Against the body stands the organization of the body by repressive
agencies, an organization that, at the limit, is the enemy _within_, the
ultimate mechanism of control: a depth psychology. When even the
smallest and most insignificant moments of life are denied access to
their material conditions for existence, one can either resort to a
healthy violence and redress those conditions, or from then on, any line
of escape will be bound to turn on the spot, in a void, captured by the
apparatuses of expression. It is little wonder then that those who live
most intensely are often won over to suicide in their early years.
The resolution of Bess's undischarged tension, of her sexual latency and
her desire for love - if from no one else, from her imaginary God, leads
her to choose death and return to the "big ship", where the other whores
refuse to go and where previously her life had been threatened. Her
decision to become suicided stems, in her mind, from making her love for
Jan unconditional- but for the condition of her 'sacrifice'.
Significantly, what she opposes to her Church and its love of the Law,
is human love -
B - "You cannot love words, you cannot be in love with a word. You
_can_ love another human being. That's perfection"
May be it is here that Bess is at her sickest - precisely because of
human love . For it is no better than love of a word, love of the Law.
In fact, it subtends the latter. Through human love we are still
prisoners of the molar figures of God and Man, of the human form. For
her escape to have consolidated its path, she sorely needed to have
expanded her horizons, not just with respect to love, but also with
respect to knowledge and perception. One cannot avoid the impression of
something sinister which deeply inbred in all of the characters of the
film. Perhaps Jan is the most open one. Bess is a jailed bird afraid
of the great outdoors, ready to contact it only in the basest of terms
and because of her mission of human love. Had she been capable of
taking her journey to good harbour, she would have discovered inhuman
love. As it stands, all we have left of her unconscious, inhuman love,
is the loss of her life because of a stupid theological dream. If you,
Mr. Rhodes, cannot see that this is the malefic poison that ultimately
leads to Bess's suicide, we surely would not know how to believe that
somehow, in your interventions, it is for life you still fight. Bess
was well aware that it was her death she wished - and God returns to
her...
B - "Father, are you with me now?", she asks to herself on the way to
the big ship.
G - "Of course, Bess."
B - "Thank you."
The disease could not be more patent. Both the Little Girl and God now
reveal themselves to be just what they are: the masks of Thanatos, the
enemy of life. Further notice, that her last words have a sting-
"I am afraid, Jan. This is so wrong..."
Yet, it is this wrong against life that the movie comes to perpetuate.
For there is no real person hiding behind the masks, only other masks.
The power of the living is precisely this plastic power to
metamorphosize, to find the motion of alterity. Where the masks freeze
on a body, all that hides behind them is death, whose counsel we
avoided.
"Everyone Genaro finds on his way to Ixtlan is only an ephemeral being.
Take you for instance. You are a phantom. Your feelings and your
eagerness are those of people. That's why he says that he encounters
only phantom travelers on his journey to Ixtlan" (Castaneda, "Journey to
Ixtlan", p.312).
At bottom, one would find that only Jan was real for Bess, and only Bess
for Jan. They were touched by the chance of sharing an inhuman becoming
between them. As one withered, the other did the same, and their last
act of love, only too human, was to share a will to die. Thereby they
aborted their journeys and became ephemeral to each other. The line of
escape became prison, and turned into self-abolition.
"Precisely from Reich's viewpoint, it is not possible to cure a neurotic
patient without dismantling the fundamental oedipal foundations. But in
putting the organism in check, the entire body is at stake. Success in
dismantling the armor carries the risk of death - as Reich experienced
with the anorgonia of cancer patients. It is to such an extent that the
organism has implanted itself in the body, that destroying one carried
the risk of shattering the other. Such is the critical problem of
therapy: to disassemble the organism without destroying the body." (DP
Antero)
It is the organism that resists the machinations of the body and
deviates its energy for symptom formation. When the agents of the body
pierce through the armor, the threat to the organism may turn the drives
inwardly, as social and historically conditioned death instinct:
self-abolition. And its familiar cry- Viva la muerte!
But, here too, there is _suicide_ and _suicide_, and we are not talking
murder, even if some murders are but disguised suicides (apparently, the
weapons purchased by the cultists of Heaven's Gate were there for the
enactment of a previous plan to provoke some 'disorderly' situation
which would be seen as a public threat and to then be shot down by the
forces of order...the Waco vision); to name a few differences that seem
essential to us-
1. Prevalent today, there is the slow-death suicide of reactive life,
with its many forms of reducing life - ecological destruction, the
dependence upon a fix, be it chemical, emotional, or sexual, the dimming
of consciousness, the betrayal of the challenges, mechanical repetition,
obsession, compulsion - all under the aegis of a nothingness of will, a
fear of life and the comfort of its substitute, survival, reactive life.
