Showing posts with label Seven. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seven. Show all posts

Sunday 28 October 2018

The Seven Ages of Rocky Balboa










All the world's a boxing ring,
And his whole life was a million to one shot
He has his exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. 



At first the Loser and a Bum,
Mewling and puking in some Plain Jane’s arms

And then the Cinderella kid, with track suit
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to the junkyard. 

And then The Champ,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad of The Tale of Clubber Lange,
Made to his mistress' eyebrow,
As Another One Bites The Dust

Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the ICBM silo’s mouth. 

And then the Mentor
In fair round belly with bad brain damage,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. 

The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd Patriarchal robes,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. 

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second fatherhood, Lukemia, Unk and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Thursday 26 October 2017

What's Mine vs What's Not Mine


"Whaddaya got?"

"Dead Dog."



John Doe, 
Killer of Men, Murderer and Rapist of Women :
[ Without shame ]

I didn't do that.




How To Stop Taking Things Personally (What's Mine vs What's Yours) 

You would have no idea of what you looked like physically without your bathroom mirror.  The bottom line is, you come to know yourself through reflection.  People in the external world are like a giant mirror.  When someone says, “Why are you so angry all the time?” You come to consider yourself to be an angry person.  If people look at you like something is wrong with you, you come to consider yourself as defective.  If people tell you that you are beautiful, you come to see yourself as beautiful.  We see the way people react to us as a reflection of who we really are and when we are children, we do not question the reflection we are being shown through other people at all.  We do not question the accuracy of the mirror.  Instead, we swallow the mirror.  Our internal concept merely becomes the same as what is being reflected from the outside. 


Let’s imagine that a child has a mother who actually does not want a child because she wants to live a life around what she wants to do and have no obligations.  The mirror (which is the mother) will not be accurate.  It will be tainted with “I don’t want you”.  This mother will not be able to reflect to a child that he or she is important and valuable.  The reflection the child will see in the mirror is that he or she is a burden and is not important and is an unwanted burden.  Instead of questioning the mirror, he or she will swallow the mirror and will see himself or herself as someone who is a burden and unwanted and unimportant and not valuable.  In order to ensure his or her survival, he or she will then adapt his or her behavior according to that self-image.  For example, if he or she sees himself or herself as intrinsically worthless, he or she may decide they cannot get connection for being who they are because no one would inherently want them in that way given that they have no value.  Therefore he or she might instead choose to get the connection they need from others through codependent strategies.


Because of our early childhood environments, many of us adopt a self-image of shame.  We swallow the mirror, which is reflecting that we are bad, wrong, hold little or no value and are unwanted.  We swallow the mirror that something is wrong with us.  This usually happens the strongest if we grew up in households where our caregivers made us the problem.  They deflected their own shame by blaming us for everything.  The mirror we swallowed held the reflection that we carried all the responsibility for anything negative.  As a result, we develop into adults who take everything personally.  Meaning that any time someone reacts to us in a negative way or any time something negative happens, it was our personal fault.  We are the ones who carry the responsibility for that fault or wrong.  We do this because we have instinctively learned from our primary childhood relationships with people who refused to carry any responsibility for anything negative themselves, that it was personal.

We end up being people who take everything personally because we were raised by people who could not face and resolve their own shame, so they passed it on to us and that shame became our self-concept.  For this reason, I need you to watch my videos titled:  The #1 Relationship Obstacle (And How To Dissolve It), in which I explain the mechanics of shame deflection, as well as Projection (Understanding the Psychology of Projecting).

Responsibility is the opposite of the state of victimhood.  In victimhood, one feels that they do not govern themselves or their own life.  One feels no ability to choose and one has lost touch with their sense of free will.  They are in a state of powerlessness relative to themselves and their life.  Responsibility is when someone healthily claims their power over themselves and their own life.  This causes them to feel a sense of their own free will and to consciously choose.  If you have responsibility, you are leading your own life.  But what about toxic responsibility? Responsibility is actually at the opposite end of the vibrational scale from self-blame, which is toxic responsibility.  But it takes a high degree of emotional awareness to see responsibility and self-blame as opposing states because both states recognize the self in a position of causation.  For this reason, self-blame can disguise itself as responsibility like a wolf wearing sheep’s clothing. But one is self-hating, the other self-loving.  One condemns the self and the other saves the self.  If you are taking responsibility, you are feeling empowered.  If you are self blaming, you are feeling bad about yourself and disempowered.  But self-blame is in fact how we escape a feeling of genuine powerlessness to someone else. 

 Sometimes, we are so powerless to something that taking blame for something is the only way we can avoid feeling powerless and victimized.  For example, often children who are abused feel less powerless and terrified and victimized if they believe that they are somehow at fault for the abuse or did something to deserve it.  When this is the case, we have a toxic attachment to responsibility.  To be responsible so as to see and own your part in the causation of events in your life is a great thing.  Up until the point where you are seeing and owning not just your part in the causation of events in your life but also everyone else’s part in it… Or potentially not seeing their part and what is theirs at all.       


