Darkening Scandinavia : Four Postmodern Pagan Essays [1 ed.] 9781443854252, 9781443852913

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Darkening Scandinavia

Darkening Scandinavia: Four Postmodern Pagan Essays

By

Francisc-Norbert Örmény

Darkening Scandinavia: Four Postmodern Pagan Essays, by Francisc-Norbert Örmény This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Francisc-Norbert Örmény All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5291-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5291-3

CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Redeemed Reader and Applied Philosophy in Francisc Örmény’s Darkening Scandinavia Adriana Teodorescu .

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 The Killing Real and the Sublime Aura in the Music of Burzum Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 35 Valhalla Rising: Of Wrath, Might and Meat Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 57 The Unnameable Luring Black Blood of Darkness Seeping Deep Into Us: An Essay on the True Nature of Persistence and Craftsmanship based on Per Petterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 103 The Secrets of the Swedish New Moon: An Essay on the Music of Lake of Tears Index ........................................................................................................ 149

PREFACE REDEEMED READER AND APPLIED PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCISC ÖRMÉNY’S DARKENING SCANDINAVIA ADRIANA TEODORESCU

Francisc Örmény’s book is located at the intersection between philosophy on the one hand, and literature, music and film on the other. Synthesizing, we can say that his work is placeable in what is acknowledged as applied philosophy, that is, an attempt to address the issues of everyday life, in its many social, political or economic aspects, or some cultural artistic elements, using tools considered to belong to the philosophical sciences, such as critical and analytical approaches. However, such classification is unable to capture the specificity of the book and ignores the originality and the poignant freshness of current research methodology. The novelty brought by Darkening Scandinavia does not lie so much in the research results obtained by the author (the discovery of unusual connections between different fields of knowledge, the implicit demonstration of the applicability of some apparently outdated philosophical models, the highlighting of the [neo]pagan substrate of postmodern cultural syntax and so on and so forth), although none of these aspects are to be ignored as they present a high degree of interdisciplinarity which can be exploited in several fields of knowledge (cultural studies, literary criticism, film criticism and so on). The novelty lies primarily in the way in which the author builds his research approach, whose construction deserves our closer inspection. An assumption present in an implicit way in Örmény’s approach, which acts as a pre-condition of the research is that the artistic territories – literature, music and film – understood in their absolute sense, that of Art, or in their relative sense, that of being potentially artistic (the case of the mass culture, for example), can be deconstructed in textual units approachable from a philosophical point of view, as they are compatible

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with philosophical methods. In other words, the respective texts can be placed in a philosophical co-text and, by extension, in a cultural co-text. It is an assumption which, at a first glance, might seem too commonsensical, but which is significant if we want to understand the conception according to which philosophy should not necessarily have as its point of origin what may be considered, metaphysically speaking, essence, and nor the pretence of a nude reality (a reality uncoded socially and culturally). Philosophy may as well start from realities that are already culturally coded such as literary works, cinematographic or musical compositions belonging to genres such as metal – one considered by many people as belonging to mass culture. The basic characteristic of the philosophical grid of interpretation used in Darkening Scandinavia is the diversity of the theoretical concepts and the plurality of methods. We come across phenomenological methods related to the social constructivist philosophy; concepts belonging to the existential philosophy of Heidegger and Lévinas, or to the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis; but we also come across concepts associated with the cultural theories of postmodernism or, why not, concepts drawn from E. Burke’s aesthetics of the sublime. Furthermore, the use of this extensive grid of interpretation demonstrates the attention that the author of the research invests in the text that he submits to investigation – the search for the areas of interpretive necessity within the text and for an adequate response to them. If the author had wanted, by any means, only to apply a philosophical investigative tool, then the whole approach would have meant rather the determination in demonstrating the existence of a dialogue between the humanistic sciences and in emphasizing conceptual or empirical correspondences, and less the attention given to the wealth of meanings of the examined text. Because of this kind of approach to the texts, Francisc Örmény initiates the ritual killing of the authors, freeing their readers – as sum of possibilities – from any predetermination in which the authorial intention might have placed them. Umberto Eco defined the Model Reader as textual strategy for a complex reading of the book. Francisc Örmény disengages (unknots) the Model Reader from the text, and throws him in full co-text, forces him to integrate the possibilities of communication with other texts, especially with those gathered in alluvial heaps by his cultural and philosophical set of instruments. For this reason, here we are not necessarily discussing literary texts, but, one could say, cultural texts. At the beginning of each chapter a conceptual framework is proposed. This contains the working hypothesis on the literary, cinematographic or musical text to be investigated, and it sometimes specifies the philosophical

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tools with which the author will work. Even without mentioning the methods, the conceptual framework is already worded in terms that emphasize its philosophical dimension and, in addition, the concepts and methods with which the author operates are presented to the reader before the actual textual investigation. Francisc Örmény's philosophico-literary, philosophico-musical and philosophico-cinematographic analyses offer a spectacle of intelligent semantic and conceptual associations, an explosion of ideas that retains its coherence and that does not allow itself to be undermined, neither by gratuitousness nor by redundancy, dangers that often lurk behind literary analyses, and sometimes it may be the case that they might affect more those analyses that use comparative methods. We return to the idea mentioned above, that the author of this book carries into effect, by means of his very methodological approach, and in the postmodern style already announced by Roland Barthes, a ritual killing of the authors of the texts that he submits to analysis, in view of exorcising the text, that is, of eliminating the prime polluting authorial intentionality. One should note that this killing has the effect of the return of the reader. A complete way of enouncing the phenomenon would be to say that the return of the reader is, before being a result of some critical strategies of relating to the text, the very triggering mechanism of such strategies. Indeed, Francisc Örmény is a great liberator of readers. In turn he enables the irruption on the scene of his own book, of the readers of Per Petterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses, of the readers of the musical texts of the band Lake of Tears, and also of the readers of the cinematic production Valhalla Rising and of those of the one-man musical project Burzum. The liberty of these readers is, as Jean-Paul Sartre would say, one full of responsibilities. All these readers are twofold-conditioned in Darkening Scandinavia: to co-exist and open themselves, beyond the semantic and the functional possibilities with which the source-text endowed them, towards the cultural and interpretative exigencies that Francisc Örmény imposes through his mode of configuring the book. The reader of Darkening Scandinavia is released, redeemed from the brutal intentionality of the author, be he Per Petterson, the director of the movie Valhalla Rising, Burzum or Lake of Tears, but he is also exposed to the author-as-critic – who is also a versed reader in his turn – Francisc Örmény. The book is structured into four chapters. The first is entitled “The Killing Real and the Sublime Aura in the Music of Burzum” and is focused on the Norwegian Black-metal project Burzum. Among other aspects, the section has the merit of being able to approach, from a

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perspective belonging to the phenomenology of music and to postmodern neo-paganism, a difficult subject such as the meaning of death and dying, a subject discussed to the point of saturation by the researchers of recent decades. The set of philosophical instruments used here is extremely diverse, from Democritus, Kant and Humboldt, through Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Roland Barthes, and up to contemporary Romanian philosopher Virgil Ciomoú. Death is what can never be defeated (an eternal personal failure), nor communicated (a continuous malignant proliferation of the lack of communication). Among the conclusions of the chapter we also find the one according to which the personal sun, the inner sun, might be stronger than the outer, natural one, an emblematic conclusion for highlighting the tension nature-culture, present, in filigree, throughout the whole book Darkening Scandinavia. “Valhalla Rising – Of Wrath, Might and Meat” is the second chapter of the book, one which (by means of a postmodern phenomenological perspective and a recuperating Freudian perspective) aims at bringing to the surface those ideatic joints less visible in the cinematographic production of 2009, joints that allow the interpretation of the film as belonging to contemporary neo-paganism. The author does not refrain from questioning the artistic functionality of feminism understood as political correctness, nor from pointing out its cancellation in Valhalla Rising by means of an offensive of the aesthetics of the masculine and paternalistic naturalism (man does not alienate himself in giving birth to an / the other, on the contrary, he is responsible for his own creation). An intermediate grid of interpretation, derived, to a certain extent, from the postmodern grid, is that of the aesthetic theories of the Baroque, and an extremely interesting relatability is that between the authenticity that the film assumes as its intention and the postmodern concept of simulacrum, belonging to Jean Baudrillard. The third chapter entitled "The unnameable luring Black Blood of Darkness seeping deep into us (an essay on the true nature of persistence and craftsmanship based on Per Petterson's novel Out Stealing Horses)” is intended to be an essay about man's relationship with nature, a relationship based on the ontological absence of a direct response of nature to human needs and, therefore, a relationship within which the adaptation of human frailties to the totality of nature is negotiated. Among the concepts employed by the author in this third chapter are Nietzsche’s concept of darkness (as a form of fertility), Vico's concept of common sense (as judgment without reflection); and also the Heideggerian notions of opening and stretching. Örmény discusses the aesthetic of the everyday work approached as craftwork (craftsmanship) – the type of work that

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appears in Petterson's novel as an alternative to the work subjected for too long to the primitivism of logic; the reinventing of the self as a constructor of meaning; the ambivalent and maternal, but not feminized, valences of darkness, those that are able to relate the Being to the wild side of the self (as it cannot be known, nor explained, by means of human cultural meanings), but also to one’s own facticity (whose acceptance becomes possible through the contemplation of still life). The last chapter is again a philosophical musical criticism, this time starting from the musical creations of the Swedish Death-metal band Lake of Tears. “The Secrets of the Swedish New Moon – an essay on the music of Lake of Tears" is dedicated to a predominantly phenomenological investigation of the texts of the band, and it insists on the neo-pagan cultural coordinates present in their messages and in the music of the Swedes. Paganism is defined, in an evolutionary context, as desire for life and for biological identitary coagulation. Among the operant concepts we now find the death drive (Freud) or the absolute void (Lévinas). One of the conclusions of this chapter captures the similarity between Heidegger’s philosophy and the music of the band Lake of Tears in the propensity to escape from historicity and to find compensatory energetic spaces. What emanates from all four studies, at the thematic level, is the preference for paganism and the temptation to propose and support the existence of a cultural paradigm of postmodern neo-paganism, and, at the methodological level, the ability to juggle with various concepts and tools of textual investigation. In addition, in all four essays, Francisc Örmény advances a phenomenology of the void. He puts it forward for consideration, in the sense that he observes the preeminence of certain textual contents which can be grouped under this concept (as they communicate intra- and intertextually among themselves), and also in the sense of a comprehensivelyinterpretative practice of his own. In other words, the author develops a personal phenomenology of the void, as a sort of reflex, no matter how lucid, critical, or tender he may be in front of the text that he subjects to analysis. The void is, in the conjugated acception of the analyzed cultural texts and of the author himself, a space that (by virtue of the absence of some strident semantic personal characteristics) becomes able to generate fertility and thus sustain the elements that surround it and in which it insinuates itself. It may be said that the void is pure syntax, the blind functionality of which only those who are too accustomed to the comfort of images can be frightened. Örmény discloses in his book small portions of the cultural history of the void (in its phenomenological dominants), certainly not from a desire aiming at an archaeology of the concept, but, in

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a personal style, in order to enrich it with new interpretations. Moreover, the cultural history of the void (this time, as practice of interrogation) becomes here a displaced history. This is so because the author does not hesitate to mark on the cultural map of the void new territories, regardless of the fact that they belong to the sphere of literary theory, of philosophy, fine arts, the theory of language or that of psychoanalysis. In the first essay, dedicated to the music of the project Burzum, Francisc Örmény re-assumes Democritus’ conception of the void, which is defined as non-spatiality which makes possible the spatiality; as a full or saturated space would never allow movement. Further, he continues with Roland Barthes where he identifies the void within the core of the intertext, that specific text which preserves (maintains, conserves) the trace of some partially long gone texts – insomuch as their context can no longer isolate them from other co-texts – which it places together, reveals them to each other, being itself this trace, as well as that which surpasses it. The author sees the scream as an interesting cultural location of the void. In this point we are in full musical phenomenology. The disarticulation of language reduces the socio-cultural expression of the ontological constituent and makes room for some potentialities which are not trapped or stuck in a human specificity. The author seems to suggest that if we can interpret the scream as force of language which erupts from silence, then, its road back to the soundless and still origins of intentionality cannot be denied. In this way, the scream may also be understood as abandonment of language, as regress – in a pagan sense – towards silence. In this context, the author characterizes the void as possessing a “sublime availability”, one due to which man cannot remain for too long within the pure, authentic form of the scream, at least not without risking dissolution. The tension of some infinite possibilities which can no longer coagulate the human being finds its “repose” in the morpho-syntactic rules of language. More or less directly, Francisc Örmény reveals himself to be a supporter of the transitory necessity of the void, as source of regeneration of the being. In culture – it itself being the most complete intertext, if we consider the problem carefully –, the scream of the music finds its correspondent in the white of the painting. The example that the author offers is that of the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich with his “White on White”, a canvas that attempts to reveal not the visible but that which makes it possible, the invisible, the empty interval. Moreover, in this first essay, the author defines the real, following Lacan, as being threatening precisely because it does not permit the void. Unlike reality, the real is impenetrable, indivisible and impossible to be captured in any way. There

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is no alteritary direction for the real, even reality seems to be a rib of the real, colonized without the participation or opposition of the latter, entirely non-functional in relation to it. In the second essay, the author considers that the movie Valhalla Rising displays and artistically represents the negative effects of the void, understood in a Nietzschean style (key) as a painful place of the emergence or of the coming-into-being of the self. The infernal fertility discussed by the author in relation to the characters of the movie, but also with Nicolas Refn’s directorial logic of the re-writing of history, is put in motion by the void, and is, up to a certain point, the void itself. Once again, we are dealing here with a symptom of the void, which is, this time, the silence and not the scream. The place of the verb does not remain empty, on the contrary, and precisely because of the void it is invaded by action, by flesh. In its turn, Per Petterson’s book shelters the void. This appears as retrievable within that human availability to allow oneself to be attacked by nature, within that weakness of the cultural joints of the characters, always ready to sprain their legs – legs which, apriorically, do not even hurt anymore. The intuition of darkness denotes the proximity of man to the void, to the (Heideggerian) openness towards mystery. Here, maybe a little more than in the other essays, Francisc Örmény insists on the issue of the fertility of the void, while bringing forth the positive valencies accompanying its discovery. The void acts in the sense of a re-enforcement of the roots, be they even impersonal, after having attained the zero degree of the significances of the being. The main character deals with the fabrication of things because, under the action of the void, he has the intuition of the self and the impulse to give it a distinguished shape. In other words, there is an uncertainty of the self, a lack of fixation which imposes research. Although he primarily regards it as a pure function that exists by associating for itself forms and semantics by means of the others, as part of a second meaning, the author recognizes in the void “the place where the major dialogical principles of the Self have their roots, and via them, the place where all restorations (of power, of identity) have their origin”. The void is, really and truly, a pedestal of ontological stability, but one from which the author extracts all forms of comfort. The dialogism provided by the void is, in our author’s conviction, an eminently savage one. The last essay, dedicated to the musical band Lake of Tears, notices the same dangerous, but necessary and functional fertility of the void. The void is detectable at the ideatic and conceptual level of the band’s texts as distance between the varied representations of the self and the possibility

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that such a self can exist outside its representations. Furthermore, it is the one that allows the advancement of the concept of phenomenological surrealism or autumnal surrealism, defined as the keeper of the traces of the summer (to be read as “of other spaces”, “of some significances that pre-exist the ones that are activated”); a surrealism that contains the axis of degeneration as the inversed sign of the cause and effect movement, an axis possible only through the emptiness (void) which permits the transformation and the morpho-temporal variation.

CHAPTER ONE THE KILLING REAL AND THE SUBLIME AURA IN THE MUSIC OF BURZUM

Summary The first study of the present collection is a short incursion into the phenomena by means of which the undefined reaches a definition (at the level of consciousness and of its afferent identities) in the music of the Norwegian Black-metal legend Burzum. Metaphors are interpreted as the hidden engines capable of revealing and setting in new motions the unconquered dimensions of the real (and of death as the final and most radical manifestation and expression of this real). A virulent signifier is on the one hand something capable of forging an authentic identity against a disintegrating background of death and chaos, and on the other hand, something capable of signalling aspects that lie beyond language and its configuring patterns (here we will focus upon Black-metal artistic screaming as a way to give a direct expression to both the real and the sublime). The study assumes and applies to the representations and messages contained within the lyrics of Burzum, notions from the theories of Immanuel Kant, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Søren Kierkegaard, Democritus, Roland Barthes and Virgil Ciomoú, and organizes them around some central concepts such as “displacement”, “revealing” (Heidegger’s “Lichtung” and the idea of a personal sun capable of outshining and giving meaning to the natural one), “communication” (the demonic and the dead being the uncomunicatable), “valorizable void or lacuna” and “translatability”. Burzum was chosen as fertile soil on which to apply, test and verify some phenomenological premises and intuitions, because Varg Vikernes created one of the most poetic and philosophical musical projects in neo-paganism, one highly compatible with the phenomenological terminology and overall methodology – if not one which demands such approaches explicitly. The aim of this material is to provide acute insights into the nature of darkness and into the ways in which artistic creation could respond (by ensuring the most

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prolific, sustained and safe placements) to the destabilizing intrusions of death, of the real and the sublime. The riddles and the knots of this world can be answered and undone only by means of an intelligently gathered and focalized energy – one capable of withstanding both the corrosiveness of the undefined as well as the weight of solidified symbols, meanings and representations. Donald Woods Winnicott’s third trans-contextual area of phenomenality (the area of “formlessness” and constant shape-shifting agglutinations within the pulsating architecture of the Self) is interpreted here as the very place where any kind of cultural experience effectively “takes place”, as adventure (revelatory play in the dark) of the Self in search of its archetypal crossroads.

1. Preliminary remarks on the nature of the valorizable void and on the general translatability of existential frequencies (communication and its necessary area of incommunicability) Pagan Black-metal and the way in which this music approaches the subjects of death and immortality should count first and foremost as a part of a larger effort to restore the consciousness by revealing its necrotic areas and by regenerating the contextually and phenomenologically appropriate hidden emotional engines (the ones which fire the imaginary and its uncanny psychic and behavioural reverberations). The uncanny, “das Unheimliche” or “the unhomely”, is used here in a very unusual and rare sense, namely in that of deterritorializing or conquering instincts. From this introduction alone one can already see that the neo-pagan way of withstanding the alluviums of time and of gaining perspective upon immortality rests on one’s capacity to disclose the dead (shadowed) areas and the inexplicit arenas of life and on the capacity to capture the turmoils (inevitable remnants of previous chaoses and intrusions of untameable energies in our daily reality) within an effective conscious vector of meaning and of need. In Emil Cioran’s interpretation, such attitudes towards life and artistic endeavour are equal with the act of setting on fire things such as apathy, torpor, irritability, physical asthenia, anorexia, nausea, intermittent pains, myalgia and so on and so forth, with the aim of burning what Heidegger would call the accumulated residual crust of tradition and with that of revealing anew the ravenous roots and veins of life (and of extracting from them a new warmth and the freshest possible sap, as they emanate straight from the essences):

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“If I could, I would drive the entire world to agony to achieve a radical purification of life; I would set a fire burning insidiously at the roots of life, not to destroy them but to give them a new and different sap, a new heat. The fire I would set to the world would not bring ruin but cosmic transfiguration. In this way life would adjust to higher temperatures and would cease to be an environment propitious to mediocrity. And maybe in this dream, death too would cease to be immanent in life.” (Cioran, 1992, p. 15)1

This is a “philosophy” of creative and energizing (revigorating) fulfilment, as it implies a passionate effort to reach an unpredictable and violently-crafted identity (being authentically torn from the compact membranes of death and turned into pulsatile personal universes). It is opposed to that of the Christian atonement – a confusedly empty and emptying state of general relief and drain of oneself out of oneself; a disinterested, impersonal and neutralized delivery of one’s worthy inner self into the hands of an artless principle of abstract unity. An authentic identity passes the tests of time precisely because it is always forged against a disintegrating background of death and oblivion, as it is a statement of subtlety or sophistication able to valorise delicate details and to withstand (by means of these latter ones) the all-simplifying, shiftless and irresponsible temptations of social power. The will to power as will to create (as ambition to force the given conditions into personal comforts) stands opposed to the will to adapt and to accept the uncomfortable nature of the datum. Christian doctrines and philosophies encourage the raw acceptance of the problematic areas of reality and compliance with them as well as with the rigid nature of the greatest discomfort of all: Death. In a disheartening majority of cases, when transposed into art, such a compliance discourages creation (because it constantly conditions it from a “politically”/politically configured notion of morality) and results in artificial artworks which Kant used to call “without spirit” (geistlos) – that is, artworks “filled-in” with a weird and sinister emptiness and coldness (that paralyzing coldness which appears when no idea, passion or ambition has real meaning for its bearer).

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The Romanian version: “Dacă aú putea, aú aduce întreaga lume în agonie, pentru a realiza o purificare din rădăcini a vieĠii; aú pune flăcări arzătoare úi insinuante la aceste rădăcini, nu pentru a le distruge, ci pentru a le da altă sevă úi altă căldură. Focul pe care laú pune eu acestei lumi nar aduce ruine, ci o transfigurare cosmică, esenĠială. În acest fel, viaĠa sar obiúnui cu o temperatură înaltă úi nar mai fi un mediu de mediocrităĠi. ùi poate în acest vis nici moartea n-ar mai fi imanentă în viaĠă.” (Cioran, 1990, p. 22)

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The rest of this study will interpret the spirit as an entity inscribable in the spaces (corridors) of transfer and movement (displacement). Pagan Black-metal understands death as a challenge of the undefined towards acquiring defining representations of the world and of oneself as well; as a challenge of the meaningless matter towards a fight meant to assign meaning and passion; as a challenge of the uncreated and of the unspoken towards creation and towards the ambition to give a voice to those obscure and deep dimensions of existence that normal language cannot reveal properly. This is the “darkness of matter” against which Fijo’s husband is fighting in the song “Frijos goldene Tranen” by Burzum. To fight the darkness of the world is to search for selfhood among lost projections. Identity is always more than what one can recollect or project in dreams and in fancies or derive from moral codes. Identity as liberation, as urge, as a platform on which one can work for real and create a phenomenological structure capable of growing by absorbing and by devouring every possibility around, is always a question of opening up the dark and inaccessible matter of phenomena; of forging a channel which will somehow allow for some other manifestation of the essence to gain access into our world and vice versa (for human intrusions into the otherwise denied dimensions of signification). Burzum calls such a channel (most probably an interface) a path capable of leading beyond the places where normal sense and common roads would lead (parenthetically it is being said, the normal roads lead to death while a path beyond these roads should lead to what lies beyond death): “While we may believe our world – our reality to be that is – is but one manifestation of the essence Other planes lie beyond the reach of normal sense and common roads But they are no less real than what we see or touch or feel.”2 (Burzum, Lost Wisdom)

Death remains in this context the unconquered dimension and a symbol of personal failure: the inability to find a path beyond the common roads and a loss of the sense of the self…an aimless wandering through the woods of the meaning. Death can also be interpreted as an expression of 2

All lyrics from the songs of Burzum were taken from http://www.burzum.org/eng/discography/, consulted on the 9th of March 2013, 12:44.

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the lack of passion and of the afferent will to ignite a personal sun into and above the hostile and impenetrable unknown. To capture the untamed on one’s own ontological frequency means to be able to give voice to the unspoken, to express or to invent an appearance for that which has no expression and no recognizable form. In the vision proposed by Varg Vikernes to do so is to emerge from the river of forgetfulness (“Glemselens Elv”), to open the closed rooms and to carve the hidden runes. One should nevertheless notice that these are but beginnings of future adventures and quests for self-improvement, signs of expansion and sources of future lives (that is, continuous processes growing out of possibilities) and never something accomplished. Only death closes cycles and completes identities (in Varg’s terms, “answers all the riddles” and “unties all the knots of this world”): “Come death, dear death; give me the answer to all riddles, give me key and wand, untie the knots of the world. Why in death, my friend, and only in death? Why do you dive into the river of forgetfulness? (...) Let me open the closed room, let me carve the hidden runes.” (Burzum, Valen)

And it is by no coincidence that when Søren Kierkegaard faced the same dilemma, he assigned the demonic to the very incapacity to communicate, that is, to the incapacity to express ideas, to assign meaning, to render something into something else, to feel the energies of details in the form of a call and to instil that call into the wet (in the sense of fertile) and life-thirsty eyes of others. To communicate is always a case of a reciprocated identity and it involves a double phenomenon: the capacity to impregnate others with your desires and then to recuperate yourself back onto yourself from the passion they have in their eyes for the seed that you have planted therein. What we are doing here is to continue Humboldt’s metaphor of communication as a sexual act: according to Humboldt, when two consciousnesses communicate, they leave in each other’s cerebral “womb” a germinative content which will further develop into a real “foetus” – the foetus standing here as a foundation and as a psychosomatic bound necessary for future revelations, the ones meant to expand the personality of the receiver to new and unexpected dimensions.

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Death is the incapacity to see or to create this phenomenological corridor into what is different and “hostile” by virtue of its very alterity, and the malignant and obtuse proliferation of the lack of communication. Death is perhaps the most direct and virulent expression of this denied dimension, and in the music of Burzum personal fulfilment is a question of to have or not to have the necessary wisdom and inspiration to see and then to release “the way through”, the way out of the very monolithic and impenetrable structures of existence. This is exactly what Michelangelo said about statues: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” The channel of communication between our world and its silent but intense “backgrounds” is seen by Varg as “A Gate out of Hell / Into the Void of Death (A Lost Forgotten Sad Spirit), a formulation which can also be interpreted as a gate out of the hell of need and of desire into that type of void signalled by Democritus, namely the void which assures the possibility of movement and evolution: “But Democritus’ starting point resides in the fact that he believes in the reality of movement, as thought is movement. It is his point of attack: the movement exists, as I think and thinking has reality. But if there is movement, then there must be a void as well, which means that the nonbeing is as real as the being. Should the space be entirely filled, there could be no movement in it.” (Nietzsche, 1992, p. 116, our translation from the Romanian edition)

“The way through” refers to the “unused ways” and, in the music of Burzum, to the unknown tracks left behind (as marks of specificity or as diacritics for the letters with which our reason operates in the ordinary course of events) by states of mind sufficiently extreme so as to be able to incarnate themselves in translucent beings made of intellective passions (such as the intense madness that could radiate vectors of positive and negative transformation). To cause the stony sands of time to pass through exquisite diffusions and infusions, towards the essences, is to recuperate the fires of illuminating creations and also those of the sacred coagulations of the Self around rare magnum opuses, from the heat persisting in the track left by the paw of an archetypal animal on the grass or on the ground: “A terrified creature in the shadows, (…) Hated by most, but loved by the best.

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She gladly travels long (time) and long (distance), she walks alone, barefooted in the dirt, on unused ways, on overgrown paths, in animal tracks and dangerous lairs.” (Burzum, Madness)

This is the true pagan essence of the Democritean space of movement which transcends personal and collective histories of conquering and of adjusting and which restores the quality of elegance to the reflective processes. We are speaking about those processes which decrease denials and increase the awareness of oneself – that is, increase the personal involvement in the crystals of the symbols and the valorisation of the strangeness of antitheses as a space where our imagination can create by bringing the (lost) spirit back into our blood. The empty spaces of strangeness, from hostile and disturbing non-principles of the Self, become great revealing and never-ending surfaces, depths and heights of availability – as they ensure and sustain “spatially” the becoming through conquest and adaptation (successful connection) of beings and of other entities. It is very important to track this principle of evolution (of attaining higher levels of actuality) through the understanding of the of the importance of the empty (in the sense of both available and inviting) spaces in the formation of signification (a process dependent on the mobility of ideas, perceptions and syntheses: re-combinations, recalibrations and re-assumptions resulting in the restoration of fire and of its warmth on new orbits of synchronization) back to its Pagan sources and days, namely back to the genius who first saw the true direction of this dynamic – Democritus. According to Jan Patoþka it is no coincidence that Democritus was the first for whom there existed a plurality of worlds, as he regarded progression not as a series of successions (as if along a ladder), but as a complex web of concurrent phenomena (processes happening at the same time; operating or acting in conjunction with oneanother; convergent, complementary, synchronous, harmonious and complementary at the level of functions) taking place within the increasing identity of integrated energetic wholes: “But except for Melissos, none of his predecessors discovered that this great revealing whole is never-ending; that things which are here, in our proximity, are encompassed within something that is endless. The same story is always repeated over and over again: near, far, near, far, and on and on. And when I take hold of this thing in its entirety, I have something like infinite space before me. Democritus is the author of the idea of empty space. (…) Yet, Democritus is the first for whom there exists something like never-ending empty space. For that reason, Democritus is also the first

8

Chapter One for whom there exists a plurality of worlds. In older thinkers we know about, the plurality of worlds is a successive plurality, not a concurrent one. But the plurality of concurrent worlds in infinite space is something fundamentally different from the mythical plurality of successive worlds.” (Patoþka, 2002, pp. 78-79)

In the music of Burzum, the progression achieved by means of exploiting the fertile void which connects the blood to the season of the spirit – in the ways of an unpredictable and dangerous sea (of passions, hopes and regrets) along simultaneous and integrated (concurrent) phenomena – is best illustrated in the song “The River of Forgetfulness” (Glemselens Elv). Here seasons coexist and tear the pasts with the same passion with which lovers tear delayed love-letters about impossible destinations (“Below the ground, the hidden world, / behind the clouds towards the west, / ends the long boat journey, / where winter and autumn are feasting”). And also, here, the dead and the living can be said to live the great constitutive Democritean void as the transitional place where the gods insinuate themselves into our lives: “the dead and the living / The dead rest in white clothes, / behind heavy cold stone doors, / but if you listen to the army of the dead, / you can sometimes hear them sing.” Such a consubstantial song is the highest possible expression of one’s sense of honour towards his purposes in life, and also the greatest possible defiance of death and of man’s fears of himself. This valorised space of movement can be seen as “death assimilated into the throbbing of life and subordinated to the purposes of the living”, instead of things being the other way around (as usually happens in the natural course of events). Should we chase this idea back into the parallel mirroring that communication uses in order to focalize, heat and heal the social spectrum, we must specify that it was still Humboldt who first observed that communication – whatever its type (ranging from human discourse to the experiment with the communicative containers in physics) – presupposes as a sine-qua-non condition, the existence of an area of incommunicability. This latter area constitutes a fundamental imperfection within the equation of a balanced (stable) and with-an-open-horizon becoming. If meaning can never be exhausted beyond all possible remainders3, then any 3 This principle was fully demonstrated by Heidegger and assigned to the recurring phenomenological distance between Dasein and Sein. The constant interplay and teasing between man and his Being is possible because of this impossibility to eliminate all remainders from a sphere of meaning – more specifically, to eliminate by revealing – as Heidegger would always speak throughout his work of the

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understanding must simultaneously be a misunderstanding – in order for that understanding to be an evolving phenomenon: “in its dynamics, thinking needs to deal with a datum similar to it and at the same time with something different from it. The resembling element inflames it while the different element constitutes for it an indispensable touchstone to test the value of what it produces through its own resources.” (Humboldt, 1974, p. 195)4 This space that stands different from the pathways on which our thinking usually unfolds its firm branches and launches its psychic tentacles is, in fact, the very space of occurring for the productive imagination – as only by means of imagination can resources be mobilized into a transformative agency. The language is stretched from within at the level of the essence of all its possibilities and of all its edifications by this space of the authentically free variations. Roland Barthes calls this space “intertext”, arguing that it is permanently in exactly the place where it should be, namely “at distance but not afar” (Barthes, 1994, p. 81, our translation from the Romanian edition); that it is “a continuously displaced extreme, a void, mobile and unpredictable extreme.” (Barthes, 1994, p. 82, our translation from the Romanian edition) The intertext – the text living and breathing between texts – is to be regarded here (not necessarily in faultless accordance with Barthes’ definition) as precisely what gets lost in each and every translation, and also as what makes possible all future translations and interpretations, id est, that sacred space which saves an idea from dying by entering into a final form. It is Erik Danielsson, the vocalist and bass-player in the Swedish Black-metal band Watain who best observed this aspect in an interview conducted by Paul Kearns and Roy Kristensen: “The music of Watain to me is a translation of an energy within us. And the more and more we are evolving in artistic skill, the more pure this translation will become. And the goal would be the day when nothing is lost in translation, when the expression doesn’t differ at all from the source that we want to express. That is a very ambitious goal of course, and I am

primordial role of the Hidden in the evolution of the Expressed…(for which reason he heavily condemned the conquering of the moon by U.S. astronauts) 4 Wilhelm von Humboldt, La différence de construction du langage dans l'humanité et l'influence qu'elle exerce sur le développement spirituel de l'espèce humaine, in Introduction à l'oeuvre sur le kawi et autres essais, Eds. du Seuil, Paris, 1974. Our translation from the French version and our italics. Work initially published by Humboldt in 1835.

