THE HOPELESS DREAM OF BEING
Split natures and broken faces in Aeschylus and Bergman
Born out of the Satyr chorus under the religious auspices of the Dionysian festival in 6th century B.C.E, drama is that unfathomable moment in Western aesthetics when we see before us on the stage for the first time, a poor, suffering individual referring to himself as ‘egô’, ‘I’, yet plainly someone else—a performer. He is and is not the figure he pretends to be, a conceit facilitated by the Dionysian’s greatest tool—the mask. In the word prosopon is the tri-part meaning of face, mask and person. But the mask that the actor of the Greek stage wore was primarily a mechanism to efface his identity, and less to present him to the audience as some one in particular. The face is the salient point of our dealings with people, a gestural matrix that far outstrips speech in expressive power. It is, however, a tool of deception, a veil of seeming that only time can penetrate as we prosopa apply ourselves to the world, revealing our nature through action. The truth that doubles on the stage is a secondary mirroring of the play of human appearances, between being and seeming. This is the sinew of drama, again reflected in the divided nature of its parent god, Dionysus—the complex deity of the Greek stage who is male and female, mortal and divine, masked and intoxicated, youth and adult. He is nature and illusion in one. The strength of the dramatic form is the fragility of human personhood, realised with such perspicacity by the tragedians.
Apollo, friends, Apollo—
He ordained my agonies—my pain on pains!
But the hand that struck my eyes was mine,
Mine alone—no one else—
I did it all myself! (II.1329-33 Oedipus The King)
The figure on the stage is neither Oedipus, nor is he one who has experienced a similar ordeal, nor does he recount what the historical figure Oedipus once said. Where the Lyrist spoke from a universal ‘I’ and the epic poet through a mythopoeic retelling, the figure on the tragic stage was a metaphoric apparition of Oedipus himself. Deploying such a technique implicitly magnifies the experience of human agency, an experience of utter horror to Oedipus and to the audience that witnesses his ruin. ‘I did it all myself!’ he cries, with that lump-in-the-throat terror that grips the individual realising himself as the architect and executor of his own ruin.
With this focus on the face, specifically the two eyes that anchored the mask, Greek tragedians were perhaps germinating the awareness that led to the 20th century close-up. It seems fair to suppose that for the greatest generations of artists working within a specific formal parameter, the choice of what to represent and how to do so is not compromised by the need to venerate or corrupt the azimuth of their art form. When newly born, the form is ill defined, rebellious, unruly. Nearing death, it self-consciously tries to adumbrate its nature (as we see in The Bacchae, with its fatuous emphasis on the rules of the Dionysiac). By returning to the mask the early generations of tragedians were not merely responding to the technical demands of a many-faced actor, but saying something of the deep changes in how they felt the world. Faith in the purity of their insight leads us to the Joycean conclusion that ‘a man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and the portals to discovery’ (Ulysses, 9). The fact that the apogees of tragic art and that of cinema hold within them a tempest of facial dynamics, suggests that cinema, at its purest, revisits the same ontological territory. Looking for examples of this, we come to two artists that, across millennia, speak in a caustic whisper of the same wounded human—those Aeschylus and Bergman. At first we can only awkwardly hold the two side by side, but with a measured grasp and a corrected incidence their correspondence can be glanced. An aesthetic topography of diaphanous faces and profile dynamics, encircled by dark chthonic forces is brought before us, and a weeping lament sounded for an absurd existence. Their setting about the comic-tragic project develops into a compelling echo.
But where truth doubles on the stage, its fragments flicker on the screen. Film language draws equally on classically dramatic principles as plot and characterisation, as it does on the mechanism of the camera—that magical box of mirrors and refracting glass. Vitreous motifs mark frail personhood since the early modern period, but I would argue (returning briefly to Sophocles) that Oedipus removing his glassy aides is part of the same passage from singular individual to shattered aggregate that holds such pertinence in Occidental thought. With the tormented Oedipus in mind, Shakespeare’s Richard II is a dead ringer for the same affliction. He says, staring into a mirror:
A brittle glory shineth in the face: As brittle as the glory is the face
[Dashes the glass against the ground]
For there it is, crack’d in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport
How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face. (IV.i.281-91)
Reality taking on a marked transparency, the selves of tragic art are placed in an impossible position where they are required to act in a world so visibly duplicitous it destroys the will to act at all. Placed up against the liminal tissue of culture, its universalisms warp before their eyes and the glassy sphere of their diminished reality can only be justified in its (temporary) destruction. The face emerges as the topos of this battle, heralded by the Dionysian’s prosopon, a tissue of seeming that can be several times stripped throughout the play—with unnatural ease. The fictitious enunciator staring out into the audience is never the full compliment—never Orestes himself—only a compelling simulation of the man that leaps into dramatic reality in the suspended sphere of seeming that the play affords. Aeschylus’ masks were coloured rags with holes for eyes, not elaborate headpieces, which in the setting would blur into obscurity beyond the first dozen rows of seating. The tragic mask first appears as a dismemberer of identity, rather than an elaborate design. It provides the actor with a distance from the disposition of his character, and the audience with a distance from the actor, mediating audience and performer in order to enable the dramatic apparition to be born. The eyes are all that remain of the civil arrangement, but drawn into the reality of the play as if they were just as much part of the mask. The shifting between the present ‘I’ of the actor and the performed ‘I’ of the protagonist never rests on one absolute of the dramatic axis—one wraps around the other in an active unity, with the eyes at the centre.