When we believe down deep that we are bad, we automatically assume that any negative thing that happens is because of us.  We take any negative reaction that someone says personally and our deep, visceral sense of shame is instantly triggered.  And many people take advantage of this by either allowing you or forcing you to own that blame, whether or not something is actually your responsibility.  They get to avoid their own shame by doing this.  But taking everything personally leads to a super painful life and it reinforces shame, which leads to things like broken relationships, addiction, and even suicide.  So what should you do in order to not take things so personally?
  1.  Question The Mirror.  If we are imprinted with a deep, visceral sense of shame, we swallow the mirror.  We accept the reflection of ourselves that we are perceiving in other people’s reactions without any question.  We need to learn to question the accuracy of the mirror itself and consider that there may be something distorting and warping the mirror itself, which might make the reflection different than the thing it is actually reflecting (you).  Ask yourself in a situation where you are taking something personally, is there something in them that could be distorting the reflection?  For example, if they are acting rude, could they be stressed with something else in their life, like a failed relationship?  If they are furious at me, could I have triggered some unhealed wound from their past?  If they are treating me like I’m a slut, could it be because they have disowned their sexuality?  If they are treating me like I’m worthless cause I have no money, could it be because their father traumatized them into feel like they held no value unless they were financially successful? 
  2. If we struggle with shame, and as such seem to inherently take all the blame in any given situation regardless of whether we want to or not, we have an impossible time separating what we are responsible for from what other people are responsible for in any given scenario. For this reason, I want you to get in the habit of doing an exercise where you discern what’s theirs and what’s yours in any given conflict or negative situation.  Alternatively, you could do what’s mine and what’s not mine, if your situation isn’t directly about an interpersonal conflict.  To do this exercise, take a piece of paper and make two columns.  Put ‘Mine” at the top of the first column and either “Theirs” or “Not Mine” at the top of the second.  Now, close your eyes and witness the negative situation from third person perspective.  Witness it as if you were a genuinely objective bystander who is able to see and know all.  And pick apart the situation for what part of the situation belongs to either column.  Here is an example that a client did relative to herself and her husband post divorce:

    His 
    His parents have a classic codependent and narcissistic relationship and have raised him to relate in that same style in relationships. 

    He was a child at the time and was not ready for marriage. 

    He doesn’t want to be there for a woman, he told me so himself.

    He is un-attuned and has said he doesn’t care whether he hurts people emotionally.  His ‘honesty’ is cruel.

    He decided to marry me even when he knew I had clinical depression… Assuming he wouldn’t or shouldn’t have to deal with that in the marriage.

    He “just gave up” with the pressure of taking care of me and didn’t even communicate about it or even put effort into getting us help with it.

    He makes himself feel good by putting people down.  LOVES shaming.

    He didn’t try to remedy the marriage at all, no therapy or anything, just filed for divorce.

    He made it about me being too hard to handle instead of admitting that he really doesn’t want a serious relationship, he wants a trophy wife.

    He spins everything that he does to hurt relationships into good things… for example, “It’s good that I run in relationships, it’s them who need to be run from.  He can’t and won’t see anything bad about himself. 

    He is not committed at all.  The minute the going gets tough he gets going. 

    He can’t be in a relationship with someone who has needs and who needs anything from him.  As he puts it “He will not sign on to be leaned on”.  He wants an independent woman who does not depend on him at all.  He sees dependence as ‘sickness’.  

    He was so self centered that when I was in Labor, he was focused on how much discomfort he was in because of feeling “sleep deprived” because I needed his support. 


    Mine 
    I was so desperate for belonging that it didn’t matter what man I was with.  Because of this, I have NO discernment with men.  I get like a starving person willing to eat poisoned food.  I wasn’t in love with him.  I wanted to belong and I really wanted to belong with his family.

    I struggle with clinical depression.  This is too much for some men.

    I married him one month after meeting him.

    I was obsessed with pregnancy and whether I was pregnant or not and even lied to a few boyfriends that I was at that age because that = getting the belonging I was so desperate for to me.  I wasn’t concerned with whether the man I was with wanted it.

    I feel ashamed that I can’t cope like ‘normal people’.

    I didn’t have the money for therapy at that time, so I didn’t go to therapy which put a lot of pressure on my partner.

    I told him I could be a stay at home mom when I had no support system.  This wasn’t true.  I didn’t realize I couldn’t do that – I couldn’t see that as a limitation of mine.

    Deep down if I’m honest, I do feel I need a man to take care of me.
     