10

Chapter One not convinced that it will be fully achieved…I’m not sure that’s possible but that’s always something that we are striving for.” (Erik Danielsson)

Assuring the life of an idea by means of continuous interpretations and translations is how we are going to read Varg’s words from the song Beholding The Daughters Of The Firmament: “In every night there's a different black.” Due to these never-ending types of darkness, existence itself can appear continuously as a yet undiscovered planet orbiting at the dark fringes of a personal (inner) solar system.

2. The metaphor and the resurrection of the signifier; the Kantian sublime and the reduction of language in Black-metal The question arising at this point of our demonstration is the following: “what is the relationship between language and the intertext (as we have [re]defined it)”? Of course, the answer is rather simple: the language is a finite form, we might even say a dead form of an idea or a “stolen possibility” – while the intertext is still an authentic state of becoming, one that retains that visceral form of energy involved in any violent (to the point of being ground-breaking) creation. The intertext becomes that particular something which, basically, keeps language alive, as a transformative entity. This is true, but let us insist on the subject and see what nuances could be gained as a consequence of the fact that we assume the full weight of this phenomenological premise. This intermediary space assures the necessary displacement (distribution, dissemination, translation, superseding and so on and so forth) of the referent, for metaphors to be able to form and acquire their spectacular clusters of images and representations. This phenomenon equates to what Sigmund Freud identified as “the process of sublimation” (the mechanism that allows people to act out their unacceptable impulses by converting them into socially acceptable expressions – and indeed metaphors do hide cataclysmic forces and intuitions). Sublimation, in its turn, when taken to its phenomenological extreme, settles into the “form” of the sublime, in the precise way in which Kant understood this sublime: the sublime no longer relates to art in the way we used to understand art, because within the sublime, at the level of the ideation, nothing can any longer be fixed onto a representation. When nothing can any longer be bound to (immobilized into) a representation, we witness the deconstruction of language and of representations – and I think that this is the very essence

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of the relation between Black metal and the sublime. The best support for this idea in the music of Burzum is to be found in the following lines: “After a Hundred Men's Lifetime In Analyzing I learn To Consume The Sphere Of Immense Power.” (Burzum, My Journey to the Stars)

We will examine in as much detail as possible what these strange words can really mean. But first, let us come back to the previous idea of displacement and ask ourselves what exactly opens up by means of this shift from a determinate idea to an indeterminate one? The answer is: the displacement (or the shift) itself. More precisely, that state in which the artist finds himself while creating (in Varg’s terms – when he “journeys” into “darkness” towards personal lights [“stars”]). Of course, everybody is familiar with proverbs which say that it is not the destination that counts but the journey towards the ends; that it is not the product but the process that makes all the difference for the producers. In the case of the artist, this kind of process or journey has a much more special and specific name: the metaphor. The metaphor is that particular process which allows the artist to remain a constant striver and not to become a bourgeois of his own successes. The process is an exuberating and triumphant explosion of free floating signifiers, while the work of art (the final product) is a mere signified or a killed signifier…a signifier that was trapped into the stone of a definite form. The metaphor is this process and possibility that the artist possesses in order to be able to remain suspended in full passage (in full process or at the living intersection of all possibilities), freed from the past and from the present as well, but with the authentic possibility to establish new kinds of links and relationships with both of them. Thus (due to this liberation) the metaphor becomes man’s way of overcoming the “rigor mortis” of the past and the accumulated wisdom (and technique), a way which allows him to assume that past once again in the present contexts. The metaphor is that “sphere of immense power” that Varg speaks about. To learn how to produce and how to read metaphors is to learn how to consume a sphere of great influence (“power”) – a substance capable of escaping all fixed (dead) instances, because when producing and when assimilating metaphors the artist is neither in his work, nor in his natural life, but in the very energy that creates life and works of art (he is in full passage / process /

12

Chapter One

ontological corridor). That is why the artist is happy not when he finishes his work of art (that is, the moment when the signifier gives its final breath [speaks its final word] and becomes a signified or a dead signifier) but when he is in full process of creating (in full stream of possibilities). Yet, in order to remain in such a full stream of possibilities, he must pursue with the destruction of language and of representation – which destruction, as we have shown, equates to the state of the sublime (in which case, the sublime is the living, nameless and overwhelming stream of possibilities). This stream operates the above mentioned displacement and that is why Kant says that while “the sublime moves, the beautiful [author’s note: only] charms.” (Kant, 2003, p. 47) Coming back to Varg’s lines, wisdom and skill are mirrored in one’s capacity to pass from analysis to creation, or, in other words, from comparison to metaphor. Analysis is carried through by means of comparisons while artistic creation is achieved in metaphors: if in the case of the comparisons, though they are contrasted and put in relation to one another, the semantic and ideatic spheres do not interpenetrate each-other and remain separated (and the meanings stay the same) – in the case of the metaphors these spheres enter into a true interpenetration, transfer of essence and fusion of nuclei (resulting in new and unexpected meanings). We could say that while comparisons write fanciful obituaries about a glorious past signifier, metaphors resurrect unexpected demons within that signifier and it along with them. Due to these processes a work of art (an immobilized signifier) is not to be confused with what the artist invests or instils (introduces by gradual, persistent efforts) in that work. In this sense (that of the metaphorical rejuvenation), Virgil Ciomoú states that man is an entity which expresses his potential and his power of signification first and foremost through his capacity to translate a level of significance into another and by means of another, thus transcending all static, homogenizing and ultimately deadly-paralyzing pressures of standards, canons and typizations: “Being of passage depends on something even stranger than the passage itself and that which results from it. This it is not about the simple fact that everything has to change. One should now change the very concept of being, as it should be the case with that of change. In this way, the being would no longer be the effect of a passage, be it that of birth or of death: it would reveal itself in the change itself, or even more, as a change.” (Ciomoú, 2008, in Avant Propos, our translation from French into English)

This idea of translating a level of significance into another and by means of another (idea which constitutes the phenomenological basis of every metaphor) in order to escape (elude, avoid) the mortifying instincts

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of reality (instincts manifested – as Berger and Luckmann show in their The Social Construction of Reality – in the form of the unproblematic habitualization), is present à-la-lettre in the music of Burzum: “From high up there I fall from time; down into the bottomless, empty and timeless. (...) Into death, from death. Into life, from life. Downwards and across the river without a source. Into darkness, from darkness; into cold, from cold. Through time, from time.” (Burzum, Jeg Faller)

“To fall from time” or to become “empty” (in the sense of “available to be filled up with new and fresh meanings”), “bottomless” (freed from the conventional limitations of traditions and norms and thus ready to discover new depths) and “timeless” – is equivalent to being able to avoid the corrosive aspects of time by remaining (as we have shown) suspended in full passage (at the living intersection of all possibilities), in the full intensity of the creative and transforming energy, freed from the past and the present and ready to establish new kinds of links / relationships with both of them. Downwards and across, above and below, beyond and behind – these are all metonymies5 for immortality, for the possibility of escaping (eluding) temporality and death by means of artistic sublimation. The metaphor operates this “timeful timelessness”6 which is in fact (as once again Virgil Ciomoú points out) the very special “time” that Marcel Proust is searching for in his famous novel In Search of Lost Time – a time which is not at all the past (as all ignorant and superficial readers believe) but a time between times, a time above and beyond all other times: the time of inspiration and creation. The power of the metaphor retains something of the infernal purity and instability of the energy – namely its imponderableness and wild unpredictability…its freedom to devour spaces and regurgitate the time back into its source (and thus kill death itself). Giuseppe Ungaretti, when commenting upon Valéry, made the following outstanding remark in this respect: 5 6

Special types of metaphors. Syntagm coined by the author of the present study.

14

Chapter One “(...) the continuous dissimulation of the tragic aspect of being human to human conscience which is reflected in order to be questioned is very much like when an object is reflected in the sea. The object becomes a plaything in water, a nothing. It is an ineffable emblem which, once fixed, changes according to the moods of the monster: a poetry of sweet disclosures, a long drawn amorous lamentation, an apparent encountering 7 pining away with antinomic destinies.” (Ungaretti in Grassi, 1990, p. 198)

In this latter case we see that the resurrection of the signifier coincides with the resurrection of the Demon. Yet, the power of this Demon to defy death is to be found elsewhere, namely in its capacity to identify a common source for different phenomena and to reunite their energies within an overwhelmingly unknown new formula. Previously in this study we have discussed the importance that Heidegger assigns to the hidden dimensions of existence. Now it is time to discuss also the far greater emphasis that Heidegger places upon the phenomenon of revealing – if we are to understand the power of the metaphor to overrun death. The darkness of death can be overturned and redeemed in the light and at the cost of creation and understanding. Heidegger here proposes perhaps the most courageous (though rather implicit, if we consider the way in which the idea is developed throughout his work) thesis: human understanding and artistic conception can create a glade in the dark forest of the Being (Sein). What we can logically deduce from this is that the Being is the dark and that human spirit (that of the Dasein) is the bringer-of-light: the German word for this glade is “Lichtung” which in English translates as “clearing”– a term which stands for a tract of land within a wood or other overgrown area from which trees and other obstructions have been removed. This term also denotes, as its main meaning, the act or process of making or becoming clear. In Heidegger's work, this term mostly refers to the necessity of a clearing in which something (an idea) can reveal itself from the hidden or from the implicit (Heidegger, 1962, p. H.133). Therefore, “things show up in the light of our understanding of being.” (Dreyfus, 1995, p. 162) The most interesting aspect is that this imagery constitutes the very heart of the album Hvis lyset tar oss (Norwegian for If the Light Takes Us): “A glade in the wood Where the sun shines Between the trees we are imprisoned 7

Giuseppe Ungaretti, ‘Testimonianza su Valéry’. In Vita d’un uomo, p. 461, quoted by Ernesto Grassi in Vico and Humanism [Essays on Vico, Heidegger, and Rhetoric].

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In this God's glade It burns it scorches When the light licks our flesh Goes toward the sky a smoke A cloud of our form Prisoners of the burials Tormented by God's goodness No flame no hate They were right we have come to Hell.” (Burzum, If the Light Takes Us)

Of course, this envisioning becomes very troublesome when related to the pagan tradition of worshipping the sun and its life-seeding wheel. Everybody witnessed the failure of the symbol of the sun within the Christian dogma because of some insufficiently radicalized theories, but to see this symbol attacked inside a pagan vision may appear a little bit strange, so one may ask himself what is the real implicature of such lines as the ones mentioned above. The answer to this dilemma necessarily constitutes the key needed in order to understand the neo-pagan vision of Burzum upon the process of constitution and self-assertion: Varg implies here the existence of a personal human (inner) sun capable of outshining the natural one (ultimately a source of death and destruction) – and this is a truly Heideggerian vision upon enlightening (as explained above). The motif of the inner sun capable of outstripping the natural one is present in other Black metal milieus as well – let us think only of the famous song “The Light that Burns the Sun” from Watain, a song which speaks of personal flames able to “ignite the heavens and scorch them thoroughly”: “Shining from the Serpent's eye. The Boundless Light that burns the sun. The fire of the Fallen One. God of Death primordial. Flame of the unknown. Mould my heart into a vessel, And possess it as your own! Make my torch into a furnace. So that I can see the secrets clear. Holy, radiant, silent. A light so strong it bears the wrath of a god. (...) The wings of Lucifer unfold. Transcending now into formation

16

Chapter One To burn the sun and all creation.” (Watain, The Light that Burns the Sun)8

Both songs relate heavily to biblical motifs and they both invoke a Luciferian vision upon light – namely light as cognition, as knowledge, as capacity to reveal and to create the world by uncovering the true zones of meaning and of passion (Heidegger’s “Lichtung”). The act is equal with the capacity to transcend all mythologies as dead or immobilized signifiers and to forge upon and into them a personal mythology, along with a world successfully brought on one’s ontological frequency. In this respect, it would be fair to mention an almost fascinating linguistic phenomenon manifesting itself in the part of Europe from which this interpretation emerges – Transylvania, a region where Romanian and Hungarian culture meet. According to Virgil Ciomoú, there are only two languages in the world (Hungarian and Romanian) that have the same semantic root (a fact suggesting an identical origin for two different phenomena) for the words light and world: in Romanian we have “lumină” (light) and “lume” (world), and in Hungarian we have “világosság” (light) and “világ” (world). Following this last thread, we can once again quote Giuseppe Ungaretti’s vision upon the rejuvenation of reality via metaphors – one according to which, the main function of metaphors is to reveal the common root of the phenomena as the reference point which configures and supports our consciousness. This common root explains all involuntary attractions and irrational compatibilities as well as the infernal purity of beliefs and emotions which constitutes the true presentness and the real intensity of reality (in other words, due to this visceral and almost occult consubstantiality, reality appears as something alive and unpredictable – not as something dull, altered, inanimate or plainly dead in matters of available perspectives): “(...) a mystery, which in poetry is that involuntary attraction of roots that bring the words together in a bond beyond their meaning, mystery perceivable in the distances of space and through time that’s given to objects and such as to bring them into view in a plateau of forgetfulness, to be divested even of their names and become, impatiently, the criers of dreams...there’s no poetry if objects, from the depth of space and night of time, cannot suddenly recall their names and overwhelm us, dazzling and frightening us with the beauty of their presence. At that point we are invested with the precision of this beauty, a precision outside of human

8

http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/watain/sworntothedark.html#5, consulted on the 1st of March 2013, 16:16.

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measure which takes our breath away and all possibilities to exist before us or any other presence.” (Ungaretti in Grassi, 1990, p. 198)9

The message in all the three cases (Burzum, Watain and Ungaretti) is that the human light of knowledge and passion is the one that gives the necessary meaning to the solar light, and the one which truly creates this world – as it invests it with the most precious possible gift and configuration (one able to transcend death and all other impersonal and sterilizing phenomena): a consciousness. When taught how to use metaphors (or how to discover its call, grace or talent by means of metaphoric transposition and reconfiguration) our consciousness slowly but surely begins to master the world, as it gains the capacity to project itself beyond the datum (limitations) and beyond death, into its own constructions and ambitions. Yet the greatness of such a human prevalence over matter is that death, nature itself and all otherwise sterile and blind turmoils become dependent on man’s capacity to register them into a meaningful configuration and to assure, in this manner, order and stability within an otherwise chaotic and self-destructive display of madness. The myths of creation – clusters of metaphors and symbols – are the first signs of such a victory over death, oblivion and meaninglessness. The metaphor, through the transfers, the empowering and the expansions that it operates or simply favours, remains the first source of cognition and the way in which the first pagans came to terms with nature and with their destinies, and began to master their presence inside some otherwise destructuring agitations and confusions. Approaching the hostile incompatibilities by means of metaphors equates to translating and revealing in terms of human needs and meanings all that they are or can be. The greatest Italian humanist Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico was the first to give an explicit voice to this fantastic intuition: “‘All the first tropes are corollaries of this poetic logic. The most luminous and therefore the most necessary and frequent is metaphor. It is most praised when it gives sense and passion to insensate things, in accordance with the metaphysics above discussed, by which the first poets attributed to bodies the being of animate substances, with capacities measured by their own, namely sense and passion, and in this way made fables of them...It is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts...Thus, head for top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and of potatoes; mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher; the teeth of a rake. A saw, a comb; the 9

Giuseppe Ungaretti, ‘St. John Perse,’ pp. 651-52, quoted in Grassi, op.cit, p.198.

18

Chapter One beard of wheat; the tongue of a shoe; the gorge of a river; a neck of land; an arm of the sea...Heaven or the sea smiles; the wind whistles; the waves murmur...and our rustics speak of plants making love, vines going mad, resinous trees weeping. Innumerable other examples could be collected from all languages, all of which is a consequence of our axiom that man in his ignorance makes himself the ruler of the universe, for in the examples cited he has made of himself an entire world’ [italics mine].” (Vico in Grassi, 1990, pp. 68-69)10

From this point of view, our inner light outburns the blind light of the sun – a light unable to see or to create beyond its energy; beyond its explicit possibilities. Human cognition brings light into the implicit and reveals basically an unlimited world of possibilities. This is the resurrection of the signified into a signifier and the purposeful manipulation of death and darkness. This idea finds its most beautiful expression in the prose of the Romanian author Liviu Rebreanu. In his novel Pădurea SpânzuraĠilor (The Forest of the Hanged Men), Rebreanu made the following wonderful case: “…nothing stands above the individual! ...on the contrary, the individual stands above all, above the whole Universe, root and branch! What would come out of the Earth without the individual’s capacity to see it, to love it, to measure it, to acknowledge it? Just like in Earth’s case, the Universe, only when filtered through the humans, has come out as an appealing reality. Otherwise it would be but a sterile turmoil of blind energies, otherwise, that is, in the absence of man’s soul. All the suns within the Universe can’t have another raison d'être but to warm the human body, the body that shelters the divine seed of intelligence. Man is the centre of the universe, because only within man, the matter itself reached selfconsciousness, only within a man’s brain was it able to acknowledge its existence as fact…Man is God!” (Rebreanu, 2002, pp. 61-62, our translation)

If Rebreanu gave to this idea its most graceful and exciting expression, it was Nietzsche’s Zarathustra who first envisaged the possibility of a human-god able to conjure the sun into worshiping him (instead of the other way around – as was the case in Egypt and all other ancient pagan civilizations): “(…) and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spake thus unto it: Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if 10 Giambattista Vico Scienza nuova seconda SS 404-5, quoted in Ernesto Grassi, op.cit, Grassi’s italics.

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thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest! For ten years hast thou climbed hither unto my cave: thou wouldst have wearied of thy light and of the journey, had it not been for me, mine eagle, and my serpent. But we awaited thee every morning, took from thee thine overflow, and blessed thee for it.” (Nietzsche, 2000, p. 59)11

Edmund Husserl (the founding-father of phenomenology) provides us with the perfectly accurate scientific and phenomenological “translation” of these very words: “(...) the entire Objective world exists for me and is precisely as it is for me. Anything belonging to the world, any spatiotemporal being, exists for me – that is to say, is accepted by me – in that I experience it, perceive it, remember it, think of it somehow, judge it, value it, desire it, or the like. Descartes, as we know, indicated all that by the name cogito. The world is for me absolutely nothing else but the world existing for and accepted by me in such a conscious cogito. It gets its whole sense, universal and specific, and its acceptance as existing, exclusively from such cogitationes. In these my whole world-life goes on, including my scientifically inquiring and grounding life. By my living, by my experiencing, thinking, valuing, and acting, I can enter no world other than the one that gets its sense and acceptance or status [Sinn und Geltung] in and from me, myself.” (Husserl, 1982, p. 21)

While the light of the natural sun can be biased or confiscated by fraudulent discourses, the inner light, if it shines at all, can’t be but authentic and grafted upon an active consciousness. The latter is one governed by a vision able to see beyond necrotic fixities and marked contingencies, and also able to integrate what it deciphers into concrete acts of consciousness, such as remembrance, anticipation, planning, association, objectivation, desire and so on and so forth.

3. Instead of conclusions: the Sublime and the Real mirrored in the Scream of the Void (lacuna and nebula) At the end of this study let us revisit the Kantian notion of the sublime (with its afferent reduction of language) corroborated through Giuseppe Ungaretti’s intuition which states that, apart from bards and other known poets and musicians, there is as well a rare species of artists – “the criers of dreams”. 11 We quoted here from the Romanian edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra, but we used Thomas Common’s translation into English.

20

Chapter One

The reduction or the destruction of language as a response to the sublime equals in its turn with the phenomenon known in French as “bouche bée” (English translation: “to take away somebody's breath” or “to be taken aback”). This is something described by Burzum in the song Der Tod Wuotans where “for a brief moment, everything stops. It is as if the universe holds its breath.” The interesting question that arises here is whether this “bouche bée” can also imply a scream – as in Edvard Munch’s famous painting. Answering this question could provide precious insight into the meaning behind Varg’s unreal screams and calls from a song such as The Spell of Destruction. If, in an evolutionary sense, the road of silence towards language passes through screams, then, when an artist who masters perfectly all the subtleties of language chooses to express himself through screams, what he really does in such a case is to “unconsciously” give a direct vocal expression to the void which sustains all movement and evolution (a phenomenological lacuna whose role in the constitution of reality was emphasized when we brought Democritus into the discussion), and to actualize a form in itself of the human subject, prior to the emergence of language: it is precisely what Lacan identified as “lalangue” (written together, without a blank space between the words). We used inverted commas when we said that the artist “unconsciously” gives a voice to a phenomenological lacuna because we wanted to stress the fact that, though intentional, this act (the scream) answers to a deep call or intuition…or talent, or even predestination. By means of this scream the artist insists on drawing the attention to those (still) dwelling in language that their language is endowed with (or holds available) a lacuna in which other dimensions (of consciousness) can insert or inscribe themselves. It is in these very lacunas that the natural objects are displaced by our consciousness with the aim of becoming artistic objects. This scream can also be seen as an attempt to grasp (and, if not, at least to mirror) the very nature of the “happening” – something that otherwise could in no way lie within our possibilities or intentions. The “happening” is the intrusion as such of another dimension, the “nonsense” that institutes and sustains the work of art… a presence that cannot be assigned to anything in this world. The lacuna or the passage signalled by the scream withholds the spirit – which spirit lies beyond death (that is, beyond past and present), as it is the living emanation of a superior ontological instance (the gods, maybe). Faith as personal strength appears only in the interval (lacuna, passage) and makes us available for the sublime – which sublime is non-objectual

Thee Killing Real and a the Sublimee Aura in the Mu Music of Burzum m

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and thus thee living proof that there is more m to reality ty that we can n know of it. Man cannnot remain peermanently in such an availlability and th hat is why the authentiic scream hass to descend into languagee and obey (o or simply take rest in)) semantic, morphological, m phonetic or ssemiotic ruless. Yet the sublime is aalways there, in the same way w in whichh the interval is always achievable bby authentic consciousness c ses. The phennomenon as su uch takes place not onnly in music but b in painting g as well – andd let us consid der here a painting whhich effectiveely pushes the t limits off possibility, Kazimir Malevich’s White on White.

This painnting is not at a all a picturee about visiblle reality but about the hidden processes that susstain it, and th hus a fantasticc break with the t use of perspective as we were accustomed to the notionn. Malevich feels the lacuna (or innterval) that we w spoke abo out previouslyy and by mean ns of this painting he tries to conveey a different sense of spacce – more precisely, he tries the imppossible: to mirror m the “pllace” that coloours and shap pes come from. In thee same sense and with the same use of the lacuna, th he Blackmetal scream ming-style, ass an elevated form f of art, trries to mirror the place where the ssound first caame from and d constantly ccomes from ever since (though thiss source [and the infernal purity p of its ennergy] was co ompletely shadowed bby the marvells of metapho ors and otherr linguistic sp pectacular artifices).

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But there is also another interpretation of the scream in Black-metal, one that has nothing to do with the will and thirst to taste the sublime (and achieve the perfect translation) – on the contrary, one which is closer to Munch’s painting and thus to the most direct possible expression of dread. The dread in this context is the panic of not finding one single intermediary space (lacuna or passage) in which to project yourself, the panic felt in front of hermetic and monolithic structures – structures independent of any intervention or will. Death and the real are such structures. As total manifestations of an energy independent of human cognition or control, death and the real can be said to be somehow similar. The only place where they differ is at the level of causality, as death can be provoked or postponed but not controlled or represented as such. A corpse or a skeleton or other so called “symbols of death” have nothing to do with the phenomenon per se but with an “empty” post festum expression. For this reason we will interpret this other side of the Black-metal scream as a panic not in front of death but in front of the suffocating compactness and denseness of the real, a real that still bears in its vitriolic shadow the premonition of the irreversibility of death…if not even the very perception (paralyzing visceral scent) of death.

3.1 The real as opposed to reality It is only the real that stands objective and independent, as that which cannot be transformed in reality, mastered, ordered, integrated, compensated, anticipated or represented in any way. The real is the only “thing” in this world that does not tolerate any representation, or that refuses to enter any structure of meaning. Anything that managed to enter into representations (that is, anything that was translated into the codes and symbols with which today's cultures operate and configure their societies) is already reality. But in order to truly understand the paralyzing and destructuring nature of the real we must revisit the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan understood by real something sinister, the absolute dread, the grinding silence, the destructuring and traumatizing experience per excellence (Evans, 1996). On a Kierkegaardian line of thinking, Lacan assimilates the real to the demonic, suggesting that, that which does not communicate in any form (that which refuses or rejects any attempt to symbolize or to represent it) instantiates the supreme “satanic”: “the world of words is that which creates the world of things – things originally confused in the ‘here and

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now’ of all that there is.” (Lacan, 2006)12 And that which cannot be approached in / by language (that which cannot be made to communicate) is the supreme diabolical presence, the absolute impossibility and the very reason for all destabilizing anxieties (because it absorbs any buffer-area, any lacuna, any passage or any other functionally-neutral space – a space in which one could make a movement aiming at adjustment or deliverance): “the confrontation with something in front of which all words cease to signify and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence.” (Lacan, 1988)13 Utterly opposed to imagination and creativity, outside symbolization and representation, the real is a hermetic structure that allows no division, no fault, no void (lacuna), no error, no determinable indeterminacy: “there can be no absence inside the Real” (Lacan, 1988)14; “the real is always in its place [author’s note: and nowhere else].” (Lacan, 1977)15 No displacement, no fissure, no identitary limit, no imprint, no impression, no division, no contrast, just a perpetual compactness tied tightly with itself and deep into itself. This is the world of the real, a virulent (because constantly growing and spreading) nebula – pretty much like the one described by Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation: “neither more nor less active or passive than a living substance is vis-à-vis its molecular code. Here and there, a single nebula whose simple elements are indecipherable, whose truth is indecipherable” (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 31); “traversed by currents, but emptied of references” (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 42); “an increasingly neutral (...) asyntactic nebula.” (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 87). The main “quality” of the real is that it strikes when and where it is least expected – when one would not think of it happening or when one would think of himself as being perfectly safe. It is uncontrollable and expressed indirectly everywhere in popular culture and folklore, inbetween the lines of proverbs and phrases such as “I wouldn’t have expected that from him / her of all people” or “there is no escape from what you fear” (the object of your fear eventually grabs you). Lacan argues throughout his entire work that man needs to interpose between himself and the real a buffer-zone, a protective membrane, a filter-area. Between man and the brutality of the real (something horrible and anguishing that stands in perfect opposition to reality) it is only a 12 Paraphrase from the chapter “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”. 13 Paraphrase. 14 Paraphrase. 15 Paraphrase.

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living quality of the transfer medium that can assure the relationing, the adaptation, the communication and the transformation (trans-formation) necessary to anchor the consciousness against the absorbing streams of fear, anguish and loss, and to transform the real into reality. The reality in this context equals a “tamed” and “domesticated” real, a real adapted to our needs and desires. The artistic scream plays the role of this transformative corridor between real and reality – the role of a sonic membrane assuring a safe contact between real and reality, if not by other complex means, then at least by signalling the dangerous approaching presence of the real. The scream achieves this by augmenting, intensifying and strengthening one’s personal aura against a darkening background of death, solidified and solidifying time, eroded feelings (dead [meaningless] because overused metaphors) and uncontrolled intrusions into reality: “In the Pool of Dreams the Water Darkens For the Soul That's Tired of Search As Years Pass by The Aura Drops As Less and Less Feelings Touch.” (Burzum, Feeble Screams From Forests Unknown)

The aura remains the highest and the hottest expression of light and of life against darkness and death. The metaphor – as capacity to make the aura shine brighter or to glow darker and more intense – constitutes the highest proof of man’s capacity to produce displacements and to thus prove his mental health (in the absence of displacements psychosis occurs and takes hold of our “perspectives”). In the music of Burzum, such an aura is able to balmily traverse all the burdenless carcasses (such as the one on the cover of Hvis lyset tar oss) as easily moulded by time and sands as they are; carcasses with which life constantly assaults you and which, elsewhere other than in the kind old desert of the self or within the clumsy but dear hourglass of memory, can and will surely become masters of your infernal ceremonies. Inside this aura, Black-metal and its striking power of intrusion, operates like a carnivorous ivy climbing the stairs and then expanding under the bed and on the arms, tightening around our faces and dragging us into the ground, making us run with her beneath the soil, back to the seed of our spiritual plant. Such a case was probably best described by Fernando Ribeiro when talking about opium perceived as an effusive strange flower whose living fruits we become while introjecting supersonic trajectories:

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“Opium, we fantasize As we fuse with your root You are a strange flower, We are your strangest fruit.”16

3.2 The empty box “inside” ourselves as the privileged space of artistic experience (interpretation included) The British psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott in his Playing and Reality (1971 and 2005) develops a theory according to which (we would say, not only in our para-psychological inter-cerebral dimensions and interstices but also in those parts of our brain dedicated to daily tasks and to the habitual ways of progressively getting acquainted with the world round us) we all carry along throughout our lives a blank space, something like an empty box or a little empty house (an evasive and slippery “pigeon-hole”, constantly ready to be re-invested both semantically and emotionally) – which he calls “transitional space” and, sometimes, “resting-place”: “Of every individual who has reached to the stage of being a unit with a limiting membrane and an outside and an-inside, it can be said that there is an inner reality to that individual, an inner world that can be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a state of war. This helps, but is it enough? My claim is that if there is a need for this double statement, there is also a need for a triple one: the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate and yet interrelated.” (Winnicott, 2005, p. 3)

Winnicott got his idea regarding the possibility of the existence of such a transitional space when he tried to see beyond “contemplation” (the unfoldings occurring inside our inner reality) and “behaviour” (the unfoldings occurring in our outer reality), and to identify a corridor that escapes these two pillars of our personality – but at the same time one that binds them and keeps them in an architectural equilibrium; a place free of 16

Moonspell, lyrics extracted from the song Opium, http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/moonspell/irreligious.html, consulted on the 1st of April, 2007, 18:44.