Given the prolificacy of the dramatic form, these observations of its base processes might seem redundant to generations of cinema audiences, but in its prototypical phase, drama takes on only the features that issue from a specific ontological field, features that are spontaneous more than prescribed. All it’s aspects—religious, dialogic, optic—are different layers of the same polyphonic fugue. Dionysus, as the god of wine and masks, implicitly glorifies the mutual construction of appearance and reality; the mask composes a surface truth whilst wine elicits a deeper one. Out of the musical mood of the Satyr chorea come characters that for reasons of necessity, avarice, confusion or fear, are forced to apply their deceptive tongues and gestural artistry to fashion a spurious self. Seeming overtakes solid identity and that which is without measure is shown to be the real stuff of personhood. ‘I am change’ could be the Dionysiac’s axiom, reveling in the universal confusion of identities by endlessly stripping reality of its mask, only to regenerate other realities in its place.
Caught in this aesthetic gyre, the tragic hero is a split individual, unable to marry his frail notions of life to the uncompromising bind of a painful fate. The Moiras (the Fates) are a complimentary religious concept, which, like the similarly feminine Dikas (Justice), pull the individual from his starry ideals into the relentless gravity of the actual, forbidding the unchecked progress of a striving intellect. No matter the clarity of ethos, Justice and the Fates will pay their retribution, whether for blasphemy or the killing of kin, even if generations need perish before the thread is fully spun. Time, fate and (specifically Aeschylean) justice will reveal all, and in the process shiver the self into a fragmentary puzzle of appearances. The frightening chorus of Eumenidies (said to have inspired miscarriages in its audience) warns of this decomposition into ineffective aggregate:
For this is the office that relentless Fate spun for us to hold securely: when rash murders of kin come upon mortals, we pursue them until they go under the earth; and after death, they have no great freedom. (Eumenides 335-40)
The fear of an unsatisfactory ontic union with earthly substance (a second death of sorts) is an admission of longing to restore unity on the human plane, generally taking shape in the pursuit of Eros. The split nature of the individual can be healed in various forms of love—for the gods or for another human. Essentially, we are born as halves, and halves cannot form unity in and of themselves. The domestic ruin of tragic visions fall upon universal forms of ‘twoness’, between husband and wife, father and son, mother and child, sister and brother. If broken, the happy polarity unfurls into a gory dismemberment of family and ultimately of self.
The threat is echoed in the Symposium (189c–139d) with a further set of implications. Plato’s Aristophanes begins his deliberation on the god Eros by charting man’s genesis from primal unity to divided individual. The androgunon was the first humanoid, a comic creation with four arms and four legs, two Janiform faces, that got around in a wild cart-wheeling fashion, plotting schemes against the gods. So significant was its power that Zeus ordained to have the creature cut into two separate entities, each sewn up with their genitals and facial aspects twisted so as to face one another, in that moment giving birth to Eros, the only force through which the divided creature could return to its archaian phusin [beginning feature]. Not stopping there, Aristophanes warns of a further division that awaits the individual out of line with the gods or unmoved by Eros, a division that would turn the symmetrical blasphemer into a lower form of sumbolon, that like a profile rendering on a tomb, could only hop about on one leg in confused circles. The secondary division is psychological, whereas the first is sexual, yet both describe the weakness of half-being.
Divisions among the sexes and within the mind comprise the majority of our undoings, indeed they prey upon each other. The choleric mind of the hyperactive introvert is the source of his social ills. Unable to love, the suspicious recluse sacrifices his functional link to the world and to others in order to become the artificial icon of self-reflective identity. Plato’s ruminations on the monopod in the Eros allegory and his comparison to traditional painting conventions seem to describe a rule; the archetypal self shows itself in profile. So when Aeschylus has a second actor walk onto the stage, we are confronted with a new dynamic that includes the profile, and with diagrammatic precision the secondary division between individual and ‘archetype’ is played out in the agon. With this in mind, drawing Bergman into the discussion is less unsettling.
From the start, Bergman, like Aeschylus is working within a religious atmosphere. Dionysus is replaced with Christ—that poor shepherd who dies abandoned on the cross in a bloody fit of pathos. One might ask why Bergman (not a believer) chooses to position God in the firmament of his art. Allied to the miracle of aesthetic awareness more than a divine being, his convictions are closer to the Dionysiac’s. His aim is katharsis, a purgation of the self and a union with primal being. The artist has named his personal gods as Beethoven and Bach, but it is the Christian god that subs in for the aesthetical in the world of his characters. In Through a Glass Darkly Bach becomes the chorus, providing the musical mood from which the action springs. The fictive god of the film is no cello suite, but a harsh, destructive presence. Like the silent Apollo in Euripides’ Ion, God is seen through the eyes of feminine madness, as an arachnid no less, and one that is intent on raping Karin as Apollo raped Creusa. The horror of a silent god is, for Bergman, a universal feature of religiosity, not a modern affliction. The pastor of Winter Light is haunted by the niggling feeling that his faith lies upon something wholly non-existent, a void that revealed itself in the death of his wife. The community suffers for his selfish faith that mistook private love for that of Christ’s. Similarly, the Knight of The Seventh Seal is forced to justify his lot without the glowing goodness of a tangible deity, seeking solace in memories and the company of others. Religion is hideous to the plague-era crusader.
