Perhaps an object like this will make it possible to link up… to
move from one subject to another, from living in society, to being
together. But then, since social relationships are always ambiguous,
since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much
as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and
create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates
the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective
reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself
guilty even though I feel I am innocent.
A spoon is stirring up the cup of coffee. It is withdrawn. A small circle of foam is left swirling round on the surface.
Given the fact that every event transforms my daily existence and that I invariably fail to communicate… I mean to understand, to love, to be loved, and as each failure makes me feel my loneliness more keenly, as… as… as I can’t tear myself away from the objectivity that is crushing me nor from the subjectivity which is driving me into exile, as I can neither raise myself into Being nor allow myself to sink back into Nothingness… I must go on listening. I must go on looking about me even more attentively than before… the world… my fellow creatures… my brothers.
…the world today, alone, where revolutions are impossible, where
bloody wars haunt me, where capitalism isn’t even sure of its rights…
and the working class is in retreat… where progress… the thundering
progress of science gives to future centuries an obsessive, haunting
presence… where the future is more present than the present, where
distant galaxies are at my door. My fellow creatures… my brothers.
A lump of sugar tumbles into the coffee and breaks
into crystals. The dark circle of the cup glistens with bubbles, like
galaxies.
But where to begin? But where to begin with what? God created the
heavens and the earth. Of course, but that’s an easy way out. There
must be a better way of explaining it all….
We could say that the limits of language are the limits of the world… that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. And in that respect, whatever I say must limit the world, must make it finite. And when logical, mysterious death finally abolishes these limits, and when there are, then, neither questions nor answers, everything will be blurred. But if, by chance, things become clear again, they would only become so through the phantom of conscience. Then, everything will fall into place.
La Luna, densa e gra[ve], densa e grave, come sta, la luna?
The Moon, dense and profound, dense and profound, how does
it stay [aloft], the moon?
—Leonardo Da Vinci, Philosophical Diaries
I no longer know of a street that leads out
I no longer know of a street
come help
I don’t know anymore
what will happen to me
during this night
I don’t know what morning is anymore
or evening
I am so alone
o Lord
and no one partakes of my suffering
no one stands at my bed
and takes away my torment
and sends me into the clouds
and off to green rivers
that curl into the sea
Lord
my God
I am exposed to the birds
to the exploding stroke of the hour
that wounds my soul
and burns my flesh
o Lord in my word is darkness
the night that beats my fish
under the wind
and mountains of black pain
o Lord hear me
o listen to me I don’t want to be nauseated alone
and endure this world
help me
I am dead
and like an apple I roll
into the valley
and must be choked
under the log of winter
o my God
I don’t know anymore
where my path leads
I don’t know what is good and bad
in the fields in limbs
Lord my God I am tired and poor
my word burns in grief
for You.
A few nights ago, I locked myself out of my apartment for the third time this year. While I sat trying to decide what to do, I was overwhelmed with the thought that my life seems composed of one mistake after another; that I am living through a seemingly endless series of disappointments. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get it right.
Whether it is an awkward public interaction, unreal crisis, or moment of social disconnection, ordinary life is full of abrupt occurrences that create discomfort and isolation. It is often shocking and painful to discover how unsympathetic and harsh the world can be when we fail. The consequences of our transgressions, however small, leave us feeling inept and alone.
The photographs I create are all constructed scenes inspired by my own encounters with this fear and failure. My interest is focused on these breakdowns of everyday life and the subsequent relationship with defeat. The sad humor and vulnerability in the situations I stage allow viewers to identify with the character I portray. In exposing my own shame and seclusion, I am giving name to the anxiety that plagues us all. The images then serve not simply as an illumination of the feeling of embarrassment, but as representations of undisguised human nature.
Those who have seen her can never forget her. She is the modern actress par excellence. ... As soon as she takes the screen, fiction disappears along with art, and one has the impression of being present at a documentary. The camera seems to have caught her by surprise, without her knowledge. She is the intelligence of the cinematic process, the perfect incarnation of that which is photogenic; she embodies all that the cinema rediscovered in its last years of silence: complete naturalness and complete simplicity. Her art is so pure that it becomes invisible.
-Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque Française
I saw the Thermals a few years ago in New York, and have never quite
figured out what they're getting at -- but this video is a lot of
fun. To be honest, I didn't think videos were made this well any
longer.
You leave joyful passions, the increase in the power of acting; you make use of them to form common notions of a first type, the notion of what there was in common between the body which affected me with joy and my own body, you open up to a maximum your living common notions and you descend once again toward sadness, this time with common notions that you form in order to comprehend in what way such a body disagrees with your own, such a soul disagrees with your own.
At this moment you can already say that you are within the adequate idea since, in effect, you have passed into the knowledge of causes. You can already say that you are within philosophy. One single thing counts, the way of living. One single thing counts, the meditation on life, and far from being a meditation on death it's rather the operation which consists in making death only finally affect the proportion that is relatively the smallest in me, that is, living it as a bad encounter. It's simply well known that, to the extent that a body is tired, the probabilities of bad encounters increase. It's a common notion, a common notion of disagreement.
As long as I'm young, death is truly something which comes from outside, it's truly an extrinsic accident, except in the case of an internal malady. There is no common notion, on the other hand it's true that when a body ages, its power of acting diminishes: I can no longer do what I could still do yesterday; this, this fascinates me in aging, this kind of diminution of the power of acting. What is a clown, vitally speaking? It's precisely the type that does not accept aging, he doesn't know how to age quickly enough. It's not necessary to age too quickly because there's also another way of being a clown: acting the old man. The more one ages the less one wants to have bad encounters, but when one is young one leaps into the risk of the bad encounter. The type which, to the extent that his power of acting diminishes as a function of aging, his power of being affected varies, doesn't do it, continues to act the young man, is fascinating. It's very sad. There's a fascinating passage in one of Fitzgerald's novels (the water-ski episode [in Tender is the Night]), there are ten pages of total beauty on not knowing how to age...You know the spectacles which are not uncomfortable for the spectators themselves.
Knowing how to age is arriving at the moment when the common notions must make you comprehend in what way things and other bodies disagree with your own. Then inevitably it will be necessary to find a new grace which will be that of your age, above all not clinging to youth. It's a kind of wisdom. It's not the good health which makes one say “Live life as you please,” it's no longer the will to cling to life.
- Gilles Deleuze on Spinoza, Cours Vincennes, January 24, 1970
"Actors, taught not to let any embarassment show on their faces, put on a mask. So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage and I come forth masked." -- Descartes, Oeuvres, X213
"Twenty-four brown-skinned slaves rowed the splendid galley which was to bring Prince Amgiad to the palace of the caliph. The Prince, wrapped in his purple cloak, lay alone on the deck under the dark-blue, starry sky, and his gaze -- "
So far the little girl had read aloud. Then, suddenly, her eyelids drooped. Her parents looked at each other and smiled. Fridolin bent down, kissed her blond hair and closed the book which was lying on the untidy table. The child looked up as if caught at some mischief.
"It's nine o'clock," her father said, "and time you were in bed." Albertina also bent over her, and as her hand met her husband's on the beloved forehead, they looked at each with a tender smile not meant for the child. The governess entered and asked the little girl to say goodnight. -- Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story (1926), and basis for Eyes Wide Shut (2000)
Similarly, this storytelling, phantasmagorical point has not been missed by reviewers, who -- despite not having read Alice in Wonderland
in any considerable depth -- deliberately misinterpret the fairyland aspects of
Shainberg's "Fur," released today in theaters in New York and San
Francisco. Robert Downey's character, Lionel, beset by
hypertrichosis, reads to Arbus' two daughters a section from Alice in Wonderland, a scene which most critics view as nothing more than the equivalent of a cinematic blow to the head, a duh moment,
just in case one hasn't yet drawn the parallels between Arbus'
imaginative fantasies and that of Carroll's own netherworldly
freaks. And we all know what Alice in Wonderland was about, of course. The mask of hair which conceals Lionel's face -- and
which he then doubles in public with prostheses of his own making --
doesn't frighten her children, content with doubles, not searching for
the depth of things -- skirting the surface, and by so doing -- as
Deleuze writes -- passing from the body to the incorporeal without the
shame and baggage of adults who are stuck on skin (Kidman being a double agent here -- yes, her moonish face lacks blemish, and...?)