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all atrophying determinations and capable to “place” the individual into the very nature of change (of trans-forming processes); a reminiscence of the essence of all special archetypal sedimentations, which essence is not and cannot be trapped in any pattern or specificity (as it is the active generator and variator of all such instances): “(…) we shall probably find that we spend most of our time neither in behaviour nor in contemplation, but somewhere else. I ask: where? And I try to suggest an answer.” (Winnicott, 1971, p. 105) “What, for instance, are we doing when we are listening to a Beethoven symphony or making a pilgrimage to a picture gallery or reading Troilus and Cressida in bed, or playing tennis? What is a child doing when sitting on the floor playing with toys under the aegis of the mother? What is a group of teenagers doing participating in a pop session? It is not only: what are we doing? The question also needs to be posed: where are we (if anywhere at all)?” (Winnicott, 1971, p. 105)

The main attribute of this transitional space, when compared to the inner as well as to the outer reality, remains its unmatched mobile nature and its constantly trans-forming phenomenal quality. Due to this capacity to tune to the appropriate frequency and to thus integrate in a creative line of development the energy flows transiting the Lifeworld (Lebenswelt), this “in-between” zone of constant potential (of overflowing resources) and of eternally-open experiences, goes beyond any binary opposition of the kind: inner reality / outer reality, object / subject, social / personal (to give just a few possible examples). Where both the outer and the inner reality remain ultimately fixed states, states subject to a stable logic of progression, to a stabilizing repetition, and to the routines of sedimentation, consolidation and organization17 (that is, they always aim at some sort of stagnant sense of security to the detriment of the true experiment and of the open-adventures of the Self, towards the sense of that Self), “the third way of living” escapes the restriction of any dimensional conditioning and assumes a fluid creative a-typical identity, 17

The external fixed reality is described by Winnicott as follows: “one sees that external reality itself is fixed; moreover, the instinctual endowment that provides the backing for object-relating and object-use is itself fixed for the individual, though it varies according to phase and age, and the individual's freedom to make use of instinctual drives.” (Winnicott, 1971, p. 106) On the other hand, the internal fixed reality is described by Winnicott in the following terms: “Here again there is to be seen a fixity that belongs to inheritance, to the personality organization, and to environmental factors introjected and to personal factors projected.” (Winnicott,1971, p. 106)

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sometimes defined by Winnicott as “formlessness”,18 and, some other times, as “area available for manoeuvre” (Winnicott,1971, pp. 106-107). For these reasons, Winnicott further defines the space of “the third way” as the very place where the cultural experience as creation effectively “takes place” (Winnicott, 1971, pp. 106-107). We offer below two main quotations able to anchor our observations back in the main text of Playing and Reality: “The searching can come only from desultory formless functioning, or perhaps from rudimentary playing, as if in a neutral zone. It is only here, in this unintegrated state of the personality, that that which we describe as creative can appear. (…) We experience life in the area of transitional phenomena, in the exciting interweave of subjectivity and objective observation, and in an area that is intermediate between the inner reality of the individual and the shared reality of the world that is external to individuals.” (Winnicott, 2005, p. 86) “By contrast with these [a.n. inner and outer reality], I suggest that the area available for manoeuvre in terms of the third way of living (…)There is a kind of variability here that is different in quality from the variabilities that belong to the phenomenon of inner personal psychic reality and to external or shared reality. The extent of this third area can be minimal or maximal, according to the summation of actual experiences. It is this special kind of variability that concerns me here and now and I wish to examine its meaning. I am making this examination in terms of the position, relative to the individual in the world, in which cultural experience (play) can be said to ‘take place’.” (Winnicott, 1971, pp. 106107)

Our ability to operate in this transitional space, impossible to exhaust as a final accomplishment and constantly surviving as an unstoppable stream (and spring) of possibilities, constitutes an echo of Edmund Husserl’s previous researches on the possibilities of our consciousness19, 18

“I referred to this as formlessness.” (Winnicott, 2005, p. 74) We are speaking here of Edmund Husserl’s notion of “Mehrmeinung” – namely, the capacity of our consciousness to constantly “intend beyond itself”. The virtue is valorized and put to work in Husserl’s system of thinking mainly by means of the “intuitive uncoverings” of the (expanding) nature of things (or, broadly speaking, of reality): “(...) each phase of perception was a mere side of ‘the’ object, as what was perceptually meant. This intending-beyond-itself, which is implicit in any consciousness [a.n. we are speaking about an active consciousness that means something, focuses upon something, aims at something], must be considered an essential moment of it. That, on the other hand, this intending is, and must be, a ‘meaning more’ [a.n. an extra-intentioning; an always-one-more-intentioning – in

19

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and it basically supports from a functional point of view that [a.n. we are speaking here about a mysterious “that”] which is (and remains no matter what) distinctively human in us20, in us as subjects to error and to perfectibility: “The self is not really to be found in what is made out of products of body or mind, however valuable these constructs may be in terms of beauty, skill, and impact. If the artist (in whatever medium) is searching for the self, then it can be said that in all probability there is already some failure for that artist in the field of general creative living. The finished creation never heals the underlying lack of sense of self.” (Winnicott, 2005, p. 73)

This space is often one of freedom, as it allows us, when life gets too tense, to escape from ourselves and to retreat into a sort of no-man’s-land which is neither ourselves but nor the others. Though this space is still within ourselves (ourselves not as some sort of interiors but as living possibilities or “golden impossibilities” as Ralph Waldo Emerson called us), it is also a sort of break from ourselves, toward ourselves. This space functions as a buffer, as an air cushion meant to alleviate the force of impact whenever something hits our psyche. This no-man’s-land is where interpretation, as a play in the dark (the Democritean space) of our imagination, takes place. Here living experience (and not inherited symbolic meaning) makes all the difference and proves once more that understanding something is living that something as an organic part of yourself: “(...) there is (…) a potential space, one that can become an infinite area of separation, which the baby, child, adolescent, adult may creatively fill with playing, which in time becomes the enjoyment of the cultural heritage. The special feature of this place where play and cultural experience have a position is that it depends for its existence on living experiences, not on German, “Mehrmeinung” ] of the Same [a.n. object] becomes shown only by the evidence of a possible making distinct [a.n. descriptive explanation] and, ultimately, [a.n. by the evidence] of an intuitive uncovering, in the form of actual and possible continued [a.n. continued = subsequent] perceiving or of possible recollecting, as something to be done on my initiative.” (Husserl, 1982, p. 46) 20 “Similarly, Winnicott points to our ability to operate in transitional space, and suggests that this ability supports much (perhaps all?) of what is distinctively human in us: The infusion of meaning from the inner world into actions and objects in the public sphere, or the expression of inner-generated truths by means of external physical and verbal forms, describes not only children playing with teddy bears and empty boxes but also the creation of symphonies, sculptures, novels, and even scientific theories.” (Jones, 1997, p. 114)

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inherited tendencies. (...) the area for play is immense; (...).” (Winnicott, 1971, p. 108)

* The infinite space of separation that Winnicott is talking about is sometimes identified by the music of Burzum as the darkest of all darknesses21, if not even as the very essence of darkness or that mysterious blind spot or punctum caecum within the eyes of time (a lapse or a suspension of life which is not normally perceived by our consciousness, as its lack of ability to seize the energy of light is compensated by other concurrent interpolated human faculties) : “A place where master of the world's / Fire doesn't get / In the darkest great / Night of the time.” (One Ring to Rule) If we are to interpret Winnicott’s atypical spatiality in Burzumish chromatics, namely, as the dark and dangerous endless potential of desire, or as that which allows and sustains any propagation of life and light alike – then, diversity (of any kind) appears as the privileged daughter of darkness. This is one of the strongest messages present in the music of Burzum. Winnicott conceived this third area of creations taking place in realtime as the domain of human inventiveness expressed through the act of playing. And if we are to regard the ways in which creation is acted out in the music of Burzum through his analytic lens, we could say that, here, 21 Winnicott’s unreal place of playful self-creation was captured in the lyrics of Burzum as the essence of artistic trans-meanings. Yet, Burzum is not the only band to have approached this special zone of transforming phenomenality. Lake of Tears from Sweden (a band whose music constitutes the subject of the last chapter of this book) interpreted this highly performative skin of darkness (a place ensuring transfers, and, through them creating and simultaneously reflecting the quality of life) as a place for sacred retreats in front of the storms of sadness (when the tears become poisonous and threaten with unprecedented floods): “Leave a room inside my dear / The hide from all the darkness you must find / When you can cry when no one cares/ Where you can leave them all behind / Close your eyes and ride into this night / There is no wrong direction here /Just a smile for every candlelight / So leave a room inside my dear / Leave a room inside, spare a place to hide (...) / Form an ocean from your teardrops / Set your sails and sail away /And promise we that you will not stop / Until you find where tears won’t stay.” (Lake of Tears, “Leave a Room”, taken from http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/lakeoftears/theneonai.html#4, consulted on the 26th of May 2013 18:29). In any case the progressive line of thought is: the play leads to adventure and the adventure leads to redemption through self-discovery and self-creation (where needed).

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creation amounts first of all to phenomena of self-discovery22 (and even of rebirth), through the insertion of severe and decisive nerves into dead matters – something like a game of planting nerves instead of seeds, in the dark, on unknown evasive soils. Such nerves, like carnivorous plants, don’t grow by using the light of the sun – instead they capture the sonic energy of the scream (we are talking here about the unparalleled Blackmetal screaming as a high, intense and infernally pure expression of the Self, one which recaptures [by manifesting itself along intuited similar phenomenal trails] and also mirrors some of the energies of past creative chaoses) and grow into weird voracious branchings and fibrillations in the electric gardens of the Self. If developed into overwhelming structures (occult neural jungles) of eating, they can be said to invert the personal mythologies of death: instead of being “just” taken by the waves and by the winds of the storm of death, the bearer of such cruel expressions of overgrowing quintessence becomes (in a diabolically real play of selffulfilment) the death of all his hidden and ostentatious occlusions (enemies, blockages, critical despairs), as well as the incarnated end of the endless rain of absolute loneliness. He sees his personal crevices (the ones in which he has previously fallen and the places where he saw his dominations of survival dethroned) being filled elegantly with his essence and then extracted from the ice and placed in an upright position (like nerve-trees), so as to be able to branch and spread all over and across the deserts of mute emotions and meaningless motions and ideas. Varg Vikernes expresses in his music this transformative phenomenality in the song “Tour Around The Transcendental Columns Of Singularity” (Rundtgåing Av Den Transcendentale Egenbetens Støtte), not in his own metaphors but by using an uncanny quotation from the Norwegian author, poet, critic and art theorist Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven (a son of Bergen, just like him): “The well of the region is no longer a dark depth, into which we stare, but a living stream, that fertilely flows through the lands of the North. Yes, to the highest visions of essence, this life can now elevate itself into development of its true power and particularity, elevated to the father of all, who is up high in Valhalla, to him, the true god...” (Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven)

The turning of a personal abyss into a spring (a source of power of regeneration) is equal to the filling with an intimate conception of the corrupted and destructive excavations dug by history into the Self and into 22 “persons who (…) are searching for the self (…) are trying to find themselves in the products of their creative experiences.” (Winnicott, 2005, p. 73)

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the perspectival spaces all around us, and it also equals with the elevation of a personal crevice into a neural tree of expansion and domination. The reality of such an act constitutes perhaps “the highest vision of essence” – one which can further unfold or liberate from itself the development of our true power of particularities. The “religious” feeling here can no longer equate to an abstract conception, application and solicitation of charisma, but to a vector of devotion to one’s sacred intuitions. Such a vector appears in the musical universe of Burzum as a “mark of the ancient beast” placed above the sign of Force (‫ܨ‬Ԧ ) of intense natural and transcendental phenomena while entering into fusion in order to form superior energetic streams. The accomplishment or the definition (within an identity) of such forms finds its expression of triumph in the Black-metal scream (an art beyond words and maybe beyond feelings as well).

Bibliography Barthes, R. (1994). Plăcerea textului (The Pleasure of the Text). Translated by Marian Papahangi. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Echinox. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Initially published in French by Edition Galike 1981. Translated into English by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. Berger, Peter L., Luckmann, T. (2008). ConstrucĠia Socială a RealităĠii (The Social Construction of Reality). Translated by Alex Butucelea. Bucharest: Editura Art. Ciomoú, V. (2008). Etre(s) de passage. Bucharest: Zeta Books Publishing House. Cioran, E. (1990). Pe culmile disperării (On the Summits of Despair or On the Heights of Despair). Bucharest: Editura Humanitas. —. (1992). On the Heights of Despair. Translated by Ilinca ZarifopolJohnston. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Dreyfus, H. (1995). Being-in-the-World. Cambridge: MIT Press. Evans, D. (1996). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Grassi, E. (1990). Vico and Humanism (Essays on Vico, Heidegger, and Rhetoric). Translated into English by Azizeh Azodi. Donald Phillip Verene – General Editor, Vol. 3. New York; Bern; Frankfurt am Main; Paris: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Translated by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Humboldt, W. (1974). Introduction à l'oeuvre sur le kawi et autres essais. Translated into French by Pierre Caussat. Paris: Eds.du Seuil.

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Husserl, E. (1982). Cartesian Meditations (An Introduction to Phenomenology). Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague, Boston and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Jones, J. W. (1997). “Playing and Believing: D. W. Winnicott”, in Religion, Society and Psychoanalysis, Janet L. Jacobs and Donald Capps (eds.), pp. 106-126. Boulder: Westview Press. Kant, I. (2000). Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer (University of Pennsylvania) and Allen W. Wood (Yale University). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. (1994). Critica raĠiunii pure (Critique of Pure Reason). Translated by Nicolae Bagdazar and Elena Moisuc. Bucharest: IRI. —. (2003). Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Translated by John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1998). Scrieri 1, Conceptul de anxietate (Writings I. The Concept of Anxiety). Translated by Adrian Arsinevici. Timisoara: Editura Amarcord. Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. —. (1988). The Seminar, Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.). Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. —. (1977). The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.). Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Nietzsche, F. (1992). Naúterea Filosofiei (The Birth of Philosophy). Translated by Mircea Ivănescu. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia. —. (2000). Aúa grăit-a Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra). Translated by ùtefan Augustin Doinaú. Bucharest: Editura Humanitas. Patoþka, J. (2002). Plato and Europe. Translated by Petr Lom. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Rebreanu, L. (2002). Pădurea SpânzuraĠilor (The Forest of the Hanged Men). Bucharest and Chiúinău: Litera International Publishing House. Trabant, J. (1992). Humboldt ou le sens du langage. Mortier, François and Evard, Jean-Luc (eds.) (French edition developed by the author and François Mortier with the collaboration of de Jean-Luc Evard). Liège: Mardaga. Winnicott, D. W. (2005). Playing and Reality. New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. —. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications.

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Internet sources http://www.darklyrics.com/ for the lyrics of Moonspell, Lake of Tears and Watain. http://www.burzum.org/ for all the lyrics of Burzum.

CHAPTER TWO VALHALLA RISING: OF WRATH, MIGHT AND MEAT

Summary The second study of this book approaches the movie Valhalla Rising directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and featuring Mads Mikkelsen from a bordering post-modern phenomenological perspective, one meant to highlight the hidden algorithms and engines of a series of life-sustaining processes such as: the pain of becoming; the intrusive demon-presence and the reptilian-urge in the male psyche; the reclaiming and the reconstruction of the lost impetuses of chaos in man’s blood (the true roots of the will to survive); the assimilation of the imbalances that appear in the spirit along with every change in destiny. The first part of the study entitled “Departing with the feminist canon” deals with the destruction of the myth of the maternal origin of the Earth (claiming that the internal fires of the warrior, when projected outside, were in fact the first form of heat to have warmed up the maternal planetary uterus) and assumes postmodernism along a Freudian line, namely as a predatory cultural force capable of breaking into pieces the Christian dream-censorship and to restart the mechanism of dreams from its very first whirlpooling stones of destiny. The essence of intrusion is interpreted here as one ascending from the atemporal fires hidden in ice and in its cruel glassy persistency in nature as well as in the fierce human stares (Gaston Bachelard). The second part of the study entitled “The Baroque aesthetics of the movie” argues that the epiphanic dynamic which invests the whole landscape of the movie with an unparalleled mobility, echoes the Baroques’ notion of “instability of the equilibrium”, and constitutes a fertile invasion of all senses – one similar to that described by Edgar Papu when he interpreted the Baroque as “an uncertain, elastic, relative notion, a living cell, protean, restless, which unexpectedly changes its forms and dimensions” and which has “the amoebic character of an unstable protoplasmic mass.” The infernal fertility perceived as instability of the scenery, strongly echoes

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postmodernism’s anticipations of the fragmentations of meaning and identity and finds its phenomenological correlative in Husserl’s vision of a “misty horizon of experience” and in Merleau-Ponty’s “expression of what is before expression”. To try to handle this mistiness of horizons is, in Linda Hutcheon’s logic, to interrogate the limits of our representations (and, through them, the limits of our understandings of the Self and of its world). The final part of the study – “The sense of silence in the postmodern aesthetics” – brings the movie within the field of contemporary Northern Irish Poetry, while trying to decipher the sense of silence in war-like situations and in other butchery-related scenarios. Implementing the technique of parallel mirrors, the section filters the silence of the warrior called One-Eye through Ciaran Carson’s poetry (John Ruskin in Belfast and Fuji film) in an attempt to demonstrate that the poet’s and the director’s decision to eliminate the mouth, together with its acts of speech, is in fact a self-prohibited cannibalism, within which all the implied meanings of lust, the compulsions to maim and the continuous streams of pulsating protoplasm are culturally crossed-over with the help of an emptied biological locus, which functions as a buffer zone between man and his monsters. The material, in its entirety, is organized around a Nitzschean logic, not with the aim of fitting the movie into a philosophical canon or school of thought (or trend of interpretation), but with the intention of indicating precisely those canonic corners around which we have tried to insinuate, filter or transpire our interpretation – because we are not dealing here (in Valhalla Rising) with any kind of canonic recurrence. The closing paragraphs discuss the relation between authenticity (Charles Guignon) and human disappearance (Michel Foucault) and the ways in which man could conserve his fragile newly born energies (and, via them, keep his consciousness alive and evolving) through the powerful vibration of his strings of interpretative self-forging against (but also and mostly out of) the carnivorous murmur of nature (Foucault).

1. Introduction. Departing with the feminist canon: Father Earth, Father War! Motto: “Mesmerizing…a trippy nightmare of savage poetry.” —Aaron Hillis, The Village Voice

Approaching a movie like Valhalla Rising in the age of simulacra can be a very tricky and slippery endeavour, in the sense that the interpreter is

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more than prone to inertially fall into the clichés of falsification that basically constitute the nucleus of this age of narcissistic blatant reproductions. To do so would be almost equal to destroying, from the very beginning, the director’s efforts to reveal a structure of authenticity: “Consider a few of the salient phenomena (…) a popular obsession with ‘self-musealization’ by video recorder, memoir recording, and confessional literature; the rise of autobiography and of the postmodern novel with its uneasy negotiation between fact and fiction; the spread of memory practices in the visual arts, often centered on photography; and the increase of historical documentaries on television (…).” (Huysens, 2001, p. 61)

For this reason we will attempt here a phenomenology and an aesthetics of the beast, while presenting (though in a preventive manner) the Nietzschean clichés that could somehow confiscate the message of the movie. We do not claim that Nietzsche’s theories are not at all fit for the general architecture of the movie (for which reason we will mention them at a key point of our demonstration), but we will still try to use them solely as canonic nails and try envisage a radical (radical from an aesthetic point of view) perspective beyond their “acknowledged apophthegmatic” status. Nicolas Winding Refn‘s film (divided into six parts: Wrath, Silent Warrior, Men of God, The Holy Land, Hell, The Sacrifice) starring Mads Mikkelsen is one of those artistic productions that attack today’s canon of political correctness with the natural “nonchalance”, the massiveness and the force of impact of colliding mountains. If John McTiernan’s Predator was accused by the feminist critique of staging “an endless stream of war (…) (author’s note: where) women are reduced to mute and incidental characters or banished altogether” (Faludi, 1992, p. 169), we may rightfully ask ourselves what would the very same feminist critique say about Valhalla Rising – a voracious cinematic impetus from where the idea itself of womanhood is completely erased – as if in the beginnings there were only men and their gods, men and their demons, as single vector of becoming (the idea is best mirrored in the lyrics of the song “Lain With the Wolf”, performed by the Irish Pagan-Black-metal band Primordial): “With words of madness and water of fire He whispers, when the demons come Do you make peace with them or do you become one of them? Do you? (…)

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Chapter Two And this I learnt and this I know You cannot escape the beast when you wear his mark.” (Primordial, Lain With the Wolf)1

As if breathing the shadows of these lyrics, Valhalla Rising is a movie about the pain of becoming – the very essence of any warlike endeavour, from the simple pain caused by the body-building weights, up to the real fights for survival. If in women’s case one may speak about the pain of giving birth, of delivering something into the world, in man’s case it’s all about the pain of becoming yourself – and here we see that Nietzsche’s “Du sollst werden, der du bist” (You must become who you really are) describes a masculine aesthetics and phenomenology; a masculine principle of attraction and worthiness. The energy, explosive and liberating for women, reclaims its dynamics in implosive, concatenating and all-absorbing forms of encrustation in men’s case. Inside this logic, the film reduces the windless, foggy and thick blood of history to its pure masculine essence and simply discards the feminine principle from the idea of becoming: for example, when The Boy tries to approach the destructive force called One-Eye and talk about the cross-shaped talisman that he (The Boy) is wearing on his neck, he mentions only the father (“Do you like it? My father gave it to me, I think.”). It is rather strange for a boy to have nothing to remind him of his mother – if we are to analyze or to filter his attitude through modern Freudian lenses.2 The movie answers the question “when the demons come, do you make peace with them or do you become one of them?” along its epic thread, in a pure Nietzschean way: “THREE METAMORPHOSES of the spirit do I designate to you: how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.” (Nietzsche, 1999, p. 13) First we see One-Eye playing the role of a camel and withstanding the tyranny of its keepers (he is forced to fight and kill within some highly barbaric contests meant to 1

The second song of the album “Redemption At The Puritan's Hand” (2011). Source: http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/primordial/redemptionatthepuritanshand.html, consulted on the 7th of November 2012 12:33. 2 Maybe the absence of the feminine element in the movie is due to the fact that the film is a fresco of only one half of the society of that time. Concentrating on the masculine does not necessarily exclude the feminine, but only emphasises the distribution of roles at that time. The boy says “my father gave it to me” because of a very simple cause which is still present today: the relation father-son is one developed more on the males’ bonding instinct, which materializes later into a true warrior code.

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provide his owner with money resulting from bets), then he liberates himself and savagely slays his former oppressors (the lion stage) and, finally, he accepts the child (who was also owned by his keepers), and on the one side he becomes his father, and on the other side he himself returns to some child-like innocence and kindness towards the laws of nature. From this point of view we could say that One-Eye makes peace with his demons and with himself as well, and that he sacrifices himself for both the child that accompanies him and for the child in himself (a condition for all forms of opening towards the essences of intentionality). Yet, things are much more complicated than this philosophical Nietzschean cliché of becoming. The postmodern way in which everything is reclaimed, constructed and envisaged (both as origin and as future possibility) has to do much more in our opinion with the gender issue. We will follow this line of interpretation. When the morbid grace of gloaming and the subsequent nocturnal mysteries are rooted back into their masculine force of evisceration, the maternal origin of the Earth (“Mother Earth”) is heavily called into question – hence the real function of the complicated aesthetics of the movie (an issue which we will discuss later on, when we will apply some of Edgar Papu’s ideas to the general cinematic architecture of Valhalla Rising). The movie proposes a very cold and hostile environment (having been shot in the old landscape of Scotland for that purpose) – with a venomous fog enwrapping the distances and imposing a suppressed (overwhelming, yet unlocatable as such) closure, which in its turn induces blockages and hidden occlusions. In this abrasive and acrid context (one reminiscent of the first wet mountains and miasmatic swamps that broke the harmony of the planetary sea in the beginnings of life on Earth, when the humans, if they were to really be around at all, must have had the presence of mind and the persistent instincts of crocodiles) there can be no cosily-warm maternal qualities of gestation and hatred remains the only way to capture the fire of the gods – a fire that the humans needed as fuel in order to migrate as sharks do towards milder climates and copulate therein: “He's driven by hate. It's how he survives. Why he never loses.”3 The discovery of fire by man must have been first and foremost (before all other mechanical and physical phenomena) a projection of his inner fire and, as such, an expression of his hatred as will to survive. Father War remains the Father of all fires to come, as true fire springs out of collusions and stands in direct proportion to one’s striking force. This internal fire projected outside was in fact the first form of heat to have 3

http://www.screened.com/valhalla-rising/16-14831/quotes/, consulted on the 21st of May 2013, 15:45.

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warmed up the maternal uterus. Without man’s quest and struggle for a place that could permit prosperity and spiritual elevation, all the maternal qualities would have remained buried and forgotten deep in the monstrous sea. Man’s hatred created life on Earth and the modern concept of understanding and rationality rests on a foundation of heavily burnt masculine philosophical stones of courage, will and that special type of nobleness that accompanies honest victories. Re-writing history is a postmodern virtue (though postmodernism likes to call it recuperation) and its occurrence in postmodernism is not at all incidental –the lesson of postmodernism remains crystal clear even nowadays: one cannot understand history and one’s origins except by rerewriting that history in a personal vein (and this means to truly assume history). The subliminal message of the final part of the movie entitled “The Sacrifice” can be regarded once again as an instance of gender radicalization and of history re-writing (conceptual re-organization): the brutal sacrifice that assures life on Earth was stolen from men and wrongly assigned to maternal figures by modernism (Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage can be an example). For this reason, postmodernism goes back to the sources of becoming and their visceral energies and sacrificial spiritual fertilities. This is definitely Freud’s “Return of the Repressed”, that is, the “indestructible nature of unconscious material” and the “irreducible character of memory traces”: Europe was born as a pagan wonder made of flames crystallized into visions (visions whose phenomenology we will associate with Freud’s “dream-thoughts”) meant to enlighten the dark paths without return and postmodernism, with its re-writings, is perhaps the predatory cultural force able to break Christian dream-censorship into pieces and to restart the mechanism of dreams from its very first whirlpooling stones of destiny: “At this point we are interested exclusively in the essential dreamthoughts. These commonly reveal themselves as a complex of thoughts and memories of the most intricate possible construction, with all the characteristics of the thought-processes known to us in waking life. Not infrequently they are trains of thought which proceed from more than one centre, but which are not without points of contact; and almost invariably we find, along with a train of thought, its contradictory counterpart, connected with it by the association of contrast.” (Freud, 1997, pp. 195196)

Christianity and paganism seem to be connected yet contradictory elements of the European train of thought. Christianity in the context of the gender radicalization staged by Valhalla Rising appears as it really is: a spiritual construct organized around key-feminine concepts such as

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motherhood, chastity and non-combative kindness – ideas expressed along the mild figure of Christ and that of Virgin Mary. In Valhalla Rising these “imports” are embodied in the character of the priest (Gary Lewis) who doesn’t fight back when he is stabbed by the General and who calmly pursues One-Eye on top of a mountain which will prove to be his spiritual mountain (a place of serenity and composure [self-possession] on the other side of the ocean, where he decides to await his death). Both he and OneEye seem to follow similar yet “completely parallel” trajectories and to regress to and rejoice in some sort of childish benevolence, a feeling beautifully imprinted along the centuries by the words of the Shakespearean character Mark Antony, who expressed his strong belief that the evil that men do lives after them. Yet, One-Eye decides to leave him up there, in his newly-found calm, and descend in order to resume his imbalances with his cluster of inner screams commonly labelled as “Evil” – an irrational element emanating hard from the deepest layers of the underground structure of Being. It sits there buried deep inside each and every one of us, counting, waiting for some door to open for it to come out. And Evil knows how to wait and has a truly diabolical patience – pretty much like a crocodile waiting motionless for hours on end until the prey literally enters his jaws. Having had full contacts with it, One-Eye remains reserved towards the easy-going serenity of the priest, as he intuits that the ancient primordial forces of this universe have many more faces and appearances than reason and good could ever have. They can never be truly tamed, understood or analyzed. Reason can only tranquilize these manifestations, within and without, from time to time or put them to sleep for a limited period. The return of the repressed and the return of the demons is both a psychoanalytic and phenomenological reality which burns the enamel off teeth every time premonitions and déjà-vu change the background. Hatred and other vesuvian fires define modern man’s taste for determination as well as his acceptance of revenant (recurring) horrors as principles of becoming: he who is driven by hatred never loses (his path). Cultures prevail over other cultures, both intellectually and brutishly, when they recuperate the hidden fires from their transparencies. One-Eye exhibits the deadliest glassy-eye that coldness has ever been able to assume as point of emanation. But in this virulent and devastating icy glass, there is (as Gaston Bachelard showed in his mystical scientific fashion) a superior fire that could relate man back to the strengths of the primordial elements from which he was “crafted” by his gods: “Thus the abbé de Mangin is very quickly convinced: ‘In the first place, it is in all the bituminous and sulphurous bodies such as glass and pitch that the electric substance is found, since thunder draws its electric matter from

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Chapter Two the bitumens and sulphurs attracted by the action of the sun.’ Thus very little more is needed to prove that glass contains fire and to place it in the category of sulphurs and pitches. So for the abbé de Mangin ‘the sulphurous odour that glass emits when it happens to break after being rubbed is the convincing proof that the bitumens and the oils are dominant within it.’ Should we also recall the old etymology, always active in the prescientific mind, which claimed that corrosive vitriol was vitreous oil (l’huile de vitre)? (...) ‘It is especially within the oils, the bitumens, the gums, the resins that God has locked up fire.’” (Bachelard, 1964, pp. 6768)

Releasing hidden fires from their encapsulations in invisibilities, in transparencies and in other silent undetected travelling essences, is performing a positive interpretation of energy. Valhalla Rising, through the looks of the character One-Eye, stages this great devotion to the fires that make ice unbearable, but also that bring the highest level of clarity in the frozen deserts of the North. Vision, the one that sees the order hidden in the gusts of chaos, and extracts it from there, is fire lurking in the pure glassy ice of an exceptional unknown eye (the light of wisdom glowing in Shiva's eye – the focal point where light reaches its unity both as natural and as psychic energy). The orb, believed by ancient and medieval astronomers to revolve around the Earth and carry the seeds of all thresholds, represents an empty grasp of reality when compared to the new type of gravity introduced by an ice made of indestructible fires: it allows us to perceive movements (falling and raising) as part of new magnetisms and, by means of them, to truly interrogate our limits (the act which Linda Hutcheon places at the foundation of the postmodern thought, when it comes to negotiating representational strategies): “We watch the process of what Foucault once called the interrogating of limits that is now replacing the search for totality.” (Hutcheon, 2002, p. 35) “(…) our access through narrative to the world of experience – past or present – is always mediated by the powers and limits of our representations of it.” (Hutcheon, 2002, p. 51)

And this is the very point where sensible qualities become genuinely sensible, that is open to change (and to new dimensions of cognition) and to redefinition by means of their very organicity. What we obtain is an evolving identity by means of a coupling capacity superior to the otherwise disfiguring irregularities of the environment:

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“(…) a living system may operate in as many different cognitive domains as the different dimensions of its structural coupling allow it to realize. It also follows that the different identities that a living system may realize are necessarily fluid, and change as the dimensions on its structural coupling change with its structural drift in the happening of its living. To have an identity, to operate in a domain of cognition, is to operate in a domain of structural coupling.” (Maturana, 1992, p. 96)

2. Pictorial Composition. The Baroque aesthetics of the movie Whatever the characters say, they say nothing – most probably, a silent legacy from the cadavers. The discharged and overflowing decomposition of the cadavers has confiscated all the meaning within words, leaving them empty and soundless. When the twilight emanates intensely from the abundant flesh into the air and vaguely (feebly) indicates the position of the sun behind some clouds swamped in fog – then we are dealing with an epiphanic dynamic which invests the whole landscape with an unparalleled mobility. Jean Rousset cited by Edgar Papu interprets this mobility as “the instability of the equilibrium” and as a special type of metamorphosis dictated by feeling and not by reason or biology. Jean Rousset directly links this feeling to the evocative force of the background (or scenery): “Jean Rousset (...) proposes (...) four principles: the instability of equilibrium, the mobility of the work, the metamorphosis and dominance of the scenery. (Jean Rousset, La Littérature de l'âge baroque en France, Paris, 1953) In the decisive haste of the Baroque, neither the form nor the idea enter, but a certain ‘emotional attitude’, an experience, a feeling of existence (...) the Baroque is a certain type of emotion or of feeling, meaning that very state named by Wellek ‘emotional attitude’.” (Papu, 1977, pp. 22-23; p. 26, our translation)

In Valhalla Rising we are dealing in fact with an infernal fertility which can’t be perceived as anything but instability of the scenery. The (cor)responding feeling is that of horror and erosive acrimony. The landscape itself breeds rapture through its every grimy mirror and instils carnivorous delusions (like wasp larvae) inside every lust. The combination of pernicious red (appearing during One-Eye’s visions) and caustic and constantly darkening (dying) daylight seems to re-create a prehistoric monstrous bird emanating simultaneously from the entire landscape – a phantasmagorical bird present in a multitude of divided sequences in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 The Birds; in an apocalyptic, overwhelming and oppressive unity in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the

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Pendulum; and called by the Scandinavian folklore Hræsvelgr (or “the Corpse Swallower” – also known in Danish as Ræsvelg and in Swedish as Räsvelg), a giant eagle which sits at the end of the world and causes the wind to blow when he beats his wings in flight or in “swarm”. Before every murder a long beak of a rather curious and strange bird seems to ooze down the characters’ long aquiline noses and to attack immediately after (along the long blades of swords and axes), bulging her fleshy shapes all over the decomposing grass. The human defensive response to this consists of a corresponding steeling of fixations (materialized in deadly looks or visceral starings). In order to better envisage this, we can imagine a weathervane, a French iron rooster placed on the roofs of churches, which appears now as an emblem of the place engraved inside every pupil, in the translucent flesh therein – a nightmarish cock wrought in edgy aluminium that functions psychotically up-and-down like some sort of a perpetuum mobile while pecking, with Sisyphus’ thoroughness, rancid female-flesh. This schizophrenic bird significantly and sinisterly-divine rises to the surface of the fog, with every murder, with the same devastating force with which continents once rose from the gloomy bottom of the archetypal ocean, and also represents an extreme case of “maraviglia” (Baroque’s visceral taste for metaphor and allegory). In so doing it creates a short and harsh perspective on the horizon, like a surgical incision, providing insight for the carnages to come and their massive chaos of bulging entrails. I think that in the context of this movie we are entitled to call this perspective “the depth of the pictorial vision” and the chaoses raging hard behind it, “a complex obscurity”: “Wölfflin attributes to the Baroque the five well-known principles, opposed to the renascent art, meaning, pictorial vision, depth, unity, complexity and obscurity. They combine in order to give a reply to linear vision, surface, multiplicity, density and clarity, clues that define, by opposition, the typical creation of Renaissance.” (Papu, 1977, p. 22, our translation)

Coming back to the gender issue (in an attempt to relate it to Baroque invasive dynamics [voracious interpenetration of effects and spaces]), we could say that in today’s heavily desacralized world, perhaps the cleanest thing in the world is an animated wall in the room of a starry-eyed wishful girl – because the boy builds a wall of corpses, as in the movie 300, an enclave of clotted blood beyond which the soul comes out like smoke and within which knives gleam along the clavicles.