  3. Do a meditation where you give back what isn’t yours to hold and keep only what is yours to keep and be responsible for.  You can either invent your own way of visualizing this or you can listen to the guided meditation that I have designed for doing this.  You can do this only once to relieve yourself of burdens you’re carrying from situations that have happened in the past or situations that are currently happening.  Alternatively, you can do this any time you are in a situation where you are feeling like you are to blame for everything.  To access the guided meditation that I offer for this process, visit my website www.tealswan.com and click shop on the menu.
  4. If you are taking everything personally, you are trusting other people (or their reactions to you) tell you everything about who you are, instead of relying on what you know to be true about yourself; what really defines you as a person without any outside influence.  For this reason, commit to the practice of authenticity.  To learn how to be authentic, watch my video quite literally titled: How To Be Authentic.
  5. Put yourself in the other person’s perspective.  Often, when we are limited to our own individual perspective, as well as the inherent shame we feel, we are blind to seeing the reality that the other person is observing so we can’t actually see what their reaction is actually about.  Doing this exercise makes it much more clear and also helps us to discern what is ours and what isn’t ours.  Pretend to be them but interacting with you.  If you want an awesome technique for how to do this, watch my video titled: The Octopus Technique.
  6. Face your own shame.  You now know that the root of taking everything personally is shame.  Therefore, make focusing on and resolving your shame, your top priority.  To learn more about how to do this, watch my video titled: How to Overcome Shame.  We all take things the most personally when people hit our sensitive spots.  For example, if I feel confident that I’m doing something right, I won’t feel insecure or take it personally when someone says I’m doing it wrong.  If I’m insecure that I’m overweight, I will take it personally if someone makes a joke about weight.  Recognize that when we are taking things personally, often a deep wound (sore spot) that is unhealed is being triggered.  To learn how to heal these old wounds, try out my process called The Completion Process, which is outlined in detail in my book titled “The Completion Process”.
  7. Question the meaning that you are adding to the experience.  We encounter various experiences in our day-to-day life.  Some we could consider positive and some we could consider negative.  But the quality of our experience relative to those experiences is flavored by one thing and that is the meaning that we assign to the experience. When we are taking things personally, it is an indication that we are adding painful meaning to an experience.  We need to ask ourselves, what am I making this mean? And then question that meaning that we have assigned to the experience.  For example, imagine that someone ignores you when you try to get their attention.  You could make this mean that they are currently absorbed in their own thoughts or you could make it mean that you don’t matter to them.  We need to make sure that the meaning we have assigned to an experience is actually the meaning of the experience.  Allow people to clarify if you are confused about their actual meaning.  To learn more about how this works, watch my video titled: Meaning, The Self Destruct Button. 
  8. Recognize the egocentric worldview.  People in general are prone to seeing themselves as the epicenter of the world.  Everyone sees the world this way because everyone is experiencing the world through his or her singular perspective.  Therefore, if you walk into a room, chances are everyone is really thinking about themselves.  We’re thinking about our own insecurities, flaws, weaknesses, feelings, thoughts, experiences and realities.  We often think everyone is thinking about us or judging us (because we see ourselves as the center of the world) when in fact, often they are not because they see themselves as the center of the world as well and are concerned that everyone is thinking about and judging them.
A miniscule part of what people do and how they act towards you is personal.  So throw up the mirror you swallowed long ago.  Throw up the mirror whose reflection shows that you are to blame for and are thus responsible for everything negative.  And as a result, you will see not only yourself, but also the world more clearly.

Sunday 28 May 2017

At 6s and 7s : Various Theories


"Oh, dear. Yeah, well, we're all supposed to come from these things, you know. 

But the monkey thing was, according to various theories extant today, that we all come from the original ape, so I just used that as a symbol, you know. 

The bestial thing and then the other bestial face behind it which was laughing, jeering and jabbering like a monkey."


The following is an interview with Patrick McGoohan that was conducted by writer/TV host Warner Troyer. It took place in Toronto in 1977 in front of, and with the participation of, a studio audience. The 35-minute program was broadcast on TVOntario, a public television network which had shown The Prisoner series along with commentaries from Troyer from October 1976 to February 1977. The Ontario Educational Communications Authority also published a 21-page booklet on The Prisoner called The Prisoner Puzzle.

WARNER TROYER INTERVIEWS PATRICK MCGOOHAN FOR THE ONTARIO EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS AUTHORITY, MARCH 1977.

Troyer: I guess the first thing I should tell you is that your guest and mine is Patrick McGoohan. Mr. McGoohan, known familiarly to his friends as Number 6, was the creative force behind, the executive producer of, and in several cases the script writer of a series called "The Prisoner," which appeared on television a number of times, not least notably on this network. 

Mr. McGoohan has come here from Los Angeles to meet you and talk to you and to me. And to meet a group of Prisoner, ah, club groupies, some of them from Seneca College which has been operating a course based on the series, some of them from OECA, and some other people, and we're going to talk about "The Prisoner" and I suppose the obvious first question is: Where the hell did that idea come from? How'd you get started?

McGoohan: Boredom, was how it started.

Troyer: Just that? With T.V.? With society, or you?

McGoohan: With T.V. initially. I was doing a series that was called "Secret Agent." Was it called that here, or "Danger Man"? It had two titles.

Troyer: "Danger Man."

McGoohan: And I'd made 54 of those and I thought that was an adequate amount. 



So I went to the gentleman, Lew Grade, who was the financier, and said that I'd like to cease making "Secret Agent" and do something else. So he didn't like that idea. He'd prefer that I'd gone on forever doing it. But anyway, I said I was going to quit. 

So he said, "What's the idea?" This is on the telephone initially, so I met him on a Saturday morning at 7 o'clock. That was always the time we had our discussions, and he said "Alright, what's the idea?" and I had a whole format prepared of this "Prisoner" thing which initially came to me on one of the locations on "Secret Agent" when we went to this place called Portmeirion, where a great deal of it was shot, and I thought it was an extraordinary place, architecturally and atmosphere-wise, and should be used for something and that was two years before the concept came to me. 

So I prepared it and went in to see Lew Grade. I had photographs of the Village or whatever and a format and he said, "I don't want to read the format," because he says he doesn't read formats, he says he can't read apart from accounts, and he sort of said, "Well, what's it about? Tell me." 