Whatever else Arbus did, her
photographs simultaneously yanked the vapid masks off her objects and subjects (subject in this case being the I, or the you doing the gazing) -- skirting
the surface of things (for where are those depths? I have not yet ascended to them...) and zeroing in on
Valery's thought that what is most deep is the skin.
In Plato, an intense debate was raging in the depth of things, in the depth of the earth, between that which undergoes the action (copies and simulcra). An echo of this debate resonates when Socrates asks: is there an Idea of everything, even of hair, dirt, and mud -- or rather is there an Idea of everything, which always and obstinately escapes the Idea? In Plato, however, this something is never sufficiently hidden, driven back, pushed deeply into the depth of the body, or drowned in the ocean. Everything now returns to the surface....Alice [in Wonderland] is no longer able to make her way through to the depths. Instead, she releases her incorporeal double. It is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the incorporeal. Paul Valery had a profound idea: what is most deep is the skin. -- Gilles Deleuze, Logic and Sense, 10
A good philosopher knows the value of masks:
Whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable. Might not nothing less than the opposite , be the proper disguise for the shame of a god? A questionable question: it would be odd if some mystic had not risked something to that effect in his mind. There are occurrences of such a delicate nature that one does well to cover them up with some rudeness to conceal them; there are actions of love and extravagant generosity after which nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and give any eyewitness a sound thrashing: that would muddle his memory Some know how to muddle and abuse their own memory in order to have their revenge at least against this only witness: shame is inventive.
It is not the worst things that cause the worst shame: there is not only guile behind a mask -- there is so much graciousness in cunning. I could imagine that a human being who had to guard something precious and vulnerable might roll through life, rude and round as an old green wine cask with heavy hoops: the refinement of his shame would want it that way.
A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and delicate decisions, too, on paths which few ever reach and of whose mere existence his closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life. Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends. And supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there -- and that this is well.
Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives. -- Beyond Good and Evil, Section 40
Don Giovanni! Be thee invited,
Here behold me, as thou'st directed.
DON GIOVANNI
Truly I did not expect it,
But anew I'll sup with thee,
Leporello, serve the table,
For my guest another cover!
LEPORELLO
puts his head out from under the table
Sir, be still, say no more!
DON GIOVANNI
Go, directly!
Leporello rises as if to obey.
THE COMMANDANT
No need of that,
Earthly food he no longer desireth,
Who of heavenly food hath partaken,
Cast away from thee now all such trifling,
Heed the sentence I hither have brought.
LEPORELLO
Sure a fit of the ague hath seiz'd me,
Of all motion bereft, I'm distraught!
DON GIOVANNI
Well, what would'st thou? Well, I listen.
THE COMMANDANT
Silence, and mark me, this hour thou hast sought.
DON GIOVANNI
Speak then, tell me, of fear know I nought.
THE COMMANDANT
Thou didst thyself invite me,
For that I must requite thee,
Then answer me, then answer me,
As my guest, when shall I claim thee?
LEPORELLO
standing far off, trembling
Say no, say no;
He is engag'd, excuse him.
DON GIOVANNI
Of fear none shall accuse me,
To none will I succumb!
THE COMMANDANT
Determine!
DON GIOVANNI
I have determined...
THE COMMANDANT
Thou'lt come, then?
LEPORELLO
Say that you can't, that you can't.
DON GIOVANNI
My heart is firm within me,
I have no fear, I'll come.
THE COMMANDANT
Give me thy hand in token!
DON GIOVANNI
Take it then. Ah, me!
THE COMMANDANT
What is't?
DON GIOVANNI
What deadly chill is this!