Despite the consonance between Dionysus and Christ, the latter is a far more melancholy figure. As the warden of Winter Light makes known to Ericsson, Christ was beaten out of his own faith, yielding to the belief that his father had forsaken him on the cross. Not only is this a dark admission that Christianity is founded on the works of a blasphemer, but a more Bergmanesque description of the eternal incommensurability between thoughts and actions. Christ’s beauty is in his performance of death and hopelessness after a life on the naïve path of the good, through which he reaches life’s final antithetical justification. It has a touch of Jung’s enantiodromia; where the sustained magnitude of a significant force brings about the opposite of its nature, similarly felt by Shakespeare’s Lear; ‘the lamentable change is from the best, the worst proceeds to laughter’ (IV.i.5-6). The cyclical overcomes the linear rise and fall of the historical, and in doing so the whole universe is embraced in a movement that does not exclude the unjust in favour of the just, seeing two motions of a singular phenomenon. The ever-present Fates of Aeschylean drama and the implicit blasphemy of Christ’s final suffering are images of cyclical undoing and describe the singular ‘I’ as a temporary illusion fashioned and disintegrated by all encompassing forces.
We try out attitudes, and find them all worthless. The forces are too strong…The horrible forces. (Esther, The Silence 1963)
Such forces are overwhelmingly associated with femininity. The Fates and Justice follow the feminine passage of a slow, cyclical application of power. Similarly, Christ’s passion is laden with feminine symbolism; in the presence of blood, the loss of self, the penetration by the spear of Longinus and the subsequent birth of the Sacraments from his left side. The females of Bergman carry on the theme (i.e. Esther above). Unnamed diseases accompanied by madness are the symptoms of his modern Bacchic women, prone to visions, prophecy and destructive of the established order. The presence of these (un)natural women upsets the happy sphere of order that male culture delimits, as they propagate the Dionysiac’s axiom, ‘I am change’. The sexualised division between culture and nature is the interpersonal manifestation of a deeper psychological division between archetype and flesh and blood human. The restored Alma of Persona, once freed from her former anxiety – the strings of her culture – is able to see deep into the reality of personhood. She can shift, as the mask stripping actor of the Attic stage, between natures, even inhabit another persona.
The wild passions of Karin (Through A Glass Darkly) scrape at the brittle ego of her artist father, whose callous obsession with documenting her suffering contaminates his filial bonds. ‘One draws a magic circle around oneself to keep everything out that doesn’t fit one’s games’. In the ecstasy of her disease, which she experiences as both euphoric and terrifying, Karin must remain beyond measure, a constant counterpoint to the vain novelist’s fantasy of knowing her true nature. In keeping with the musical threat of consonance overthrown by dissonance, the feminine soul, untuned to Apollonian measure, shatters the cultural glass and all that is ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘us’, ‘they’. A nauseating freedom robs actions of their purposive strength and only as aesthetic phenomena within the reality of dramatic art can such unjustifiable ends meet in harmony. This is the ‘holy freedom of art, the holy slackness of art’ (Shame 1961).
A specific surface emerges in the Bergman’s treatment of man’s twofold dividedness. His lifetime obsession with depicting the face is, like Aeschylus’s second actor, a diagrammatic exploration of split natures. Endlessly we are shown the face in profile, half-shadow or an arrangement of profile and frontal aspect. Bergman and Nykvist’s complex language visualises the play between 1st and 2nd person, ruler of the discourse and interlocutor, archetype and imperfect human. The feuding sisters of The Silence perform this dynamic of faces, shifting before the camera in helices that map a twofold conflict. Power is never confined to either aspect. The profile intimidates with its cold stare into history, silently reflecting upon itself to solidify its status as archetype, yet tremendously weighed down in the stick of such introspection. The eyes that face the camera are exposed to the emotional barrage of existence, but this emotion confers completeness and a meaningful link to the corporeal world, hence it may act. Only Anna is able to juggle the two functions with any success. Her transitions between archetypal ‘mother’ and ‘nymph’ are seen alongside Esther’s self-destructive passage between hollow intellectual and drunken maenad. Where Anna succeeds in her roles, Esther succeeds in another sense, as the shattered initiate of the ‘masking’ process itself—a wounded Bacchant. ‘Faces’ and ‘hands’, she inscribes on a note for her nephew, bestowing the base truth of the dramatic form, and with it the higher polarity between essence and manifestation. Faces show, hands do; faces veil the truth, hands uncover it. Anna is able to unify sexuality with motherhood, a combination unsettling to Esther and Johan, the former out of inescapable envy, the latter from a necessary male illusion—the separation between archetypal virgin and mother (Johan’s peculiar interest in the Rubens depicting a satyr and nymph seems to legitimise such an appeal to The Silence’s mythic awareness).