So I talked for ten minutes and he stopped me and said, "I don't understand one word you're talking about, but how much is it going to be?" 

So I had a budget with me, oddly enough, and I told him how much and he says, "When can you start?" 

I said Monday, on scripts. And he says, "The money'll be in your company's account on Monday morning." 

Which it was, and that's how we started. 

Behind it, of course, was a certain impatience with the numerology of society and the way we're being made into ciphers, so there was something else behind it.

Troyer: Was that a personal thing in terms of your reaction to society or was it more of an observation? Do you feel you're being...

McGoohan: I think we're progressing too fast. I think that we should pull back and consolidate the things that we've discovered.

Troyer: 
You didn't initially want to do 17 films?

McGoohan: 
No, seven, as a serial as opposed to a series. 

I thought the concept of the thing would sustain for only 7, but then Lew Grade wanted to make his sale to CBS, I believe (first ran it in the States) and he said he couldn't make a deal unless he had more, and he wanted 26, and I couldn't conceive of 26 stories, because it would be spreading it very thin, 


But we did manage, over a week-end, with my writers, to cook up ten more outlines
and eventually we did 17, 


but it should be 7.

Troyer: But you did ten in two days? Ten outlines?

McGoohan: Over a week-end, yes. Outlines, I mean a sort of...7 or 8 page format. (Troyer chuckles.)

Troyer: How would you have described or explained the concept of the series to those writers, the first time you sat down with them, what did you tell them?

McGoohan: It was very difficult because they were also prisoners of conditioning, and they were used to writing for "The Saint" series of the "Secret Agent" series and it was very difficult to explain, and we lost a few by the wayside. 

I had sat down and I wrote a 40-page, sort of, history of the Village, the sort of telephones they used, the sewerage system, what they ate, the transport, the boundaries, a description of the Village, every aspect of it; and they were all given copies of this and then, naturally, we talked to them about it, sent them away and hoped they would come up with an idea that was feasible.

Troyer: What about the philosophy, the rationale of the Village? What did you tell them about that? Its raison-d'etre, not its mechanics...

McGoohan: (very deliberatelyIt was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. 

And this is the one rebel that they can't break.

Troyer: To what end was that process of breaking down the individual will?

McGoohanTo what end?

TroyerFor the Village, what was the purpose, the goal?

McGoohanI think it's going on every day all around us. I had to sign in to get into this joint! 

(Troyer: Uh-huh) Downstairs, yeah.

TroyerMade you angry, too? (Chuckle.)

McGoohanSlightly, yeah. Pass-keys and, you know, let's go down to the basement and all this. That's Prisonership as far as I'm concerned,and that makes me mad! 

And that makes me rebel! 

And that's what the Prisoner was doing, was rebelling against that type of thing!

TroyerBut can you, in everyday life, summon the will and the energy to rebel every time any indignity occurs?

McGoohanYou can't, otherwise you go crazy! You have to live with it. That's what makes us prisoners! You can't totally rebel, otherwise you have to go live on your own, on a desert island. It's as simple as that.

Troyer: 
How much psychic attrition is there, spiritual attrition in not rebelling? 

How much do you give away or lose? 

How high is the cost of not rebelling every time?

Not complaining every time?

McGoohan: 
Ulcers, ulcers.

Troyer: 
Do you have ulcers?

McGoohan: 
I have a couple.

Troyer: 
Bad ones?

McGoohan: 
Not too bad. 
They're gettin' worse. 
(laughs)

Troyer: How many scripts did you write? Your name was on 2.

McGoohan: Well, my name was on and then I wrote under a couple of other names: Archibald Schwartz [ Genuine/Precious, Bold Dark-Complected Person (Black Irish?) ] was one and Paddy Fitz [ Paddy the Bastard ] was another.

Troyer: So how many all together?

McGoohan: I t'ink 5.

Troyer: Which ones? The last one...

McGoohan: The first one I re-wrote. It came out...not the way I wanted, and then the last one, I wrote. The penultimate one, I wrote. Free For All - another one, and then there was another one, I can't remember the name of it offhand. It's a long time ago.

Troyer: What's your response to what could really only be adequately described as a "cult" which has grown up around the series, a kind of mystique about it, here and in Europe?

McGoohan: I'm very gratified because, when it came out originally, in England, there were a lot of haters of it. A love/hate relationship, whichever way you look at it. Already there was a small cult. Now there's a much bigger one over there. 

In fact, when the last episode came out in England, it had one of the largest viewing audiences, they tell me, ever over there, because everyone wanted to know who No. 1 was, because they thought it would be a "James Bond" type of No. 1. 

When they did finally see it, there was a near-riot and I was going to be lynched. And I had to go into hiding in the mountains for 2 weeks, until things calmed down. That's really true!


Troyer: They were angry?

McGoohan: Oh, yeah! Walking around the streets, it was dangerous!

Troyer
Why? Why were they angry?

McGoohan
Because they thought they'd been cheated. 
Because it wasn't, you know, a "James Bond" No. 1 guy.


Troyer: 
It was Themselves.

McGoohan
Yes, well, we'll get into that later, I think. 
(Knowing laughter from Troyer
Come back to that one, that's a very important one.