This suicide rules not in anomie but in order. It is a collective
suicide, in which we are all accomplices. 'Misery loves company.'
2. There is the great disgust, in all of its forms, when the lies and
deceptions break down because they are taken to their consequences, and
an ultimate form of self-deceit takes over: from the 'cool' suicide of
Mr. Nirvana, the flight of Commander Applesauce's ground crew mission,
to the suicides of Goebbels, Masada, Jonestown, the Kamikaze, etc, it is
already the face of nothingness one is contemplating before it overtakes
us. There is still some will here, though very, very sick, but it wants
solely its own abolition as well as that of others.
3. Following Artaud - there are the 'suicided' of society, van Gogh,
for instance: "One never commits suicide by oneself". In the case of
suicide, adds Artaud, "one needs a whole army of bad beings to have the
body decide to deprive itself, against nature, of its own life." The
brother Theo, Dr. Gauchet and a certain Gauguin are part and parcel of
the crowd that expedited van Gogh. Aside from those murdered, many were
the Gypsies, schizos and Jews, etc, suicided by Nazism, and this
continued on- long after it was defeated (Sophie's choice). The
suicided are those murdered in silence. In the absence of will, the
hand that turns against the body is but an extension of the hand of the
murderer.
4. There is aesthetic suicide, part of the dallying with forms: it may
be the samurai's or that of a Mishima, in revulsion against a world
where daring is no longer a value, or it maybe a Hitler's Damnation of
the Gods, or a Seneca's resignation.
5. A subtype of the aesthetic suicide is found in Socrates- the need to
make of Reason a tyrant led him, in self-deception, to disguise his
suicide as murder, as he "compelled Athens to hand him the poison cup"
(TOFI, 12) There are murders that disguise suicides - the will to
nothingness of many of the captured Red Army Fraction members, the
catholic martyrs of the Church that sailed to Japan in the XVI and XVII
centuries, the process of Gilles de Rais, the recent events at the
Japanese embassy in Peru, etc. Bess's suicide stems from a need to make
of her God a tyrant, in her process of verifying its reality. She
exchanges, in the process, her love of life and a life empty of love,
for the ideal love of God.
6. There is also suicide that stands as a natural end - Debord's,
Deleuze's, Sue Rodriguez', the cases of Dr. Kevorkian - often as the
natural end of a process of disease, whether self-inflicted or not -
"Disregarding the demands made by religion one might well ask: why
should it be more laudable for an old man who senses the decline of his
powers to await his slow exhaustion and dissolution than in full
consciousness to set himself a limit? Suicide is in this case is a
wholly natural and obvious action, which as a victory for reason ought
fairly to awaken reverence(...)" (HATH, I, 80).
To confuse suicides under one grand umbrella might seem justified by
invoking that we know almost nothing about death, and that is what they
all have in common, death. But this would be stupid, all the more so if
we pretend to affirm life up to and including death. What do we know of
death? The programmed senescence of differentiated cells? And does that
even account for the latency and failure of stem cells? That death is a
fog of energy that enters the body through the belly and that we 'must'
chase it with each breath? How can anyone feel important when death
stalks one at every moment?
Artaud may well be to the point when he writes- "And if there is still
one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic
dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake,
signaling through the flames" (Preface to "the Theater and Its Double").
Undoubtedly it was Joan's signal that moved de Rais (de Retz), and this
was also John Proctor's choice- to signal through the flames - along
with 18 others at Salem. But, here, even Bess is signaling through her
flames - the carved body of desire.
There is not much we can add to this, but to remind anyone that nothing
beyond death itself can be ascertained about it. No one can exclude
that it might, under certain conditions, it too, be a test, an
experimentation, a metamorphosis - as _physical_ as that of birth.
Castaneda describes the ancient Toltec knowledge of the massfree energy
of the cosmos - much as Reich did with his late-day duality of OR and
DOR energy substrates in a cosmic aether. Death is stricken by the
tumbling momentum of the aether particles, but life is maintained by the
rolling moment of its waves. There is a whole new physics here, a
physics of the rhythms of duration, their transmutation and recurrence.
It comes at the encounter of what we have written on the cosmological
and ontological significance of Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal
recurrence.
