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All things shining
Apr. 7th, 2012 03:51 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 1. High today: 11.
Around 5:30 this afternoon, I picked out Venus again, twice, lying on the ground. Each time, I stood up, and couldn't find it anymore. The second time, I tried to hold on to it as I stood up, but it vanished somewhere on the way. I don't have any good guess as to why this should be; poetical explanations, obviously, suggest themselves, which one might find enticing or distasteful depending on one's taste. (I just find them too obvious. But I might say that I do find referring to Venus as "it" a little, er, impersonal.)
The last two nights, we watched The Thin Red Line and Badlands, to round out our intermittent Terrence Malick festival. I wish that I'd seen his films in order, especially the last three, which clearly form some sort of trilogy, though I don't imagine he set out to make one. I said after seeing The Tree of Life that I thought it needed to be longer, but The Thin Red Line and The New World might as well be episodes in The Tree of Life. (I'm really surprised that these three films don't seem to be conventionally referred to as a trilogy. I would've called them Malick's "nature trilogy"; there seems to be one person commenting on one forum who has called them his "Man and Nature trilogy".) The trouble with watching Tree of Life first, I think, is that many images from the other two films recur in it, and so, watching them out of order, you get the feeling that Malick just can't resist shots of waterfalls and low-banked rivers and sunlight streaming through trees (which is probably true, too; after all, I can relate), and when they come up, you think, oh, there's another Malick shot. A long ways into Thin Red Line, I said to L. that there hadn't been a waterfall yet, but then there was. I think that if you watch them in order, the effect might be something like the effect of The Road after the string of McCarthy novels starting with Blood Meridian: you might see Tree of Life as Malick reducing the thing he has been saying to its essence.
I think it's probably also useful to see Badlands first, or to see it first and pay more attention than I did when I watched it on youtube before seeing Tree of Life (though, as always, the problem is that you don't know what it is you ought to have paid attention to until you have the whole in view). It is very easy to get the impression from the last three films that Malick is a kind of Manichean, and maybe he even is, but if so, he's not a simple one. There are a lot of idyllic indigenous people and--what to call them?--soft, idealized women (and hard, brutal men) in those last three films. There is a lot of voice-over pondering about how evil came into the world, and visual assertion of natural innocence (both beautiful and sublime) in opposition to civilized fallenness. As I said before about Tree of Life, it's an easy mistake when you begin with that film to suppose that the opening lines about the opposition between nature and grace is a thesis statement; by the end of that film you've got to realize that it's a mistake, but with the others it's plain that nothing could be further from the truth. For Malick the fall from grace is a fall from nature (and, for me, it is to Malick's great credit that he is not afraid to make himself ridiculous in his hammering on that point). And yet in Badlands the fallen savages of civilization spend a while living an idyllic life in the woods (and there are a bunch of those Malick-y shots to show it). In Thin Red Line, if I understood what I saw, the natives whose innocent life begins the film are eventually shown to have shelves of skulls. (A shrine, maybe? Probably not.)
I have to say that I was taken aback by the last line in The Thin Red Line (which goes to show how little I've bothered to poke around the net for stuff about Malick), given that his name doesn't appear anywhere (that I recall, or in the index) in All Things Shining. It, uh, suggests a possible identity (which one might rather do without, but, well, there it is) for the "wise old master" in the Epilogue of All Things Shining, who tells his two students: "The time has come for you to go out into the world. Your life there will be felicitous if you find in it all things shining."
I had started to say that that Epilogue says something very close to my heart, but as I write it out, well, maybe not so much. It goes on like this: the two students go out into the world, and years later they meet again: "Said the first to the second, glumly, 'I have learned to see many shining things in the world, but alas I remain unhappy. For I also find many sad and disappointing things, and I feel I have failed to heed the master's advice. Perhaps I will never be filled with happiness and joy, because I am simply unable to find all things shining.' Said the second to the first, radiant with happiness, 'All things are not shining, but all the shining things are.'" There is something that I like about this, which is what I like about Sturgeon's Law, and what I find enticing about Nietzsche's thought that one eternal moment of joy can redeem all of existence. But it is not that essential Heideggerian thought which is closest to my heart, and which I don't think Dreyfus and Kelly get. Dreyfus and Kelly are the kind of Heideggerians who follow Heidegger back to the Homeric and Heraclitean Greeks and suppose that you've gotten where you need to get once you've recovered a sense of being as phusis, burgeoning upwelling overflowing (joyous and terrible) "nature"--"whooshing up", in Dreyfus and Kelly's infamous phrase (which actually doesn't appear until late in the book). Not all things are shining, maybe, if not all things lend themselves to showing up in the manner of phusis (which, you can say, much of the flat plastic and concrete ugliness of our world does not, or not easily). But if you get that the heart of what Heidegger is after is not the original or best or truest revealing of being but the very revealing of being itself (that truth in the deepest sense that makes truth in any other sense possible)--the "event" of the (continuous) lightning-flash of being's happening-to-us--then it's impossible to follow Heidegger and say that all things are not shining, though some things allow us into their shining more easily than others, and again it is ugliness (both the flat kind and the horrible kind) that allows it least. "Beauty is the shining of truth"--beauty is the apparentness of the the lightning-flash of being.