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All arts “propose themselves to perpetuate life, to extract from it something that does not die” (Papu, 1977, p. 51, our translation); something that manages to stay alive in the bony deserts of human settlements or in the temporal seas filled with the carnivorous fishes of the fiercest resentments, silversides which return to the bait each time the spine splits (bifurcates and ramifies) like a tree struck by lightning. The film promotes that venomous essence of the Baroque which determined Edgar Papu to affirm that “the Baroque remains another uncertain, elastic, relative notion, a living cell, protean, restless, which unexpectedly changes its forms and dimensions and the place where we knew it. It has the amoebic character of an unstable protoplasmic mass.” (Papu, 1977, p. 13, our translation) The infernal fertility presented by the film and perceived as the instability of the scenery, strongly echoes postmodernism’s opaque anticipations of the storms of sin, its fragmentations of meaning, its displacements of identity and its unpredictability when it comes to making sense of the revenant explosions of the Self. The Self is perceived here as bonemeal ready to be discharged in the dimensions that lie beyond the grasp of words – where, if the consciousness manages to permeate, it fertilizes the silent confessions, turning them from crypto-transcendental eliminations of essence into living and bloodthirsty pre-conditions of openness. From this point of view, the entire film Valhalla Rising could be regarded as a Husserlian “bracketing”, “epoché” or “reduction”, as the production lays open the pre-conditions or the pre-givenness of our world of flesh and fire, that weird condition of life and energies called by Husserl “misty horizon [a.n. of experience]” (Husserl, 1931, p. 102) – more precisely, it presents man’s (re-)entering such a misty horizon (natural but with severe repercussions for mental sceneries), where creation and uncreation give the most utter possible meaning to loneliness; where man feels himself truly thrown into the world (as Heidegger imagined him) of fierceness; where roots (fire, water, earth, air) resurface and become carnivorous. It is here where we find that which we always hesitate to talk about, namely, “the expression of what is before expression and sustains it from behind.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 167) And the way in which the film stages and performs this “bracketing” makes cruelly seeable, like the lines of nerves through flesh and bones, the real links between visible and invisible, between pre-reflective and reflective human activities, and those between the instinctual purity of animalism and the cultural inhibitions of man, all beautifully curled around emotional stems by Nicolas Winding Refn. And, if Husserl is right, and intentionality can’t be but intentionality of something (it can’t exist in the absence of a referent called “intentional

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object”; thus it always revolves around and even creates for itself that “intentional object” – in the situation when such an object is not available otherwise4), or, to put it differently, a consciousness is always a consciousness of a defined presence (object or non-object), then the phenomenological reduction will reveal (in an unusual and somehow surreal light) the directions along which the tentacles of our consciousness reach, grasp and connect to their objects (of desire and need). And Valhalla Rising is first and foremost about bringing “(...) the highly diverse anonymous processes [a.n. states of consciousness5] into the [a.n. thematic] field comprising those that function ‘constitutively’ in relation to the objective sense6.” (Husserl, 1982, pp. 48-49) The way in which Mads Mikkelsen interprets the meat, the eyes of steel and the airy distances as functioning constitutively in the shaping of man as a faceless predator (as a beast whose real face is continuously rebuilt by his emotions, needs and desires), and the way in which he brings the diverse anonymous processes of the medium (its unknown forms of energy which constantly create, in most cases unconsciously, strong analogous forces in our mental elongated contractile structures) into the evolving chemical formula of the first (meat, eyes of steel and airy distances), speaks considerably about the fact that the artist is “sometimes 4

Professor Elisabeth Ströker explains this total mobilization of our mental faculties in front of outer presences as a capacity of our mind to envisage, inside personal models, the real interactions to come. In this way, man can establish and personalize the very coordinates of impact with future entities: “Even though the real, actually existing object is not inside but outside consciousness, its reality cannot be established apart from those acts of consciousness in which it ‘counts as’ an actually existing object, those acts in which it is referred to, believed, and in judgement explicitly posited.” (Ströker, 1993, p. 61) The formation of such Selfconfiguring and World-configuring anticipative representations and impact-models constitutes the foundation of man’s capacity to master nature and to turn his “helpless” / helpless thrownness-into-the-world into an act of conquering and construction (of entities and meanings). Here is where we should assign phenomenological meaning to the series of visions organising the destiny of OneEye during the entire movie, as a complicated metaphoric argument for orthogenesis (i.e. the existence of a mysterious inner drive that ensures the evolution of species much more than natural selection could ever do). 5 Considering the fact that, in the fanciful and almost surrealistic context of our essay, Dorion Cairns’ translation is rather elliptic or too technical, we complemented each problematic segment from the quotation with additional information (always marked with a.n. – author’s note), in order to offer a more explicit and expressive picture of the role of the phenomenological concepts and operations in the economy of our interpretation. 6 In relation to the objective sense = in the formation of the objective sense.

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obliged to eliminate the trodden roads in order to clear the way to its own creation (Papu, 1977, p. 16, our translation) – knowing that to choose “the path of minimum resistance of a comfortable eclecticism, which, as any eclecticism could never lead us toward the essences” (Papu, 1977, p. 21, our translation) is not the solution worthy of a warrior-poet. Edmund Husserl regards this process of bringing the unknown courses which function constitutively into the thematic field as a matter of “clarification through explications (detailed descriptions)”. The fact that Valhalla Rising contains no such “confessions” on the side of the main character (only speculations from other secondary characters, such as those of the Viking chieftain: “He's driven by hate. It's how he survives, why he never loses”) invites the viewers to somehow actively participate in the creation of the film itself, in its bracketings and continuous awakenings of revelatory tentacular roots. And this is definitely Nicolas Winding Refn’s great directorial artifice (to make the viewer himself participate in the uncovering of the hidden potentialities of conscious life; to teach the readers how to put personal fires into the “mere” indications contained in the abrasive medium and thus acknowledge the fact that there cannot be any finished object or objective sense – that everything is and must be an infernal quest) and the ultimate proof or radically-progressive artistic genius: “The horizons are ‘predelineated’ [a.n. pre-figured] potentialities. We say also: We can ask any horizon what ‘lies in it’, we can explicate or unfold it, and ‘uncover’ the potentialities of conscious life at a particular time. Precisely thereby we uncover the objective sense [a.n. which is always only] meant [a.n. meant = indicated] implicitly in the actual cogito, though never with more than a certain degree of foreshadowing. 7 This sense, the cogitatum qua cogitatum, is never present to actual consciousness [vorstelling] as a finished datum [a.n. as a datum given once and forever]; it becomes ‘clarified’ only through explication of the given horizon and [a.n. of] the new horizons continuously awakened [der stetig neu geweckten Horizonte]8.” (Husserl, 1982, p. 45)

Such phenomenological opennesses are best mirrored by postmodernism’s recuperatory aesthetics, which allow a plurality of possible readings and a superior mobility of concepts across times and spaces. Learning to play new games with the Self, translating phenomena into newly crafted 7

That is, which is always aimed at/meant/focused upon only in an implicit way. That is, of the constantly (new) appearing horizons; of the horizons constantly actualized in the sense of brought/awakened to life. Here Husserl uses the verb “wecken” which literally means “to awake”. 8

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languages and taking into consideration atypical emotional landmarks that change the course of thought towards unusual directions, should result into acquiring new degrees of accuracy in the recognitions with which we conceptualize everything. Linda Hutcheon in her The Politics of Postmodernism insists on the fact that the images with which we operate in our contemporaneity (and their hallucinatory succession – in the case of films) are photo-graphies, that is, mute and unpredictable signals (maybe even unstable projections of savage artistic instincts) conditioned by the context only in formal matters but free and critically uncontrollable in their essence (and this is perhaps the most acute meaning of pagan mysticism and savagery in postmodernism): “In Ideology and the Image Bill Nichols argues that the visual image is a mute object, in a way; its meaning ‘though rich, may be profoundly imprecise, ambiguous, even deceiving’ (1981:57) (…) the text also never guarantees any one single, already apparent meaning.” (Hutcheon, 2002, p. 120) “Of course, riddles or enigmas are perfect postmodern analogues, since they offer the attractions and pleasures of deciphering: they demand active participation and self-conscious work in creating the meaning of the text. In photo-graphy these riddles foreground the fact that meaning may be conditioned by context, yet is never fixed.” (Hutcheon, 2002, p. 121) 3. Instead

of conclusions: the sense of silence in the Postmodern aesthetics

How are we to truthfully approach the Silent Warrior in the age of noise and hysterical yearning (or, at best, longing)? Certainly not by indulging ourselves in elated readings of ideal disintegrations such as that presented in Rimbaud's “Le Dormeur du Val”. However, we could approach him during every part of Ciaran Carson poetry of war, a poetry centred around life-sequences such as “the interrupted two-way radio-speak of a soldier walking into a trap, the aftermath of explosions, a lucky escape and recurring noises: the boom of war, a helicopter confused with a washing-machine's spin cycle…”9

9

C.L. Dallat, “Mapping the territory”, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview15, last consulted on the 11th of December 2012, 23:10.

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If we are to filter the issue along Watain’s song “Legions of the Black Light”, we could say that the silence reappears in postmodernism as a “primal paradox” or as a focal compactness and denseness of the points of no return. One-Eye’s silence recaptures and re-unleashes upon the world the ultimate Baroque monstrosity, the Black Sun – a Vorarephilia which still burns nowadays in the eyes of snakes, sharks and crocodiles. When and where words lose all their substance, the essence ascends into the eyes and makes all the “mental winds blow” there – there, meaning into the eyes of the “chosen sons of snakes” where “A burning wrath reveals the Black Sun.”10 Interpreted by the obscure social and political circles as a “manly code of silence”, this kind of attitude towards the fluxes and refluxes of life has to do, in any case, with an extreme response to the violence of history and to its senseless cruelties (where words disappear, meanings ascend to other ontological frequencies [into the waters boiling and freezing in the eyes]), and it also equates to a distancing from humanity, back into the reptilian: “This problem of muteness (the violence of history) and speech (the ability to make sense of history) is intrinsic to his poetics, since the problem of representation is a central one for Carson. In John Ruskin in Belfast he is haunted by the symbolic ‘blank mouth’, ‘[t]hat calm terror, closed against the smog and murk of Belfast’, but overcomes this with his poetry by exclaiming ‘let that missing mouth be mine’ (Belfast confetti, 98).” (Czemiel, 2010, p. 131)

In virtue of this new aesthetics of utter resistance, in the poem “John Ruskin in Belfast” by Ciaran Carson, we are presented a painting, within which, the mouth is simply left out, as the painter refuses to paint it or couldn’t find an acceptable aperture: “See how in the static mode of ancient Irish art, the missal-painter draws his angel With no sense of failure, as a child might draw an angel, putting red dots In the palm of each hand, while the eyes – the eyes are perfect circles, and, I regret to say, the mouth is left out altogether.“ (Carson, 1989, pp. 97-98)

The absence of the mouth in the portrait of a warrior is perhaps the strongest living symbol of self-prohibited cannibalism: implied meanings 10

All quotations in this paragraph are extracted from Watain’s song “Legions Of The Black Light” – the opening song of the album "Sworn To The Dark" (2007). Source: http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/watain/sworntothedark.html, consulted on the 6th of December 2012, 19:55.

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of lust, the compulsion to maim, the performative contour of the ravenous slayer, the continuous stream of pulsating protoplasm – all these are culturally crossed-over with the help of an emptied biological locus, which functions as a buffer zone between man and his monsters. It is not at all by accident that Carson comments on the above mentioned ars poetica are to be taken as a serious warning against the temptation to re-open this antediluvian place of carnage and of absorption: “That blank mouth, like the memory of a disappointed smile, comes back to haunt me. That calm terror, closed against the smog and murk of Belfast: Let it not open, That it might condemn me. Let it remain inviolate.” (Carson, 1989, p. 98) That is why One-Eye never speaks – in order not to irreversibly catch in his algorithm the thirst of the great vortexes and to re-unleash them upon the surrounding nature. Such “logic” was made famous by Nietzsche with his maxim according to which “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” (Nietzsche, 2004, p. 52) This is also why the sinister blank mouth reappears in Ciaran Carson even nine years after John Ruskin in Belfast in the poem Fuji Film (1998), where Carson says about some people in the crowd that they wear white masks where their mouth should be and that others wear sharkskin suits – “Some wore sharkskin suits that shimmered like a rainbow; Some wore surgeons, with a white mask where their mouth should be; Some bore barracuda grins, and some wore minnow (…)” (Ciaran Carson, Fuji Film)11

The mouth and the voice disappear also because the philosophy of any true butcher is to let the meat do the talking, and this is what One-Eye ultimately does: a radical act of authenticity tearing into pieces any possible fancy or wishful postmodern simulacrum. The meat does the talking by virtue of the oldest life-force on Earth: gravity. The one that keeps oxygen on Earth and makes life “breathable”. When all the stars in the universe have exploded and reformed into smaller stars until they finally disappear, something will still remain to keep the matter together: gravity. Even with our corpses we are all part of this primordial force of creation and recreation, and it’s by means of a wise use of gravity that One-Eye becomes one with the dark ancient forces of the Earth… that he 11

Ciaran Carson, “Fuji Film” (1998) taken from the section Emerging from Absence, An Archive of Japan in English-Language Verse, http://themargins.net/anth/1990-1999/carson_fuji.html, last consulted on the 13th of December 2012, 01:33.

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manages to become a discerning force. In the face of gravity, words are meaningless.

3.1 Authenticity and disappearance The movie is conceived as a surreal hyperbole of disappearance. The characters gradually dissolve into the coldly-absorbing background and take with them any distinction between sacred and profane and also any sense of reversibility. Anything that might have existed and anything that could have existed becomes but a colossal lack of solutions whose exhaustion, persistent and incisive like tannic acid, can’t eventually fail to make its weight felt. When shapes are overwhelmed by the landscape, when they break down and gradually slip into dispersion, all that remains are the traces of previous movements. All such traces are persistent marks of authenticity, of a veritable presence of energy that can’t truly die but when re-settled into its original structure of effectivity: the unique human self. Charles Guignon interprets such phenomenal manifestations as selfabsorptions and as extreme instances of self-possession. Yet, the logic of authenticity remains, and we should acknowledge beyond the shadow of any intellectual hesitation the fact that this is the only possible logic in situations of total contacts with the dark-side of nature (we are referring here to those terrible moments when the nature of the outer nature attacks our inner nature): “Becoming authentic, as it is commonly understood, involves centering in on your own inner self, getting in touch with your feelings, desires and beliefs, and expressing those feelings, desires and beliefs in all you do. So understood, authenticity clearly counts as a personal virtue: it aims at defining and realizing your own identity as a person. The emphasis is entirely on owning and owning up to what you are at the deepest level. The common objection that such an ideal can lead to self-absorption and an almost solipsistic concentration on one’s own psychological life gains its plausibility from its extreme emphasis on self-possession.” (Guignon, 2004, p. 83)

One-Eye turns irreversibly towards his intuitions, trying to embody an ultimate principle of conservation of energy and of revelatory associations, but he never seems to quite perceive the meaning or significance of the blind fluxes of force (the drives) performing transposition all around him, nor to give a voice to the needed rectangular reading of the deformities constantly contorting the shapes within his landscape and soulscape. Reading him in a Heideggerian key, we could say that he misses his “humanitas” and, consequently, that he can’t avoid falling outside his

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essence (Heidegger, 1988, p. 302); that he ends up being, as Foucault saw the problem of the historical man, erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea – “as though he were merely an object of nature, a face doomed to be erased in the course of history.” (Foucault, 1970, p. 313) The true obscenity is to be read in the overbearing psychopompous12 infallibility which religion, whatever its kind or aim may be, uses as pretext to unleash genocide, every time it is confronted with and poisoned by the acrylic spectrum of chaos. Far from “Imitatio Christi“, what religion truly stages in every situation of crisis is an imitation of the chaos itself, one which drags people way below any level of representation, back towards the monstrous ravellings of the uncreated; of the nightmare of deformity, of malformation or of misshapenness; one whose rancid shadow has been terrifying humanity since the very beginning (stemming most probably from the origins of time), revealing the true nature of our evolution from beasts as “an immense expanse of shade”, as Foucault noticed, that is, not of a full black shadow, but of a semi-diluted, simulated and falsified shadow (for reasons of cultivating a social [political] heavilysentimentalized hopeful delusion of redemption), which will eventually claim back its entire quantity and quality of deadly blackness: “(…) violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of shade which we are now attempting to recover, as far as we can, in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought. But our thought is so brief, our freedom so enslaved, our discourse so repetitive, that we must face the fact that that expanse of shade below is really a bottomless sea.” (Foucault, 1970, p. 211)

Valhalla Rising seems to present an intermediary alarming world, always caught between the realm of the living and that of the dead, in a dangerously unsettled, venomous emission. Here, characters and forms are distorted by incomplete frequencies and echoes, unknowable phenomena which are much more erosive and harmful than their complete analogues from life and from death. The director’s vague allusion here is that the one who usually operates this “aberration of forms” (Foucault, 1970, p. 156), Charon – the eater of the undifferentiated and the moulder of the viscous and vicious acidic flows of the dead; the one who controls and gives some sort of order and bearability to the newly born unknown dangerous emanations (“things” that are very biting and dangerously-unpredictable, because they don’t know yet the laws and nor the “sacred” / inviolable 12

Direct reference to the Greek word ȥȣȤȠʌȠȝʌȩȢ (psuchopompos) designating those guiding creatures, who escorted the newly deceased spirits to the lands of the dead.

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territories of matter) – is no longer there, or, for unidentified reasons, refuses to perform. Without his intervention shapes and forms collapse into the fractures they carry within and all over them, and the traces left by the characters’ previous movements do not suffice to guide them out of their dishevelled semi-darknesses and out of their twilightish horizons. Looking at facts from this angle, we see now how the entire journey of the warriors across the ocean is in fact a large hyperbole meant to signal the disappearance of Charon and it is staged by Nicolas Winding Refn as a downcast (or, better said, as an extremely forlorn) quest for this protective in the sense of preventive figure. Yet, the journey proves to be a weak simulacrum or a pathetic failed attempt to embody and implement a human surrogate for the functions of the Great Transporter and Settler of Storms. The only solution for salvation from disintegration remains the one discussed by Charles Guignon, namely an absorption into the self, into one’s authenticity as the last safe fragile island in an enraged ocean of newly born and uncontrollable venoms. History, as the history of the social spirit hypostasized in religious forms, reveals itself to be a catastrophic misconception of martyrdom and of justice, the only justice possible from a phenomenal logic being the justice of the monster who ensures the continuity of venoms and that of the balms of melancholies, by providing safe trails of drainage, much more complex and much more adequate trails than those impressions left in the landscape by our previous movements. According to Michel Foucault the murmur of nature is the becalming assurance of the presence of this necessary monster(s) – the one who will stabilize for us the insane slippages of the newly-born energies, and also the one who will keep our consciousness alive along the powerful vibration of the strings of interpretation (One Eye consents to die because he can no longer interpret, decipher or find a single trace of Charon on the New Continent): “And history (…) either picks out an entity and allows it to survive, or ignores it and allows it to disappear. This has two consequences. First, the necessity of introducing monsters into the scheme – forming the background noise, as it were, the endless murmur of nature. Indeed, if it is necessary for time, which is limited, to run through – or perhaps to have already run through – the whole continuity of nature, one is forced to admit that a considerable number of possible variations have been encountered and then erased; just as the geological catastrophe was necessary to enable us to work back from the taxonomic table to the continuum, through a blurred, chaotic, and fragmented experience, so the proliferation of monsters without a future is necessary to enable us to work

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Bibliography Bachelard, G. (1964). The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Translated by Alan C. M. Ross. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Carson, C. 1989. Belfast confetti. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press. Czemiel, G. (2010). “‘History's broken mirrors’: Ciaran Carson's and Paul Muldoon's Redressing of the Past”, pp. 127-38, in Sikorska, Liliana (ed.): History is Mostly Repair and Revenge: Discourses of / on History in Literature in English, volume 1. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften. Faludi, S. (1992). Backlash-The Undeclared War Against Women. London: Chatto & Windus. Freud, S. (1997). The Interpretation of Dreams. Translation by A. A. Brill. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited. Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Guignon, C. (2004). On Being Authentic. London and New York: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1988). Repere pe drumul gândirii (translated into English as Pathmarks). Translated and with introductory notes by Thomas Kleiniger and Gabriel Liiceanu. Bucharest: Editura Politica. Husserl, E. (1931). Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by R. Boyce Gibson. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. —. (1982). Cartesian Meditations (An Introduction to Phenomenology). Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Hutcheon, L. (2002). The Politics of Postmodernism. Abingdon Oxon and New York: Routledge. Huysens, A. (2001). “Present Pasts; Media, Politics, Amnesia”, pp. 57–78, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.): Globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Maturana, H. (1992). “The Biological Foundations of Self Consciousness and the Physical Domain of Existence” in Beobachter (Konvergenz der Erkenntnistheorien?). Karin Obermaier, Volker Redder (eds.). München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Bandredaktion.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1999). Thus Spake Zarathustra. Translated by Thomas Common. New York: Dover Publication Inc. —. (2004). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated by Helen Zimmern, e-text published by Kessinger Publishing. Document available at: http://books.google.ro/books/about/Beyond_Good_and_Evil.html?id=7 u1TNfGn5_0C&redir_esc=y, last consulted on the 12th of December 2012. 19:58. Papu, E. (1977). Barocul ca tip de existenĠă. Volumul 1. (The Baroque as type of existence. Volume 1) Bucharest: Editura Minerva. Ströker, E. (1993). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by Lee Hardy. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press. (Initially published in German under the title Husserls Transzendentale Phänomenologie, Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 1987).

Internet sources http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/18/featuresreviews.guardianrev iew15 http://themargins.net/anth/1990-1999/carson_fuji.html http://www.darklyrics.com/ (for the lyrics of Primordial and Watain). http://www.screened.com/valhalla-rising/16-14831/quotes/

CHAPTER THREE THE UNNAMEABLE LURING BLACK BLOOD OF DARKNESS SEEPING DEEP INTO US: AN ESSAY ON THE TRUE NATURE OF PERSISTENCE AND CRAFTSMANSHIP BASED ON PER PETTERSON’S NOVEL OUT STEALING HORSES

Summary This rather esoteric essay attempts an abyssal incursion into the abstruse, confusingly-dark but strangely and significantly influential layers of Per Petterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses. It is constructed around two pivotal archetypal structures of magnetism, and divided accordingly into two sections: the highly metamorphic darkness and the telepathic fiery influence of stars. The material uses phrases and lines borrowed from the lyrics of Danish and Swedish Death and Doom-metal bands as locators of ideatic pressure points and as knifelike reflectors of sacral intuitions and identitary differentiations. In the analytical passages referring to persistence and craftsmanship as ways of constructing, revealing and maintaining an identity in this world, we have turned to Heidegger’s notions of opening (“die Erschlossenheit”), stretching (man projecting himself into the future, always hoping for things, always being pulled ahead of himself into purposes that he is trying to fulfil) and perspective; to Nietzsche’s notion of incomplete, hospitable and fertile darkness; to Giddens’ notions of re-embedding and re-skilling and to Giambattista Vico’s notion of common sense as “judgment without reflection” and as “expression of a fundamental experience”. Throughout the whole paper we interpret this fundamental experience as being that of a constant absence of analogies between human needs and nature and, consequently, as generating a constant need to adapt the human fragilities to the “totalities” of nature (to intervene in nature and to let nature

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intervene in you). Along this conceptual framework we tried to “recuperate” some unspoken or indirect themes, motifs and messages present in Per Petterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses, and to invest them with a stronger and deeper power of contrast between dark and light. Such a plentiful and contrastive resonance is one meant to make these “polarities” more effective and persistent, both at the level of their influence and at the level of their background persistence. In the second section we have continued Heidegger’s claim that man can determine the nature of entities in their Being without necessarily having the explicit concept of the meaning of Being at one’s disposal, in an analysis of the most familiar (general) possible expression of this state, one which silently under-stretches and configures the Lebenswelt: common sense. When combined with the intrusive and conquering forces of imagination (out of which the fascination for womanhood in all its forms is the strongest), common-sense can be said to operate a re-embedding of man into his personal magnetic fields – that is, into his / her precious persistencies. When such a re-embedding is achieved, man begins seeing in the Dark – meaning that he begins seeing the possibility of valorizing the threatening void haunting him / her from everywhere (Lévinas) as a space of movement, creation and recreation by means of a personal vocabulary (Rorty). The essence of Romanticism as well as the force of metaphors and poetry (elements through which our imagination materializes itself in this world in concrete expressions / projections of the Self, from great works of art to “mere” household repairs and innovations) is to be sought through an isolation understood not as misanthropy but as a separation from everything that falsifies the self (established patterns of living, alienating pseudo-values, human bearers of past confusions and inducers of complacence). Such departures from the familiar towards the unfamiliar, towards the infernally pure sources of the reproductive dimensions, constitute the genetic code of the beauty of personal adventures – something that history as a science will never be able to record and acknowledge as such, unlike the artistic fanciful expressions which often do so.

Introduction: the city and the village; the stars and the darkest Romanticism Today’s Western capital cities (those compact cultural intersections of interlaced and interspersed fields of production and advancement) have indistinguishably merged into the hyper-real city described by Jean Baudrillard, when influenced by the spellful conceptual mirage of Las

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Vegas, as an antibody type of place where art acquires a decisive nightly decomposition of the city’s essentially silent stages. If the silences of the old unyielding cities (configurations immune to pressure or persuasion, with buildings retaining something from the allure of solitary, distant trees) could bind the people to the throbs of the massivenesses within their blood, or could link them to the clouds of the oak treetops which traverse their veins (canopies helping the migraines evade their vile pollutions and corruptions, cloistered in alcoves, by calmly but firmly guiding them towards those bleaching clays that absorb and remove colours from the oils of mornings and dusks), the scintillations of the new city absorb the beliefs and their worthy feelings: as if in a literary experiment, colours swallow all scents and images efface all human touches – and perhaps it is here where the real warmth of the magic gets stolen. The instability and the frailty of the urban ethos is not a reflection of a historical condition or of an emotional density of the self, but a vulgar repercussion of the financial ersatz safety-net, a faulty and mischievous device pretending to ensure the manoeuvres of the business circus acrobats, who fall and jump up all the time, everywhere, like devouring locusts. This explosive but empty volatility finds its spectrum of influence along the immense advertising boards, which adorn the protuberances of the busy cities until they engulf them: “When one sees Las Vegas rise whole from the desert in the radiance of advertising at dusk, and return to the desert when dawn breaks, one sees that advertising is not what brightens or decorates the walls, it is what effaces the walls, effaces the streets, the façades, and all the architecture, effaces any support and any depth, and that it is this liquidation, this reabsorption of everything into the surface (whatever signs circulate there) that plunges us into this stupefied, hyperreal euphoria that we would not exchange for anything else, and that is the empty and inescapable form of seduction. Advertising, therefore, like information: destroyer of intensities, accelerator of inertia.” (Baudrillard, 1994, pp. 90-91)

Here, lengthwise and crosswise, the excessive mirror of the billboards with their alert scenarios written as if in the trance of the swarm of hungry locusts (that is madly looking for food and for the frenzy of the maceration) transforms the epistemological drift of the world into chaos and a panic of the decoupling from the internet and from all sort of webs – which all mask the more essential decoupling suffered here by the modern man, the decoupling from the self. Furthermore, it disrupts (breaks) the personality up to an irreversible injury in its structures of sliding (those structures of connecting and of opening): the manias and the addictions

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become morbid, the assassinations – telepathic, and the advertising incantations – overdoses. Having these aspects in view, it is fairly easy to understand why, when presented in New York, Philadelphia or London (billboard-cities having Las Vegas as a sort of golem model for entertainment and illusionary triumphs and accomplishments), Per Petterson’s novel caused – we could say facetiously – deep transcranial magnetic stimulations (TMS). Per Petterson’s novel had such a strong impact in these places as it makes people want to go back into their nature, and it does so in an uncompromisingly mannish but captivatingly elegant way and tone. Out Stealing Horses is a neo-Viking manifest against any kind of entertainment lacking practical intelligence or good sense, and one built around what Nancy Fraser would term as the ambition “(…) to take seriously the problem of reconciling Romanticism and pragmatism.” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, p. 312): “Then I (…) start to sharpen the saw with the file as gently and systematically as I can until the edge of each tooth in the chain is sharp and shining. I don’t know where I learned to do this. Presumably I have seen it on film; a documentary about the great forests or a feature film with forestry setting. You can learn a lot from films if you have a good memory, watch how people do things and have done them always, but there is not much real work in modern films, there are only ideas. Thin ideas and something they call humour, everything has to be a laugh now. But I hate being entertained, I don’t have any time for it. [a.n. our italics]” (Petterson, 2008, p. 72)

In the part of this study entitled Section I we will explore the complexly magnetic relation between Romanticism and pragmatism as it is depicted by Per Petteron in Out Stealing Horses, yet not in the direction proposed by Nancy Fraser, but along personal lines of infusion, grafted upon a classical Heideggerian perspective on the act of projecting to the point of installing oneself into the outcomes of his work. We will try to reveal the phenomenology of the visionary contribution which sustains and reveals the self during real-time integrated expressions of personal skill. The conclusion of this first section would be the one according to which Romanticism and pragmatism enter a chiasmatic formula of effectivity only when they are part of an authentic feeling of the skill. Such a feeling will determine its bearer to treat everyday activities as challenges for a faithful artisan of the self and of the world in which that self settles and finds the most suitable (in the sense of restful) positions for his tentacles.