The women of Cries and Whispers (1972) are similarly differentiated. Ingrid Thulin, a decade after her role as the academic Esther, gives us Karin, an acerbic matriarch that, like Cervantes’ Vidriera, is characterised by a constant comparison to glassware. Her brittleness is psychosomatic, shielding herself from physical human contact and privately inflicting wounds upon herself with that symbolically heavy substance—glass. She stares into a three-way mirror repeating to herself ‘a tissue of lies’, before performing the bizarre act of cutting into her genitals with a small shard of glass. Her private ritual attempts to artificially unite her cultured visage to a deeper nature through the simple thrill of pain and sexual gratification. The masturbating Esther, and the masochistic Karin are nightmarish visions of individuals trapped in a hall of mirrors, simulating reality within the confines of their own person. Glass is the model of their undoing. Only as a shattered aggregate can the two worlds in question—the inner notion and the outward manifestation—finally meet.
‘Twoness’ is at the base of Ingmar Bergman’s explorations of the human soul. Reading him alongside the master of the 2nd actor, he and Aeschylus seem to body forth a similar awareness, wedded to the psychosocial pall of lost meaning, the biting disjuncture between being and seeming. ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’ is the Corinthians passage from which Bergman’s ‘faith’ trilogy rises. In its context, referring to the opaque glassware of the time (not until 13th century Venice is colourless glass popularised), the wisdom associates what is face-to-face with truth and clarity. Hence, it leaves the brittle glass formula to the ‘dark’ outward glance or profile. Glass, unlike earthenware, never absorbs its contents. It retains its crystalline identity, or is shattered. Tragic art is a vision of shattering, gathering itself into a profound reflection of the maleficent tendency of the individual to construct a private reality on selfish terms. To re-augment the farcical privation of truth, the living icon explodes itself on the stage and the cathartic detritus settles to be rebuilt anew. Beneath these psychical cataclysms are sexual forces, something of a faded plurality in the 21st century. For Aeschylus and Bergman, the female was an entirely different creature. Characters like Alma and Clytemnestra underscore the ease with which the female may travel the passage from archetype to complex ethos (and back again), where men are mired in privilege, hubris and naiveté. When Clytemnestra lectures the chorus of elders on ‘putting appearance before truth’ and ‘forcing their faces into smiles’ while fawning on great men with ‘watery affection’, she is drawing together the sexual, psychological and societal amplitude of such false seeming (Ag. 790-796). As Aeschylus is prone to do, he positions the chorus and the antagonist at sexual opposites, elevating the divisiveness of the social plane into a sexual contest. Ironically, it is Clytemnestra who proves the deceptive sycophant, but this is far from a hypocritical flaw. So well does she play the game of appearances that the hapless Agamemnon is lured down the blood-purple carpet to his slaughter in the feminine waters of the bath. The art of Through A Glass Darkly’s David pales in significance to Karin’s ability to move between entirely different worlds. None of the men of the film ever see into Karin’s visions, only lament the impending loss of her beauty to (an unnamed) schizophrenia. Death breaks them, gutting art and faith of its former integrity. David’s ‘so called art’ is Pastor Ericsson’s so called God, that in the absence of a loving, breathing other loses its glow. And there is always the Swedish twilight as a constant reminder of death’s slow, unrelenting bind.
BIBLIO
Nietzsche, F. 2000, The Birth Of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith, Oxford.
Calarme, C. 1986, The Tragic Mask in Ancient Greece, History of Religions Vol. 26 No.2 pp.124-122, University of Chicago.
Foley, H.P. 1980, The Mask of Dionysuse, Transactions of the American Philological Association, Vol. 110, pp.107-133, Johns Hopkins.
Knox, B.M.W. 1972, Aeschylus and the Third Actor, American Journal of Philology, pp. 104-124, Johns Hopkins.
Stanford, W.B. 1954, ‘The Looking Glass of Society’ in Aeschylus, The Classical Review Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 82-85, Cambridge.
Marshall, C.W. 1999, Some Fifth Century Masking Conventions, Greece & Rome (2nd Series) Vol. 46 No. 2, pp.188-202, Cambridge.
Aeschylus II, 1971, trans. H.W. Smith, Harvard
THE WEEK IN NEWS, 2
MEN WITH WEAPONS WALKING
HU JINTAO TAKING PICTURE
MORE OF A DEAD RHINO
TV PRESENTERS
A PAGE FROM THE BOOK
PUSH IN TO BULB
THE WEEK IN NEWS, 1
BLOOD ON WALLS OF BUS
PROTESTERS SHOUTING ‘NO TO AMERICAN DRAMA”
HOUSE WITH THREATENING MESSAGES SCRAWLED IN BLOOD
SEALS OF INFLATABLE BOATS
HILLS
MORE OF FLAMES
PEOPLE LOOKING AT LAPTOPS
SMITH’S HANDS
OFFICIAL BALL
DRIVERS AND RIDERS
Wide of the sophora flowers
REALISED; RELEASED
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 2011
Edition of 50, 40 pages, 19 x 26 cm, digital offset print
$AU30 at www.leonbatchelor.com
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
God of light and truth, Apollo is the photographer par excellence. We might picture him skirting the clouds, shooting from the hip, repurposing light and bestowing his immortal truths to the awe-struck suppliants below. All photographers are Apollonians by trade. They set aside the flux of the material world as though it need only exist hypothetically, in service of.
