Being At Sea

Kiefer, Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them, they sank as lead, 2020

The sea, broad and vast, with all its mighty force, ended right there before his eyes. Be it the edge of time or space, there is nothing so awe-inspiring as a border. To be here at this place with his three companions, at this marvelous border between land and sea, struck him as being very similar to being alive as one age was ending and another beginning…

– Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

Scattered on the Japanese coastline are ancient stone markers, some more than six hundred years old. Each bears some variation on the following message: “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes beyond this point.” Although some of the stones do not specifically indicate where it is safe or unsafe to build, all bear witness to those times when the sea suddenly rose up and swallowed the land. In the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the coast, some media commentators pointed to these moss-covered sentinels as signs of modern hubris. Not only towns but also nuclear power plants had been constructed in taunting defiance of the ancestral warnings.

The aerial footage of the sea washing over the Japanese landscape during the tsunami event offers what may be some of the most terrible and sublime sights ever captured on video. There are shots in which it is impossible to tell whether we are looking at land or sea, where it seems that the land itself has become the sea. These are images of a crisis point where all sense of order and stability has been swept away into a surge of primal chaos. It is as if we were watching the geological formation of the earth’s surface in a cosmic time lapse shot. The eyes of the absolute do not distinguish between rock and water, landmass and ocean. Everything is ultimately liquid, or as Heraclitus may have seen it, pure energy: “The transmutations of fire are first the sea; and of the sea, half is earth, and half is lightning flash.”¹ 

∞

The failure of the socialist experiments of the twentieth century does not make Marx obsolete. On the contrary, it allows us to see Marx in the best light, neither as a social scientist nor even a philosopher, but as a poet and prophet seeing the forces at work below the surface. Some of Marx’s most profound insights lie in his occasional metaphorical excesses, the rifts of his thought. Compare the above fragment of Heraclitus to the following passage from The Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels describe the effects of capitalism on Western culture:

All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.²

The sense of “zero history,” all-pervasive now in what feels like an epochal twilight, was nevertheless present at the beginning of the Industrial Age, only we could not then allow ourselves to see it. It was industrialization that first challenged our cozy notion of history as a linear march, and it did it by showing us that nothing in culture was absolute and unchangeable: everything could change in a flash —and everything would. If the linear, progressive view of history dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is only because the new rulers needed an image of stability, even as they profited from the fact that the great change had already happened, and that it was irreversible. “Modern bourgeois society… is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the subterranean world which he has called up by his spells,” Marx goes on to say.³ It took centuries to apprehend the results of the great shift into the modern mode. The violence of the 1900s physically enacted a calamity that had already happened in the soul; it was the materialization of nightmares that had haunted the preceding century.

We resist seeing ourselves as historical creatures today because doing so would force us to face the fact that we are every bit as ghostly and evanescent as the pale figures of archival newsreels or the vacant faces that stare back at us from daguerreotypes and 1960s Polaroids. The enduring obsession with social relevance reflects our collective obsession with escaping the non-being of those that lived and died before us, for only the famous dead retain a modicum of relevance in our minds, and only public esteem can break the spell of total anonymity that haunts us all.

The epigraph with which Beckett opened his one and only film, Esse est percipi (“to be is to be perceived”), is the motto of the spectral age. We have come to behave like the ghost in a gothic romance, who foists her phantasmal image upon the living in hopes of delivering a message or expressing a point of view; only when the living have acknowledged the message, and busied themselves fixing up some unfinished business of the past, does the ghost find peace. From this perspective, the social media sphere that rose up in early twenty-first century is recast as a necropolis of chattering skulls. To exist in this virtual otherworld is quite literally to haunt the world. Spectral fragments of our selves are sent to float around the lives of others, begging for attention. Social media is more than the fulfillment of Andy Warhol’s prediction that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes; it is the clearest actualization of a collective desire to break the confines of death, the flesh, and forgetting.

The crucial point is that this aversion to time is founded upon the truth that the modern age has uncovered through its Faustian bargain, namely that history is a kind of dream. That is what the images from the Japanese tsunami reveal with such shocking clarity. To quote the comics writer Alan Moore, our culture has gone fluid, and is now in the process of becoming steam. But the more a culture melts away, the more desperately will its members cling to a sense of solidity, a fact that partly explains our culture’s curious need to remain in constant apparent flux while resisting all real change. The details shift but never the perspective, never the frame. Our obsession with sameness has reached the point where the word “novelty” has come to mean its precise opposite.