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In this point we could say that Petterson, through his novel, “rewrite(s) the cultural script his socio-historical milieu has prepared for him” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, p. 303), as he proposes a significant alternative to the extreme psychological terrors through rationalizations and robotizations taking place in the cities; namely that he envisages for his reader the possibility of re-skilling as an effective expression of the reflexive reconfiguration, re-evaluation and re-consideration of the self. We will also try to follow here (constantly along Heideggerian lines) the ways in which Anthony Giddens’ interpretation of the act of personal actualization as reskilling has the capacity to establish new types of communication between man and his object, as well as between man and his medium. The closing section of the chapter (Section II) is an attempt to reveal the hidden engines and reservoirs of melancholy – the ones that, in our consciousness, fuel the light of the stars in July, eternally and unremittingly. The quality of such a persistence (of vision) is mirrored, at the human level, in the existence of a set of fundamental intuitions of essences label by all people in the simplest possible terms, as “common sense”. Hereinafter, Romanticism is identified in pure Heideggerian terms as “‘the urge to think the Unthinkable’” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, p. 311), as an infernal and total light resulting from the burning of all our bridges (“May the bridges I burn light my way!” says the famous proverb belonging to an unknown thinker). Our inner regenerative power as well as our ability to leave solid imprints in our reality is a gift from both the dark and the light, in their extreme forms – the only ones truly able to break down any (blind) faith and demand instead for adorations of the final dances. The bloodplay of darkness, the one that makes every edge an edge of destiny itself (the one unknown influence constantly haunting us), is the pulse of creation striking its sacred hours inside the greatest desirers. Knut Hamsun’s Lieutenant Glahn and Per Petterson’s Trond are such men, and they kneel in front of their personal goddesses with evasive reverences that are truly special and truly superhuman (in Nietzsche’s most acute possible sense) in their capacity to mask the real overwhelming infiltrations. They would often creepy-crawl in the unknown ways of the snake, at the feet of beautiful women, in order to grow old next to them and especially in them, infiltrated in their knurled tibias and in their soft, fluffy and inviting knees and hips which waltz on the forest roads like some divinely controlled bullet-balls. In their moments of splendour and deep clarity, such knees and hips become metaphysical hot meteorites drawing the map of happiness, namely, the divine trajectory that intersects our thinking with the thinking of the universe – thus allowing one to

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understand what the “intelligence of matter” and the electricity really mean: “I was aware of her standing there, warm-skinned in her washed-out blue dress, and because she did not go straight to her boat as she usually did, stepping into it and pushing out the oars, I was sure something was going to happen, that it was a sign (...) her eyes had a dreaming look as if she was not present at all and looking at the same thing that I was looking at, but at something beyond, something larger than this that I could not fathom, but I realised she was not going to say anything either, to stop these two men, that as far as she was concerned they could go on to the bitter end to settle once and for all something I did not know about, and possibly that was just what she wanted. And that alarmed me. But instead of letting it drive me off I allowed it to draw me in, where else was there for me to go? There was nowhere to go, not for me alone, and I took a step closer and stood right beside her so my hip was almost touching her hip. I don’t think she even noticed, but I felt like an electric shock, and the two on the pile noticed (...).” (Petterson, 2008, pp. 80-81)

Whenever and wherever Trond or Glahn feel that they breathe absences or lacerating presences of power, they would summon the severely inviting demons of these knees and hips, and encourage them to possess the women and make them lift their dresses and show them their feet: “I sat watching her [a.n. the dairymaid of the farm] with my back against the wall (...) the knotted scarf holding back her hair, the golden light on her face, her inward-looking gaze and the half smile, her bare arms, and the bare knees glowing faintly below her skirts on each side of the pail, and I could not help it, but inside my trousers I grew tight so suddenly and with such force I had to grasp for breath (...).” (Petterson, 2008, p. 104) “Your feet are prettier than Edwarda’s – just look yourself and see.” (Hamsun, 1921, p. 111)

To take delight in admiring such knees – the absolute opposites of the big hungry void bulging its emptiness all around us – is to allow your eyes to follow them like the dark, as you wanted to feel yourself embedded in their entire Being and then back into yours. The adventurer wants to taste the unmatched bumps of a girl’s tibia, to climb with his tongue on them like on some miniaturized mountains and to softly caress them with the tips of his fingers, with the same delicacy with which he shamefully taps

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Pan’s horn night after night. Her bony bumps – His horns – the adventurer’s materialized idols…” my vultures – my immortal sculptures”.1 Both sections (I and II) of this study follow this complex phenomenon of intrusion and unfolding into host-environments, and try to account for the new colours that the Eigengrau (also known as “dark light” or “brain grey”, the term denoting the colour seen by the eye in perfect darkness) receives when torched by transformative intentionalities. More precisely, we will analyze the intrusions and the unfoldings of the creative spirit of man into the objects of his work and into the densities of darkness surrounding him from everywhere and constantly adjusting his blood pressure (the first section); and the intrusion into ourselves of a fundamental intuition of nature and of its ways, one that precedes any rationality and acts most acutely at the level of the purity of emotions: common sense (as it was defined by Giambattista Vico). Common sense in this context can be considered a meta-expression of that “mysterious” supreme (unhistorical) permanence best captured by Richard Bernstein in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism...: “(...) there is or must be some permanent, unhistorical matrix or framework to which one can ultimately appeal in determining the nature of rationality, knowledge, truth, reality, goodness, or rightness. An objectivist claims there is (or must be) such a matrix and that the primary task of the philosopher is to discover what it is and to support his or her claims to have discovered such matrix with the strongest possible reasons.” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 8)

The second section launches a search for the root of fascination with femininity, on the pattern of this not so much “unhistorical” as transhistorical matrix, the one which functions as the ultimate map of the traveller succumbed to severe yearnings and nostalgias.

1

An adaptation of the lyrics of the song “Herr Spiegelman” by the Portuguese Necro-Romantic Gothic-metal band Moonspell. The initial lines were: “I am your vulture, your immoral sculpture / Mirrorman, who understands / I know you, I am you”. Source: http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/moonspell/irreligious.html#10, consulted on the 6th of May 2013 13:13.

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1. “Darkness Weaves With Many Shades” (Illdisposed2) Motto: “Can you see the dark during daily hours? (...) Servants of the dark. Walk with me under stormfilled skies. Walk with me and you'll never die. (...) You posses me, my love, like you posses the dark.” (The Project Hate3, The Locust Principles)

1.1. Desire and zero meanings of words Per Petterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses constitutes a perfect graphic sign for our emotional grammars, one which functions both as a punctuation mark (for our trains of thoughts) and as a musical brace connecting two or more lines of music that are played simultaneously (though it can also be said to have some physical reverberations of that leather loop that slides to change the tension on the cord of a drum – if we think of the way in which the Jonsered chainsaw helps the protagonist connect to the healthy ruggedness of the forest). Strong features are known to demand a hearty courageous indifference to contingencies doubled by a sharpness of perception, able to correctly mark the passing of time, the decompressing nature of changing seasons and the sacrifices and wills needed for attaining and, most of all, for performing a sustained revival. In this geography of self-imposed (and even self-conceived) and ardently-assumed points of no return, setting the appropriate graphic emotional signs and creating the much-needed reflective intervals are crucial endeavours: “Not that the birch tree was a small thing, that is not what I mean, and not that it hasn’t turned out well either, because in fact it has, with Lars’ help, but I really wanted to be alone. To solve my problems alone, one at a time, 2

Illdisposed is a Death-metal band from Aarhus, Denmark, and these lyrics used in the title are part of the song “Darkness Weaves with Many Shades” from the EP “Return from Tomorrow” (1994). Source: http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/illdisposed/returnfromtomorrow.html#4, consulted on the 12th of December 2012, 15:16. 3 The Project Hate is a Swedish industrial death metal band and these lyrics are part of the song “The Locust Principles” from the album “The Lustrate Process” (2009). Source: http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/theprojecthatemcmxcix/thelustrateprocess.html, consulted on the 14th of January 2013, 12:05.

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with clear thinking and good tools, like my father probably did those times at the cabin, took on one task after another, assessing it and putting out the tools he needed in a calculated order starting at one end and working his way through to the other, thinking and using his hands and enjoying what he did, in the same way I want to enjoy what I do, to solve the daily challenges that may be tricky enough, but within clear limits, with beginnings and ends to them that I can foresee, and then be tired in the evening but not exhausted, and wake up all rested in the morning, brew my coffee and light the stove and look out at the light that comes pink over the forest towards the lake and get dressed (…) and then get on with the tasks I have decided shall fill that day. That is what I want, and I know I can do it, that I have it in me, the ability to be alone and there is nothing to be afraid of.” (Petterson, 2008, pp. 158-159)

In the morning mist, when the colours begin to fade mildly, as if the summer’s end has cast upon the world a strange demoralizing contamination, independent of all the sterilizations that the winter can come up with, man can no longer afford to be a fugitive from darkness; he can no longer defy or ignore his intuitions of imminent extinguishments inscribed in the Northern melancholic departures. So we could say that in the fragment above the author is not really talking about any possible logic of work or of a rationalized lifestyle at all, but about intuition, more precisely about that feeling of being attacked by nature with unknown poisonous breaths of divesting intimations. And at the end of the novel he even accurately describes such an inexplicable, sudden and sinister invasion of the living by the dangerously-vagabond (drifting) venoms of the uncreated, one which seem to have a predisposition to approach us especially when our souls exude, in their turns, their stormy and corrupt moistures of despair: “I didn’t want to go into the bank, so I waited outside between the windows with one shoulder against the grey brick wall and my father’s woollen scarf round my neck; October slapping my face, a clear feeling of the Klara river not far behind me and all that it carried with it, and a shiver in my stomach, as if I had been on a long run and had got my breath back, but the effort was still within me. A light someone had forgotten to put out. (…) Goddamn, it was so cold out there in the street, I was sure I was going to get sick. When my mother came out at last with a confused, almost dreamy expression on her face, I felt as if the chill from the river had laid a film of some unknown material around my body and made me a fraction more aloof, a fraction more tick-skinned than I had been before.” (Petterson, 2008, pp. 233-234)

At this point, using this “chemical” quotation as a rear-view mirror for the previous incantation of work and of self-reliance, we could say, while maintaining ourselves in the sphere of “substantial” awareness, that the

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intuition of darknesses to come functions as a conditioner for those who can feel in the wood fibre the scent of Arctic grey and its clandestine proportions of bereavement and beseechment. Computers, cars, chainsaws and other tools have logic but not intuition, at least not yet. Intuitions are always fired by purposes and a purpose is something like a desire. A desire is, in any event, both a vulnerability and incorruptible source of energy (motivation). Desire sparks off intentionality and intuition, and, consequently, we could say that it is by means of strong impending dispositions that the zero degree of meaning is outgrown and at the same time strengthened at the level of the fortitude of the roots (the literal meaning of a word or its zero degree is discussed by Umberto Eco in an endnote from his The Limits of Interpretation, with direct reference to the notion of dark and darkness): “This zero degree would be that meaning accepted in technical and scientific contexts. If one asks an electrician what he means by dark, he would probably answer ‘without light, obscure’. Webster (at the item dark as adjective) provides first the same technical definition and records ‘sinister’ and ‘evil’ as secondary definitions. Only this way one can understand why, at the beginning of Dante’s Divine Comedy, dark woods signifies, by connotation and as a metaphor, the sinister and evil life of a sinner. In every connotative relationship the first sense does not disappear in order to produce the second one; on the contrary, the second sense must be understood on the grounds of the first one.” (Eco, 1994, p. 43)

1.2. Men – aestheticians of work devoted to mystery and forgers of meaning In Per Petterson’s quest for one’s own free and sincere resources, we are dealing with more than just a manic and excessive adherence of a grumpy and peevish old man to his typified-to-the-border-of-symbols ways of life and of comfort; we are definitely dealing with an aesthetics of work capable of embodying a (senti)mental plasticity of intuition, desire and calmness that goes beyond our unbecoming concepts of form and function (both exposed too much to the malicious primitivisms of logic). Logic becomes indecent and inelegant when it comes to revealing by embodying the appealing spirit of endurance and of determination – both rooted not in standards, but in tender and close-to-the-soul intuitions of order, symmetry, and proportion. Inside the darkly-divine aura of such insights, there is no priority between form and function – the two undulate around each other like two snakes personifying the two long chains of DNA, in an attempt to transcend from within the abrupt and edgy nature of

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all sedimentations, back towards the cosy womb of desire, and to (ful)fill it with that vibrant and unknown trans-contextual “matter” which constitutes everyone’s identity. Because this is what it is all about in the fascination for work and craftsmanship: an effort to give shape to an intuition of the self, a shape capable in its turn to reflect back an identity that could anchor the self against all storms of bleakness, sometimes so sinisterly incarnated avant-la-lettre (as a warning) in the forest’s dark. For this reasons we must correlate the first quotation about the refuge in craftsmanship and the joy of working with the following fragment: “Something inside me is changing, I am changing, from someone I knew well and blindly relied on (…) into someone much less familiar to me and who really has no idea what kind of rubbish he has in his pockets, and I wonder how long this change has been under way.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 152)

The subliminal message or the magnetic resonance of the prose fragments cited above (and phenomenologically secured by us into an aesthetic structure of persistence) could also be the fact that there are no minor events in this world (since the fragility of our identity is a flare erupted from the rippled nature of our desires, which configure our purposes on account of the specificity of world’s finest details – or, to put it otherwise and less philosophically, people search for themselves in every minute cell, piece of sand or incantation that could give them an identity as a feeling of distinction and uniqueness that is worth representing) – only minor people, unable to realize what is really going on with them; people who have forgotten how to respond to the rare (as they are) provocations of elegance; and who have forgotten how to survive as pulsating spectrums of possibility, by constantly renewing their sense of what-is (to use a Heideggerian way of naming “things”). In order for our soul not to become the sinisterly-withered ghost of a scarecrow, the renewal achieved by recovering and reinventing ourselves as constructors of meaning should be performed even when, and mostly when, immersed in the most common possible works, because here is where awareness and intuition have been debased to their numbest possible fingers; here, in the blurry torpid background, the psychic tentacles are dormant and the force of projection is very weak. Equally, here, the influence and the temptation of death as convenience and as complacency are stronger because they are very easy to digest. We have to be extra-careful with these swallowingswamps of inertia because – as both Petterson and Heidegger suggest – man, throughout his entire existence, lives constantly projected into his purpose, which is one confluent with his desires and perpendicular to his

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identity. If Heidegger is right and if the “ahead” is where we really live, then we should stop behaving like “rational animals” who do their daily jobs by virtue of mechanic logics and take things for granted (for what we were thought that they mean), and become more sensitive to the ways in which small details reassess and at the same time challenge our capacities to instil ourselves into the future: “‘Heidegger’s major contribution in Being and Time is to show how the old Aristotelian essence of man as the rational animal is in effect an abstraction, because what comes first is man’s own existence. And existence for Heidegger is nothing but this stretching where we are constantly projecting ourselves into the future, always expecting things, always hoping for things.’ (Miguel de Beistegui); ‘Heidegger is a man who first wanted to investigate how practical action shows that we are pulled ahead of ourselves into purposes that we are trying to fulfil, into tasks that we are working on. Think of a farmer in The Black Forest for example, making a barrel. This is someone who has a future task that he is trying to fulfil and he has a logic operating there that shows that the human being is actually extended ahead of himself; the ahead is where we really live: what we desire to do, what we anticipate, what we want this wood to turn out to be.’” (Thomas Sheehan)4

The great phenomenological artifice of the novel lies in the writer’s ability to transform this projection into the future (and this incarnation of one’s spirit into one’s purpose) into its apparent antagonistic direction: into an illuminating journey back to the fertile roots of the archetypes. As Jan Patoþka reads this phenomenon, in such moments, the darkness that separates the origins suspended in pulsations of purity from the forthcoming storms of the self, becomes the ultimate dialogic principle (“polemos”), the ultimate divine possibility of (or, better said, availability for) radical transformation (redefinition) and recuperation (here darkness signifies Heidegger’s openness to mystery5, while daylight stands for one’s 4

Human, All Too Human is a three-part 1999 documentary television series produced by the BBC, which follows the lives of three prominent European philosophers: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The quotation was extracted from the second part of the documentary (the one dedicated to Heidegger), from 15: 50 to 16: 59. 5 Heidegger coined this phrase with the aim of encouraging radical phenomena of juxtaposition and of substitution that is, in simpler words and in a neoDemocritean tradition, to encourage thinkers to allow the implicit dimensions of their dispositions to constitute a reservoir for active thinking. “Openness to the mystery” was invoked by Heidegger first and foremost with the aim of finding and of maintaining a function that could ensure the free variation of meaning within

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blind acceptances of his faith, for the lack of curiosity and for the incapacity to see and to taste the marvels of this world, hidden in the surrounding presences): “This beginning then reaches out to future historical outreach, especially by teaching what humankind does not wish to comprehend, in spite of all immense hardness of history, does not want to understand, something that perhaps only later days will learn after reaching the nadir of destruction and devastation – that life need be understood not from the viewpoint of the day, of life merely accepted, but also from the view of strife, of the night, of polemos. The point of history is not what can be uprooted or shaken, but rather the openness to the shaking.” (Patoþka, 1996, p. 44)

Edward Findlay, in his commentary about Patoþka’s notion of polemos, interprets this human tendency to provoke positive displacements in nature’s dormant but archaically welcoming fecundities, as a yearning for adventure and as an obsession for revealing hidden admirations : “The vision of Heraclitus is a relevant parallel, then, in the sense that it is only through an understanding of life as problematic, as characterized by a lasting struggle rather than an everlasting peace, that humans can hope to experience freedom.” (Findlay, 1999, p. 144) In the context of the logic of our essay, we could say that polemos applied against a prolific and highly fissionable darkness would amount to chasing away the clandestinity that stole from man his skills and his vocation – namely, the urban clandestinity of Baudrillard’s heavy mirrors of advertising and entertainment. And it would also amount to bringing instead true reflections (both in the sense of individual thinking [mental concentration; careful consideration] as well as in the sense of receiving [with the particular sense of retrieving; of reclaiming what was once ours as genuine creators / forgers of fire and ice] from nature unfalsified reflected images, sounds, scents and intuitions of our feelings), whose focal point sustains the infernal purity of real creation, which is, according to Patoþka, that type of creation that defines its designer and enforcer as pure and untameable electricity (one condensing in itself all previous “helpless” melancholies – now turned into principles of seizure, of history, away from the scientific obsession for predictions: “(…) if we explicitly and continuously heed the fact that such hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of technology, we stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery.” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 55)

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annexation or of appropriation [the French term “accaparation” can best define this octopus-like virtue of previously repressed {strangled and silenced} but now conquering melancholies]): “(…) a new creation, as when a person wakes from a dream into reality and cannot sleep again. Suddenly we have purposeful reflective activity here.” (Patoþka, 2002, p. 76) Such electricity, says an old Platonic intuition, manifests itself only in its most condensed possible form, and such a condensation ends up turning it, at the level of the shape, into its antagonistic pair: darkness. Such electricity is the essence of darkness and also the moment when darkness becomes visible in its unsuspected dimensions, illuminated by man’s personal lights. And even Plato said that these forms of energy are not to be found within cities populated with absurd fights, but in the layers of the ancient, forgotten sources: “So you must go down, each of you in turn, to join the other in their dwelling-place. You must get used to seeing in the dark. When you get used to it, you will see a thousand times better than the people there do. You will be able to identify all the images there, and know what they are images of, since you have seen the truth of what is beautiful and just and good. In this way, the government of the city, for us and for you, will be a waking reality rather than the kind of dream in which most cities exist nowadays, governed by people fighting one another over shadows and quarrelling with one another about ruling, as if ruling were some great good.” (Plato, 2000, p. 226)

In this point of personal grace – a moment of invocation of the ultimate shape-shifter (the god Loki, let’s say); of the overturner of parasitic and impending standards and patterns of communication with the Being (Sein); of the opener of the voracious vortexes of creation – man becomes a complex conceiver, possessed by both Romanticism and skill, and his acts “would represent this individual as a ‘genius’ or ‘strong poet’, irrespective of the field of his inventiveness.” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, p. 303) Each and every outer creation is “but” a synecdoche for a larger phenomenon – the creation of the Self. The creation of the Self will always include a contestation of everything that is perceived as foreign space and / or time and a fight for better cultural meanings – expressivities meant to harmonize the tension between invention and application (Fraser). Per Petteron’s novel should be interpreted in Fraser’s terms as a search for the Self in the form of a “contestation (…) conceived to include struggle over cultural meanings and social identities” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, p. 318), but still one which ambitions itself to “avoid, also, a dichotomy between sheer invention and mere application, between

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the heretofore undreamt of and its routinization.” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, p. 318) The decision to go back to the roots of human authenticity (authenticity seen as projecting itself at the level of personal and collective skills) amounts to a true spiritual healing within societies. The effects of such an initiative range from personal “small” therapies (possibilities for self-assertion and for making the self a more transparent source of creativity) to larger phenomena of social re-activation and adaptation of old springs of spirituality, coherence and motivation – a real opportunity to re-develop rural areas and to return to tradition its charisma (compelling attractiveness that can inspire devotion in others) and, through the emotional weight of this tradition, to provide the possibility of regulating eco speculation and imposture and to eliminate unwanted disturbances in the rural ethos: “Yet if such a person takes the trouble to re-skill appropriately, a reasonably informed choice can in fact be made. All such choices are not simply behavioural options: they tend to refract back upon, and be mobilized to develop, the narrative of self-identity.” (Giddens, 1992, p. 141)

In this context, an important stage in the process of self-construction and self-actualization (that is, in the process of re-stabilizing self-identity) would be for one to try to re-skill or just (simply) skill himself. At the level of the academic discourse, the process of re-skilling has its “re-” derived from the Husserlian phenomenological reduction, as a privileged moment of reflexivity and of substantial restoration of perceptions. In this particular context, the process of re-skilling can be said to carry out a “knowledgeable use of convention.” (Giddens, 1992, p. 52) Talcott Parsons sees skill in relatively similar terms – namely, as transfunctional6 syntheses between cultural systems and legacies and personal vocations and passions. As the two dimensions interact and interplay, they set in motion the social network (this reality remains very visible in traditional rural communities, but rather abstruse and sometimes even improbable in hyper-real cities) and activate a genuinely telepathic umbilical cord which connects the object of work to the spirit of the worker: “(…) outputs from both personalities and the cultural system converge upon the organism in socialization processes, in the operation of skills, and in various ways.” (Parsons, 1966, p. 18)

6

Our phrase (interpretation), not Parsons’.

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1.3. Re-embedding men, like stones in cement, in their adventurous dark sources The intense and unbroken spirituality which constituted the soil on which ancient craftsmanship flourished and motivated its neophytes, was completely purged by modern abstract and highly specialized systems, which have retained only the superficial functional aspect. It is not just that today’s abstract systems have abundantly focused on the shape of the function while completely forgetting its gist and fund, but also the fact that, in so doing (that is, “mechanizing” and “automatizing” everything, including thinking and feeling vis-à-vis the object to be created), they transformed the man from an active creator into a passive consumer, alienating him and equally estranging him from his environment (which environment, in his turn, becomes hostile, unsympathetic and indifferent to man’s spiritual needs): “Abstract systems de-skill – not only in the workplace, but in all the aspects of social life they touch. The de-skilling of day-to-day life is an alienating and fragmenting phenomenon so far as the self is concerned. Alienating, because the intrusion of abstract systems, especially expert systems, into all aspects of day-to-day life undermines pre-existing forms of local control. In the much more strongly localized life of most premodern societies, all individuals developed many skills of ‘local knowledge’, (…) relevant to their day-to-day life. Everyday survival depended on integrating such skills into practical modes of organizing activities within the contexts of the local community and the physical environment. With the expansion of abstract systems, however, the conditions of daily life become transformed and recombined across much larger time-space tracts; such dis-embedding processes are processes of loss.” (Giddens, 1991, pp. 137-138)

Once here, we could say that Per Petterson’s novel is first and foremost about re-embedding man into his personal magnetic fields capable to attach the individual back to the fields of force and of attraction of the Earth, or, in other words, about re-embedding the precious persistencies of man into the mechanisms of the world, through the state of wonder (an impossible feeling in the abstract worlds) in front of what actually is out there (an old Platonic tremor): “(…) Plato and Aristotle are right in says that thauma archƝ tƝs sofias (“wonder is the beginning of wisdom”). Aristotle, to be sure, also tells us that the lover of myths is also a philosopher in a way; though he will be one only if he seeks to awaken a sense of wonder, of awe over what actually is; (…).” (Patoþka, 1996, p. 40)

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Even if in today’s globalized world it is impossible to restore the control once held by pre-existing rural societies (an almost extra-sensorial form of solidarity connected to a strong spirituality, around which such settlements gravitated and according to which they adjusted their atmosphere and cycles of generations), it is still possible for the thoughtful individual to re-embed himself into the very continuity of the spirit of history through wonder, skill and the cultivation of a personal magnetism. And it is only by means of wonder, magnetism and skill that Michelangelo saw detailed statues in blunt and rough blocks of stone, or that (in order to take a Nordic example as well) of the fictional character Floki (a boat builder played by the Swedish actor Gustaf Caspar Orm Skarsgård), in the Canadian-Irish historical drama television series “Viking”, saw the future boat in the arching of the trees of the forest (“I can tell which trees will make the best planks just by looking at them, I can look inside the tree.”7). Per Petterson renders this elaborate phenomenality in the form of a complex exercise in authentic self-esteem (in-depth coverage of the inner sources of personal waves of power and in-depth mapping of their mixed routes to the surface): “What I do, which I have never let anyone know, is I close my eyes every time I have to do something practical apart from the daily chores everyone has, and then I picture how my father would have done it or how he actually did do it while I was watching him, and then I copy that until I fall into the proper rhythm, and the task reveals itself and grows visible, and that’s what I have done for as long as I can remember, as if the secret lies in how the body behaves towards the task at hand, in a certain balance when you start, like hitting the board in a long jump and the early calculation of how much you need, or how little, and the mechanism that is always there in every kind of job; first one thing and then the other, in a context that is buried in each piece of work , in fact as if what you are going to do already exists in its finished form, and what the body has to do when it starts to move is to draw aside a veil so it all can be read by the person observing.” (Petterson, 2008, pp. 69-70)

Asking ourselves what does this tool or that piece of wood really mean, and what is its true relevance in our lives, equates to the act of redefining abandonment (of both the self and the raw matters awaiting to be processed) as primordial curiosity towards the world around us – or as “opening”, as Heidegger would call this special state of wonder, surprise 7

http://vikings-shieldmaiden.tumblr.com/post/45069098559/floki-is-a-boatbuilder-among-other-things-i, consulted on the 2nd of May 2013 01:38.

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or genuine admiration. The way this questioning is put into effect by Per Petterson organizes and opens up an unremitting incantation of those nonbeings capable of hosting or accepting in themselves the unadapted-to-thepoint-of-disturbingly-different dreams, hopes and expectations; an invocation of unthinkable perspectives. Here, Per Petterson’s intimate relation of seduction with Darkness reaches its most visible point: the love of and the yearning for Darkness is the obsession with the possibilities of the unknown, of the unexplored path within and without the self; with the unthought visions and with the undiscovered inner and outer treasures; with the uncreated capable of hosting errant creations. Heidegger calls this special state of opening towards the possibilities of this world “die Erschlossenheit”. In Trond’s case things are taken a little bit to the logical and intuitional extremes of this tendency, and we can go as far as to speak of an addiction to Darkness and of a slowly but surely developing intolerance to light: “(…) and I do not switch on the torch, merely let my eyes grow used to the darkness until I stop straining them to catch a light that went out long ago8.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 97) “And the sun was shining and flashing in the river, which was running high after several days of rain, and it would have been a perfect picture of that summer and the things we were doing together, if I were not still hobbling badly on one leg, and because inside me, not far from where my soul was, as I saw it, there was something worn and tired that just now had made my ankles and thighs too weak to carry the weight they normally would have done.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 171) “I spread my fingers out as I walked between the dark tree trunks, like down a corridor of pillars, and let my hands slide through the air, slowly up and then down again in the powdery light, but I could not feel anything, and everything was as it always was, like any night at all.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 102)

Light appears, throughout the entire novel, as hellbent on grounding people inside a wide spectrum of conformity and of slow and almost imperceptible slumbering. Here Albert Schweitzer’s famous words seem to actualize the very axis around which the novel rotates: “The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives”: where form and function should be living biological projections meant to release us from patterns (a dance of shadows ready to re-embody), when assigned to tired, inauthentic, 8

See the quotation above from Plato about learning to see in the Dark.

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irrelevant and canonized models of moral meanings and values, they become tamed and sedately social. The somehow invisible but still overwhelming ideatic dimension of the novel revolves around an effort to reinterpret morality, and the novelist tries not to destroy it or to fight against it, but to reveal it as a state of opening towards the self and its capacities – one able to keep alive within us the meanings of our actions (manual labour being only the first but still the most clarifying example of how to get entangled in the world), of our longings and of our fascinations. Darkness and the unknown directions and the unanswered questions of loneliness are needed in order to activate some structure of the self, structures that our sociality, lived daily as prefabricated morality, prevents from emerging. The sociality can only operate with a finished and unequivocal structure of morality; with a datum of morality that doesn’t seem to cope at all with what is still truly alive and wild inside us, more precisely, with that side of our identity that can never be truly taken out, deciphered and anticipated. Also, standardized morality is only interested in anticipation, not in courageously unleashed intuitions, capable of releasing new inner and outer geographies. For these reasons loneliness and the delightful dark misanthropic introspections or journeys through our inner pressures (to use the term of the Swedish Doom metal band Katatonia) are not at all regarded as being safe or desirable by the acknowledged morality. Yet they remain an indispensable ritualistic dimension for all those who have descended too deep into their identity in order to be able to go back to the volcano’s lip without knowing (understanding) what’s really down there and why it was planted there in the first place (at such points, a journey back would mean a total nonsense – it would be too late to re-reach the normality of the surface and it would probably mean death in the middle of the road back, with no answer and without any justification for the energy spent so far). Of course, the scenes where the father is not as happy as he “should” be when seeing his daughter (who got into a lot of sad and maybe unnecessary trouble to find and visit him) or where the same man avoids recognizing his neighbour, who is in fact a close acquaintance from childhood – remain quite controversial and morally arguable, equivocal if not downright condemnable: “I have not seen Ellen for six months at least, and have not spoken to her since I moved, or well before, actually. To be honest, I have not given her much thought, nor her sister, for that matter. There has been so much else.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 190) “(...) and then she suddenly turns stiff, and with her back to me she says:

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Chapter Three ‘Would you rather I hadn’t come?’ As if she realised only now that this might be a possibility. But it’s a good question. I take a little while to answer. I sit down on the woodbox trying to gather my thoughts, and then she says: ‘Perhaps you’d really rather be left in peace? That is why you are out here, isn’t it, that’s why you have moved to this place, because you want to be in peace, and then here I come bursting into your yard and disturbing you at the crack of dawn, and it wasn’t anything you wanted at all, if it were up to you?’ She says all this with her back to me. She has dropped the cloth in the sink and grips the edge of the worktop with both hands, and she does not turn around. ‘I have changed my life,’ I say. ‘That’s what’s important. I sold what was left of the firm and came out here because I had to, or things would have turned out badly. I couldn’t go on the way it was.’ ‘I understand that,’ she says. ‘I really do. But why didn’t you tell us?’ ‘I don’t know. It’s the truth.’ ‘Would you rather I hadn’t come?’ she says again insistently. ‘I don’t know’, I say, and that is also true; I don’t know what to think of her coming out here, it was not part of my plan (…).” (Petterson, 2008, pp. 200-201) “‘Thank you for the company,’ he said through the darkness. I waved my torch and turned to walk up the gentle slope to the house and opened the door and went into the lighted hall. For some reason I locked the door behind me, something I have not done since I moved out here. I did not like doing it, but all the same I did.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 13) “I did not recognise him the first few times I saw him, so I just nodded when I passed by with Lyra, for my mind was not running on those lines, why should it be? When he was outside his cabin stacking piles of firewood under the eaves and I was on my way along the road thinking of other things entirely. Not even when he told me his name did it register. (...) Now suddenly I am sure. Lars is Lars even though I saw him last when he was ten years old, and now he’s past sixty (...) Not that it changes anything. It doesn’t change my plan for this place, doesn’t change how it feels living here, all that is as before and I’m sure he did not recognise me, and that’s the way I would like it to continue. But of course it does make some difference.” (Petterson, 2008, pp. 62-63)

Yet, none of them is as controversial as the gesture of Trond’s father of quitting his family for his true love, one whom he would kiss and invade with such splendour of dark passion, cruelty and madness, that the voyeur (Trond) could actually see the flowers on the woman’s dress become erectile and dancingly protuberant:

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“(…) and she had the blue dress on with the yellow flowers that she wore when she went to Innbygda. (…) He kissed her, and I could see she was crying, but it was not because he kissed her she was crying, and anyway he kissed her and anyway she cried. Maybe in these days I lacked certain type of imagination (…) but (…) They kissed each other as if it was the last thing they would do in this life…” (Petterson, 2008, pp. 108-109)

In the quotation above, courage, betrayal, seizure without one being aware of it, devotion in rapture, the Salamanders regenerating their lost limbs and Jupiter’s magnetosphere seem to simultaneously fuse into an impenetrable gesture, one made of intensive and excessive phenomenality (the kiss). It increases the visibility of the eidolonic essence of those who behold such black crystals, but it also leaves behind, in the hearts of the other loved ones, a grief-stricken but somehow subsided banality (such as that described by Raymond Carver in his prose), yet one that retains the seeds of might and magic as stemming from the very contact with the first bearers of black flames. According to Richard Rorty, one can be said to have descended deepenough into his identity when he or she begins seeing in the Dark – that is, when she / he begins seeing the possibility of a personal vocabulary and, together with it, the possibility of a new dignity, one away from “the humiliation that comes from being redescribed in someone else’s terms”): “(...) a specifically human form of suffering, namely, the humiliation that comes from being redescribed in someone else’s terms while one’s own vocabulary is peremptorily dismissed.” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, p. 307)

Trond’s entire life can be interpreted as an adorer’s and an adventurer’s search for a personal vocabulary, for his inner sense of wonder – one which he intuits as living within him as early as his childhood. Isolation will always give off an appearance of immorality and selfishness – but what every “judge” should ask himself is: what exactly is that thing against which isolation occurs as a natural re-action? In Out Stealing Horses, the isolation is a dedicated separation from everything that falsifies the self (established patterns of living, alienating pseudo-values, and, nevertheless, the bearers of past confusions and the inducers of complacence [family and friends]) – a departure from the familiar towards the unfamiliar, understood as possibility of restoration through intrusion and unfolding into new reproductive dimensions: “(…) Rorty now discerns a ‘selfish’, anti-social motive in Romanticism, one that represents the very antithesis of communal identification. He finds that the Romantic’s search for the sublime is fuelled by a desire for

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Chapter Three disaffiliation, a need to ‘cut loose from the tribe’. Thus, behind the strong poet’s love for what is original and wholly new lurks a secret contempt for what is familiar and widely shared.” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, p. 309)

True morality is not a social convention, nor is it about inhibiting one’s true nature, or about poisoning his essence. True goodness is sometimes forced to take a detour through a more acute focusing on the self, which may be interpreted by those close to us as indifference and cruelty. However, in order to redefine bitterness and to learn how to release ourselves from it (or to re-discover ourselves behind it), we must accept the provocations of fascination and walk its path with the eagerness of a child. In simpler words, when a torrid melancholy towards the adventures of the renewing is involved, any social morals that stand in the way become unequivocally disfiguring (the reason for which Trond, though deeply affected in the first instance by his father’s decisions, keeps walking his hopeless path, preferring a dark poisonous adventure [a bath in the most acrylic bleakness] to the lack of adventure): “I do not know how many times I made that journey during the late summer of 1948 to wait for the train from Elverum. And each time I felt as tense and expectant, indeed almost happy when I got on my bike and set off down the Nielsenbakken and all the way in, to stand there waiting. But of course he did not come. And then came the long-awaited rain, and I went on cycling into Oslo almost every other day to see if he was on the train from Elverum that particular day. I wore my sou’wester and oilskins, I looked like a fisherman from Lofoten in my yellow outfit, and I had Wellingtons, and water splashed out on either side of the wheels. It came gushing down the hillside under the Ekeberg ridge and onto the railway line on the right side of the road before the rails vanished into a tunnel and popped out again on the left side a little further on, and all the houses and buildings were greyer than they had ever been and vanished in the rain with no eyes, no ears, no voices, they told me nothing anymore. And then I stopped. One day I did not go in, nor the next day, all the day after that. It was as if a curtain had fallen (…) Late that autumn a letter arrived (…) It was a short letter. He thanked us for the time we had spent together, he looked back on it with happiness, but times were different now, and it could not be helped: he was not coming home anymore.” (Petterson, 2008, pp. 223-224)

And to seek adventure and self-discovery at the margins of the Self (there where the “tribe” as a community is unlikely to venture and will surely never settle), is to re-ask yourself those questions whose answers seemed to be the very stability-fences of your life, to demolish and rebuild

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these structures of anchoring against the tempestuous void raging hard beyond and behind “the isle of the Self”9. And all these because of the awareness of the fact that “(…) separation is not reflected in thought, but produced by it” (Lévinas, 1969, p. 54) and that “interiority is the very possibility of a birth and a death that do not derive their meaning from history.” (Lévinas, 1969, p. 55) T.S. Eliot gave a cold but fair intellectual expression to this state of quest and of foreplay for conquest: “Where is the Life we have lost in living? / Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” (T.S. Eliot, Opening Stanza of Choruses from the Rock) The novel is about making peace with oneself by understanding the ultimate masculine fragilities when caused by fascinations. Darkness appears in this context as the protective and nourishing amniotic fluid inside which the hidden roots, the hidden origins and the hidden derivations of man can advance and create an opening of their own (with a divinely evasive new light, crafted directly from gloominess and cleansed with the abrasive clarity of melancholy). Darkness appears here as a force of revelation and of restitution tributary to Edmund Burke’s conception of the sublime as fascination with the devastating pure intensities of unknowable but persistent instances of self-preservation inscribed (as messages and encouragements from our archetypal ancestors) in the roughest natural instances, from the stony and almost millenary-encrusted bark of trees, to the motley expressions with which some emotional inner demons sometimes resurface and refuse to leave (here, such an obsession with darkness is equal with the ambition of finding the most beautiful claw of the soul): “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible subjects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” (Burke, 1993, Part I, Section VII) “(…) if the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether fine or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome encumbrance, they are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a

9

“The absolute void, the ‘nowhere’ in which the element loses itself and from which it arises, on all sides beats against the islet of the I who lives interiorly (Lévinas, 1991, p. 147).”

