Heroic Ascent

 

As I lay in the grass at Halibut Point watching a fellow traveler clamber through the meadowy jungle to its destiny, I seemed to hear strains of the Richard Strauss tone poem "Also Sprach Zarathustra." It had been woven into stirring moments in such films as Being There and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

That music bursts onto the screen with brass and tympani bombast when Chauncey Gardner (Peter Sellers) emerges from his grandmother's cocooned estate into the urban complexities of Washington, D.C.

There was a great world out there waiting to be discovered and navigated, but no safety net.

Producer Stanley Kubrick opened 2001 with that same music accompaniment to his "Dawn of Man" scene. A troop of pre-humans was investigating their environment.

Kubrick used Homer's The Odyssey as a source of inspiration for the title. He said, "It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness....The film is basically a visual, nonverbal experience [that] hits the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting."

Dermacentor variabilis - American Dog Tick

The protagonist we have been tracking at Halibut Point is a young arachnid on its own unaccompanied journey through unknown terrain, fulfilling an implanted destiny.

At last it reaches a promontory where it can await an opportunity to nourish itself and its unborn progeny.

The Star Child approaching Earth

Stanley Kubrick brought the symphonic drama of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" back at the end of his film when the Star Child began a new dawn scenario of birth and discovery as it approached Earth. According to co-writer Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick was "determined to create a work of art which would arouse the emotions of wonder, awe ... even, if appropriate, terror." 

In the final scenes the music takes a lilting turn into Johann Strauss' "Blue Danube Waltz". We are left to contemplate possibilities, favors, and fates.