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A desk and chair sit centre stage, in front of him a microphone on a
mic stand positioned for the SPEAKER, on the desk a black lamp, a
script, a drinking glass, a pair of scissors and a glass vase containing
a single long stemmed pink carnation; upstage left an upright piano
on a three quarter angle towards the audience, where sheet music
would normally be there is a circular mirror; 100cm above the piano
a green silk dress hangs on a coat hanger suspended from the ceiling,
attached to its neckline is a large white beard; downstage left is a
mound of black volcanic rocks, about 300cm in diameter, 50cm in
height, on top of the mound are some silver stilettos.
SPEAKER arrives in silence, walks down stage and addresses the
audience directly, with hands behind back.
Good evening, thank you for coming. The essay I am going to read
was born out of the research for a feature film in the making called
The Empedocles Clause. The film follows a self-involved performance
artist [wry look] as he attempts to make plans to have his body burnt
in a volcano after he dies, and the rehearsal for this final artistic act.
It simultaneously charts the journey, 2500 years earlier, of Empedocles,
the Pre-Socratic philosopher, ascending Mt. Etna in a fit of
imposter syndrome to self-immolate. I wrote the essay as a form of
sacred procrastination whilst avoiding actually writing the screenplay.
Let’s begin.
SPEAKER turns and walks to the desk, sits down, turns on the
lamp, turns on the mic, takes a drink of water and reads from the
script’s title page:
turns the first page and reads:
SPEAKER slowly and deliberately cuts the first joint off the carnation’s stem,
allowing the segment to fly off wherever it may go
SPEAKER
I am going to tell you what I am going to do and then I am going to do
it. First I will deliver an essay about proto-forms, about Pre-Socratics
and Early Cinema, flow and fixity, it will be a dense tangle of references,
certainly rambling, perhaps pseudo academic. Then it will break down.
It will become a kind of preverbal guttural song, not comprehensible
in rational terms. From this soup, a poem will be born, a poem about
Empedocles, as a woman, waking up from a feast thrown in her honour
for bringing an old lady back from the dead, only to realise that she is a
fraud, that her philosophy is fantasy, and running up Mt Etna to incinerate
herself in shame. Then I will dress as her, and leave the building. But
while I am speaking you will forget all of this, and the whole thing, the
texture of its unfolding, will come as a surprise.
Ok. So here goes.
SPEAKER slowly and deliberately cuts the second joint off the carnation’s stem,
allowing the segment to fly off wherever it may go. Then cuts a piece of hair and
puts it in the ramekin.
The quote is from Empedocles:
‘For in the past I have been a boy and a girl, a shrub and a bird and the fish
that leaps from the sea as it travels.’
SPEAKER
What I have now to sing is about the origins of things. But this is a
dangerous topic. As Pier Paolo Pasolini put it in his prose poem ‘Poet of
Ashes’ … [looks up from script] goddamn that’s a lot of Ps … [returns to
script] As Pier Paolo Pasolini put it: ‘the way one becomes a fascist [is]
by darkly pining for mistaken origins’. But who gets to decide which are
mistaken origins and which are authentic ones? Perhaps origins is the
wrong discourse. So let’s not talk about them after all.
So what do I want to talk about? Well… as previously stated I am
researching a film called The Empedocles Clause, about two voyages up Mt
Etna to self-immolate, separated by 2500 years. One of those voyages made
by the Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, who, from a newly-discovered
fragment we understand to have been a woman suffering from terrible
imposter syndrome; the other made by a self-involved performance artist.
The Pre-Socratics were a ragtag bunch, sometimes closer to shamans,
healers, or poets (and as I will later propose, clowns) than philosophers
as we now understand them. They threw out grand statements about the
world: Thales said ‘everything is water’, Heraclitus said ‘everything flows’,
and our friend Empedocles said that ‘everything is Fire, Water, Air, Earth,
Love and Strife’. They built on each other’s theories for around 200 years,
creating a fertile soil from which western philosophy grew. Many wrote
their theories in verse, to be performed to an audience, and only fragments
remain. They wanted to know about how the cosmos functioned, and their
ideas are still vital today. But with the arrival of Socrates, and his student
Plato, things became much more formalised, anthropocentric and in my
opinion, boring.