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Chapter Three sort of tranquillity tinged with terror which, as it belongs to selfpreservation, is one of the strongest of all passions.” (Burke, 1993, IV, vii)

So, whereas common light is host to different parasitical forms of morality, for which reason it inevitably installs a closure, the inner darkness, with its outer projections in the depth of the woods and in the distances of the interplanetary ranges, recuperates all the needed spaces (of movement, of vision and of evolution of skills). Fascination, if it exists at all, can only confirm such spaces, as they are its only compatible structures of manifestation. In matters of intense physical phenomena (such as darkness and storms) reflecting or mirroring deep metaphysical structures and spaces of manifestation, the novel instils subtly but consistently (and with an unmatched elegance) a mania for defying the limits and cultivates a special taste for it – for the limitlessness of human vision and capacity of sensorial experience, as well as for the possibility of entwining apparently incompatible fields of perception and influence (“entwining” pretty much in the sense of Foucault’s example of transfer of hypnosis and of induction between the lightening and the Night’s dark): “The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess; a limit could not exist if it were absolutely insurmountably and reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. (...) Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, as the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside or as the open area of the building to its closed spaces. Rather their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no infraction can exhaust. Perhaps it is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity; the flash loses itself in this space it marks with its sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has given a name to obscurity.” (Foucault in Bouchard, 1977, p. 34, p. 35)

1.4. Craftsmen as retrievers of stormy old shapes and essences from the Darkness of the Spirit; Objects as scars From the myth of Pygmalion onward, any fascination for control over the feminine fragility and delicacy ultimately results in or expresses itself in some sort of raw matter: as man ages, he transposes all the fantasies and dreams of the smoothly agreeable and wildly provocative graceful forms of his youth into some more direct and decisively recuperatory acts of

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creation – most of them ranging from mere adjustments made in the house, to complex instances of craftsmanship or business plans able to shape the dynamics of the systems of the world. In more or less explicit neo-Viking contexts, such as is the case with today’s Norway, such craftsmen of shapes become retrievers of shapes, that is, instinctual trackers of the old ways. Discovering one’s hidden heritage, the one that was transmitted to him from the first and ultimate creators – from those who envisaged, designed and put into effect the archetypes, the Gods (whatever this expression truly designates) – equals with distinguishing that unbelievable tonality that makes the difference, as it links some otherwise impossible (in the sense of divergent) melodic lines. Darkness, with its ambiguity and infernal fertilities, is this grandiose fever or tonality – the supernatural compressor (and also releaser and retriever) of ontological densities. It lets the impassable pass (almost unnoticed) and impregnates the world with its surreal and indestructible essence. Both Per Petterson and his predecessor Knut Hamsun identify what we have named so far “endurance” and “persistence” as some sort of expansion of the syndromes within desire, which is an action meant to cleanse them (these desires) of their nameless nature – to which insistence the nature answers with a real-life inhalation of its darkest name: a visualized voice in motion. This last breath before the dark is a silent devouring which releases those thorns stuck in their own nightmares and re-assigns them as ravaging psychic claws: “There was silence all around us. There had been days and nights of rain and wind and incessant roaring in the pines and the spruce, but now there was absolute stillness in the forest, not a shadow moving, and we stood still, my neighbour and I, starring into the dark, then I felt certain there was something behind me. I could not escape the sudden feeling of sheer cold down my back and Lars Haug felt it too (…).” (Petterson, 2008, p. 9) “(…) my senses begin swinging in a certain rhythm. I am ringing in tune with the great stillness (…) and my heart strikes toward it in a soft throbbing. So for some minutes. It is blowing a little; a stranger wind comes to me a mysterious current of air. What is it? I look round, but see no one. The wind calls me, and my soul bows acknowledging the call; and I feel myself lifted into the air, pressed to an invisible breast; my eyes are dewed, I tremble (…) I turn my head round; the stranger wind is gone, and I see something like the back of a spirit wandering silently in through the woods…” (Hamsun, 1921, pp. 134-135)

In this way, the waves of darkness re-open in the guise of caresses, all the betrayed scars, invading light’s sick infinity with deep, explorable and tempting abysses. Darkness endows this world with that state-of-opening

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called by Heidegger die Erschlossenheit. Only when challenged by the mysterious fleshy blackness of a mouth to perform the perfect kiss, or by other apertures (both physical and metaphysical) which call for wild penetrations, man becomes “an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do” (as Herman Melville beautifully called him) and takes advantage of that void space in which he (the Dasein, the man) regains-bybuilding the ontological distance separating him from his ideality, from the authenticity of his emotional responses. The facticity that the Dasein exercises over the world is possible due to the existence of a space of motion, an "openness" (as Heidegger calls it) – all the constitutive moments of man as fact-of-being-in-the-world (understanding, emotional situation [or positioning], fall, discourse) being modes of this state-of-opening of the world. When man expresses himself or takes action, he reveals a specific “there” (“Da” in German) – i.e. a “there” related to the historical, cultural and environmental situation and also a “there” adzed by the purposes related to these concatenating conditioners. This is the facticity of the Dasein (Faktizität): man defines himself (in the sense that he becomes real and visible to himself) and fulfils an identity with his every gesture. Facticity is something built and continuously generated, wittingly, and for this reason it stands as something radically different from the simple factual occurrence of a mineral (for example): “Dasein understands its ownmost Being in the sense of a certain ‘factual Being-present-at-hand’. And yet the ‘factuality’ of the fact [Tatsache] of one’s own Dasein is at bottom quite different ontologically from the factual occurrence of some kind of mineral, for example. Whenever Dasein is, it is as a Fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein’s ‘facticity’.” (Heidegger, 2001, p. 82)

The reason why Heidegger’s translator uses inverted commas when attributing the factuality to the Dasein is that facticity and factuality are two radically different aesthetical and ontological regimes. The Dasein as fact-of-being-in-the-world is never a mere presence or a presence-as-such. Constantly driven by all sorts of preoccupations, he defines himself with every action that he takes, with every vision that he cleanses, with every gesture and every intention that he shows – he defines himself in the sense that he leaves behind some sort of imprint which functions as landmark and as stabilizer for future initiatives, as Aaron Stainthorpe from the British Doom-metal band My Dying Bride observes when he says that “we walk in everyone's shadow and footprint”:

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“Each has their own thoughts and feelings and each deals with emotions and desires in complex and different ways and depths and the expression of these emotions is their imprint on the world we all live in, whether we like the look of it or not. And we walk in everyone's shadow and trace footprints well trodden for millennia before us but we must still plough on despite wanting to be unique, lest we turn to emotional dust and wither away to be scattered by an unfavourable wind.” (Stainthorpe in Örmény, 2010, p. 50)

A mineral is not able to make such a difference; it only exists as such – forever stuck in its own mysterious silence. For this reason, it only possesses a “factual occurrence” or “factuality” (Tatsächlichkeit), while humans, as creative forgers, possess “facticity” (Faktizität) – something capable of intervening in the dynamics of phenomena, to alter the course and the curse of the rivers (if we are to make a guiding reference to Per Petterson’s novel “I Curse the River of Time”) and to leave precious directions behind for those who will still want to venture on the high seas of secrecy. Per Petterson’s phenomenological attempt in Out Stealing Horses is to demonstrate that by contemplating the factuality of the so-called “still life” (he doesn’t speak about minerals as Heidegger does, but mostly about different forms of wood: trees, timber, lumber, logs, barks, resin, sawdust) we get a better perspective on our own facticity and on how we should conceive, organize and orient it. That factuality contains in its frozen structures (fibres) not only indications or clues that could be deciphered by specialists or by esoteric persons, but also the very genetic code of future facticities, which is inscribed deep in every smell, in every nuance or in every threat that the “still life” manages to give off or to carry across and into contexts. Of course, one could easily sustain this opinion by quoting the famous passage where Trond’s father inhales deeply the aroma of the trees freshly “peeled” of their bark, trying to find there the coordinates and the colours of his future initiatives or, simply, the episode when Trond himself tries to calm and embalm his dreams by recuperating the substance of his fragilities from the persistent smell of the wooden boards that made up the walls of his room – and this is in fact the true nimbus of the notion of persistence that we mentioned in the title of this chapter, as it appears in the novel: “Sometimes he stood there a long time just sniffing the wood, even pressing his nose against the bare timber where the bark had been stripped off and the resin was shining still, and breathing it deeply in, and I did not know if he did that because it was something he liked to do, which I did, or whether his nose could read some information from inside it to which

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Chapter Three we other mortals had no access. If so, whether this information was good or bad I had no way of knowing, but it did not make his impatience any weaker.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 165) “(…) ‘Good night and see you tomorrow,’ and then he went out, and I turned towards the wall. Before I fell asleep I put my forehead against the coarse timbered wall sniffing the faint scent of forest it still held.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 166)

While “factuality” remains an undeniable reservoir of substance and a constant source of deliverance, the essence is fundamentally a product of human creativity and clarity of vision. It is the most constricted possible form of light, presenting itself, because of the intense pressure of tightness, as utter darkness. It is there, existentially, always ready to be intruded upon, released from itself (loosened in its pressure points) and unfolded. Umberto Eco applies this “theory” to the case of an oil painting, showing how the uniqueness or the irreproducibility of an object of art is directly related to the exclusive dynamics (rhythms) of intrusion and unfolding into deep phenomenal matters, processes giving in their turn (returning) unique material expressions (combinations of vision and decanted intensities applied against the solidities of the background). Everything here resembles the uniqueness of scars on the skin, where the design of the weapon (material quality) is combined with a phenomenal quality (the intensity and the passion of the injurer – the imprint of a special relation of force between the attacker and the defender or the keeper of essence). Every scar is a mark of passion and there are no similar scars in this world and, no similar contexts of intensities that produce them. The status of a scar relates to both the origin and to its later solidification – and, together, these two moments give to this type of imprints an “authorial authenticity”, by virtue of which they become “their own type”: “There are objects so complex in material and form that no attempt to reproduce them can duplicate all the characteristics acknowledged as essential. This is the case with an oil painting done with particular colours on a particular canvas, so that the shades, the structure of the canvas, and the brush strokes, all essential in the appreciation of the painting as a work of art, can never be completely reproduced. In such cases a unique object becomes its own type (…). The modern notion of a work of art as irreproducible and unique assigns a special status both to the origin of the work and to its formal and material complexity, which together constitute the concept of authorial authenticity.” (Eco, 1994, p. 179)

Per Petterson’s greatest and most charmful (with the sense of motivating) contribution in this respect is to show that this dynamics of

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uniqueness is not something that belongs exclusively to acknowledged great works of art or of engineering, but, on the contrary, that it is present in an acute and authentic form in each and every daily practical activity through which man simultaneously constructs and reveals his Self (constructs it by revealing it step-by-step). This is the true essence of visionary facticity, understood as the will to tame the hungry surrounding Darkness and also as the constant proof that every man is a creator / constructor and that he can’t live but by being a creator / constructor: “(...) I fall into the proper rhythm, and the task reveals itself and grows visible, and that’s what I have done for as long as I can remember, as if the secret lies in how the body behaves towards the task at hand, in a certain balance when you start, like hitting the board in a long jump and the early calculation of how much you need, or how little, and the mechanism that is always there in every kind of job; first one thing and then the other, in a context that is buried in each piece of work, in fact as if what you are going to do already exists in its finished form, and what the body has to do when it starts to move is to draw aside a veil so it all can be read by the person observing.” (Petterson, 2008, pp. 69-70)

Every object of art or any “humble” product of our daily devotions is like a scar on the skin of the Darkness that encircles us – something that marks a special moment (a turning point) in our past and, nevertheless, an effect of one’s identity (as a warrior or as an adventurer). It is also a “landmark” pointing towards the unknown dimensions of power, or towards the hidden purities of intensities. Although the Dasein is characterized by facticity and thrownness (Faktizität und Geworfenheit), Heidegger does not hesitate to point out that he is not as naturally or “self-evidently” characterized by an essence. We could say that Trond chooses isolation in virtue of an instinctual Heideggerian intuition – namely the one which says that the Essence (das Wesen des Daseins) comes from the life-style and from the types of relationships that man develops with the Welt and with the objects and creatures dwelling inside this Welt. In other words, out of existence. In Existence is to be found the essence of the Dasein, in the fact that he is active (authentically involved both physically and intellectually) in the world where he lives (this is the viable Heideggerian “formula” of “In-derWelt-sein” / “within-the-world”). A real involvement into the world, according to Heidegger, presupposes a unitary structure and way of “being-there”10, we could say a chiasmatic unrestrained and skilful 10 “The compound expression ‘Being-in-the-world’ indicates in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unitary phenomenon. This primary datum must

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determination capable of melting in its inertia all traumas and to unite the human rhythms of work with the rhythms of the resistance of woods and with the endurant invasions in it of the metal – to the point where the scent of trees and freshly cut timber passes into the tools, both being part of the same spirit and passion, one able to make all contingency irrelevant and all suspicion disappear naturally (and here is the true moment when people take things as they come and when their tools become authentically constitutive iron-and-rope structures): “But when you are in the swing, and all of you have fallen into a good rhythm, the beginning and the end have no meaning at all, not there, not then, and the only vital thing is that you keep going until everything merges into a single pulse that beats and works under its own steam, and you take a break at the right time and you work again, and you eat enough but not too much, and you drink enough but not too much, and sleep well when the time comes (…).” (Petterson, 2008, p. 75) “(…) and from among the tools I picked up a pike pole and hung a coil of rope over my shoulder, and my father took a pike pole too and two axes and sheath knife, and Franz took a crowbar and a freshly sharpened saw, and all this we kept in the shed and more too: saws and hammers and two scythes and clamps and two planes and chisels of different sizes, and various files hung from nails in rows along the wall, and there were angleirons and a good many tools whose use I did not know, for it was a wellequipped workshop my father had in that shed, and he loved those tools and sharpened them and polished them and soaked them with different oils so they would smell good and keep for a long time, and each and everything had its appointed place where it hung or stood and was always ready for use.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 171) “‘We’ll soon see to that,’ he says, pulling out the choke on his saw, which is a Husqvarna and not a Jonsered (…) I start the Jonsered, and luckily succeed at the first try, and we attack the birch, Lars and I, from two angles; a pair of slightly stiff men between sixty and seventy with earmuffs on their heads against the deafening howl from the saws when they eat into the wood, and we bend over them and hold our arms well away from our bodies to make sure the dangerous chain is an extension of our will and not the other way around, and we deal with the branches first and cut them off close to the trunk and saw them into suitable lengths and cut away everything I cannot use for firewood and gather all that into a heap I can put a match to later and have a bonfire in the November darkness. I like be seen as a whole. But while Being-in-the-world cannot be broken up into contents which may be pieced together, this does not prevent it from having several constitutive items in its structure.” (Heidegger, 2001, p. 78)

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watching Lars work. I would not call him brisk, but he is systematic and moves more elegantly up to the birch trunk with the heavy saw in his grasp than he does out on the road with Poker. His style infects my style, and this is how it usually is for me; the movement first and then the comprehension, for gradually I realise that the way he bends and moves and sometimes twists around and leans is a logical way of balancing against the supple line between the body’s weight and the tug of the chain as it takes hold of the trunk, and all this to give the saw the easiest access to its goal with the least possible danger to the human body, exposed as it is; one moment strong and unassailable and then a crash, and suddenly ripped to shreds like a doll can be, and then everything is gone and ruined forever, and I do not know whether he thinks like this, Lars, as he wields the chainsaw with such aplomb.” (Petterson, 2008, pp. 140-141)

Obviously in search of his essence and reservoirs, Per Petterson’s narrator proposes an independent pursuit of the refreshing crowns of creation inside the wet and twilightish forest of the North, especially with the aim of placing himself in that point where the outer utter darkness enters the wood fibres and enlivens the trees. In the Norwegian author’s vision, here is the place where the essence is decanted. Of course, there are many ways of reaching such a placement and the novel is a superlative collection of impressions in this regard (all of them warmly-misanthropic in effect, but not in nature and intent), yet none free from the influence of Knut Hamsun’s majestic prose of wet scents of woods, of invading murmurs of mountain springs, and of frantic skyscapes painted by the sharp winds and by the transparent colours of the canopies of the trees. “(…) behind the hut was the forest. A huge forest it was; and I was glad and grateful beyond measure for the scent of roots and leaves, the thick smell of the fir-sap, that is like the smell of marrow [a.n. here we see the same obsession with the messages and directions hidden or inscribed in the scents of woods]. Only the forest could bring all things to calm within me; my mind was strong and at ease.” (Hamsun, 1921, pp. 4-5) “Then, perhaps, if the wind veered round, the peaks in the distance would almost disappear, and there came a storm, the south-westerly gale; a play for me to stand and watch. All things in a seething mist. Earth and sky mingled together, the sea flung up into fantastic dancing figures of men and horses and fluttering banners on the air. I stood in the shelter of an overhanging rock, thinking many things; my soul was tense. Heaven knows, I thought to myself, what it is I am watching here, and why the sea should open before my eyes. Maybe I am seeing now the inner brain of the earth, how things are at work there, boiling and foaming.” (Hamsun, 1921, pp. 10-11) [a.n. this is perhaps the most illustrative example of what it means to truly be “within-the-world” / “In-der-Welt-sein”]

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Chapter Three “(…) the mountain sides were wet and black with the water running down them, dripping and trickling always with the same little sound. That little sound of the water far up on the hills has shortened many an hour for me when I sat looking about. Here, I thought to myself, is a little endless song trickling away all to itself, and no one ever hears it, and no one ever thinks of it, and still it trickles on nevertheless, to itself, all the time, all the time! And I felt that the mountains were no longer quite deserted, as long as I could hear that little trickling song.” (Hamsun, 1921, pp. 13-14)

Coming back to Trond’s misty dreams of consistent forests, we could say once again that man’s essence is always mapped on the substantial surrounding “still-life” and that man has to find ways to recapture the life frozen therein – and this because (and Trond knows it very well) the forest has always already done what one dreamt last night. The forest withholds ancient fusions: when she murders the light by spreading her wings, the branches pierce the veins from within and the dedicated Dasein manages to capture some of her sap in his blood and to see the hidden Runes making visible the cardinal points towards which the Vikings oriented the looks of their wooden gods. Such deities were carved with old pagan mastery and hammersongs in the very places where the sun and the darkness of the forest glowed together in the seraphic shape of man’s true intelligence (revealed essence as expanding unity with the forest): “There was the scent of new-felled timber. It spread from the track-side to the river, it filled the air and drifted across the water and penetrated everything everywhere and made me numb and dizzy. I was in the thick of it all. I smelled of resin, my clothes smelled, and my hair smelled, and my skin smelled of resin when I lay in my bed at night. I went to sleep with it and woke up with it and it stayed with me all the day long. I was forest. (…) I was worn out without realising it, and I just went on.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 74)

And, indeed, the maximum point of being-active-in-the-world occurs when the Dasein gains perspective upon and insight into the Sein (his Being) – and in this vertex Dasein’s essence becomes readable as it reaches its point of maximum visibility. Here man becomes genuinely oriented in his world. From this perspective – from its intimatelygenerative fund – depart all the articulations, intuitions, assumptions and, ultimately, agreements and decisions. Due to such a perspective or insight (as a result of a deep psychic fusion with the ancient energies of nature) man possesses an instinctual grasp of the (true) nature of all that is out there or, in Heidegger’s terms, he “can determine the nature of entities in their Being without necessarily having the explicit concept of the meaning of Being at one’s disposal”; he can get intuitively “Articulated in his

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Being” or, in Shakespeare’s terms, he can live in times that are properly and securely set “into their joints”: “One can determine the nature of entities in their Being without necessarily having the explicit concept of the meaning of Being at one’s disposal. Otherwise there could have been no ontological knowledge heretofore. One would hardly deny that factically there has been such knowledge. Of course ‘Being’ has been presupposed in all ontology up till now, but not as a concept at one’s disposal – not as the sort of thing we are seeking. This ‘presupposing’ of Being has rather the character of taking a look at it beforehand, so that in the light of it the entities presented to us get provisionally Articulated in their Being. This guiding activity of taking a look at the Being arises from the average understanding of Being in which we always operate and which in the end belongs to the essential constitution of Dasein itself.” (Heidegger, 2001, pp. 27-28)

The wide notion of space (generally speaking), such as the hidden and quiet corners of a small-bourgeois house; the precision of seasons suspended in critical temperatures mellowing down and allowing the elegant and whimsical jealousy and the daring enthusiasm with which a lover courts his girl; the impenetrable privacy of a siren hidden in a bell; the velleity to play the role of your own master – all these converge eventually into the depth of those unknown corridors that function as delineations and that make possible the division of powers within man, and within the deep liquidity of the eyes that helps him slip through the sun and through the transparencies and mists of the seasons...into milder and rougher forms of eternally incomplete darknesses (decrypted by us in here in a Nietzschean key): “God’s advocate am I with the devil: he, however, is the spirit of gravity. How could I, ye light-footed ones, be hostile to divine dances? Or to maidens’ feet with fine ankles? To be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.” (Nietzsche, 1999, p. 72)

That is why in Per Petterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses it never gets completely dark – neither outside, nor “inside” – we are presented “only” hallucinatory nuanced instances of glooming where, just like in the case of black-and-white photos (or in that of the stars shining against the universe’s dreadful black), the silhouettes of ideas can be seen more clearly when they are contrasted with black (and the resulting dreams can be better sheltered from the disintegrating outer light which could otherwise wear them away):

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1.5. A personal piercing of the black-and-white cold profusions of the novel It is hard to say whether the novel answers or tries to answer questions of the kind “is there something beyond ourselves?”; “do moral obligations define us as persons or as masks? (if we look closer at the Latin origin of the word: persona -ae = a mask, especially as worn by actors)”, or “what’s the true relation between liberty and the diabolical cruelty towards the beloved ones?”– but it surely tries to provide its readers with precious insights into the nature of inner and outer darknesses and into the compatibility of our personal choices with the unrelenting scowl of the unstoppable forces of determination set by nature in stern, cold lines of seasonal progressive aggression. Like a myriad of translucent Strigiformes compacting the clouds, constricting our vision and contracting our brains in the very form of those suffused with abominable white cloudscapes of intoxicated serenities and deceased promises, the Nordic light intruding into the Night, always ends up egging in our brains the delicate crystals containing the smell of distances to come: “I was up once that night. I climbed cautiously down from the bunk and looked neither to the right nor left so as not to miss the door, and then I made a visit out behind the cabin. I stood there barelegged in only my pants with the wind in the trees high above me and the leaden clouds which I imagined were full of rain and soon would burst, but then I closed my eyes and lifted my face to the sky, and there was nothing coming down that I could feel. Only cool air on my skin and the scent of resin and timber, and the scent of earth, and the bird whose name I did not know hopping around in a thicket rustling and crackling and sending out a steady stream of thin piping sounds from the dense foliage a few paces from my

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foot. It was a strange, lonely sound out there in the night, but I did not know whether it was the bird I thought was lonely or if it was me.” (Petterson, 2008, pp. 166-167)

Yet, the efforts of the novelist, as I view them, aim at a third “area” of composure, one beyond black and white (as failed ways of betting on transparencies and of exchanging perspectives) and one compatible with an atypical temporal structure. We are speaking here about that particular embolism, interval or intermission, where processes of change find their decisive click of unleashing; where the tears are being absorbed back into their blood in order to wash away the sins along the smooth glassy surfaces of the faces (of the intangible lovers) whose reflections pour into each other; where we peel off the sterile bark of the days, causing the hellish roots and the veins of the day to resurface. Such veins and roots are described by Per Petterson as virtual directions – phases resembling those hologramic lines drawn by Dean Stockwell in the American television series Quantum Leap, with the only difference that, unlike Stockwell’s guiding physical trajectories (we are referring mainly to the famous episode when such patterns are applied to billiard balls), Petterson’s lines operate at the metaphysical (and maybe infernally metaphoric) level of destiny: “(…) luckily she had not cottoned on to what was happening in my life at my end of the street, and then I stepped out of the circle, the shining arrows stopped shining, and diagrams and lines melted away and ran down the gutter in a thin grey stream and vanished into the nearest drain.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 233)

Such an intermediary area of phenomenalization is presented by Petterson as causing unknown (being very transient and atypical) sensations, lurking in-between the acknowledged “sense-data” and “emotional loci”11: “It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 221) 11

We use inverted commas in both cases, because Kant’s presentation of the ways in which our imagination operates, proved to us that there is no such thing as “sense data” or “emotional loci”; that every force or impact that we experience is a question of imaginative mediation and linkage with the previous accumulated experiences and conceptual concatenations, as well as it is a question of intervaldynamics.

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Following this weird logic, poetic insight tells us that there must be another day within the week (apart from the seven we already know), a hidden day…a slippery and greasy one that we cannot locate for sure inside those 168 hours that fulfil the cycle of an acknowledged week. Few people know about this eighth day, as it is so molten and merged into the other seven days that, although some feel that there is something strange lurking in their temporal soothing flow – they don’t take the time to ponder upon the subject. However, it is present in expressions of the type "I've been thinking all day and getting nowhere". In fact, this “nowhere” designates a temporal loop within which the density of time is a little bit atypical and so are our biological and mental rhythms when travelling through this temporal trans-space. Should we call it a dwarf day? Anyway, this eighth day of the week is the interval when life shifts its weight from one point to another and makes us unable to recognize ourselves. “But life had shifted its weight from one point to another, from one leg to the other, like a silent giant in the vast shadows against the ridge, and I did not feel like the person I had been when this day began, and I did not even know if that was something to be sorry for.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 102)

Consequently, we wear the therapeutically-boring Sundays as some vapid undies and we dress ourselves in Mondays as if in the knight’s shiny armour, always with an inexplicable sense of loss. And yet, we need this embolism, interval or intermission because due to it and only due to it, “time is what prevents things from happening all at once”. Both coherence and cohesion are achieved thanks to this interval – one that can only be valorised through authentic decisions. This interval pretty much plays the crucial role of punctuation in the bulky body of the otherwise undifferentiated text(ure) that constitutes our overall lives (facts, thoughts, feelings… would all float mixed together, like in a big cosmic soup, in the absence of this turning differentiator). The demons of the eclipse know this very well, the eclipse itself being the astral equivalent of the interval, a godly moment of fracture in the very heart of the great flows and strong currents. Their stories are tales of monstrosity and muddy planet-sized agglutinations of dead material – but this doesn’t have to scare us, this is who they are and our voices will, like crystal clear cold autumn lakes, simply reflect their barbarian, hyperbolic and nonsensical enormity, in order to search for a sense along these colourful reflections. With an ontological regime operating beyond black and white (“a thin grey stream” as Petterson calls it at page 233), this alluring “line / interval of demarcation” ultimately serves a universal openness, as it has an inner

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gravity able to keep our mental atmosphere from dispersing into the open spaces. Nevertheless, one must avoid relying too much on its gravity as it not a true celestial body, it is just the quick sand between two cycles which “only” mimics the gravity so that we won’t feel this diastole of the week – this interval of relaxation and dilatation of the temporal ventricles, during which the vessels get filled with new and fresh time, able to fully restart the cycle of the week. Sometimes it so happens that we accidentally see and sense this diastole and, instead of waiting it to pass and forget about it, we take it for all sorts of apocalyptic things: the end of the world or of ourselves, the coming of God, the appearance of a demon, or just an ominous general state. Now is when most of the suicides occur…hopeless, senseless and timeless – just as they have always been. Hamlet himself was here when he observed how “the time is out of joint”. We, as human beings, have in the palm of our hands (properly speaking) the necessary acuteness needed in order to gain the premonition of this diastole – of this temporary end of a cycle when the engine of the week stops for a few moments to recapture its energies, together with new streams of time into its ventricles. That is why we have this beautiful gift – the possibility to take the beloved ones under our wings (“Pour yourself into me, [a.n. when] our time approaches so near, that I sigh”, says it so metaphorically the British Doom-metal band My Dying Bride in the song “Sear Me MCMXCIII” from the album Turn Loose the Swans) and to keep them safe in there (in a pleasant cosy sensation which resembles the pneumatic fluidity of a dance), until the disaster passes: “We dance and the music dies. We carry them all away, as we glide through their lost eyes.” (My Dying Bride, lyrics from the same song, “Sear Me MCMXCIII”). Per Petterson renders this case in his fabulous ending sequence of the novel, one meant to grasp once again in all its warmth the surreal passion of D. H. Lawrence’s main character from Sons and Lovers: “When we were out on the pavement and walked on down to the station and to a café, perhaps, for something to eat, my mother put her arm in mine, and we went on like that, arm in arm like a real couple, light on our feet, our heights a match, and she had a click in her heels that day that echoed from the walls on either side of the street. It was as if gravity was 12 suspended . It was like dancing, I thought, although I had never danced in my whole life.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 238)

12

Our italics and bold.

