When I was recently reminded of the The Luzern Photograph, a posed picture in 1882, showing the famous ménage à trois of Lou Andreas Salomé, Frederick Nietzsche, and Paul Rée, some memories stirred.[1]
The photo shows Nietzsche in harness being “whipped” by Lou, while Rée stands leaning bemusedly on the outside of the harness. Since Nietzsche’s impulse was behind the staged photo, we may assume that some (possibly unconscious) intention to do with his life path placed him alone as the horse while Lou’s erotic interest seems more directed to the younger man’s rear end, goading him on (into his career as poet, as she did with Rilke?). All this led me once again to the 1889 apocryphal Turin incident in which Nietzsche saw a horse being whipped. He rushed over and embraced the horse, sobbing. Shortly after he became “comatose”, a state of paralytic dementia, remaining in that state for ten years before he died.
This incident also captured the imagination of Hungarian director Béla Tarr in 1985. He later composed and directed a movie, The Turin Horse, in 2011. This movie was based on the artistic question, “what happened to the horse?” I soon found my way to an interview with Tarr at Cineuropa—an astonishing interview (see link at end)! To take just one passage here:
Our starting point was Nietzsche’s sentence, “God is dead”. This character says, “We destroyed the world and it’s also God’s fault,” which is different from Nietzsche. The key point is that the humanity, all of us, including me, are responsible for destruction of the world. But there is also a force above human at work – the gale blowing throughout the film – that is also destroying the world. So both humanity and a higher force are destroying the world.
Tarr’s startling thought flies in the face of contemporary belief, held in so many disciplines, that our world-wide predicament is “human-caused” only. We have taken any notion of “a higher force destroying the world” completely out of the contemporary world picture (apart from extreme religious, anachronistic groups etc.). Yet Tarr, a thoroughly modern man, just goes ahead and inserts this “alien” notion (ie alien to the modern ear), without explanation, into his interview.
Such shocking claims are the work of an artist, or madman! We could compare such artistic/mad claims with those of poets like Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…” What human being is responsible for this disaster that Yeats speaks of? Yet can its truth be doubted today?
Tarr claims that BOTH forces (human and “above human”) are destroying the world. In our collective attempts to save ourselves, we are paying attention to only one—the human one. We simply do not want to countenance for a moment that there might be a force working in the world that we humans cannot, at least in principle, control. We are, however, about to be shown!
Some of us can apprehend glimpses of this “higher force” from time to time. I have, many times. For example, in 2016, I reported a dream in an essay.[2] I will repeat it here:
A huge, whirlwind storm is emerging into visibility from (as?) a mountain and approaching us. Its self-originating light is partially obscured by a circus that is in the foreground—i.e., the artificial lights of the circus obscure it. Yet the storm itself is becoming visible.
Now in 2018 it has become clear that the only aspect of our growing predicament that we focus on is the human one as I said (e.g., the Trump circus in the foreground). We ignore the truth of such dreams or such artistic claims because we have no category of experience by which we can address the “more than human” side of the destructive force ripping our lives to shreds. We have dispensed with any metaphysical category (“God is dead!”) and refuse to open our hearts to the truths of poetic speech. So we can thus only reduce such dreams to the human dimension, at the cost of the actual phenomenology of the dream. At best, we conclude that the dream storm (or Barr’s unrelenting gale in his movie) must only refer to actual storms that are caused by climate change i.e., once again, only human causes!
However, certain individuals are confronted with the reality of the dream storm in ways that cannot be ignored or simply reduced to the human-all-too-human. How can such individuals share their findings, their appeals, their truth, with others?
In my view there is only one way now—”the way of the artist”— artists such as Béla Tarr, who boldly makes such truth claims as the above, with no explanation. He, like Yeats, offers instead an artist’s inspiration![3]
There is one thing you can do, at least in the beginning, if you want to explore this uncanny utterance from a visionary artist. Watch his movie! See if you can find your way to the truth of what he is saying. This truth will by-pass the busy mind, buried as it is in today in what we are told to think or believe, reduced as it is now to a transitory meme vehicle, and parasitized by information that has nothing to do with human individuality.
Truth instead may pierce the heart and a bell may sound.
You can find Tarr’s interview here. Be warned, it’s dark and bleak but speaks truth.
Also the movie trailer:
[1] With thanks to Russ Lockhart
[2] The Light within Our Ever-darkening Shadow
[3] MAKING NEW WORLDS: the way of the artist
(NB: the movie is hard to get online. I bought a copy on eBay)