Around 2400 years later, a form of moving photography emerged more or
less simultaneously in America and France: the cinematograph. It looked
like our dreams, images were recorded onto a strip of cellulose with light
sensitive silver nitrate, then projected onto screens to give the illusion
of motion, like Zeno’s arrow, always moving, always still. Its early artists
displayed a freedom of language and a cosmic fixation. Georges Méliès
loved special effects and used them strikingly in Le Voyage dans la Lune
(1902). He played with them like a 4-year-old who is still an animist, who
understands the world as a lively place. Jean Cocteau was also a master of
invention when it came to special effects, and Le Sang d’un Poet (1930)
begins with an artist in his studio, his sculpture coming to life and telling
him to climb through the mirror. He does, and the shot as he passes
through the mirror is intercut with an aerial shot of him falling into an
identically shaped pool of water. This idea comes straight from a child’s
imagination. As he falls through, we see the metaphor of cinema itself
reflected back at us: passing through a rectangular threshold to arrive into
the fluid world of dreams. Cinema became much more crystalised in the
30s, 40s and 50s, with the talkies bringing in a stronger connection to
naturalism and conventional narrative, with the narrative driven feature
length film introduced even earlier, around 1910. Screenplays in Hollywood
are now so formulaic, so governed by dogma, that you will often see an
inciting incident on exactly the page that the scriptwriting guru Syd Field
says it should occur (between p. 25-27). This is partly why it is comforting
to watch these films: we have already seen them a thousand times.
The novel has existed since the classical era, however the novel as we
know it, the novel that is so much about the subjective experience of the
individual didn’t emerge until the 18th century. Laurence Sterne was a
minister in 18th century England, who wrote the famous novel The Life
and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). Sterne’s great invention
was a novel of digressions. There are so many digressions that our
narrator, Tristram, isn’t born until half way through. There are also many
typographic innovations, including a black page when Parson Yorick dies.
Again it is no coincidence that this very early modern novel is so inventive,
the form hadn’t yet crystalised, there weren’t set rules to play by, so Sterne
made his own.
Witold Gombrowicz said of his novel, Ferdydurke (1937): ‘We live in an
era of violent changes, of accelerated development, in which settled forms
are breaking under life’s pressure… The need to find a form for what is
yet immature, uncrystallised and underdeveloped, as well as the groan
at the impossibility of such a postulate – this is the chief excitement of
my book.’ Whilst what he describes at various points as ‘immaturity’,
‘greenness’, is not unproblematic, this coming from a man whose later
novel Pornografia (1960) is about two adult men trying to force a love
affair between two youths in a small town in Poland, it has a connection
to what I am attempting to appeal to: that the uncrystallised form is the
sacred one. *Gombrowicz’s philosophy of immaturity, whilst it may seem
similar, is the opposite of Lolita’s narrator, Hubert Hubert’s disgusting
idea about nymphets. Humbert Humbert wanted to fix a moment in time,
Gombrowicz wants to unfix. Look at this tangle of thorns. Let’s move
quickly on.
During the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, Simone Weil, the
anarchist mystic, looked to the Occitan Troubadour tradition to uncover
a new way, infused with the archaic. In her essay ‘L’inspiration occitane’
she identified two opposing energies in history, that of ‘spirit’ and that
of ‘force’. On this sceptic isle today, I think we can look to the mediaeval
Welsh poetry of Taliesin. Taliesin points us to a world that is animate,
where the poet remembers being a harp string, a strong wild boar, a
salmon in the water. The poem ‘The Battle of The Trees’ bears striking
resemblance to the Empedocles quote that I began with, so much so that I
will read you its opening:
I was in many forms
Before my release;
I was a slim enchanted sword,
I believe in its play.
I was a drop in air,
The sparkling of stars,
A word inscribed,
A book in priest’s hands,
A lantern shining
For a year and a half
Taliesin was not one single poet, but a poetic voice that poets chose to use
over the course of several hundred years in mediaeval Wales. I think this
speaks a great deal about our current ideas of originality in art, about oral
culture and the humility that it implies. At one point in the poem, there
is a line ‘when the trees were enchanted, in the anticipation of not being
trees’. Let us as people be enchanted, in the anticipation of not being
people.
I was introduced to Taliesin by my housemate, a deeply enchanted, tall
Welsh man named Meilyr Jones. I woke one night to find him reading
from ‘The Battle of the Trees’ in Welsh having returned late from the pub.
