"My bow and arrow's to hunt boys and kill them. The world's better off without them. Spurty scum, that's what little boys are made of."~David Mitchell Black Swan Green
"You mean there's a catch?"
"Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane then he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.
Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure that he saw it all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or the flies Orr saw in Appleby's eyes. He had Orr's word to take for the flies in Appleby's eyes.
"Oh, they're there all right," Orr had assured him about the flies in Appleby's eyes after Yossarian's fist fight in the officers' club, "although he probably doesn't even know it. That's why he can't see things as they really are."
"How come he doesn't know it?" inquired Yossarian.
"Because he's got flies in his eyes," Orr explained with exaggerated patience. "How can he see he's got flies in his eyes if he's got flies in his eyes?"
It made as much sense as anything else, and Yossarian was willing to give Orr the benefit of the doubt because Orr was from the wilderness outside New York City and knew so much more about wildlife than Yossarin did, and because Orr, unlike Yossarian's mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle-in-law, teacher, spiritual leader, legislator, neighbor and newspaper, had never lied to him about anything crucial before.
1982?
Michael:
Watched Return of the King a few days ago: "Frodo, don't ever let go". Are we really going back to the eighties? It seems so weird, because I lived there, while for you it is some kind of dream land or TV sitcom, which is sort of how it is with me now, anyway. This image is speaking to me again, the Fisher King on the Moon:
hey Michael, I (doug) did some time in the 80s as well. Actually, it is the year 82 that is haunting me. I was ten, the same age Elliott was when ET came to him in the film released that year. (I have another 80s year, 1989, a revolution year that haunts me a bit too, but it's a tricksy one cuz it is also 68, 86, and 98. All these are the same, we're just spinning. But I'm being led back to '82 (when Depeche Mode's A Broken Frame was released. It's the one featuring the song "Secret Garden" that I keep beating over all your heads.
See, the garden of Eden is childhood. We need to get back to our selves beyond what've become to survive. A moment is here for a return to magical thinking. We definitely can move the historical age from the gut (chakra) to The Heart.
This is a call to go back in time! Remake it all anew. . .
Michael: Well, you know I came out in '82, when I was 22, so that is indeed some catch. Also the same year that the "gay cancer" was manifesting. I had a vivid dream last year of being taken up in a giant mushroom-shaped spaceship and then being deposited back in Seattle, but it was the 80's. There was something I needed to do, to make right, to correct some great error of that epoch. Still don't know really what that means, though I did have two friends with me on this time traveling journey - the three musketeers?
Michael: Well, you know I came out in '82, when I was 22, so that is indeed some catch. Also the same year that the "gay cancer" was manifesting. I had a vivid dream last year of being taken up in a giant mushroom-shaped spaceship and then being deposited back in Seattle, but it was the 80's. There was something I needed to do, to make right, to correct some great error of that epoch. Still don't know really what that means, though I did have two friends with me on this time traveling journey - the three musketeers?
A Message From The Future?
(life out of balance):