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2: “Stars in July” (Blazing Eternity13) Motto: "When it's darkest men see the stars." —Ralph Waldo Emerson

2.1. On the naturalness of common sense If man “can determine the nature of entities in their Being without necessarily having the explicit concept of the meaning of Being at one’s disposal” as Heidegger claims, it means that he (the man, the Dasein) does it pretty much in virtue of what today's society likes so much to call “a common sense”, yet without knowing exactly what it truly means. Indeed, Per Petterson’s novel is a strong inquiry into the accurate, cold and rough reservoir of common sense, and it is an inquiry conceived and carried into effect from a perspective upon common sense inaugurated in the old Italian humanism by Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico. According to Vico (whose ideas we are to assume along the directions established by his interpreter, Ernesto Grassi), man’s almost instinctual grasp (“without the concept”) of the nature of things and his capacity to see the real demands of morality behind the standardized and sometimes drastic forms of acknowledged (and imposed) morality, are possible due to a “hidden” (always more implicit than explicit) human faculty called “sensus communis”, one which Vico describes by using a strange and almost oxymoronic (that is, almost impossible) phrase: “judgment without reflection”. Taking things even further, Ernesto Grassi reveals the fact that in Vico’s vision, common sense, far from being “common” in today's sense of the words, is common in a complex and crucial way: it is a “Godgiven” intuition of the (true) necessities that dictate human resolutions and revolvings from the primordial times until now, but one which is rooted in each-and-every imagination, this meaning that each individual responds to this ontological imperative in a personal, creative and, most importantly, distinctly-spiritual way. Concerning the relationship between common-sense (seen in this way) and nature, Grassi stresses the fact that this is neither more nor less than “the expression of a fundamental experience” (fundamental in the sense 13

Blazing Eternity is an Atmospheric Doom and Dark Metal (with slight shades of Black-metal) band from Copenhagen, Denmark, and these lyrics used in the title are part of the song “Stars in July” from the album “A World to Drown In” (2003). Source: http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/blazingeternity/aworldtodrownin.html#4, consulted on the 16th of December 2012, 15:44.

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that it defines man as such from his earliest erectile and expansive moments) – that of a constant absence of analogies between human needs and nature and, consequently, of a constant need to adapt human fragilities to the “totalities” of nature. This means to intervene in nature and to let nature intervene in you, and this is after all what really unites us in a truly common experience (and perhaps the main unstated subject of the novel Out Stealing Horses): the need to find and maintain an appropriate “orbital” place in nature, one where the “wave function” can give an appropriate distribution of energies and one that could harmonize, in a unitary structure of transcendence, our grief, fear, hope, enthusiasm, love and calmness – as if each of these emotions is a separate instrument performing its proper parts in an orchestra of the self (the melody of this orchestra being the rhythm and the song of our lives): “According to Vico’s approach, the historical world arises from interdependencies of human requirements, from the elements needed by man. From these derive the necessity of intervening in nature, by humanizing it, as well as the necessity of establishing human institutions, social community, political organizations, and ways of life. What lies at the basis of this structure is neither philosophical considerations, nor theoretical or metaphysical conclusions, but common sense (sensus communis). I shall quote only a crucial passage from Vico: ‘The human will, highly unstable as it is by nature, is rendered firm and definite by the sense common to all men with respect to what is needed by and useful to them: these are the two sources of the natural law of nations. The sense that is common to all is a judgement without reflection, universally felt by an entire group, an entire people, a whole nation or the whole of the human race.14 (...) «Common sense is the criterion divine providence has taught man in order that he may determine what is certain in the natural law of nations».15 Common sense is, therefore, the fundamental function inspiring the same ideas in entire nations that do not know each-other.’” (Grassi, 1990, pp. 24-25) “If common sense has its roots in ingenious and imaginative activity, it radiates human spirituality and can be interpreted only as an expression of a fundamental experience, that of the absence of analogies or patterns between human needs and nature and of the need to look for them. Spirituality is to be interpreted here as a ‘llack’, in the sense of a lackening 14

In the footnote for this quotation given at page 39 Grassi provides the following reference: passage taken from Scienza nuova seconda, in Opere di G.B. Vico, edited by Fausto Nicolini, 8 vols. in 11 (Bari: Laterza, 1911-41), pars. 141-142. 15 Scienza nuova seconda, par. 145.

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* We have interpreted this “lack” that Grassi speaks about, in the first section of this essay, as “darkness” and, more precisely, as space of evolution (psychic branching). If we are to go back to the statement from which we’ve built up this study (the novel functions as a musical brace connecting two or more lines of music that are played simultaneously) and to correlate it with the idea of sensus communis as drawn from Vico and applied to the Nordic Forest, we should see how Per Petterson manages to open a new dimension inside ourselves, one made of many instruments and, sometimes, of conflicting musical tones and rhythms, but one that is kept well together as it sustains itself upon the becoming (suitable, attractive) pressure points. Sensus communis signifies here a sense that could cover the lack and the darkness by finding the appropriate pressure point in nature – that is, an emotional confluence that turns every feeling into an instrument within an orchestra of the self, as it reflects that nature back heavily upon the self. Such an anchoring makes possible what we have recognized in the first section as “journeys through our inner pressures” (the title of a song by Katatonia) – journeys which, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty observed, along their translucent passing, open up new dimensions beyond the musical structure, while using that very musical structure as, we could say, a genetic code of expansion: “When, in the concert hall, I open my eyes, and visible space seems to me cramped compared to that other space through which, a moment ago, the music was being unfolded, and even if I keep my eyes open as the piece is being played, I have the impression that the music is not really contained within this circumscribed and unimpressive space. It brings a new 16 dimension stealing through visible space, and in this it surges forward.” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, pp. 257–258)

16

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. The English version of this book appeared under the title “Phenomenology of Perception” and was translated by Colin Smith. It appeared in New York (Humanities Press, 1962) and in London (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). The translation was revised by Forrest Williams in 1981. We are quoting here from the version reprinted by Routledge in 2002, pp. 257–258.

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To liberate one dimension into another and to create great new gliding spaces and the darkest possible glades (that is glades newly cleansed [decanted] from darkness, containing all over themselves the infernal purity and fertility of that darkness) is to stop time for a few moments; to suspend life's eternal wheel inside which we are running like rats and to actually have a moment of realization. Per Petterson’s such moment (and certainly the ideatic nucleus of the novel) is the one in which he declares that “No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to” (Petterson, 2008, p. 68) – a line which maintains strong spiritual affiliation to Knut Hamsun’s previous famous statement according to which “Sorrow and joy are from within oneself.” (Hamsun, 1921, p. 7) Under the shield of such a magic invocation of the deepest strengths of the self, the traveller finds a spiritual island safe from the storms of time, and becomes the first to properly see the July stars through night’s dew and the last to bid them farewell in the cold morning mist – thus the only one to feel the true weight of both their distance and intimacy: “I shut my eyes into a squint and looked across the water flowing past below the window, shining and glittering like a thousand stars, like the Milky Way could sometimes do in the autumn rushing foamingly on and winding through the night in an endless stream, and you could lie out there beside the fjord at home in the vast darkness with your back against the hard sloping rock gazing up until your eyes hurt, feeling the weight of the universe in all its immensity press down on your chest until you could scarcely breathe or on the contrary be lifted up and simply float away like a mere speck of human flesh in a limitless vacuum, never to return. Just thinking about it could make you vanish a little.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 125)

Cleverly allowed to unfold and spread its inscrutable tentacles, the novel is a charming tale about the true nature of unfoldings. Darkness is presented as the ultimate matter from which all such unfoldings are and have always been created (generated). Darkness creates fabulous spaces and thus answers the question of how can one get “an answer I could live with” (Petterson, 2008, p. 130): by creating it yourself, by forging it alone in the utter and plentiful darkness all around, with fire and ice (as telepathically absorbed from the cold distant stars above).

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2.2. Sons and Lovers17 Feminine beauty quintessentially condenses all the lights and darkness into the brightest but also the coldest possible star: melancholy. Out stealing Horses presents the case of an eternal boy trying to find projections or incarnations of his lucky star, among girls and women that have not lost their maternal moonish qualities (secrecy, protective sexual mysticism, unconfessed and unconfessable lusts and magic tastes), and who ends up in the arms of the mother of all mothers – mother nature (the womb of all true men and irredeemable adventurers). The way the temporal sequences are organized by the author creates a complex spiral of resonance around this quest of meaning in the vicinity of possible maternal warmths, that is, in the nearness of the fires of origins – the thunders that strike the essence into human endeavours. To this end, the narrator moves back and forth in time, constructing, reconstructing and adjusting his Self, so as to be as permeable as possible to this special type of revealing intensity. A complete re-evaluation takes place in this novel (one meant to prepare the Self for future higher rituals of passage), and what Umberto Eco says when analyzing the case of Pliny the Younger applies perfectly to the architecture and to the spectrum of effects of Per Petterson’s world (one dominated by “colliding”, confusing and conflictive epistemic worlds, whose compatibilization is a matter of finding the right focalization, the one whose rays could melt unnecessary ice and unleash from beneath it the structures by means of which man grasps the Darkness, internalizes its phenomenality and transforms it into Self-sustaining kingdoms of Meaning). Eco regards this growing of personal empires in a rather symbolic way, as “an extrapolation of the fabula’s level” and, who knows, maybe he is right and this perspective is also one of Per Petterson’s main ways of understanding human consciousness in its directions of 17 Here, as well as in the novel itself, the reference to D. H. Lawrence’s famous book is obvious but also very very shifty [“(...) my mother put her arm in mine, and we went on like that, arm in arm like a real couple, light on our feet, our heights a match, and she had a click in her heels that day that echoed from the walls on either side of the street. (...) It was like dancing.” (Petterson, 2008, p. 238)], and for this reason, in this second section of our study, we did not approach the subject of womanhood on this classic pattern, but we tried to enter the dark aesthetic depths of the phenomenon – in an attempt to understand the hidden sensibilities that, like Lévinas’ desirous void, require their replenishments violently (like the cruel Gods demanded their blood sacrifices). For this reason, we interpreted the matter phenomenologically, as a game of mutual (emotional) engulfing, played by the void against its intentional makeweighters and vice-versa.

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sedimentation, trails which evolve into walls around the “city” of the Self, and which later function as reservoirs and as tracks of our intentionality: “The Model Reader, confused by a double flickering mirror where two epistemic worlds collide and vanish one into another, may now admire the sublime decision of the hero: fortes fortuna invat, let us proceed, I don’t care about my death! (…)This story of temporal shiftings-in and out is also a story of rapid switchings in focalization. It happens as if a moving spotlight were throwing its rays, alternatively, on two different epistemic worlds so that, by a sort of optical effect, one never realizes which world is being focused on; or, as happens in so-called ‘three card monte’, where the trickster manoeuvres his cards at such a speed that his victim cannot any longer understand which card is where: a paramount example of discursive manipulation determining the extrapolation of the fabula’s level.” (Eco, 1994, pp. 135-136)

The best face of women remains close to us (always a part of what we really are, regardless of all temporal shifts, disruptions, necroses or rumpuses), so close that it pours like silt over those seen and unseen …while our visage wanders undiscovered through the uterus of the day. One viciously tears apart the bridal wings of the butterflies and so, the scales of the day become visible and discernibly cold and wet through the fog – like the denture of fear in the unrecognized mouth of mushrooms. Mute trumpets are the big, abducting proboscis (and other fragile deadly tubes) of gnats. At the foot of living beings, the gnats purr the guts of wait. The faces carved clumsily in the trunk of contingency look bewildered at this electric stomach started at random. Like divinely-smelling knees, the fog bulbs haloed by the washy-black of the distant horizon withstand the cross of the cardinal signs which floats on the stream of days. Feelings emptied of all transparencies: the condensed milk of the mountain-breast. The distances between us will rot and the venom of this mountain will incessantly poison the nothingness contained within the unhappened lives. When the belly of the fog is so close, one starts, unconsciously and unintentionally, hypnotized by a stunning evil – a pure and placental evil, to fill with stones the sack of impatience... having nothing to do since reality constantly invents itself by itself alone. This fog is moistened with death’s secretions. Buried under the mushroom of time, the soul barely breathes and the bracken stings one’s brains like nettles, until his memory unwraps into splints – like those of an imploded tree: the broken bones of other darknesses, shine like abandoned (by their animals) shells. With Mercurian obesities and chipped bruises, life stands between lovers like a sharp sickle, pulled up by a bad light.

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All plants are just some dull-swinging-back-and-forth polyps. Man realizes that what they do offer him is actually a horrid silty laziness. And when he takes a bark which looks like a piece of plywood in his hand, he will surely realize that what he holds in his hand is the sad(dest) tooth of death: “I picked up a little dry twig and held it in my hand and sat looking at it, and thought my own thoughts; the twig was almost rotten, its poor bark touched me, pity filled my heart. And when I got up again, I did not throw the twig far away, but laid it down, and stood liking it; at last I looked at it once more with wet eyes before I went away and left it there.” (Hamsun, 1921, pp. 23-24)

The forceps of gloaming open up the thighs of despair inside the lovers. Ash-softnesses crumble in the sky and the desirer descends into his own body as in a salt mine. Tomorrow is a pair of rusty scissors, all as big as the horizon. If anybody knows how darkly-warm and cosy it is behind the eyelids (after a few putrid nights of unsleeping dictatorial madness), then that somebody surely knows that darkness and its cold fire – the picture of our burning bridges lighting our ways – are our silence and our strength to be alone, when the whole earth collapses into us. The outer projection of that magic place behind the eyelids are the softly round and enticingly-smelling knees of the beloved girl – the utmost confirmation that our instinct never deceives us. In these two places (behind the eyelids and in front of the knees) no one can really touch or harm us, unless we want them to, unless we like them to. This is the hidden meaning of loneliness and the concealed warmth of darkness. And, indeed, in front of such divinely warm rotundities, everything is confirmed, and we start breathing hard, as a buoy in the fog. Then her eyes become abruptly shifting, agitated like a whirling sea in which all the creatures of the world had made love, and her thighs tighten with longing, on top of each other and against each other: she wants our bodies mixed as a centipede, swarming together, and making up a sublime strait jacket – one made of a darkness as impenetrable as the occult purity of white digestions, and buttoned up with stars.

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Patoþka, J. (1996). Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Translated by Erazim V. Kohák. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. —. (2002). Plato and Europe. Translated by Petr Lom. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Plato (2000). The Republic. Edited by G. R. F. Ferrari. Translated by Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter in a book Foucault, M. (1977). ‘Preface to Transgression’ in Donald Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (trans.), Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 29-53. Fraser, N. (1996). “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy” (pp.303-321) in Reading Rorty. Alan Malachowski (ed.) Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell Publishers. Findlay, Edward F. (1999). “Classical Ethics and Postmodern Critique: Political Philosophy in Václav Havel and Jan Patoþka”. The Review of Politics, 61 (3): pp. 403-438

Internet sources Örmény, F. and Stâncel, T. (2010), “Interview with Aaron Stainthorpe” in Europe’s Times and Unknown Waters, August 2010, No. 4, pp. 47-50. http://www.waterytimes.com/PDF/waterytimes_4_rev.pdf http://vikings-shieldmaiden.tumblr.com/post/45069098559/floki-is-a-boatbuilder-among-other-things-i http://www.darklyrics.com/ (for the lines extracted from the lyrics of the bands The Project Hate, Blazing Eternity, Illdisposed, Katatonia, My Dying Bride, and Moonspell)

CHAPTER FOUR THE SECRETS OF THE SWEDISH NEW MOON: AN ESSAY ON THE MUSIC OF LAKE OF TEARS

Summary The last analytical approach of the present book is aimed at the music of the Swedish Gothic-Doom-Neo-Progressive-Death metal band Lake of Tears. The text represents an example of a borderline (between applied literature and philosophy) interpretation and expansion of some ideas and suggestions present in the rich musical universe of the band. The study is divided into six parts which try to identify both the technical and the emotional musical roots and influences of the band, as well as the living metaphorical space that Lake of Tears managed to create within its listeners, and to supply constantly with unknown effusive streams of fertility. The whole material is basically organized around Lucien Dällenbach’s vision upon the type of representational strategy known as mise en abyme (one assumed through the interpretive filter provided by Linda Hutcheon) and around Emmanuel Lévinas’ logic and vision upon exteriority. The latter, with its chaotic and voracious forces of fertility is assumed within a literary, pagan and phenomenological tradition, as the primordial dark essence of our world; as the trans-real, dangerouslyplentiful or unpredictably-generative (abundant) source of death and of life (where life is understood as ascension from mononuclear beasts to reptiles, birds and superior emotional predators). Paganism is interpreted in such viscerally-evolutive contexts (intertwined webs of phenomena theoretically mirrored at the level of the process of reduplication, with the aim of creating new neural logics capable of re-writing [decoding and recoding] both personal and collective genetic and emotional histories) as will to life and as will to coagulations of a biological and emotional identity, as projected against a disintegrative back-ground which is constantly infiltrating us and which is constantly opening enclaves of death inside us (enclaves identified by Freud in the general phenomenon of Todestrieb – “death-drive” or “death instinct”). The music of Lake of

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Tears offers its listeners the possibility of a fruitful riposte against chaos (identifiable up to a certain point with Lévinas’ background), namely a sexification of the blind forces via our dreams – dreams whose intensities are established during childhood and become complexly matured in our artistic adulthood. The music of Lake of Tears offers in this sense some imposing, motivating, melancholically invasive and warmly revealing dreamscapes, while creating in its listeners unbelievably lasting structures of power, grafted upon and rooted in their inner surreal solar saps. Here Freud’s vision upon the distinction unconscious-conscious is adapted to the specificities of our text along Richard Rorty’s reading of the cultural and of the identitary implications of these two pivotal poles of the active (dialogic and dia-logic) self. The last two sections of the study are focused on the motif of the rain in the music of the Swedes and on that of the road. Here we invoke a Heideggerian understanding of the road as filtered through Otto Pöggeler’s vision, namely the way as way of thinking and feeling, as way of journeying towards a real and re-discovered (pagan) self (the term “Denkweg”). The significance of the road is further revealed through Jan Patoþka’s and Edmund Husserl’s methodological vision upon the open spaces of creation and of unfolding of intentionality, and subsumed, when entering into constitutive operational complexes, to a more general cultural tendency identified by Nancy Fraser as “radical theorizing” (an extreme form of individual self-fashioning). We could say that the sonic images of the rain remain the most expressive and complex artistic structure crafted by Lake of Tears, as they illustrate most accurately the effort of the band to feather the world with a duvet of dark, intimately-warm and wildly-creative youth: the rain remains a creator of opportunities, a living liquid entity that knows nothing about decomposition or about infrequentability, and for this precise reason, it plunges exuberantly into the first and throws you irresponsibly into the second. From a dirty symbol of a death, bloated from imbuement with moisture and rottenness, the music of Lake of Tears sheds a new light over the rain – one from which the elements of hysteria and of nervousness have been driven away, in their place being brought some suave-frolicsome silhouettes of calmness and of reminiscent afterglows of our first adolescent love-stories. The three structural levels of reflection involved in the technique called mise en abyme (the énoncé which reflects the text’s story and which directs the reader to future events, yet unread, or to past ones, both within and preceding the text; the énoncé reflecting on the énonciation or the process,

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the production, carried out by the agents; and the third level where the code itself is reflected in its expansions, until it explodes into an overwhelming allegory covering multiple constellations of significance) are applied, in the last four sections of the study, as a phenomenological vibrant warp, to the beautiful images and emotional progressions present in Daniel Brennare’s lyrics.

1. Introduction: origins, musical influences, emotional and visionary roots, echoes and associations, marks of endurances, magic ingredients of songs and the warm and cosily-inviting doors they open towards paganism Lake of Tears is a fabulous darkly-romantic and pleasantly-melancholic metal band from the city of Borås, located in Southern Sweden, a city of railways, smiths (forgers of anvils and of armour) and also a site ravaged by fires four times (in 1681, 1727, 1822 and 1827). It was almost “normal”, we could say, for the fire to escape at some point from the twirling volcanoes raging hard in bellies of the locomotives, from the fierce Viking hammers of the smiths and from the unfortunate burning torrents overwhelming and swallowing up the streets and the buildings, and to enter into a memorable artistic expression, such as the one “crafted” in the song “Burn Fire Burn” – the heart and soul and the cornerstone of the creative potential of the band, and probably the best link between Death-metal and Gothic-metal ever conceived and carried into effect. The nucleus of the band was established 1994 when three “orbital rings” (Daniel Brennare – Vocals / Guitar, Mikael Larsson – Bass, Johan Oudhuis – Drums) secured a unique musical structure of heavy guitars, deeply-echoing and elegantly sustained drum-rhythms, black-diamond like succumbing and addicting bass-riffs and crystal clear warm-vocals that are never-ever disorienting in any way. Today’s lead guitar is solidly assumed by Fredrik Jordanius, but I don't think anybody can or will forget Magnus Sahlgren's mournful and yet luminously enchanted solos that basically brought the most fragile ingredient into their memorable melody lines and cosily-warm melancholies. Daniel Brennare’s tenacious, deep and strongly protective voice colours every guitar riff, like an intuitive velvety living piano rooted in the subterranean dark fertilities of all melancholies, gists and inwardnesses. His variety of vocal signatures began in the style of Johan Edlund’s (Tiamat) devilish and saturnine Neo-noire Romanticism and, later on, developed personal introspective theatrics, in my opinion only vaguely

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tributary to Pink Floyd, Peter Robert Garrett (Midnight Oil) or Peter Murphy from Bauhaus (if we look for instance at the way in which the two singers perform their necro-Rock N Roll high-pitched vocals on “In The Night” [Bauhaus] or “Crazyman” [Lake of Tears]). Yet, we could place his voice in as direct a competition as possible (in terms of charm and brave elegance) with another priceless and blissful voice of Borås, that of Mathias Lodmalm from Cemetary, most probably a close-friend of the band, as he collaborated with Lake of Tears as early as 1994, when Lodmalm performed some backing vocals and a guitar solo on “Greater Art”, and was also next to Daniel Brennare in 2011, when his voice could once again be heard on some passages of the Illwill album. It is hard to compare these two fantastic voices (definitely the best that the Nordic cold Romanticism ever gave to the world), but we could say that while Lodmalm’s is more invasive, adventurous and ardent (burning and fiery like the almost occult fascination for the flesh of sad and supple lonely girls), Brennare’s remains more paternal, always divinely anodyne, pleasantly tenebrous and sweetly-melancholic. Though at times angry and fast, as if it were splinters popped straight out of the sharp and spiteful guitar riffs, his vocals remain poetic and cordial (regardless of the genre in which they operate), indefinable but significantly entertaining and even motivating to the point of a warm, intimate and long-needed demonization. Without neglecting the other contributions, we could say that the vocal performance remains ultimately the one that casts upon the whole musical edifice an enjoyable and highly expressive obscure clarity, and that it adds a real Darkness (with capital D) to the mood of the songs – thus turning the melodies into some really haunting harmonies. Ingeniously grafted onto the heavy structure massively sustained by guitars, bass and drums, the vocal parts, the organ, the keyboards, the cello, and the acoustic guitar play the role of the disruptive elements, assuring the lifeblood of the powerful melodies proposed by Lake of Tears – namely that particular twist of feeling (so natural that it remains almost indistinguishable) or that unknown sonic colour which makes the mood swing imperceptibly but significantly and, most importantly, which makes it so that the band can simultaneously reinvent itself and in the meantime become more and more its typical, unmistakable inner-self. In order to resume our thoughts on the ways in which the songs are woven, we could say that, while maintaining a delightful (very entertaining) old school approach concerning the classic Gothic and Death metal rhythmic section (guitar, drums, bass) – element and attitude which played the decisive role in turning the album “Headstones” into an absolute classic in Gothic-metal – Lake of Tears found the secret alchemic

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ingredient in other sections of their music (beginning with flute, cello and keyboards and culminating in the fantastic voice), thus managing to both revive the flair of the past days of aggressive metal and to launch, for the first time, a newly built vessel of unknown and yet very familiar intense emotions (a vessel of magic inner and outer tunes, we could say), into unconventional but strangely hospitable waters. * Through all the eight studio-albums released so far – Greater Art (1994), Headstones (1995), A Crimson Cosmos (1997), Forever Autumn (1999), The Neonai (2002), Black Brick Road (2004), Moons and Mushrooms (2007) and Illwill (2011) – the well-arranged rhythms and harmonies are under-stretched by a complex constellation of more or less evident musical influences and references. We will try to guess some of them and maybe even construct or re-design some associations where we consider there is place for such an endeavour. The music of the Swedes combines mushy superfluous distinctive qualities of sounds, well introduced into their frequencies (something like a sincerely seductive but not necessarily or exaggeratedly erotic play in the dark, unfolded on an addicting nightful pagan Abba tune infused with many other metallic, cold, elusive and allusive dark-wave disco effects of 80's), with clear-cut and sometimes heavier-than-an-oil-tanker Doom, Death and Black-metal elements. The influences may be a little bit difficult to recognize, because of the highly metalized and heavy versions in which Lake of Tears adopted them, but following the thread of “that special diffuse feeling” we could identify more or less faint traces of Abba in the song “Devil’s dinner”, of The Cure (the song “One Hundred Years”) in “To Die Is to Wake” (the main riff of the two songs is basically part of the same haecceity1 in both form and spirit), of Xymox (the song “Call It Weird”) in “Making evenings” or of Brain eaters (the song “Fiend without a face”) in “Children of the grey” or “Down the Nile”. From here, the musical river changes its natural course, and instead of running towards the calm swamps, it begins climbing upstream: Psychedelic rock, Progressive metal, Doom, Death, Dark and Gothic metal, and, most recently, Thrash-metal (the song “The Hating” definitely “hijacks” some good old Slayer, Testament, Destruction, or Kreator aggressive vocals, vengeful lyrics and insane riffing-styles, spiced with 1 In philosophy the term defines that property that uniquely identifies an object and the Latin word haecceitas literally translates as “thisness”.

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raw and military-mournful solos), pioneering Speed-metal and Punk centred thematically around what Motörhead constantly declaimed as “abuse of power” (the song “Parasites”), neo-dark ascending self-anthems of Horror-Punk and “Metal N Roll” (the song “Taste Of Hell” echoes modern bands like “The Undead” or “The Crimson Ghosts” in matters of dark and melodic trails, but, most of all, it echoes that special type of attempt at keeping alive the charmingly-simplistic and warm-hearted metal cavalry of the 80's pursued by Darkthrone with their Circle the Wagons [equally, a desire to uphold once again the catchy old-school wealth of tasty riffs which only “the masters of the old metallic practices” know how to plant in order for these riffs and tunes to slowly ripen with age, and a celebration of the authentic {or rightfully called “generic”} speed / thrash / punk / heavy metal – one meant to carve these latter ones in toay's stones of destiny and of youth nostalgic madness]), Dark-Thrash metal Murder Ballads (the song “U.N.S.A.N.E.” being a fast paced and abyssal reminiscence of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and one highly compatible with Intravenös & Savage beast songs such as “While my guitar gently weeps” or “Henry Lee”[cover]) and, unbelievable but true, Black-metal (the song “Midnight Madness”). “Midnight Madness” finally fulfils, in a generous form, the Burzumlike demonic high-screams and vocal trends of “Dreamdemons” or of “Down the Nile”. If the previous traces of Black-metal in the music of Lake of Tears were faint and rather warmly-possessive attempts to both seduce and sidestep the shivering coldness of Tristitia’s Black-Doom metal masterpiece “Dancing Souls”, now (with “Midnight Madness”) we are dealing with a real intravenous Nordic Black-metal perkiness: uncompromising, buoyant, self-confident, vigorous and even cheerful celebration of the dark nature of the North, as a revival of one’s true Identity. The Doom-Death-metal parts in the music of Lake of Tears always have a specific trajectory, namely one meant to make their Gothic-metal stronger – more intense and effective at the level of the uniqueness of the feeling of their music. Such influences appear mostly on the first two albums, Greater Art (1994) and Headstones (1995), are rooted in the Swedish Death metal of the early ’90’s (1993 being perhaps the referential year in this regard) and gravitate around the following musicians: Johan Edlund from Tiamat (the albums The Astral Sleep – 1991 and Clouds – 1992), Christofer Johnsson from Therion (the album Beyond Sanctorum – 1992), Mathias Lodmalm from Cemetary (the albums An Evil Shade of Grey – 1992 and Godless Beauty – 1993) and maybe around an incredibly dark and sanguineous but strangely esoteric Death-metal band from the

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city of Sala called Wombbath, which in 1993 released the full-length Internal Caustic Torments, one on which the musicians pioneeringly introduced obscure and dismal atmospheric keyboards or synthesizer effects into an otherwise sinisterly growled Death-metal. When talking about Tiamat’s The Astral Sleep I think we are fully entitled to consider “Lady Temptress” and “Mountain of Doom” as parental effigies for Lake of Tears songs such as “Lady Rosenred” and “Upon the highest mountain”, and even for “Evil Inside”: a spellful metal of very intimate whispering vocals and acoustic guitars, confessing forbidden dreams and astral bodies. From Tiamat’s album Clouds, Lake of Tears acquired the taste for the glorious evocation of the elitist mystique essences of the ego, and learned how to generate surreally fluctuant soundscapes. What was to be gained from Therion’s Beyond Sanctorum was a venomous sense of transition in Death-metal or a know-how “to dwell in possibility”: metalized folk-music insertions, ways to emphasize the primal aggression and utter darkness by means of melodic mournful solos (let us think of the shy but winsome solos from the song “Enter The Depths Of Eternal Darkness”). This early masterpiece of Therion influenced many generations (that were groping for the deepest and sadlysharpest tunes in the space between Death and Gothic metal) in many ways, in the sense that it taught them how to inject progressive and symphonic theatrics into raw and putridly-cavernous Death-metal structures, and thus raise new intellectual and anticipative horns and create spaces for “pandemonic outbreaks”. Yet it was Mathias Lodmalm who truly did the unthinkable, and injected a deep, warm and dark feeling into the traditional misanthropic furies of Swedish Death-metal. Lake of Tears most surely got from here a warm sense of destiny and that delicate touch of magic Evil which colours even the darkest and farthest possible corner of the universe. Lodmalm’s voice is somehow dark, harsh, severe and freezing, but he never really growls, and by finding this intermediary tune of wizardry, he coordinates all the other instruments towards unmatched associations, abundant emotional flows, atmospheric dynamics and well-balanced captivating dark melodies. Wombbath remains a question of personal speculation and it has to do with the special ways of darkening the signs of death and of regression, back into their viscous stones and bone-structures, and it also with the dark adrenaline resulting from this effort – one which tries to be the equivalent of (or at least to mirror) the mysterious dark matter of the universe.

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* With a Daniel Brennare always haunted by the question “how would Lake of Tears sound if they grafted their cosily-purple and darklyprotective style on this or that genre?” – from Doom (Johan Edlund-like passages), to Psychedelic, Thrash-metal (the weird Mille Petrozza-like vocals from “The Hating”) and Black Metal (Nocturno Culto’s vocals from the album “Under a Funeral Moon” assumed by Brennare on the song “Midnight Madness”) – Lake of Tears became an incredibly selfreflective band, taking introspection to atypical levels of inner strength, fluent and graceful fancy and visionary self-reliance. We are dealing here with a music that never fully commits to the dark side and which uses depression with radically different aims than the majority of Doom and Dark metal bands: it provokes our shadows and sets our imagination on fire, luring them both with sad-seductive hosannas. Even more, we could say that it is a music able to teach you how to actually outthink your demons (“Crazyman”) and gain an unexpected control over your unfathomable fluxes of energy. For these reasons, in the following sections, we will concentrate on some auspicious pagan concepts and archetypal entities present rhythmically in the music of Lake of Tears, such as reptiles, birds, frogs, rains, time and maidens. These representations are able to invest our consciousness and our identity with authentic lines of force by revealing metempsychotic destinies that explain our childish dispositions for captivating and (a little bit) sinister magic animals. In the doing of it, these apparitions encourage and even reclaim a higher level of goodwill towards the world, and a less bitter taste for the accumulated sorrows. We consider that the whole complicated and gracefully-unreal musical “architecture” proposed by Lake of Tears was conceived so as to serve (in the sense of “to better outline”) these apparitions, and so as to help us become better acquainted with them (and with ourselves, as relegated in their mirrors).