Troyer: 
D'ya know what's really interesting, to me, is a number of my friends and colleagues who watched the entire series told me, after the last show, that they were angry because they hadn't found out who No. 1 was. 
That went by quickly and they refused to acknowledge it.

McGoohan: 
That was deliberate. I forgot how many frames; I think there were 52 frames, or something, of the shot when they pulled off the monkey mask.

And No. 1's a monkey and then No.1's... Himself.
It was deliberate. 

I mean, I could have held it there for a good two minutes and put a subtitle on it saying, "It's him," you know. 


(All laugh.
But I thought I wasn't going to pander to a mentality so low that it couldn't perceive what I was trying to say, so you had to be a little quick to pick it up. 

That's all.

Troyer: What is your response to all the analysis and all the philosophising and criticism of the series? People have tried to make so much of it and to find so many levels of meaning, to parse it in so many directions.

McGoohan: I'm astonished! For instance, the beautiful presentation, the thing that you prepared for our good friends here, puts profounder meaning into many of the stories than I ever thought of.

Troyer: (Chuckling) Or more pompous?

McGoohan: (Automatically) Yeah. (Troyer chuckles again.) No! Oh, no, not at all. No, no. I think it's marvelous; I'm most gratified.

Troyer: Some questions...over here...

Girl: How did you feel about the response to "The Prisoner" when it was first shown in Britain?

McGoohan: Delighted. I wanted to have controversy, argument, fights, discussions, people in anger waving first in my face saying, "How dare you? Why don't you do more 'Secret Agents' that we can understand?" I was delighted with that reaction. I think it's a very good one. That was the intention of the exercise.

Troyer: Did you get any special kind of response from politicians, from bureaucrats, people in the kind of corporations we all know and hate?

McGoohan: Not enough. I suppose they steered clear of it. But then, of course, they'd be the very ones that wouldn't understand it.

Troyer: Uh-huh. Was there any one that was more fun for you than the other? Was it fun playing a Western?...a western hero for a few...(McGoohan: I, ah...) a few scenes?

McGoohan: I don't know what concepts you good folks have put on that one, but the reason for that, I'll tell ya, is because I wanted to do a Western. I'd never done one. And they'd never made a Western in England, and we were short of a story. (All laugh.) So we cooked that one up (McGoohan chortles), we wrote it in four days and shot it, ya know..
.
Troyer: It was harmless...

McGoohan: it was fun, yeah, it was fun. And takin' whatever you put into it, that's the reason for it. Then we sorta stuck the figures up and all that and put some other concepts in which have other levels, sociological levels, which you can take what you want out of them.

Troyer: Can you make a decent creative enterprise, build one, in any medium, without building it on several levels at once? However much of it is conscious or unconscious?

McGoohan: It's very, ah...a lot of it was conscious, in my case. Of course, other things happen. F'instance, a t'ing happened, the balloon thing, which has been made a great deal of...




Troyer: "Rover."

McGoohan: "Rover," yes. Now, the reason that happened, again, it's like the Western. This, ah...


We had this marvelous piece of machinery that was being built which was gonna be "Rover" and this thing was like a hovercraft and it would go underwater, come up on the beach, climb walls; it could do anything. That was our original Rover. 

By the first day of shooting, unfortunately, the engineers, mechanics and scientific genuises hadn't quite completed it to perfection. (Troyer chuckles.

And the first day of shooting, Rover was supposed to go down off the beach into the water, do a couple of signals and a couple of wheelspins and come back up. But it went down into the water and (laughter all around) stayed down, permanently. 


And then we had to shoot. We had Rover in every scene that day. So we had no Rover and Rover didn't look as though he was going to be resurrected at all. 

So we're standing there. My Production Manager, Bernard Williams (wonderful fellow), standing beside me, and he says, "What're we gonna do?" And he went like that and he looked up and there was this balloon in the sky. And he says, "What's that?" And I said, "I dunno. What is it?" He says, "I think it's a meteorological balloon." And he looked at me. And I said, "How many can ya get within two hours?", ya see. So he says, "I'll see." And he went off and he called the meteorological station nearby. And I did some other shots to cover while he was away and he came back with a hundred of 'em. He took an ambulance so that he could get there and back fast because it was quite a ways to the nearest big town. And he came back with them and there were these funny balloons, all sizes, and that's how Rover came to be.

And sometimes we filled it with a little water, sometimes with oxygen, sometimes with helium, depending on what we wanted him to do. And in the end, we could make him do anything: lie down, beg, anything (Laughter)...Really. 


We used about 6000 of them...

Troyer: Did you really?

McGoohan: Oh, yes. They're very, very fragile. They break very easily.

Troyer: So you'd lose a lot of scenes, then, when you were shooting in a boat...

McGoohan: We always had another one standing by, back-ups, all the time, yes.

Boy: What interested me was the style in which it was done and the whimsy and the hundreds of little touches, but from what you've been saying so far, they all seem to have been accidents. You know, the white balloon was a accident and you happened upon the Village...

McGoohan: Oh, yeah...

Boy: And it's, you know, incredibly lucky.

McGoohan: Yeah, but you...no, no, no, no...There were these pages, don't forget, at the very beginning, which laid out the whole concept; these 40-odd pages laid out the whole concept. That was no accident.