"Gazing in teams, the new seers were able to _see_ the separation
between the tumbling and circular aspects", he explained. "They _saw_
that both forces are fused, but are not the same. The circular force
comes to us just before the tumbling force; they are so close to each
other that they seem the same.
The reason it's called the circular force is that it comes in rings,
threadlike hoops of iridescence- a very delicate affair indeed. And just
like the tumbling force, it strikes all living beings ceaselessly, but
for a different purpose. It strikes them to give them strength,
direction, awareness; to give them life."
"What the new seers discovered is that the balance of the two forces in
every living being is a very delicate one," he continued. "If at any
given time an individual feels that the tumbling force strikes harder
than the circular one, that means the balance is upset; the tumbling
force strikes harder and harder from then on, until it cracks the living
being's gap and makes it die."
7. Of churches with tinker bells
The final descent into hell is prompted by God's choice- "Whom do you
want to save - yourself or Jan?"
If we believe you or von Trier, the _blessing (wrath) of God_, is more
pain, more suffering, more degradation as punishment for desire. Where
is your criticism of your Christian faith here, Mr. Rhodes, a faith that
knows only how to thwart, to kill and to deprive desire- to make it turn
in on itself, in a frozen void, in the most isolated and miserable of
fashions; a world populated only with voices of recrimination and
suicidary redemption or the threat of psychiatric intervention... Where
is your denunciation of the slaughter of innocents at the hands of
Christianity? Are you really going to sit there passionately defending
that it is the great celestial sadist that has set these tragic forces
into motion? How cynical, we thought you _loved_ Bess. Love? We must
conclude your love, your sensuality is far more entwined with the
imaginary, distant twisted flesh of martyrs roasted on the spits of the
venomous little man. A final orgasmic fit of feeling which manages to
raise itself up from the self-numbing hypnotic state of suffocation.
>Because of this sacrifice, God returns to Jan his ability to walk. When Bess is buried, God >greets her entry into heaven with bells ringing in the sky.
Von Trier's smoke and mirrors. In the grand tradition of spirit knots,
slate writing, rapping hands, sack tests, and spirit collars (Miracle
Mongers and their Methods...), Von Trier now chooses to transform his
scalding portrait of desolation into the fairy-tale gendre of
make-believe, a tribute, no doubt, to his recently _found_ Catholicism
(sweet sedation for his notorious phobias? Is this the dwarf that calls
Polanski a midget?). It was a most convincing demonstration, that one:
nothing on the radar, but the pearly gate chimes resounding all the
same- that clinched it. Nice touch, after the despicable Magdalenian
stoning. Nothing like a religeous conversion to make a man lose his
marbles entirely (yes, theological 'pilput', if you like).
"Death - the certain prospect of death could introduce into every life a
precious, sweet-smelling drop of levity - and yet you marvelous
apothecary souls have made of it an ill-tasting drop of poison through
which all life is made repulsive!" (HATH, II, 322).
Lars von Trier: apothecary of lost souls selling them the poison of the
ultimate cure: Ananke.
>_Breaking the Waves_ shows us a faith that is entirely otherworldly and epistemically >incomprehensible but one that cannot be said to be a will to nothingness for it is on the >strength of this faith that Bess wills for her beloved not a life in heaven, but a continued life >of health and vigor on this earth.
No, it shows us a well-worn fairy tale: the fairy tale of faith, no
matter how stupid. And it shows us Von Trier's project to enjoin the
spectator in his submissive _belief_ in the "otherworldly". Von Trier's
project is not incomprehensible, but on the contrary, the constant siren
song of the predictable priest.... temptation, sin, guilt, retribution,
remorse, sacrifice, crucifixion and finally, after a miserable life and
death- grace and paradise in the hereafter. And all this through that
nebulous suspension of knowledge, of affirmation of power, of experience
of life, otherwise known as (bad) _faith_.
>Lambda C would surely shout that she was sacrifing herself for an altruistic ideal which is >just nihilism in disguise (...)
The ideal is only the molar signifier of the arrangement. What is at
stake are the forces which compose the ensemble. Nihilism is not a
matter of ideology, Mr. Rhodes, it is a progressive physiological
sickness, a blockage and fixation of the process of becoming, a
displeasure with life which comes to run so deeply through all the
organs that the reduction, the overriding of the feeling of life is made
paramount. "If possible, will and desire are abolished together" (GM:
17).