The stone markers on the Japanese coast had one aim: to pierce through the delusion of stability and induce what the Greeks called anamnesis, the sudden recollection of a truth that already inhabits us, but which the ratiocinative mind lulled us into forgetting. The inscriptions on these stones are more than warnings against tsunamis; seen through a wider lens, they become permanent calls to awaken to the impermanence of things. In this sense they are like works of art. Both reveal the truth that the one constant is change, flux, becoming. It is the truth that Heraclitus saw at the very beginning of philosophical thought.

∞

On the one hand: the stone markers, Heraclitus, and art. On the other: the normal perception of time as a neat triptych of past, present, and future. These two modes of being exist side by side in the history of cinema. In bad films, the function of flashbacks is to justify or explain what is happening in the present. As the “cause” of the now, the past is finished, and the memory of the past is relevant only inasmuch as it explains present behavior. The worst films will actually give flashbacks a different aesthetic look, such as black-and-white or a high saturation, to make sure the viewer knows that the tyranny of linear time has not been violated by the insertion of the past into the normal, organic sequence of events.

In the best films, by contrast, the past interweaves seamlessly with the present in such a way that we perceive it as a living dimension of time. The past is the unconscious or preconscious aspect of the present. It is there with us, virtually, as the characters act in their worlds. Sometimes the presence of the past is suggested by some element in the shot: an object, a gesture, or a gaze. Other times, the past manifests physically in the scene, such as in the long tracking shot in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) where the camera moves from the stalker’s (Alexander Kaidanovsky) dreaming head to a series of objects from the past submerged under water, or the moment in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) where the aspiring actress (Naomi Watts) discovers her own dead body lying in bed. In art, time ceases to be a series of discrete instants in a linear chain and becomes a force all its own, the process of becoming that enfolds everything.

When James Joyce defined history as “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” he did not mean that the key to happiness was to live as though the past had never happened. To awaken from the dream of history is to awaken to history’s oneiric nature. Only by seeing the past as a dream can we understand that it is real and that it matters. Only by seeing the past as a dream can we understand that the word “history” is really a modern euphemism for a much more primal and unsettling phenomenon, namely the dead. The dead have left us, but by their absence, they haunt us always.

Joyce wrote a novella entitled “The Dead.” It is the story of a weak-willed man who comes to the realization that the person he thought he knew better than anyone, his wife, will forever remain something of a stranger to him. When she was young, she confesses to him, the boy she loved died, and his memory never left her. In the final pages of the story, the husband faces the full meaning of the mystery that his wife has come to embody. Sinking into that mystery, he sees the past—the realm of the dead—as an ever-present dreamscape superimposed over the world of the living.

He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.⁴

The dead are with us now. They are present in our language, our beliefs, our social structures, our architecture, our memories, our dreams, our DNA, our art. John Berger writes: “The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.”⁵ Carl Jung speculated that the collective unconscious was the accumulation of ancestral images gathered over hundreds of generations. Our most potent and universal symbols are gifts from those who have come before us; they are themselves vestiges of the dead. Indeed, many indigenous cultures make no real distinction between the dream world, the spirit world, and the hereafter. For them, simply to dream is to converse with the vast hosts, that is, with the plenitude of the past, which seeks recognition by the living. The shaman is a traveler between the two realms, and his vehicle is the creative imagination, the inner eye that perceives the invisible. Art, as a shamanic act, is communion with the dead. The dead live again in art.

To see life as the protagonist of Joyce’s story comes to see it is to be thrown into the very essence of time. It is like going to sea. In pursuing the symbol in the imaginal realm, the artist enters the sea of becoming: she becomes “at sea,” adrift on the tides of chaos, a rider on the storm. Perhaps this explains why the sea is such a potent image in the history of art, appearing in every art form and tradition. The Japanese painter Hokusai showed how the tidal wave is not only a force of power and destruction, but also an embodiment of the nature of being. In Melville, the sea is explicitly depicted as the locus of ceaseless becoming, the chaos place beyond the boundaries of Empire where even Newton’s laws lose their authority. He wrote, “[In] landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God.”⁶

Notes

1. Fragment 21 G.W.T. Patrick translation: http://www.classicpersuasion.org/pw/heraclitus/herpate.htm ↩︎
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. James Joyce, “The Dead.” ↩︎
5. John Berger, “Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead,” in Hold Everything Dear. ↩︎
6. Herman Melville, Moby Dick. ↩︎

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Weird Studies Patreon.