Boy
No, but the little touches...

McGoohan
Those things come anyway.

Boy
But I haven't seen them come very often in any other series.

McGoohan
But they come because you're looking for them, you see. 


I was fortunate to have two or three creative people working with me, like my friend that I said saw the meteorological balloon. 

And wherever one could find these little touched, one put them in. 

But the design of the "Prisoner" thing, that was all clearly laid out from the outset.

Boy: And the style of the way...

McGoohan: And the style was also clearly laid out and the designs of the sets, those were all clearly laid out from the inception of it. There was no accident in that area, you know, the blazers, and the numbers and all that stuff, and the stupid little bicycles and all that.

Troyer: Was it a series, do you think, which had an appeal, a kind of narrow-gauge appeal, chiefly to people in the upper twenty percent of the intelligence quotient bracket or whatever?
McGoohan: Mostly intelligent people...such as we have here?

Troyer: Yeah, I meant that.

McGoohan: You see, one of the t'ings that is frustrating about making a piece of entertainment is trying to make it appeal to everybody. I think this is fatal. I don't think you can do that. It's done a great deal, you know. We have our horror movies and we have our science-fiction things. The best works are those that say...somebody says, "We want to do something this way," and do it, not because they're aiming at a particular audience. They're doing it because it's a story they think is important, and is a statement that they want to make. And they do it and then whoever want to watch it, that's their privilege. I mean, the painting in an art gallery, you know, you have a choice whether you go and look at this one or that one or the other one. You have a choice not even to go in.

Second Boy
One analogy that comes up, from literature, is with epic poetry, or with an epic. 

And "The Prisoner" seems to have all the qualities that belong to an epic, including the kind of structure which you ended up with: 
the thing that began with 7 parts and ended with 17.

McGoohan
Yeah.

Second Boy: 
There have been a few peculiar epic works which have done that sort of thing or been on the way, Spencer's "Faerie Queene" for instance, or Tennyson's "Idylls of the Kings" ...

"Idylls of the King" which became a 12-part non-epic with all the properties and qualities of an epic.


I have one question based on that perhaps peculiar observation, and that is: 
one of the figures in some of the epics, like the "Faerie Queene," is The Dwarf who accompanies Una and the Redcrosse Knight where the idea for Angelo Muscat come from?

McGoohan
Oh. I don't know. 
Where did that come from?

Second Boy: 
Is there a literary image...

McGoohan:
 No, I certainly never thought of one. 
There were all sorts of interpretations to little Angelo. 


He's a very sweet man and...a very, very sweet man. It's this sort of...there should be something also--sinister about him. 



I mean, there was always the possibility that he might be No. 1. 

See, I don't know if anyone...do you pick up that at all..? 

I don't know, but that...because he was such a good friend and always by the side of No. 6, that there was...should have been an implication that perhaps he was a sinister character, and particularly in the last episode, when he goes...he's the one that goes out with No. 6 and they go into the...

Maybe he's over No. 1 somewhere...

You know they have so...they have stars, superstars, and what are they gonna call them next? 

Comets

So what...maybe he's a comet or something, little...little Angelo.

 So there should be that remaining sinister thing about it.

Second Boy: 
I was just curious, because there were so many images of all...of all the figures that are in the series that are...that have literary connections, whether of not they're deliberate...
(McGoohan: Yeah.)
...deliberately connected or not doesn't really matter, does it? 
There might be an element...

McGoohan
No, I don't think...I don't think it does.

Second Boy
No, doesn't matter at all.

McGoohan: I don't think, in that sort of...I, I use the work "surrealistic" about it...thing, that one has to tie up all the loose ends. I think there's...that you...options are open for the beholder to interpret whichever way he likes.

Third Boy: Mr. McGoohan, my question deals with religion.

McGoohan: Yeah.


Third Boy: 
I understand, in reading a little about you, that you're a very religious man, and my question pertains to "Fall Out.

I have interpreted a lot of the acts as being...having this content. 

I'm thinking specifically of the crucifixion of the 2 rebels, of when their arms are drawn apart, the temptation of No. 6 by the President of the Village, of the temptation of Christ...

McGoohan: 
They give him the throne.



Third Boy: 
"Drybones," all of that. 
First of all, would you agree with my idea that that is intentional? 
That it is...

McGoohan: 
Ah, answering: No, 
I had never any religious inspiration for that whatsoever. 

I was just trying to make it dramatically feasible.

 Certainly the temptation with the guy putting me up on the throne and all this stuff, ah...it's Lucifer time. 

But I never thought at that moment. 

Maybe somewhere in the back of my mind it was there, 
"And the hip bone's connected to the thigh bone" 
thing. 

I just thought it was a very good song for the situation and also was applicable to the young man because, as you know, it's easy for us to go astray in youth and he was astray and he's trying to get everything together again.

Third Boy: 
When I speak of religion, I mean a moral attitude towards life.

McGoohan: 
I would think that's necessary, yeah.

Third Boy: 
OK, then, is it fair to say that No. 6 draws upon that? 

Is that the source of his defense? 

Is that how he gets up in the morning and faces another day in the Village?

McGoohan
I think that's a very good comment and I think that's probably true, yeah...