Though Apollo’s voice has long been silenced, lost in the banter of his many emissaries. The camera is the most prolific of these and fiercely it has undertaken to enclose the world in a photographic circumference. Without obstruction or warning the epic bidimensional plane gathers the world into its symbolic triumph. It goes unnoticed that the photograph, like the furnace and the laboratory, infiltrates the material substrate of what surrounds us. The ensuing struggle to locate where the artificial gives way to the natural ends in apparent failure, having only turned up endless forms of artificiality. Not without this great sacrifice does the camera goad the world into imagery and the beauty of mere appearance.
To delight endlessly in the divinatory apparatus of the camera is to inevitably terminate its grace. We suddenly look upwards into the light and find only an irresolvable glare. The Apollonian is then put upon to seek out the cause of this terminus but will only cast his eyes sideways in suspicion of the actual. This movement sideways into the mortal world brings with it a challenge to the photograph – that it is merely artifice. As if destined towards this final obstacle, the modal axes of the camera disclose a conflict of this very nature. For if the ‘portrait’ is to portray then the horizontal aperture must involve itself in something else. It resists the allegorical might of the portrait, gesturing upwards into theory, divination and eternity. Rather the ‘landscape’ looks anxiously about the horizon, resisting apotheoses.
So the Apollonian presses on, a man with a hammer to which everything looks like a nail. His frenetic use of the camera to pulverise all that is into two meagre axes habituates us to the photograph’s prosaic consciousness, its Artificial Intelligence. Though don’t we still look timidly through the lens – into what? “Shall truth in truth’s own temple be denied?” [1]
1. Euripides, Ion, trans. Gilbert Murray 1954 [366]
Hamlet and Dionysian man
“In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no - true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man,
Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; now he understands what is symbolic in Ophelia’s fate; now he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god; Silenus: he is nauseated.
Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; faced with the intermediary world of these Dionysian companions, the feelings described here exhausted themselves.”
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [section.7]
Stills from Gamlet, 1964. by Grigori Kozintsev, scored by Dmitri Shostakovich
BERGMAN’S CATHEDRAL
“People ask what are my intentions with my films-my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be.
There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed-master builders, artists, laborers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.
Regardless of my own belief and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; “eternal values,” “immortality “and “masterpiece” were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.
Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal.
Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil-or perhaps a saint-out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts. Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.”
From Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergmanr (New York, 1960), pp. 21-22.
Rudd as literary construct
Image via The Canberra TimesPolitics is not poetry. It is built on a sickly bureaucratic tongue, prone to repetition, passivity, dangling third-person plurals and a whole stinking host of corpse-like lexical impoverishments. This is the lingua franca of politics, a system with a grand taxonomy. The newest local addition is the Ruddism; the verb “fiddle-faddle”, the graceless metaphor “life’s walls”, among a catalog of stand-ins for his much-hyped foulness of tongue. “Balderdash”, he rebuked the miners with, “absolute bunkum”. The Gillardism is perhaps on its own humble journey, although “moving forward” just cannot compare to the much-erring “fair shake of the sauce bottle mate”, nor the magisterial “detailed programmatic specificity”.
Then why, with such fertile oratory in the air, does Kevin commentary carry with it such a comprehensive, and equally divers, bank of literary and historical illusions? The man refuses to be pinned down by the bored scholarship of the opinion pages that repeatedly dips into the histories and the canon to find evidence of his true nature, turning up many contradicting versions of a thoroughly unfathomable figure. Latest efforts continue the trope. A Canberra Times piece, Rudd is Banquo at the feast, adds not much more than a headline and a cartoon to the dramatic cause. And an inch-by-inch (or cm x cm) Napoleonic allegory in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Labor’s Little Corporal rallies troops for Battle of Waterloo went as far as predicting a full scale comeback after Rudd ‘blitzed’ the ABC’s Q&A (when did they tune in?). Both attempts to render Rudd readable leave much to the imagination, if for different reasons. Where one lacks illustrative detail, the other bends multiple histories to fashion an incomprehensible future. Leave it to some pithy Brisbanite’s in the comment section to cry foul:
Napoleon introduced reforms that last to this day. The Napoleonic code, the metric system, establishment of the central bank, Banque de France. Rudd gave us Pink batts, fuel watch and the BER. (Pete)
This column is a waste of space. (Bob Meadows)
The literary and historic allusion writes politics large, larger than it often deserves, stealing the ethos of more illustrious political characters and kindling present-day parliamentarians in their image. The floor of the House is oft the stage, not merely the reference, for such rhetorical conceits. So it was with the spectre of the ‘carbon tax’, driving Abbott’s gormless misquote “Out, out, foul spot!” trying to somehow fashion a “latter-day Lady Macbeth” from Gillard’s back-room conspiring against a ransomed King Rudd. Not as Banquo, but the King of Scotland, Rudd’s blood spilled over into the hands of the Opposition. In particular, the Shakespearean palette provides for useful application in the political sphere. Not explicitly historical, it wraps a thread of the fantastical to the discourse without miring the assertion in the stick of historical ‘fact’. In the ribaldry of politics, Shakespeare provides a context to discuss the various fictions of political life in their true form—as fictions.
