" shows that the ONLY thing that survives the test of time is "religious experience". Not necessarily in the way that we know it but still… would you agree?
2 Is intelligence genetic? If so, should we all become super intelligent through genetic modification?
3 What are the effects of videogames on intelligence? What role do they play in our evolution?
4 Can we seriously evolve as a species with so many of us still well below average intelligence? Is the Braincap the only solution in your mind?
2 Technology, medication, education. What's the connection?
3 Is advanced technology a necessary condition to our development as a species? Is it the only condition?
4 What is the difference between an average living creature and a super smart computer?
5 Will machines ever become a separate species?
6 Do clones have a soul? Are they merely clusters of information?
7 Is our emotional evolution up to speed with our technological?
8 Are we "destined" to die as determined in our genetic code or is it merely an inconvenience?
2 So far extra dimensions have only been mathematical probabilities. What are the chances of us discovering and communicating with extra dimensions? How do you think it will happen?
3 We can "grasp" a single, two, and three dimensions. Why are we having so much trouble with 4, 5 or more dimensions?
4 Does the problem have to do with the length of "now" we can perceive? Is it a matter of developing a proper vocabulary?
5 Does time exist in all dimensions?
6 Can the Internet be considered a new dimension? Is it a portal to another dimension?
7 Yogis are believed to have the ability to transcend time for an instant. What is the connection between spirituality and that extra dimension?
2 Will cyber societies eventually replace physical ones?
3 You said money would be abolished in the relatively near future. Can you describe one possible scenario in which it happens?
4 How will we resolve our disputes? Should the justice system change?
5 Waste management: what do we do with all of our garbage?
6 What will happen to the medium of film and story telling? Olfactory films? Virtual films?
7 Will we see an infallible truth machine?
8 New energy sources and politics. Do we need a catastrophe to change our ways?
9 Do you believe our folly to emanate purely from our struggle with our animalistic urges?
10 Will we ever rid ourselves of envy, greed, lying? Can we do without them?
11 What is the role of our emotions in our evolution?
12 Drugs and hallucinogenics have played an undeniable part in our evolution. What is your view on the subject? What role will they play in our future?
13 We are considered a type 0 civilization. Will we see our next civilization rising in our lifetime? What will have to change? At what price?
14 What are the fundamental differences between our civilization and the next?
15 After we've "won all the battles", what's left for mankind to do, to aspire to?
16 How plausible is the Overmind destiny you described in Childhood's End?
2 What do we need to take from earth, what will we need to create in space? What would you take?
3 How will our biology change? What is the future of love?
4 You sent mankind to Jupiter and its moons. Now pictures of Iapetus show unusual signs of artificial origins. Do you think our destiny is connected in any way to that particular satellite?
2 In the first chapter of Rendezvous with Rama, why did you choose September the 11th as the day for the greatest meteorite tragedy in world history?
3 How did you "know" about Iapetus? How do you think H.G. Wells "guessed" the tetrahedron shape?
4 Do you believe nature is full of "accidents" and coincidences or purpose and reason?
2 Do you have a personal "God Theory"? Do you believe in a higher force? Do you pray?
3 Do you meditate? Have you had experiences with energy healing?
4 Western science is now able to manipulate matter while eastern meditation is said to be able to transcend time. What do you think about the gap between the two? Can they ever meet? Quantum Yoga?
5 A large portion of the world's population is entering old age. What will people do with so much spare time? What are your feelings regarding the old? What is the place of the elderly in our society?
6 Olaf Stapledon says the purpose of mankind is "to acknowledge the world, admire it, and crown it with further beauties." You said that you believe our purpose is to create god. How do you feel about that purpose today?
7 You said that we came from the sea and are heading toward the stars. Do you still feel this way today?
8 What would you tell your father if he were alive today?
Day 2