When I went back to bed it was reverberating in my body like a crystal
charged with energy. Meilyr is living proof that the re-enchantment of the
world is not only possible, but accessible to us in any given moment, indeed
it was he who inspired me to write this. Am I suggesting that we return to
a Medieval world? No, but the 13th century was perhaps the last moment
in Europe where an animist worldview was prevalent, so charting the
golden thread of its poets might hold a key to the mess we are in.
And the mess we are in, without going into the details, I think we are
all aware, brings me to think about ecology. The Pre-Socratic worldview
and the ecological one have much in common: they see the world as an
interconnected web. As I hinted earlier I have been inspired by recent
archeological evidence, uncovered in Arcagas, Sicily, that Empedocles was
in fact a woman, and suffered from imposter syndrome, which forced her
to run up Mount Etna and throw herself inside. She was the last western
philosopher to express her ideas in verse, and proposed a schema for how
the world is made up in what she termed ‘roots’: that everything is fire,
water, air and earth, with the forces of love and strife binding things
together and tearing them apart. Without love things fall apart, without
strife there is no motion. Like gravity and entropy. She also believed in
metempsychosis: that matter and spirit are interconnected and thus the
soul is reborn as the matter is reintegrated into the world, a development
of Heraclitus’ ideas about flow. Thus she had already been a boy and girl, a
shrub and a bird, and the fish that leaps from the sea as it travels. To think
like Empedocles, the rational mind is not enough. As 13th century mystic
Marguerite Porete said, ‘Reason is always half blind’.
I want to argue that it is not a coincidence that early cinema, the early
modern novel, early Welsh poetry and early philosophy were so lively but
that they form a pattern unfolding throughout time, reflected in many
moments and movements, and a mode of thinking and being that we can
all access at any moment, in any era.
SPEAKER slowly and deliberately cuts the third joint off the carnation’s stem,
allowing the segment to fly off wherever it may go. SPEAKER then moves the
ramekin onto the script, picks up the nail scissors and cuts one nail, allowing it
to fall into the ramekin, and replaces the ramekin in its original position.
The quote is from Simone Weil:
‘Contradiction is the lever of transcendence’
SPEAKER
But surely we need structure, we need crystalisation, it is an inevitable
process that any given form will find its language as it develops. Isn’t
history just a pendulum between chaos and order? And aren’t chaos and
order part of the same cosmos. I mean, if everyone wrote like Gombrowicz
how would you sleep at night?
And again, nostalgia for origins can be dangerous ‘the way one becomes a
fascist [is] by darkly pining for mistaken origins’.
Svetlana Boym, in her book The Future of Nostalgia, lays out two kinds of
nostalgia: restorative and reflective.
Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national
and religious revivals. It knows two main plots—
the return to origins and the conspiracy. Reflective
nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores
ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining
different time zones. It loves details, not symbols…
Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth,
while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.
Doubt here, is key. We need a generative form of doubt, like a generative
form of contradiction. A state which is in flow is one which has room for
contradiction, even paradox.
Pasolini is such an appealing figure for me because he allowed contradiction
to flow in and out. He was a gay, pagan, Catholic Marxist. Perhaps another
place where fascism gets its start: certitude and the denial of contradiction.
Lo scandalo del contraddirmi, dell’essere
con te e contro te; con te nel cuore,
in luce, contro te nelle buie viscere;
The scandal of contradicting myself, of being
with you and against you; with you in the heart,
in the light, against you in the dark viscera;
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gramsci’s Ashes (1954)
Another great figure who lived out their contradiction (contradiction
being in fact the opposite of hypocrisy, hypocrisy being the denial of
contradiction) is Simone Weil, whom I mentioned before. Weil was an
anarchist individualist, a Jewish Catholic, who said that collectivity was
evil yet went to help the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. As a
writer she is simultaneously intractable and aphoristically accessible. If I
have a gravestone (if they manage to find some remains after the volcanic
incineration) I would have Weil’s epigrammatic statement engraved on it:
‘Contradiction is the lever of transcendence’ perhaps with a little picture
of the catapult that got me into the crater. Her lever is a rigid little
metaphor for the process of arrival into a fluid place. It mirrors her phrase
that ‘Christ’s body was the counterweight of the universe’. Perhaps reality
needs prying open in order to arrive into the flowing iridescent sea of
transcendence. So here is my dare to you: contradict yourself today. Do it
now, right now.