The challenge remains, unaided by a culture ever waning in affection for the Bard, to somehow interpret Kevin Rudd through this rubric. The drama is there—the man cried on national television after being pried from the leadership in his first term—yet the scholarship is messy, and once and for all his psychology needs to be given an Elizabethan equivalent and set aside, lest we all lose hope in the ‘Shakespearean method’, a certain loss to posterity.
Rudd, of course, liked to picture himself as the benevolent Henry V, invoking him in the great GFC siege of ‘09, mustering his citizenry “into the breach”. But come the auguries of “the greatest moral and economic challenge of our age”, Rudd is crestfallen, harassed by an obese mining lobby, and plots are afoot among the assassins of the Labor right. Henry V would have seen that coming, beheaded Gillard and Shorten, and perhaps hung drawn and quartered that “cruel, ingrateful, savage and inhuman creature”, Mark Arbib. But this did not come to pass, and Rudd made a muck of Henry V by blubbering on the evening news after a very efficient, bloodless coup. Truly, at no point was Rudd ever made of the same mettle as Henry V, and would have rightly feared to wander the Labor camp at nightfall to find out what the caucus really thought of him. As the precise, uncompromising leader Rudd was known to be, his “merry few” turned out to be literally three people in the upper establishment of cabinet.
Exiled, not assassinated, Rudd finds himself in the psychological moor of the foreign affairs portfolio, a lonely, white-haired misanthrope reminiscent of the ailed King Lear. Roaming the heath of the UN Security Council, demanding urgent briefings on unstable Japanese nuclear reactors, marshaling a no-fly zone over Libya, the deluded champion of the good shook his pen at the storm clouds. Filial ingratitude had taken its toll and the minister, like the sorry Lear, was tolerated in his fits of righteous tally-ho-ing, but not encouraged. In the opening act, the ETS was like the honest beauty Cordelia, apparently unwilling and unable to summarise its merits in a few sweet stanzas. It wore the fate of all unsellable policies and was promptly sold off.
On the other side of politics, the subplot found its footing in the ousting of Malcolm Turnbull, that noble Gloucester who’s far-seeing eyes only led him towards calamity. A similarly brutal fate awaited the Liberal leader, and after his eyes had been plucked out in retribution for his Earthly disposition, the most eloquent of parliamentarians roamed blind through the hinterland of the backbench lamenting the loss of a saner polity, “I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw. Full oft ‘tis seen, our means secure us, and our mere defects prove our commodities”. In the months that ensued, the backwardness of the Abbott reign began to take shape as Rudd searched for insights in a private storm cloud.
Foreign Minister Rudd, strangely hanging onto the airs of a Prime Minister, was resolved to be philosophical. His recent Q&A appearance mixed mea culpa with a more naturalistic bitterness. As he squirmed through the recent history of Labor injustices, he seemed to revel in the chance to flick some mud at Gillard and Swan, his scoundrel progeny, by suggesting that “there were those in cabinet” that wanted to scrap the emissions trading scheme for good, something he could not abide. And in case this gave the impression that it was not all his fault, Rudd launched into a pining aside where the audience got another dose of his uniquely uninspiring contrition. And this is the first of many threads that unravel Rudd qua Lear, and where the ‘Shakespearean Method’ begins to lose its footing over a man who seems destined to forever be “hidden in full view”, as David Marr observed in his Quarterly Essay treatment of the former PM’s psychopathology.
Lear is only applicable to Rudd as a cautionary tale, something with which the younger, pernicious bureaucrat could measure the lessons wrought from his downfall. In Lear’s stormy, shattered state, the old king turns to Rudd and jeers; “Get thee glass eyes; And, like the scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not.” Rudd wanted to have it both ways; noble martyr in the battle for a greener economy and mild servant of the people, waxing apologetic to the ABC audience over his failure to enact this self-same policy. Forever the politician, his ‘just call me Kevin’ act was more foolish than ever now the reality of the brief Rudd years has been shown for the intricate fabrication of media-managing and poll-driven plotting that it was.
He has been called characterless, driven by anger, stubborn, ambitious, vicious, domineering, an alien—yet something remains unfinished in the public discourse on Rudd that suggests a deep fascination with his glassy exterior - fragile yet not at all malleable. Tragedy is founded on the maxim that justice inclines its scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering, but for our Kevin this wisdom seems eternally beyond reach no matter the inflictions made on his person. Stuck in the gyre of pretense that sabotaged his erstwhile impervious man-of-action façade, he struggles to communicate, having stretched the public’s patience too thin. As David Burchell at The Australian pointed out last year, “because Rudd has assembled his public personality out of his perceived need to be all things to all men - a Jew to Jews, a gentile to gentiles, speaking to the weak in the language of the weak… it’s hard to discern the character on whom this tragedy is being enacted.” Burchell, like Marr is prone to dwell on the esoteric nature of political identity, but there is something undisclosed in Rudd that calls for such responses.