Moral force which says, 
"I have a spirit of my own, a soul of my own and it's not all my own because it's joined with a greater force beyond me." 

I don't think he got up every morning and analyzed it to that extent
but I think that that force is within him and anyone who is able to fight in that individual way.

Third Boy: Would you say that there is a distinct lack in the rest of the villagers? Are they soulless beings?

McGoohan: Ah, the majority of them have been sort of brain- washed. Their souls have been brainwashed out of them. Watching too many commercials is what happened to them.

Troyer: I used to think that television commercials were spiritually healthy because they made us skeptical and that that was probably a very good thing to learn very early on.

McGoohan: Well, they don't make enough people skeptical because if they made enough people skeptical, the people who were made skeptical wouldn't be buying all the junk that they're advertising and then they'd be out of business.

Fourth Boy: 
There's one sequence you do with Leo McKern where he says, "I'll kill you." 

You say, "I'll die," and he says, "You're dead." 

Is that a figure of speech or was there an underlying thing happening there?

McGoohan: 
Now you're talking about 'Once Upon A Time'?

Fourth Boy: 
Yeah, 'Once Upon a Time'.

McGoohan: 
Well, that was very interesting that one...(which was probably my favourite earlier on, Warner. That was probably it.) 
That was one that was written in the 36 hour period. 

And Leo McKern, who was a very good friend of mine and a very fine actor I think, came in on short notice to do it, and it was mainly a 2 hander. 

The brainwashing thing, he was trying to brainwash me and in the end No. 6 turns the tables. 

And the dialogue was very peculiar because all it consisted of was mainly "6, 6, 6," and 5 pages of that at one time. 

And Leo, one lunchtime, went up to his dressing room and I went to see the rushes and I knew he was tired. 

I went up to the dressing room to tell him how good I thought he'd been in the rushes. 

And he was curled up in the fetus position on his couch there, and he says, 
"Go away! Go away you bastard! I don't want to see you again."


I said, "What are you talking about?" 

He says, "I've just ordered 2 doctors," he says, "and they're comin' over as soon as they can." 

He says, "Go away." 

And he had! 

He'd ordered 2 doctors and they come over that afternoon and he didn't work for 3 days. 

He's gone! 

He'd cracked, which was very interesting.

He'd truly cracked. 


And so I had to use a double, the back of a guy's head for a lot and eventually Leo did come back and we completed them and also he was in the final episode, so he forgave me for everything, but he did crack, very interesting, I thought....

Troyer: Much as he cracked in that final episode.



McGoohan: Same, exactly the same.

Troyer: I was wondering about how much intensity there was in that. I know that acting is always an enormously intense experience but in that head-on 2 hander where there was so much dynamic pressure. 


Obviously, it was real.

McGoohan: It was 8 days shooting and for most of those 8 days we were head to head on from 8 o'clock in the morning 'til 6:30 at night with an hour for lunch. So, it was pretty intense. 


It was psychiatrist couch time, sort of thing.


Troyer: Were you a different person when you came out the other end of that series?

McGoohan: Tired, that's all.

Troyer: Beyond that?

McGoohan: No, no....

Troyer: It wasn't purely psychoanalysis?

McGoohan: No, no, I never let any part that I play sort of take over. I think that that's nonsense when that happens. I think you should be able to go in and do it, learn your lines and do it. Some are more fatiguing that others, some are more emotionally exhausting than others. 

I mean, you can't play Hamlet without being drained or King Lear without being drained but to say that you lived through the day playing Lear or playing Hamlet before you go out the next night and go on to the stage, I think that's ludicrous.

Troyer: What about the notions that some actors, some people in other creative endeavors have, that we all have a finite bank of energy that each time one brings some of it up there's a little less left for next time, or for the other end of the road.

McGoohan: I think that the contrary is true. When one looks at people such as Arthur Rubenstein, people with tremendous talents and they are young men. 

They're young men at 75, they're young, 80 they're young! 

Their vitality, in fact, increases. Their energy increases. It just happens, I mean the force. The adrenalin increases. It just happens that the machinery of the body, the parts, the spare parts are wearing out a little bit...I think it increases and I know a lot of old folks who are young, young people.

Troyer: So the creative urge is a muscle, the more we flex it, the stronger it gets.

McGoohan: I think so, yeah. Yeah. It's just this stuff wears out. That's all.

Fifth Boy: Mr. McGoohan, when you began "The Prisoner," you began it in a decade in which a lot of people were used to secret agents. 

You very neatly saw the next decade coming. I thing you saw Watergate; the enemy within as opposed to the enemy without. 

I don't know if you can answer this, but if you were going to do the series again and you had to look aged to the 80's and you were thinking in terms of what you see as being the real enemy, not the storybook enemy but the enemy that's really going to hassle us. If you were going to look into the 80's now, what would you look to?

McGoohan: 
I think progress is the biggest Enemy on earth, apart from oneself, and that goes with 1self, a 2-handed pair with 1self and progress. 


I think we're gonna take good care of this planet shortly. 


They're making bigger and better bombs, faster planes, and all this stuff one day, I hate to say it, there's never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn't been used and that thing is gonna be used unless...I don't know how we're gonna stop it, not it's too late, I think.