Around 5:30 this afternoon, I picked out Venus again, twice, lying on the ground. Each time, I stood up, and couldn't find it anymore. The second time, I tried to hold on to it as I stood up, but it vanished somewhere on the way. I don't have any good guess as to why this should be; poetical explanations, obviously, suggest themselves, which one might find enticing or distasteful depending on one's taste. (I just find them too obvious. But I might say that I do find referring to Venus as "it" a little, er, impersonal.)
The last two nights, we watched The Thin Red Line and Badlands, to round out our intermittent Terrence Malick festival. I wish that I'd seen his films in order, especially the last three, which clearly form some sort of trilogy, though I don't imagine he set out to make one. I said after seeing The Tree of Life that I thought it needed to be longer, but The Thin Red Line and The New World might as well be episodes in The Tree of Life. (I'm really surprised that these three films don't seem to be conventionally referred to as a trilogy. I would've called them Malick's "nature trilogy"; there seems to be one person commenting on one forum who has called them his "Man and Nature trilogy".) The trouble with watching Tree of Life first, I think, is that many images from the other two films recur in it, and so, watching them out of order, you get the feeling that Malick just can't resist shots of waterfalls and low-banked rivers and sunlight streaming through trees (which is probably true, too; after all, I can relate), and when they come up, you think, oh, there's another Malick shot. A long ways into Thin Red Line, I said to L. that there hadn't been a waterfall yet, but then there was. I think that if you watch them in order, the effect might be something like the effect of The Road after the string of McCarthy novels starting with Blood Meridian: you might see Tree of Life as Malick reducing the thing he has been saying to its essence.
I think it's probably also useful to see Badlands first, or to see it first and pay more attention than I did when I watched it on youtube before seeing Tree of Life (though, as always, the problem is that you don't know what it is you ought to have paid attention to until you have the whole in view). It is very easy to get the impression from the last three films that Malick is a kind of Manichean, and maybe he even is, but if so, he's not a simple one. There are a lot of idyllic indigenous people and--what to call them?--soft, idealized women (and hard, brutal men) in those last three films. There is a lot of voice-over pondering about how evil came into the world, and visual assertion of natural innocence (both beautiful and sublime) in opposition to civilized fallenness. As I said before about Tree of Life, it's an easy mistake when you begin with that film to suppose that the opening lines about the opposition between nature and grace is a thesis statement; by the end of that film you've got to realize that it's a mistake, but with the others it's plain that nothing could be further from the truth. For Malick the fall from grace is a fall from nature (and, for me, it is to Malick's great credit that he is not afraid to make himself ridiculous in his hammering on that point). And yet in Badlands the fallen savages of civilization spend a while living an idyllic life in the woods (and there are a bunch of those Malick-y shots to show it). In Thin Red Line, if I understood what I saw, the natives whose innocent life begins the film are eventually shown to have shelves of skulls. (A shrine, maybe? Probably not.)
I have to say that I was taken aback by the last line in The Thin Red Line (which goes to show how little I've bothered to poke around the net for stuff about Malick), given that his name doesn't appear anywhere (that I recall, or in the index) in All Things Shining. It, uh, suggests a possible identity (which one might rather do without, but, well, there it is) for the "wise old master" in the Epilogue of All Things Shining, who tells his two students: "The time has come for you to go out into the world. Your life there will be felicitous if you find in it all things shining."
I had started to say that that Epilogue says something very close to my heart, but as I write it out, well, maybe not so much. It goes on like this: the two students go out into the world, and years later they meet again: "Said the first to the second, glumly, 'I have learned to see many shining things in the world, but alas I remain unhappy. For I also find many sad and disappointing things, and I feel I have failed to heed the master's advice. Perhaps I will never be filled with happiness and joy, because I am simply unable to find all things shining.' Said the second to the first, radiant with happiness, 'All things are not shining, but all the shining things are.'" There is something that I like about this, which is what I like about Sturgeon's Law, and what I find enticing about Nietzsche's thought that one eternal moment of joy can redeem all of existence. But it is not that essential Heideggerian thought which is closest to my heart, and which I don't think Dreyfus and Kelly get. Dreyfus and Kelly are the kind of Heideggerians who follow Heidegger back to the Homeric and Heraclitean Greeks and suppose that you've gotten where you need to get once you've recovered a sense of being as phusis, burgeoning upwelling overflowing (joyous and terrible) "nature"--"whooshing up", in Dreyfus and Kelly's infamous phrase (which actually doesn't appear until late in the book). Not all things are shining, maybe, if not all things lend themselves to showing up in the manner of phusis (which, you can say, much of the flat plastic and concrete ugliness of our world does not, or not easily). But if you get that the heart of what Heidegger is after is not the original or best or truest revealing of being but the very revealing of being itself (that truth in the deepest sense that makes truth in any other sense possible)--the "event" of the (continuous) lightning-flash of being's happening-to-us--then it's impossible to follow Heidegger and say that all things are not shining, though some things allow us into their shining more easily than others, and again it is ugliness (both the flat kind and the horrible kind) that allows it least. "Beauty is the shining of truth"--beauty is the apparentness of the the lightning-flash of being.