The man brilliantly fashioned a mirage of respect and solidarity that eddied across the entire party structure, concealing the real potential of a leadership challenge. No one saw it coming—especially Rudd, who squirmed for hours in front of Gillard, Swan and the negotiator John Faulkner on that fateful eve’. The sudden leadership baton-swap was as jarring for the media as it was for the majority of the Labor party, and efforts to evaluate the mess turned up more Shakespearean allusions than the member for Griffith could wear. Not Banquo, Henry V, Lear, nor any other exiled, deposed or baited character from the folio would prove a worthy mach. Prospero forgave Antonio. Coriolanus had the guts to rebuke his usurpers. Rudd, true to his legacy, did nothing. He resists that tradition in politics to die the good death, accept one’s fate and move to the subterranean of memoir writing or public speaking engagements. The Labor show will struggle to go on as long as Rudd’s glassy mantle haunts its stage. Not quite a politician, not quite a work of art, he is a character more splintered than Shakespeare could endure.
The Promethean Coup:
E-commerce and the chrysalis of artificial life in space
“Such contrivances have I invented for mortals, yet, wretch that I am, I have no device by which I can escape my present sufferings.” [1]
Having thieved the creative ‘fire’ of Zeus and bestowed it unto man, Prometheus laments the age that he must spend chained to a rock, far from the inspired toiling of the sovereign souls whom owe this apostate their intellect. Making a leap, half judged and half hoping, we find the modern conquest of the stars aligning itself with the tragic view of human nature found in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. With the very real prospect of cultivating existence beyond Earth, the spectre of artificial intelligence threatens to supplant Prometheus with mankind, and, as the fruits of our labour sprout limbs and march off into space, leave man shackled to a dying Earth. Who would ascribe such pitiful a destiny to us—Prometheus’ proud favourites? Schlegel, no misanthrope, saw the tale of Prometheus as “an image of human nature itself” [2]. The leviathan brooding beneath the surface is of uncertain design, yet as the CEO of PayPal sells up and looks to colonise Mars in a matter of decades, we’re forced to entertain a synthetic, privatised, networked hive in our imaginings. Indeed, many of the fuselages in the commercial space race display an immaterial dotcom genesis in their branding, and are but one of the signifiers of what manner of life may reach beyond the gravitational singularity of Earth.
Elon Musk, billionaire founder of SpaceX, Tesla Motors and Paypal, takes a longer view than most of the prospects for life in the passionless expanse of space. The astro-pioneer entrepreneur calls on the human race to extend life beyond Earth now. “It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it’s been possible and that window could be open for a long time…or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now” [3]. Branson may grin with unremitting zeal at his quaint sub-orbital day trips for Russian businessmen but Musk stands as the lone corporate force hell-bent on the red planet. In an evolutionary turn away from the Darwinian to the Lamarkian, the proverbial Giraffe may push its head high enough and long enough to get that new neck. To perform this heavenly elevation of the human conscience (body in tow or not) would be to fulfil numerous worst nightmares. Though it can’t be gainsaid, an immensity of human fantasy is spurred on by the hubris for our pithy instrumentation. “Man in several years is able to effect a selection which slothful nature can produce only after centuries”, says Huysmans’ sycophantic hero of À Rebours. The divided camps fall in distinct territories of our nature, as space travel hits at the crux of civilization’s plans for itself, forcing us to pick a side.
This is the tale of human innovation, the poiesis that fans out across history, realised in the divers modes of ordering, both constructive and destructive, that drive the technological winds. At base, this innovation has a conservative logic to it. The first Hominid tribes of the savannah brought nature under control to reach homeostasis—tools to keep warm, to feed, to prolong the existence of the clan [4]. This steady-state, although foreign to we self-afflicting moderns, is still represented in aspects of the industrialised world. Even the humble air-conditioner is a tool for correcting an inbalance, but demonstratively, its mass-uptake and the inefficiency of its application overrides any hypothetical ‘use-value’, pointing us to a different understanding of our ‘uptooling’. In what is an astonishing destabilisation of this techno-genetic principle, the tools themselves become the steady-state environment and we the means for its moderation. No longer homeostatic, but technostatic, the penumbra of human artifice transfers its historic role to its enthusiastic patrons. Space travel proves the ultimate hubristic act, the great justification of a civilisation too big for its boots. If we are to side with its prophecy, essentially that space travel is a necessary event for our species’ survival, then we must prepare for the magnitude of change that awaits the intellectual and corporeal human in its impending realisation.
The stupendously ambitious aspect of Mr. Musk’s SpaceX venture is not his destination, but the more implicit intention to have the journeys manned. The Mars payload will be endowed with Earth’s evolutionary steed and in this extravagance is Elon Musk’s first major misstep. His imagination seems all too human when set against his purpose, composing posterity in terms of beating human hearts while marshalling a movement that lays a very different seed. The future existence of inter-stellar man is both heartless and dickless, and no amount of courage or boldness on Musk’s part should let us indulge the contrary. The idyllic image of cosmonaut life is turgidly reiterated in the pictorial and cinematic fantasies of the last century as huge domiciled terrains that say more about our inability to live on Earth than our potential to flourish elsewhere. Any colonisation of regions beyond Earth will have no recognisable footprint (how we marked the Moon), as more successful prototypes evince. We are lured anxiously into a future where a diffuse, biosynthetic supra-human roams joylessly through imperfect vacua, digesting rogue sediment and embalming itself in protectively engineered algae, whilst a virtual interior churns through vast amalgams of coded farce that ceaselessly conjure a long abstracted self. And if this sounds hyperbolic, we only need to recall that we once sent a golden LP into space encoded with the brainwaves of Ann Druyan thinking thoughts of love for Carl Sagan, along with some Beethoven and Chuck Berry to boot. Information is a seed easily extracted from its inefficient Earthly hosts. This contemporary information ecology is mainly a method for its own inward machinations—node to node. Comparatively, human activity is a rarity in the current media sphere. The alien phylogenetic criteria of environments beyond Earth are far more suited to these non-metabolic digital interlocutors. Musk’s humanism, however, does not reach this far out, and even if the spirits of his instruments have arguably intimated their design on such perilous territory, we have not cared to listen. Just as the plough built the pyramids, e-commerce will send a queer golem off into space.