Fifth Boy: Do you think maybe there's going to be a strong popular reaction against "Progress" in the future?

McGoohan: No, because we're run by the Pentagon, we're run by Madison Avenue, we're run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don't revolt we'll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche.

Sixth Boy: We tend to view the threat, the Village there, as sort of a thing as something external like Madison Avenue, the media. How responsible are we for accepting this? Where do we become involved in being "unfree"?

McGoohan: Buying the product, to excess. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we're at their mercy. We're at the mercy of the advertiser and of course there are certain things that we need, but a lot of the stuff that is bought is not needed.

Sixth Boy: 
Did you regard the Village as an external thing or as something that we carry around with us all the time?

McGoohan
It was meant to be both. 

The external was the symbol, but it's within us all I think, don't you? 

This surrealist aspect; 
we all live in a little Village.

Troyer
Do we?

McGoohan: 
Your village may be different from other people's villages but we are all prisoners.

Troyer: 
Well, I know who the idiot is in mine.

McGoohan: 
Yes, Number 1 - same as me.

7th Boy: 
Is No. 1 the evil side of man's nature?


McGoohan:
 The Greatest Enemy that we have...

No. 1 was depicted as an evil, governing force in this Village. 

So, who is this No. 1? 

We just see the No. 2's, the sidekicks.
 Now this overriding, evil force is at its most powerful within ourselves and we have constantly to fight it, I think, and that is why I made No. 1 an image of No. 6. 

His other half, his alter ego.

Troyer: 
Did you know when you first outlined the series in your own mind, the concept that No. 1 was going to turn out to be you, to be No. 6?

McGoohan: 
No, I didn't. 
That's an interesting question.

Troyer
When did you find out?

McGoohan
When it got very close to the last episode and I hadn't written it yet. 

And I had to sit down this terrible day and write the last episode and I knew it wasn't going to be something out of James Bond, and in the back of my mind there was some parallel with the character and the No. 1 and the rest. 

And then, I didn't even know exactly 'til I was about the third through the script, the last script.

Troyer: 
How about you colleagues, the other writers. 
Were they surprised?

McGoohan: 
Yep.

Troyer: 
Were they annoyed?

McGoohan: 
No.

Troyer: 
Did they decide it was untidy?

McGoohan: 
No, they used to come along from time to time and say, "Who's No. 1?" you see. 

And I told them , "It's a secret" until I actually sat down and wrote it - and it was, actually; they didn't know until I handed out the script.

Troyer: 
But were they disappointed by that...?

McGoohan: 
No, they liked it. 
They said they always knew it was going to be him.

Troyer: (laughs
Once you told them.

McGoohan: 
A few of them did, really. 
Nobody really knew. No.

Troyer: Why the Double Mask? Why the monkey face?

McGoohan: Oh, dear. Yeah, well, we're all supposed to come from these things, you know. It's the same with the penny farthing symbol bicycle thing. Progress. I don't think we've progressed much. But the monkey thing was, according to various theories extant today, that we all come from the original ape, so I just used that as a symbol, you know. The bestial thing and then the other bestial face behind it which was laughing, jeering and jabbering like a monkey.

Eighth Boy: Mr. McGoohan, during the last episode, Fall Out, we see the Prisoner. He's smiling and laughing and dancing for the first time and yet later on the very last scene is exactly the some as the very first scene where he's driving off with his familiar stern face. My question is, has the Prisoner between the first and the last episode actually changed any?

McGoohan: Ah, no, I think he's essentially the same. I think he got slightly exhilarated by the fact that he got out of this mythical place and felt like doing a little skip and a dance, and singing a bit, and felt very happy to be going home with his little buddy, the Butler, you know. And we never did a cut of him when that door opened. We just saw the door open and he went in. So, you never knew whether his exhilaration was lost when he saw that sinister door that was left like an unfinished symphony.

Ninth Boy: In the final episode, does the Prisoner really consider becoming the leader of the Village?

McGoohan: No. He does not. He just wants to get out and he uses a technique which he hadn't used before that, which was violence, which is sad, but he does; and that's how he gets out and then, of course, in the final episode, he goes back to his little apartment place and he has his little valet guy with him and the door opens on its own when he goes in the car. There you know it's gonna start over again because we continue to be Prisoners.

Ninth Boy: 
And that leads to my last question, what would the Prisoner be likely to do with his newfound freedom?

McGoohan: 
He hasn't got it. 

Which is the whole point. 

When that door opens on its own and there's no one being it, exactly the same as all the doors in the Village open, you know that somebody's waiting in there to start it all over again. 

He's got no freedom. Freedom is a myth. 

There's no final conclusion to it. 

Ah, and I was very fortunate to be able to do something as audacious as that with no final conclusion to it because people do want the word 
"THE END" 
put up there. 

Now the final 2 words for that thing should have been 
"THE BEGINNING".

Troyer
This is kind of a banal question, I guess, but if you could leave one sentence or paragraph in the head of everyone who watched the Prisoner series, the whole series, one thing for them to carry around for awhile, when it was over, what would it be?

McGoohan: 
B C N U

Troyer
Just that?...enigmatic to the end.

McGoohan
Be Seeing You. 
That means quite a lot.

Troyer
It does indeed.

McGoohan: 
B C N U. 
Yeah.