THE COMMANDANT
Turn thee, ere heav'n hath doom'd thee,
There's time yet for repentance.
DON GIOVANNI
vainly tries to free himself
For me there's no repentance,
Vanish thou from my sight!
THE COMMANDANT
Dread then, the wrath eternal.
DON GIOVANNI
Away, thou spectre infernal!
THE COMMANDANT
Yes, repent!
DON GIOVANNI
No!
THE COMMANDANT
Yes, repent!
DON GIOVANNI
No!
THE COMMANDANT
Yes!
DON GIOVANNI
No!
THE COMMANDANT
Yes! Now must my soul take flight!
Exit.
Flames appear in all directions, the earth trembles.
Depending on where one stands, the sensationalist jacket blurb from John Paul II can either be an inducement to see Godard's "Hail Mary" -- recently released on DVD -- or cause for grave scandal.
That aside, the more interesting film (there are two on this DVD: Godard's "Hail Mary," as well as Anne-Marie Mieville's "Book of Mary") is Mieville's: a 27-minute short meditation on the life of an intelligent young girl weathering her parents' incipient divorce while carrying with her at all times a short book of Baudelaire's poems, one of which she recites and repeats to an imaginary class of students:
...my spirit with a heavy fear forebodes...
To an empty room, of course...
...which is quite different from Hannah's (1 Samuel 2:1) rejoicing and exulting, and from Mary's Magnificat, which begins: "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord..." The Latin version of the Magnificat uses the word "anima," while the Greek employs ψυχή, or soul/spirit. These versions express less fear, naturally, while the young Marie has more of a taste of foreboding..
At one point, in the dialogue, Marie's mother remarks that "...it was man who invented the soul," a comment similar to that made by Otto Rank to his one-time student, Anais Nin. Marie is not put off, but does repeat the phrase about her spirit being "heavy" -- or pregnant -- with fear, somewhat doubtfully.
Later, Marie hears in the strains of Chopin's "Concerto in F Minor" the chords of both disagreement and agreement, as she notes in a conversation with her father. Her father, less enthralled, wonders where his copy of Mahler's Symphony No. 9 has gone; he can no longer find it.
To Marie, the Chopin concerto "sounds like people in a discussion...agreeing and disagreeing (a bit of both), changes of mood, icy, exasperated, 'I demand,' fire, fire, careful, error, horror, suffering,..."
Godard's point in making the film was to give a sense of the everyday to the Annunication, the "everydayness" of the Gospels that is (sometimes, if not always) lost. The minor annunications in our midst, captured by Henry Ossawa Tanner, below, testify to the same ones expressed in Denise Levertov's poem "Annunciation." We imagine Mary not so compliant, perhaps, her "yes" not so readily given, all part of an agreeement and disagreement, and the changes in mood -- icy, fiery -- that our own small annunciations -- to say yes or no to seemingly miniscule decisions -- entail.
Marie's name, her mother reminds her in a bit of wordplay, can be re-arranged to "aimer." Saying yes requires love, above all, and the "sin" so prominently played out in these last days of a election campaign point directly to the root of that word -- "a lack" -- a initial refusal and lack of both the soul and the flesh's consent. Faith asks not for compliance, but our consent, always modelled after Mary's own. Consent not given, it is argued here, is not cause for damnation.
Those caught in "sin" lack something substantial, and their downfalls inspire not pity, but only the highlighting of an accident in education in their reading of books they allegedly hold to be sacred, while forgoing the very act of choice which defines our humanness. To them, the biblion is more more important, a fetish object of divine rules which they carry in lieu of a mature reflection on the state of their own pneuma, without which, they are -- to carry the pun further, sine qua non, and breathless, mere walking dead.
Denise Levertov
Annunciation
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book,; always
the tall lily.
Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
God waited
She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.
_______________________
Aren't there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
Uncomprehending.
More often
these moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
_______________________
She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child—but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
only asked
a simple, 'How can this be?'
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel's reply,
Perceiving instantly
the astonishing ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness, to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power—
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love–
but who was God.
