Antipodes! How it started from Emerson and went through Leconte to Huxley to Blake

Men hold themselves cheap and vile; and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension of his personality.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/antipodes in the 'Quotes' section

What's not to love about the above quote?  A fantastic call to arms for humanity, reminding us that we choose our connections to and throughout reality, ultimately controlling our perceptions of existence. Also worth noting is that now that I've read it a few times I realize that it is the "inspiration" behind such current pop culture phenomenons as "The Secret" and pop-psychologist Marianne Williamson's poem Our Greatest Fear. And beyond it's pop culture cache there's even more to love!  See the end of the first sentence which reads "...and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts." And yet a fagot is a bundle of sticks used to generate fire while a thunderbolt is the sound of thunder. Therefore man is a bundle of sounds like thunder, presumably to be thrown on a kind of fire that consumes vibrations instead of carbon. (SO FUNNY!  And it only took me about 45 minutes to write!)  The other funny line, of course, is ";he feels the antipodes and the pole,".  At this point I'm not even trying to be clever : ) but no matter how funny it is that "...he feels...the pole", the word "antipode" of course captured my imagination, which all started back in 2002 when I first saw a film called....

Ridicule, directed by Patrice Leconte, written by Remi Waterhouse with collaboration credits for Michel Fessler and Eric Vicaut.  Le conte, BTW, means 'the story' or 'the tale' or 'storytelling', and now that I'm writing this I wonder if it's his real name? Whatever, it's a great name for him, I've seen several movies directed by him, they've all been fantastic, but Ridicule is absolutely fantastique and even won the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in 1997.  But why am I talking about it in this Antipode post?  Because the first scene and the penultimate scene of the film involve a character being 'ridiculed' by being called "Monsieur Antipode".  And because of this film it took me many years to realize that the word I was pronouncing "ant-ee-pode" was the same word as the English one I'd known for years but pronounced "an-tip-uh-dee".  (sadly I've done this with words my whole life...remember when I was six and at church trying to figure out if Joeseph was 'unique' or 'eunuch'?  Or when I was 28 and trying to impress with my take on Joseph Campbell's masterpiece on 'archtypes'?  And still it continues : ) )  One of the first places I had remembered reading the word Antitpode in English was while reading...

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.  Actually, I never read this book : )  I read Brave New World, and I've read all ABOUT the book The Doors of Perception,  particularly about Antipode's, which is the word Mr. Huxley used to describe different planes of perception or awareness that can be reached through malnutrition, self-flagellation and drugs such as LSD or Mescaline.  The title of Mr. Huxley's book reminds me a bit of the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote above, but the title of the book is actually from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.   Blake did not use the term Antipode in his work, but this ends with Blake because Huxley references him, because the title of the book and some of the themes resonate with Mr. Emersons quotation above and because the title of Blake's book references metaphorical ANTIPODES!

And finally...the end. : )