SPEAKER slowly and deliberately cuts the fourth join off the carnation’s stem,
allowing the segment to fly off wherever it may go. SPEAKER then picks up the
q-tip, turns head left, carefully removes the wax from right ear, looks in mild
disgust at the yellowed cotton end, then dispenses of it in the ramekin.
The quote is from Bart Simpson:
‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’
mimes one hand clapping against itself
SPEAKER
So how to pry ourselves open into this magic place I hear you thinking?
In Zen Buddhism there is a concept, ‘Beginner’s Mind’:
‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,
but in the expert’s mind there are few’
Shunryū Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970)
One tool for accessing beginner’s mind is the koan, a sort of a riddle that
is supposed to stun the mind into silence: ‘If you meet the Buddha in the
road, kill him’—or: ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping’ … [claps one
hand again, slower this time]
Clowning and zen have much in common, because in order to become
a clown you have to get yourself out of the way. A clown is someone
who takes seriously what is seemingly ridiculous, and what is seemingly
ridiculous is often where deep truth lies, where great insight becomes
possible. I see the Pre-Socratics as clowns: Heraclitus, who refused to
be understood, who delivered his philosophy in cryptic aphorisms, who
died covered in dung after failing to cure himself from dropsy; Zeno, who
refuted that motion existed; Empedocles, who ran up Mt Etna to self-
incinerate, attempting to her followers that she was a god, but leaving a
silver sandal on the crater rim; Thales falling into his well… these are the
gestures of clowns, and it takes a clown to reinvent the world, a Charlie
Chaplin, dancing with the globe in The Great Dictator—one of the most
beautiful gestures in cinema ever—a nonverbal somatic contradiction,
choreographic statement about fascism, folly, hubris, and beauty that
surpasses the rational. It takes a clown to reinvent the world. (We can
return another day to discuss the difference between Donald Trump and
Werner Herzog).
Empedocles’s sense that she had lived before is in stark opposition to a
Platonic idea of spirit as removed from matter. Personally, when I am lost,
I lie in the bath and visualise dissolving inside a volcano, and as I dissolve I
become part of the universal continuum, sensing that I am a nothing, with
nothing to say, who can perhaps speak a tiny something only through a
channelling, and my chosen lineage is with the forms before the forms, and
those who dreamt in the abyss.
Instead I offer an image: I see Empedocles running up Mount Etna, sweat
running down her beard, her mind a mess of inner winds, no longer sure
that she is a god, but as she runs her body and volcano merge, she leaves
behind the world of forms, and moves towards dissolving.
SPEAKER steps on a loop pedal under the desk and this phrase loops
monotonously and continues making loops, extended vocal grunts and howls,
clinking of glass, slurping of water, rattling of matches
VOICE OVER (from the sound desk)
And believing she is a fraud
having played her resurrection trick
(levers, haze, a little balloon)
on some old crone
Empedocles of Arcagas (E for short)
slips away
from her lover’s warm spoon
where they lie, post-feast, post-fuck,
a small rip
& the sliver of dawn
opens up
Once free she begins
ascending
that great redeemer
Mt Etna (I burn)
Earlier that day
dressing for the post-resurrection drinks
she’d slipped on some dressy shoes
strappy patent leather things, a little silver heel
seeming cute at the time (mother’s heirloom),
but now as she scrambles across
basalt
she curses ‘I should have worn the bloody Brooks!’
Her mind a mess
of inner winds,
and many fires
which speak of being caught out:
What happens when, say,
one reveller realises they’ve left their
purse at the old lady’s house
returns, knocks, nothing
nudges door ajar,
finds old bitch snake cold
and cries ‘E has impeded the whole truth!
the rest about Roots n Strife
must musn’t also be right!’
So up & up she toils
in spite of poor footwear choices
& as sweat begins to pour down her beard,
the liquid dawn solidifies into morning;
the candid April sun
casts a basalt shadow show
something lifts in her mood
fresh winds bring hope
and with it ideas
(those dangerous bedfellows)
and because stories take no time
we ascend like this:
Crunch
Up!
With the view getting more and more
I-N-S-T-A-G-R-A-M-M-A-B-L-E
she pivots for a moment
turns a silver heal
‘goddamn!’
tumbles into a ravine
knocks head against raven-black rock
and the picture goes dark
—
a beat
—
nothing.
George Finlay Ramsay