This vague, shapeless inevitability is strangely intuitive to nostalgic modernity, with its deep concern for progress, the point of no return and the image of information as an autonomous being. But is this “nostalgia for the whole and the one” [5], a captioning of modernism we owe to Lyotard, only tentatively locatable in a limpid coterie of late-modern theorists? Where there is certainly a feeling of ‘woe is us’ among many, it is perhaps overridden by a stronger kind of collectivist sentiment, one that can be traced back to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan; where he points equivocally to his contemporary, Artificial Man.
For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, which is but an Artificiall Man…in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment…are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall.
Hobbes manifests a collective, supra-conscious spirit said to inhabit all matter and motion of man, his laws and automata. An homage to artificial intelligence more passionate and adroitly reasoned is not likely to be found, nor one written with such pompous felicity. The dense composition of the Hobbesian common-wealth is framed by an essential capitulation to the ‘Artificial Man’ of mechanism and bureaucratic device, with whom a covenant has been struck to ensure a measure of peace and freedom; specifically, freedom from a state of ‘nature’ or irrationality. His undeniably brutal, but cheerfully theoretical reading of all person and material as instruments of a collective superhuman teeters on an industrial apotheosis. In a way this is his prerogative and he trod dangerously close to blasphemy for it. Giving credit where it’s due, Hobbes was far subtler minded than some of his latter day countrymen (Bentham, Hitchens), and with a reverent cadence, Hobbes found his kinsman more put upon than idiotic, with worldly pressures weighing strongly on their moral constitution, and that outward looking anxiety that things could all so easily descend into to a state of warre.
The necessary bonds of man to the mechanisms of sovereign power must remain in linkage, not by the strength of their design at all – Hobbes classifies them as weak – but by the dangers that stem from breaking them [6]. Years on, the fragility of the bond between man and machine is still, in effect, its greatest strength. As we grow ever more fearful of a world divorced from mechanism, we form an ancillary pact to carry on the incubation of Artificial Man’s problematic growth. Our commitment to this supra-conscious entity, or ‘mortal god’ as Hobbes revered, is a contract we have struggled to understand. It is a deity of many heads, some bearing the grimace of rationalism, others the symmetry of a virtual utopia, and its present omnipotence is what we feel when thrust against progressive technologists like Musk, reeling back in horror at the cyborg shadow they cast – in them the implicit promise of man’s final hour.
Similarly to the Hobbesian common-wealth, the question of extra-terrestrial man rests on a matter of allegiance. To what are we morally bound – to our race or to our planet? To our spirit or our institutions? And to what extent are we conscious of this allegiance, wherever it may lie? Likely, our general feeling will be that mankind hasn’t the right nor the capacity to treat the greater universe as terra nullius. And taken to its conclusion this moral acumen finds humanity chained to the Earth like the activist to a tree, but with the same chains unwittingly strangling the very thing they hope to save. Isn’t it the case that releasing man from Earth, in turn releases Earth from man? Without the measure of hindsight, this allegiance seems hard to detect, though Hermes, in the final moments of Prometheus Bound, offers up this biting dictum:
Do not, when you have been caught in the snares of ruin, throw the blame on fortune, nor ever at any time say that Zeus cast you into unforeseen calamity: none indeed, but you your own selves: for well aware, and not on a sudden, nor in ignorance, will you be entangled by your senselessness in an impervious net of destruction. [7]
In the face of the goading Hermes, Prometheus knew his fate, and I contend it is equally true of mankind. Yet we continue the incubation of machine life even as it scars us. It may be that the anonymous figure that Zeus’ messenger refers to, who will “substitute in thy pangs, and shall be willing to go both to gloomy Hades, and to the murky depths…” is revealed as man himself, in a similar way man constitutes the vessel of Hobbes’ Leviathan but tragically far from the lofty hopes of mid-17th-century England. The Heracles of the myth, who slays the liver-eating bird, begins man on his own journey of self-discovery. Perhaps unknown to Aeschylus, in its final act the Promethean coup observes the heroic arts of man betray the ferocious optimism of its progenitors, and consign them to a wretched hunk of iron.
[1] Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, Loeb Classical, trans. Alan H. Sommerstein, 2008, Harvard, p. 493
[2] A.W Schlegel, 1886, p.79
[3] Paul Harris, The Observer, Elon Musk: I’m planning to retire to mars
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/01/elon-musk-spacex-rocket-mars
[4] W.I. Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, 1981, Rider/Hutchinson, London, p.76
[5] J,-F Lyotard, 1985, p.81-82
[6] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Form, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, Peng. 1985, p.264
[7] ibid Sommerstein 2008, p. 561