In support of Von Trier's conclusion, you wrote:
>Bess understands marriage as the mystical union of man and woman. Man and woman are >one, therefore, and, thus, in saving Jan Bess is saving herself.
_Now_ we find ourselves at the level of the altruistic ideal. The
orgasmic body is indeed miraculating, mysterious and even ecstatic (in
the sense of overwhelming emotion) but mystical (in the nomenclature of
the Church), it is not. And under the religeous cover of marriage as
"mystical union" everything under the Christian sun may pass and does.
Through the notion of mystical union we may forget the somber,
vituperous communities of revenge, the economy of brutalized and
brutalizing, civilized subsistence, the useless, unending expenditure of
the force of life in labour; the emotionally castrated mothers and
fathers who are unable to impart to their offspring any emotions at all
other than their own clouded fear and loathing of life- even
_especially_ when dressed in the festive smiles of normalcy; the
psychiatric wards where mental, physical and pharmaceutical
straight-jacketing act as backstops to control the overflows of desire
there where the communities of the godly have failed. The no-exit
facade of the slow-suiciding society. Instead, the pious (cynical) man
rejoices that through the mystical union of man and woman, who doubles
as sacrificial lamb (the blood of Eden), we may be saved from all this
by that raging psychopath in the sky, who is also our tormentor, once
his taste for torture has been satiated . There is nothing quite so
stirring or erotic to the Catholic sensibility as the glassy-eyed
androgyne, having lived a life of anguish, bleeding to death in ecstasy;
imagining the final convulsions of death as a delayed but finally
exquisite cosmic orgasm. And no, he protests, he did not enjoy the
suffering, nor was he aroused by it- it was rather his _spirit_ that was
uplifted and by divine grace at that.!...
>In one fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, for instance, a devout and pious family slowly >(and presumably painfully) bleeds to death because God has willed it so.
Just so, one could say it's an obsessive mania. A cheap way to avoid
our responsibility, not before God, but before our own lives. Yes, Mr.
Rhodes-Breton-Sad-Camus, "God did not create us Men, but it was Men who
created God and barred any escape beyond the human, that is to say,
beyond the _state that most promotes suffering_. Men cause suffering,
not God." (Artaud, "A André Breton", 1937)
>But things are a whole lot different if we believe the fairy tale or even if we have only the >slightest twinge of a feeling that maybe, just maybe this fairy tale does have something to do >with reality, in which case we are forced to re-assess our reasonable grasp thereof. We have >to ask ourselves such questions as, if God is good, why would He will such a horrible death >on such a good family? This question would lead us only to more painful questions like, do >we even know what the good is, and this would perhaps smack us up against a most >horrible suggestion, namely that perhaps our reasonable grasp of reality for all its >reasonableness does not help us to understand anything at all.
Such a "good family", Mr. Rhodes? Then let us answer your second
wrenching question: yes, you seem to know very well what this "good" is,
but rather than rage against it, as well as against this
"reasonableness" which bolsters it (the monster of Reason lost to its
senses, the guardian become guard) you clutch your popcorn, swallow
gratefully the director's bait, and clap feverishly for tinkerbell...
"The Church no longer needs bells, because the bells are in the sky,
ensuring that Bess will not go to hell despite the pronouncements of
male ministers" - a Kierkgaardian touch. Perhaps, like Hegel, you
believe that in thought, in the thinking of such thoughts ("just maybe
this fairy tale does have something to do with reality"- your own will
to nothingness, grateful for support), you might overcome your finitude
as a natural being and may therefore attain divinity or 'godness'
itself? Seeking meaning in meanings of meanings- you could equally
avoid the real questions at stake by pondering the number of angels
capable of dancing on the head of a pin and the mystical meanings
thereof. You are loathe to consider such everyday horrors (eg Bess's
sacrifice) as stupid and meaningless. Suffering _must_ have a grand
purpose, and this purpose "must not, at all costs, be considered as the
mere desire to reproduce Power (the 'status quo') for it's own sake but
as something ideal - as the spiritual aim of achieving (God) and Reason
in history". The cost of this choice is paramount: it is nothing short
of perception, of will to power. "This systematic totalization of
perception by intellection, or reasoning, finds in such abstract thought
the totalitarian unity of its system and the reason for its conservative
impotence, the secret motive for its magical and rationalist eulogies of
the 'status quo'." And while contemplating the stagnant ideal, under
your nose still pass the fleeting multiplicities of desire in their
endless dance of creation. Thus spake Lambda C (not Nietzsche).
To be continued...
Lambda C
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