2. Mise en abyme and vocabulary shifts in the music of Lake of Tears The paganism that the music of Lake of Tears gives off is one which has to do with the flamy chest of the fire (one that looks like the bulging and richly feathered chest of a gander – the thick plumage of the bird symbolizing the strength and compactness of fire), with the inability to ever gather all your courage (just as one cannot remove a specific smell

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seeped into the wood fibre panelling a room), and with that special type of inner-revival (Renaissance) which comes from beyond the banality of unhappiness and which brings with it a new kind of reality, or “just” a new sense of reality (like a warm, rosy skin which propagates itself in silence). The novelty of the approach of the Swedes should be read both at the level of the techniques of creating special types of images, and at the level of the morphological and functional changes in vocabularies (and, along their progressions, at the level of the changes in the human perception) that such images induce. The main but also hidden technique governing the sonic shadows and the colourful warm sounds, playing its tentacles in the depth of expressions and significances (at the level of the artistic reflexes of both the singer and the listener) is the mise en abyme (or mise en abîme, or “the droste effect”). Quintessentially, the music of Lake of Tears is constructed as a play of emotional mirrors, where the surfaces, the sub-texts, the patterns, the densities and the symbols mirror, absorb and enframe each other, rendering the signifiers and the meanings on the one hand highly unstable, but on the other hand, admiringly open to re-descriptions and to new comprehensions (that is, prone to acquire new qualities and dimensions or to recapture lost essences). Mirrors operate in this case in an unusual way and acquire new functions or exceed their (normal) purpose, shifting the focus from the outlining of some emotional phenomena through the relationships of the characters of the songs, to the obscure diseases of the self. The result is an innovation mirrored in the relocation or the resettlement of fictional characters’ typology (demons, ravens, dancingly-inviting shadows, angels, Evil, Devil, Darkness, Fire, reapers, dragons, pagan gods, rain, twilight, Lady Rosenred, Raistlin, Lily Ann, sorcerers) through reflections which re-position the human subjectivity invested in them, and which change the code of the cultural heritage (symbolism) with which they were impregnated throughout European history. When all these relocations are instilled into a fresh phenomenal geography, and when their reflections create a common focus for the inner and the outer sun, the Self receives its magic trans-typology and becomes a sustained and coordinated principle of disclosure of hidden treasures. In Brennare’s terms, it acquires a “clairvoyant stare”2 (Under The Crescent) – that is, the capacity to see “beyond the waters of shimmering tears” (Headstones) and to perceive the 2

All Lake of Tears lyrics cited in this fourth chapter were taken from today’s most complete archive of metal-lyrics – Dark Lyrics.com (http://www.darklyrics.com/l/lakeoftears.html). The site was consulted between the 11th of October 2012 and the 16th of May 2013.

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“sweet silent colder changes” (A Crimson Cosmos) taking place (or sometimes projected) into the secret skies from the eyes of the beloved: “And I beheld the dawn of the hidden sky (...) Please grab my hand and take me away / Take me into your eyes to meet a beautiful day.” (Eyes of the Sky) Triggering visionary experiences, opening new eyes by a wise use of reflections and penetrating hidden magnitudes is the historically acknowledged way to both foretell the future and to enter into contact with remote ancestors. Mise en abyme, as a textual technique of incantatory representation, plays a key-role in producing supernatural textual effects (in unleashing mysterious qualities of enchantment and entrapment), as well as in translating the classical mythology in a modern mode and code (into “local” styles of loneliness, perversion, and dark chastity). Throughout all these stages of re-arrangement and re-positioning, complex mirrorings take place, creating ontological densities analyzable at the level of the technique called mise en abyme. We will assume Lucien Dällenbach’s position upon this method through the interpretive filter provided by Linda Hutcheon. Like a luring silence or a fantasy invasion which directs its entire creative aggression against forgetfulness, this type of representational strategy is described by Linda Hutcheon as involving an unusual dynamic of the process of reduplication, with the aim of creating new neural logics – and, from here, the needed premises for re-writing (decoding and recoding) both personal and collective genetic histories: “(...) there may exist more than just a simple mirroring mise en abyme. And such is indeed the case. Lucien Dällenbach’s extensive study of this reflexive modality, in Le Récit spéculaire (Paris: Seuil, 1977) (...) feels that the mirroring image is central to the concept of the mise en abyme, but that there are three distinguishable kinds. One is a simple reduplication, in which the mirroring fragment has a relation of similitude with the whole that contains it. A second type is a repeated reduplication ‘in infinitum’ in which the above-mentioned mirroring fragment bears within itself another mirroring fragment, and so on. The third type of doubling is labelled ‘aporistique’, and here the fragment is supposed to include the work in which it itself is included.

The detailed typology with which Dällenbach follows this diachronic analysis is based on three structural levels of reflection. For example, the mise en abyme might consist of an énoncé which reflects the text’s énoncé, its story. This could take the shape of any kind of plot résumé, in narrative or in any other form. (...) At this level it is also important to note the position of the mise en abyme in the text, and the direction in which it points, for it can direct the reader to future events, yet unread, or to past

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ones, both within and preceding the text. Dällenbach’s second level of reflection is of even more interest to a study of overt narcissistic fiction for in this case an énoncé reflects on the énonciation or the process, the production, carried out by the agents – both author and reader. A third level, in which it is the code itself (either narrative or linguistic) that is reflected, is obviously that at which both overt and covert modes of metafiction can operate. At a certain point, however, the mise en abyme becomes so extended in size that it is better described as a kind of allegory.” (Hutcheon, 2006, pp. 55-56) a) The first structural level of reflection is traceable in the music of Lake of Tears in the lyrics of the song “Rainy Day Away”. Here the mise en abyme appears in the form of a divinatory Whitmanian spider’s web of dreams, more precisely, under the form of a dream within a dream (the narrative voice awakens from a dream and later it discovers, not without melancholic delight, that it is still dreaming), reflecting both the story of the mother-dream as well as indicating its future appositions (as in biology – the future growths of successive layers of a cell’s wall) and the directions of all the dream-threads involved in the living (in the sense of evolving) design of the web. In Hutcheon’s and Dällenbach’s terminology, the énoncé reflects the text’s story and it points to the events, “yet unread, or to past ones, both within and preceding the text”: “Should we come to sail for the mellow and grey Would it bring us comfort say, just a rainy day away I've got a little something on my mind A little line of evening rhyme, a boogie bubble refrain again Come let's dream some, come take a ride in my dream machine Let's make a funny one, let's take a ride in my dream machine Should we come to stray in this nightmare play I would like to ask you if I may dream today away And for about a year we'd lose this fear Of old men going nowhere near the grey to play the game Come let's dream some, come take a ride in my dream machine Let's make a funny one, let's take a ride in my dream machine And when the dream is done, it's time to have another one.” (Rainy Day Away)

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The concealed dangers (the flaws) appearing at this level of mise en abyme (over-solicitation of the fleshly data), as a site of intense focalizations aimed at forcing the tightest depths, are outlined by Barbara Johnson, who points to the fact that these incantations of frozen transparent fires can empty (cleanse, sterilize) the addressee (often a dream-girl) of her essence and, chiefly, of her constitutive impurities (her fascinating inconsistencies ) – the ones that mark the very contours of her beauty and the dismal apertures through which she releases her call (lure) into the world of man: “‘Everything’ in this imaginary land thus resembles a glistening mirror – including the (...) consciousness, or conscience. Ironically, the ’belle conscience’ has here become, in a literal sense, what it is often called in a figurative sense: the seat of reflection. But if everything has become a mirror, then the normal function of the mirror as a confirmation of identity has been uncannily subverted and infinitely mise en abyme. In the very terms in which he invites the lady to the land of her own correspondence and offers her an infinite reflection of herself, the poet in fact transforms that self into an empty hall of mirrors: if the lady can mirror herself in what resembles her (...), she is no longer seen in the mirror; she has become a mirror herself.” (Johnson, 1992, p. 33)

Yet, far from creating a site of terrible glassy incorporation (entrapment), the lyrics of Rainy Day Away use a special technique of creating reflections: the song applies the myriad glare of rain droplets against the murky late autumnal forest, and so it generates a dazzling ephemeral but extremely enticing chimerical aisle, where transfusions of meaning consistently agglutinate (like red blood cells or like cross-cutting rays thrusting hard into their focus) into layers of chandeliers decorating and at the same time enframing the neck of time, with black pearls bearing the uncanny seeds of the black suns (of devotion). Such chandeliers also act as magnetic compasses indicating the future directions or cardinal points of the text. b) The second structural level of reflection appears in the song Boogie Bubble, where the music of the Swedes presents the most “transparent” case of encapsulation of outer demons within inner demons and vice versa, and, mostly, of reciprocated limerence between the human and the demonic: “(...) nightbirds on my mind / Cloud demons with wands of doom, (...) Strange things and stranger one finds, in them cloudlands of my mind (...) Every boogie bubble holds a demon inside, each and every demon rides upon a purple cloud.”

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The term “limerence” describes best the building blocks or the genetic material with the help of which the compulsive edifices are released into reality (by means of caressing sonic chisels in the case of the music of Lake of Tears). A postmodern Freudian and Rortian vision operates here at the very level of desire, that is, at the level of the powers that write the code of an identity: “Freud made the paradigm of self-knowledge the discovery of the fortuitous materials out of which we must construct ourselves rather than the discovery of the principles to which we must conform.” (Rorty, 2010, p. 270) And when the “material” used to build a self and an inhabitable world for its emergences is not a “solid” or an identifiable as such instance, but a state – limerence being a cognitive and emotional state of extending, intensifying and encroaching obsession with another person or aura; the term being coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in Love and Limerence: the Experience of Being in Love (1999) and explained as stemming primarily from an ultimate (near-obsessive) form of (dark) romantic love – then we are definitely dealing with a “pure” phenomenological issue (a brisance, we could say). What mise en abyme does in this case is to exploit the immanent duality of the human nature and to point to the fact that some couples, such as man-demon, cannot be devoured by history, as the two entities dwell in each other’s unconfessed desires, unexpected thoughts and weaknesses – all projected in the ephemeral but premonitory cloudscapes (Brennare’s ultimate level of mirroring, interchangeability and persistence of sameness inside the unfolded-in-itself image). By means of the bubble something always escapes and carries the seed of madness (the genetic code and the modus of influence) to unknown horizons – and, at the level of this travelling, daring, curious and adventurous escapism, Brennare makes his mise en abyme truly spectacular and atypical: if the droste effect created a complexly compact and hermetic structure of burying deep the same in itself, in the case of boogie bubbles, we see that the dependence of an idea on its model can exhaust neither its significance, nor its future root taking. In this song man and demon are presented as succumbing to each other’s unpredictable influence, along the lines of a limerent-limerent bounding based on transience (instability) and persistence through shape-shifting: clouds and bubbles form, disintegrate and re-form, thus making their essence virtually indestructible (that is why history can never devour such a bond, it can only disrupt it from time to time): “The bulk of relationships however, according to Tennov, are those between a limerent person and a nonlimerent other, i.e. limerentnonlimerent bounding. These bonds are characterized by unequal

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A process such as the visible (or somehow perceivable) “instantiation” of the whirpooling hands of time, by its definition, is never a compact and hermetic course of action. Here no dependence can exhaust a meaning, and the mise en abyme can only reflect on the énonciation, on the process, on the synoptic production carried out by both the author and reader. On the other hand, concerning the song Boogie Bubble, Hutcheon’s case of overt narcissism and Dällenbach’s consubstantiality of literary agents (author and reader) are both “symptoms” of a common lust shared by man with his demons. In such a case, the unfailing self-sustainability of the creative processes (as radiating from both author and reader into common focuses) and their inexhaustibility (in matters of ideas and motivations) derive from the exchangeability of roles between demons and man: man as author – demons as readers; demons as authors – man as reader. The boogie bubbles carry the ideatic and emotional seeds in all directions, simultaneously turning all types of processes into sites of redistribution of values across classic cultural formulations and concrete (historical) models. Such redistributions act as a sort of foreplay (initiation) for the inceptions that will provide the generative force necessary for bringing about ontological shifts and for making the phenomenology of these transfers visible (both retrospectively and prospectively). The American thinker Richard Rorty reads these inceptions as vocabulary shifts and labels them as the true motors of history. Such tectonic forces are forces of imagination – those forces which see (perceive) the hidden metaphors in the still lifes surrounding us and in the still emotions with which we respond to stimuli. Possessing the necessary skills to unleash such forces into the world is a first step in trying to seize the nature of the unpossessable: “The mere redistribution of truth-values across a set of propositions formulated in some taken-for-granted vocabulary is a paltry thing compared to a change in vocabulary. With vocabulary shifts, urgent questions suddenly lose their point, established practices are drastically

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modified, entire constellations of culture dissolve, to make room for new, heretofore unimaginable ones. Thus, vocabulary shifts are for Rorty the motor of history, the chief vehicles of intellectual and moral progress. Consider, finally, exactly how it is, according to Rorty, that vocabulary shifts occur. A vocabulary shift is the literalization of a new metaphor, the application across the board of somebody’s new way of speaking, the adoption by an entire community of some poet’s idiosyncrasy. It follows that poets, in the extended sense, are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the social world’.” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, pp. 305-306)

Here Nancy Fraser and Richard Rorty speak about those shifts in thinking and in constructing sense that are actually able to genuinely change the very perception that we have upon the entities populating our world – in Kantian terms, shifts that have the power to act at the level of our concepts and to induce therein dissolutions in the classical conceptual models and organizations and to create instead new(ly shaped) recipients for the outer stimuli. If imagination has the power to produce such transmutations, this reality forces us to acknowledge the fact that Kant operated with a limited sense of imagination (reducing its functions to the synthetic ones), wrongly assigning to it equal powers to sensibility and intellect. According to postmodern theories, imagination governs the other two faculties not only by means of its capacities to perform syntheses but also by means of its powers to enforce, like a virus, a desired behaviour and configuration in the host cells of the intellect or in those of sensibility. The aesthetic dimension of a text can only be experienced through imagination – if it is to be experienced at all. And when or if this personal imagination has the power to induce and sustain an aesthetic experience, it means that the virus-like behaviour of imagination begins to make itself felt (that the virus of imagination attacks, invades and conquers the cells of sensibility and of intellect) – in more exact words, it means that the imagination of the reader is creating new metaphors in real-time and in real-space, while simultaneously using as a fertile host the models of the author and then destroying them: “(...) [the] birth of the reader must be at the cost of the author.” (Barthes, 1977, p. 148) And here (at the level of the reader) is where true literature begins, where Romanticism reveals its warmest and its most maternally-erotic spot. Here is also where true narcissism is effected (where, in Nancy Fraser’s terms, “every making” becomes “a self-making”) and, why not, the place where masculine enthusiasm becomes intimate in its eternal need to be proved and re-proved.

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“(…) from the standpoint of the Romantic impulse, every arena of invention would be a branch of literature in an extended sense, just as every significant act would be an aesthetic act and every making a selfmaking. Here, novelty would be valued for its own sake; it would be the sheer difference between what is merely found or inherited, on the one hand, and what is made or dreamed up ex nihilo, on the other, that would confer value and importance. (…) [a.n. the Romantic impulse] becomes aestheticizing, individualist and elitist. It is, in short, the impulse to father oneself, to be causa sui, to separate from one’s community. Thus the masculine pronoun is appropriate.” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, pp. 303-304)

In order to be able, as a reader, to carry further the aesthetic emotional and conceptual architecture of a text, to invent new coordinates, to envisage new lines of expansion and to construct new pillars to sustain such increases and elaborations – one has to be able to isolate his processes of signification, in the sense of finding or of providing for them separate and unique spaces of unfolding and sedimentation. This means redefining processes of signification as (fresh) metaphors. At this level of the mise en abyme the music of Lake of Tears can be regarded as a gracious poetics of open processes. We will take here just three examples of primordial trans-contextual entities present in the music of Lake of Tears and approached by us by means of this new poetics of processes. These entities (time, night and light) descend by means of a ladder made of frames into the abyss, “en abyme”, or towards their timeless and placeless essences: -

-

time – “Running all the time and knowing time is running out / and knowing all what time's about.” (Cosmic Weed) night – “Come night comes every tear you’ve cried / Come night so comes your time to see / Come night comes hatred to my heart / Come night comes healing of my scars / Come night so comes my time to be / Come night I’m there again / Come night come night I reign / Beware for the night will find you / Beware for I am there behind you I slay / Come night comes all those things my dear / Come night comes all those things you fear / Come night so comes your time to die.” (Come Night I Reign) light – “Riders of the Nile race towards the light / Swiftly moves the golden lion / South's an eon watching, waiting to be whole / Never will the roaches tire.” (Down The Nile)

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c) The third structural level of reflection is the “sector” where the code itself (narrative, conceptual, aesthetic, linguistic or phenomenal) is negotiated and often played against itself, so as to advance dia-chronically – that is, so as to become possessed by the gods, sick with the gods, or god-sick persons while we are involved in creative acts; so as to be able to establish channels of communication with superior forms of energy. As Linda Hutcheon showed, here “both overt and covert modes of metafiction can operate” and it is also here where “mise en abyme becomes so extended in size that it is better describable as a kind of allegory.” For these reasons, in the following sections of this last chapter we will occupy ourselves solely with this third structural level of reflection, in an attempt to understand the allegory involved in the human becoming an ascension from mononuclear beasts to reptiles, birds and superior emotional predators (the negotiation of the human code and our true metafiction). We will analyze this becoming as an effort to contain (within a human crafted and envisaged series of frames) the aggressive background which stands for the Greatest Nothingness, the eternal source of Life and Death alike. Using interpretation not in order to solidify the already rigid-enough standardized cultural sedimentations, but in order to develop new keys of lecture for the various aesthetic and synaesthetic phenomena involved in man’s natural selections, we will try to identify the root canals leading, along the nerve of darkness, to the archetypes hidden in the main teeth of superior emotional predators. By operating at the level of the instruments (agents) of instilling (the “teeth” of passion), one can extract new meanings from the roots, that is, new or hidden nerves capable to reveal to the analyst new models of expressing and of applying knowledge (a source of both motivation and confusion for the thinkers, ever since antiquity). It would be appropriate to read the archetypes in this context under the label proposed by Richard Mathews, that is, as marks of the powers of infinity (“overwhelming and eternal forces”): “In each model of antiquity we find expressions of the human imagination dealing with powers of infinity. These models are the roots and archetypes of fantasy. We sense a purpose in these early works to cast the infinite in finite terms, to translate overwhelming and eternal forces into down-toearth language and physical presences, to use the imagination and the containment, or expression, of words to control and comprehend the overwhelming forces.” (Mathews, 2011, p. 11)

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3. On the specificity of the lovely human-reptiles (and their later ascent into birds) and on the horrid nature of backgrounds The impact of the music of Lake of Tears is always a question of inserting the right catchy melancholic groove (sense of propulsive rhythmic feeling) into the darkest, deepest and coldest possible background scar: “So tonight the time has come To breathe in deep and sadly ride this one To make a space in between In the line of all my broken dreams.” (House of the Setting Sun)

We are speaking here of a combined sonic and psychotic background – where the background is understood as reminiscent alluvial deposits of past critical moments of guilt and of lust, reflecting heavily (and sometimes unbearably) upon the present of the ego. This is the time when the crevices of the scars begin to throb again, long after the initial wound was inflicted. If we are to make here a psychoanalytical joke and apply Lemmy Kilmister’s perverted metonymy from Motörhead’s song “Killed by Death”, we could say that the painful past contorting our facial expression equals to the act of “squeezing one’s lizard” (lizard – the first form of life able to escape the engulfing moist mud, silt and slime, by running on its own feet), while the response of the cornered ego is to unleash back upon the chaos its most powerful manifestation deciphered by humans – the snake Jörmungandr : “If you squeeze my lizard / I'll put my snake on you / I’m a romantic adventure / And I'm a reptile too.” (Motörhead, Killed by Death) We see that the battle that the music of Lake of Tears is talking about is not so much a battle between Good and Evil, as it is a battle between the outer rapacious chaos driven by unknown and unrepentant forces of assimilation (absorption) and conversion and man’s inner chaos, one able to embody itself, through the magic force of imagination, in its own cataclysmic representations (such as is the case with Jörmungandr) in order to withstand (and counterbalance) the pressure of external intrusions. The song “Head On Phantom” seems to depict man’s power to generate a personal Jörmungandr and to install, via this snake (who is constantly biting his own tail, and, by this act of biting,

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it encircles the whole world in the ocean's abyss3), a closed circle of reaction and counter-reaction between him and the unpredictable grim (uninviting) “environment” (or “background” as we identified it earlier). This is the terror of balance4 of his existence: “At the centre of the situation A constant rotation Endless alteration At the centre of the situation And there is no salvation.” (Head on Phantom)

The repetition of the equilibriums is needed in order to keep the balance of life, as fragile, scary and dangerous as it is. When there is no salvation, or when salvation can be nothing but an abstract mathematical notion, then, there is just melancholy, a celebratory bitter-sweet feeling of memory extrapolated to the senses (just like the taste of champagne).

3.1 Champagne and absinthe Champagne is a celebration of the outer – of the background or of the environment, just as absinthe was a celebration of the inner idyllic green meadows (or their fractal erotic introjection). Champagne is yet a superficial way to enjoy the victory over some minor circumstances of the environment, and the music of Lake of Tears teaches us that there is no such thing as a true triumph over the nature of things and of phenomena (the absorbing / engulfing background; the one which holds us captive and makes us be “far from nothing at all”): “There are dark days ahead You wish you were otherwhere instead Waiting for the day you'll be dead You will always be scared Light, there is no more light Now you made it on your own Into a world of stone.” (Planet of the Penguins)

There are only occasional pleasant shades, subtleties, boogie bubbles, flickers and tremors which constitute the true frail nature of epiphany and 3

We will discuss the theme of the ocean in the music of Lake of Tears in subsequent passages – see the section “Time and toes; ganders and ghastly waters of seclusion”. 4 If we are to use Jean Baudrillard’s terminology.

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the devastating magnetism of seduction – the rest being “just” an incessant bleeding for the “scenery” (background, environment): “I think I got into the situation With the hope of salvation Far from nothing at all I thought it was quite a chance A special circumstance On my way to heal See I Feel And for the scenery I need I bleed.” (Head on Phantom)

The bitter-sweet hope (just like the taste of champagne) should be regarded as a trivial balm and as a lame valve or bleeder for our cheap daily hysterias, when compared to the certainty of magic in our lives. Magic, desire and a taste for the forbidden are expressions of a yearning to bring unknown and yet so alarmingly intuited forces into action (a state which Freud labels as “taboo”, as such forces are generally prohibited in the standard cultural frames), and by means of them, to discover new dimensions of the self. Following Christopher Bracken’s line of reasoning, we could regard the musician in his relation to his artistic act as a “savage philosopher”, as an opener and as an enforcer of avenues towards the forbidden objects of our desires. Music creates both corridors towards and hyper-real instantiation of the forbidden objects of our desires. In other words, it constitutes the only alternative that we have if / when we want to descend into our personal and collective ancestral (pagan) abysses (and do this against the pressures and the oppositions of all backgrounds) and reconstruct ourselves by means of the old flavours / “flavours” and tastes: “Freud explains that when desire encounters a prohibition it cannot otherwise circumvent, it retreats to the unconscious, where it remains active but escapes detection. The prohibition meanwhile remains ‘noisily conscious.’ We are compelled to avoid certain acts and to repeat certain others, but we no longer understand why, until finally the burden of avoiding what we want to do dictates everything that we allow ourselves to do (...). Desire, however, is energy. As long as it is held in ‘tension’, it seeks out every available means of discharge. So it takes the detour of the sign. Forbidden to satisfy itself directly, it turns its energies onto ‘substitute objects’ and aims. The savage philosopher is one such substitute, an avenue for the pursuit of forbidden objects of scholarly desire. We scholars speak of ‘new savage’ in order to speak of something else. What is it? And what are the limits of the prohibition against it?

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One school of authors keeps coming back to the hypothesis that discourse is not an instrument for the communication of thought but an occasion for the deployment of forces. Together they share a desire for words with mana. Such a desire, to use Freud’s language, is a taboo.” (Bracken, 2007, p. 2) “Our way to healing” implies the understanding of the fact that, if under the circumstances of a highly venomous and omnipotent background, love, fascination, adoration, enchantment, attractiveness, motivation and frenzy can and do exist, this can only mean that along the way, we’ve managed to somehow capture something of the essence of this primordial environmental Evil inside of us, and turn it into something else. It means that we’ve become a part of the primordial forces or that some of the primordial forces came to be eaten by us… that we’ve somehow managed “to conquer the demon” and “be the one in command”. Of course, we are speaking about an almost insignificant side of the (environmental) demon that we’ve managed to conquer so far, but the fact that we’ve kept on finding ways to cultivate our fascination, love, feeling of specialness and adoration throughout the centuries (by means of literature, music and science) means that, besides the blind external fire, there is an inner fire as well, one that has the potential to release us upon the elements that kept us away and insane with fear, feebleness and uncertainty up to now; one that will one day outburn the present blind environmental forces: “Darkness and chaos unleashed, stirring the sleep of the beast I've got this wonderful plan to conquer the demon Then I'll be the one in command To keep you away they kept you insane Oh, they kept you insane A wakening mind set on fire, flames getting higher and higher I've got a wonderful goal, to conquer the demon Then I'll be the one in control To keep you in play they kept you insane Oh, they kept you insane.” (Crazyman)

Just as the lizard grew feet, liberated itself from the cold mud and managed to remain in the play of life and successfully dwell in the middle of wet forests and wind-burnt mountains, humans are known to grow psychic tentacles. Some sort of crucial insanity must have forced the lizard to become more than a snake and acquire feet in order to survive and conquer other fields of experience and salvation (ranging across all

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continents except Antarctica). Surely, it was some sort of madness-driven magic that did the work for the reptile: it was forced by the medium to do so and it replied with the unbelievable creativity, will and vision that only conscious beings are capable of. The later transformation into birds (the prideful gander in our case) and the reaching of the ultimate horizons of the Earth was the completion and the liberating blossoming of all the seeds of magic that reptiles carried inside since the very beginning. In a similar way, one needs a creative insanity in order to be able to withstand the constant weight of the background and to be able to somehow remain awake and able to play with his inner fire. The power to ignite such transformations and to unleash a magic response back upon the oppressive background is the concrete quality of every metaphor, stronger and more powerful than any logic. If the background hadn't kept us insane we wouldn’t have been able to produce such magic out of our otherwise placid organic constructions: “Fascination of uncreation, there's nothing you can say You can't run, you can't hide, you'll never get away No reflection, a new direction, here to end your life Wicked breed of evil seed, laughing as you die Gonna get you next floating in darkness (Six, six, six) Gonna get you next coming with pain (Chaos) Darkness and Vain.” (Floating In Darkness)

…and let us remember that only lizards are “crazy” enough to smile when they die (they, and their stony and mountainously voracious ancestor, the cynical crocodile). This is the thoroughly tested (roughly tried) but extremely trustworthy essence of the Nordic man, and this is also the mirage or the true call of the Northern Stars. This has nothing to do with hope. Hope is a mark of weakness and degradation whereas being able to follow a call is being able to make true magic happen and turn melancholy into creativity and, most of all, into expensive and comprehensive vision. Some drink champagne to celebrate their pathetic slow and indistinguishable fall into the background, other project their inner landscapes upon the gruesomeness of the medium and find themselves mirrored back unto themselves by means of the absinthe (as the poets have shown):

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Charles Cros

Raoul Ponchon

Octave Féré and Jules Cuvain

Lendemain (With Flowers and with Women)

L'Absinthe

Absinthe Song

“Absinthe, I adore you truly! It seems when I drink you, I inhale the young forest's soul, During the beautiful green season.

“Greetings magic essence Greetings, the Verb of liqueurs! Spirit of the mystic torch Steel hardener for the hearts Grass of the flesh! Right of the soul Your nourishing stream flows You, are you not the flame When wine is only the blood? In your changing nuance The weak or the strong, see The colour of hope Or the frosting of death; The green of the earth Or the bitter tint of the seas, A paradise of light Or the glimmer of hell! Oh you, exterminator Of weak imbeciles! You remain our protector, We love the stormy waves. Disrupting our brains; We provoke a shivery death, Consume us to the bone! (...) To absinthe Three times holy, There must be a divine cult.”5

“With Flowers, and with Women, With Absinthe, and with this Fire, We can divert ourselves a while, Act out our part in some drama. Absinthe, on a winter evening, Lights up in green the sooty soul; And Flowers, on the beloved, Grow fragrant before the clear Fire.”

Your perfume disconcerts me And in your opalescence I see the full heavens of yore, As through an open door. What matter, O refuge of the damned! That you a vain paradise be, If you appease my need; And if, before I enter the door, You make me put up with life, By accustoming me to death.”

5

All the quotations below are taken from http://www.absinthe.se/absinthepoetry#fere_and_cuvain, last consulted on the 24th of December 2012, 01:12.

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The music of Lake of Tears captures perfectly the mystic air of this transition from champagne to absinthe (with all the ontological implications), and in the doing of it, it adjusts “the unsettling” element(s)6 to an approachable human(e) frequency: “Take me where the sweet water flows Take me where the winds of spring blow As swaying as tide, bitter and sweet combined I close my eyes... Nothing to fear, there is no evil near Only you and me And water sweet, shallow but oh so deep So very deep Take me where the sweet water flows Take me where the winds of spring blow Different somehow, see so much clearer now I open my eyes... Wandering dim, deep down into the dream Of obscurity With water deep, bitter but oh so sweet So very sweet Take me where the sweet water flows Take me where the winds of spring blow.” (Sweetwater)

To unleash Jörmungandr upon the chaos itself is to represent in a human code the flow of instincts in nature. This (inevitably artistic) act is almost equal with raping or at best with “sexifying” the chaos (the background) in an almost biblical way… of the snake – penetrating it with the crawling will of the (future) cadavers and planting one’s seed therein. To have sex with the chaos is to remove what Freud called “the deathdrive” (Todestrieb) from our lives: “(…) a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state.” (Freud, 1987, p. 380) The lyrics of the song Pagan Wish basically describe this way of conquering death (the corrosive unknown vortexes of chaos) by means of sexually disjointing it – and I think we are safe to say that we can see here at work a healthy Pagan Freudian logic of invasion, possession, pleasure and triumphant erectility (that part of our ethos capable of filling itself

6

What we have termed as “the disturbing but still fascinating background”.

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with blood and of becoming that very blood in its most rigid or withstanding possible incarnation): “Wish I could split the night in two Wish I could, what I would do to you Wish I could hold the nights apart Oh, to you I give the sun, my heart I'll be the cyclone how it strays I'll be the moon escaping there I'll be your cancer now, the sun that eats away Wish I could be the waking sun Just for once I'd be the brightest one Wish I could find you where you hide Like the sun I'd be the tide that swallows tide.” (Pagan Wish)

Unleashing Jörmungandr upon the chaos means responding to the placid, bouldery and massively undifferentiated tyranny of the background, not with an equal aggression (as such a thing is not possible) but with a focalized invasion, a precise cut in the nerve of thickenings, one meant to drain and, later on, to melt the solid accumulations (“Mountains of Might” as Immortal from Bergen [Norway] calls them) into approachable in the sense of mouldable-according-to-human-fantasy silhouettes. To squeeze the destiny of new and seemingly impossible manifestations in precise locations – just as the lizard grew its feet in concordant dynamics with its body – is to admit that, at least spiritually, we are still creepy-crawlies trying hard to produce feet and afterwards wings for ourselves. Inviting magic creates special floaty insubstantial reverberations in the skin, waves able to absorb the various rains that haunt the forests and the hills surrounding your childhood and turn them into limbs of seizure. Apart from this, the greatest achievement of reptiles and amphibians is their capacity to survive with and in cold blood – their ability to supplement the absence of the sun with a complex inner blazing (a probable reminiscence from the infernal viscera of the fire-belching Dragon). Imposing, motivating, melancholically invasive and warmly revealing, the song “Burn Fire Burn” creates an unbelievably lasting structure of power inside every listener. It constitutes a fabulous hymn of worship and a dark celebration of our precious inner reptilian legacy and of the magic essence that these creatures have transmitted to us infra-biologically (that is, a celebration of our inner surreal solar saps):

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Chapter Four “Burn beacon fires, blow horns of doom Sinister ascendancy, death's coming soon We shall take the fire everywhere And all our enemies shall burn, yeah In the fire they all shall die... And like the dragons we shall reign Reign in fire, reign in flames We bring the fire where we turn Burn fire burn.” (Burn Fire Burn)

* The music of Lake of Tears knows best and above all how to repair torn ideals and how to pair illusions, according to shades, whims and sleepy moods. Daniel Brennare created a fantasy world, full of possible inverted commas – through a music that invites each and every one of its listeners to become a potential philosopher and to establish in this way and only in this way, where to place the inverted commas and where to avoid them (this strange selection being the responsibility of the philosopher par excellence). And this invitation is open or held on a very broad spectrum of social types, say from the Tibetan monk to the American businessman, from the criminal to the criminologist, in the sense that it is a music able to create a web (or a tissue) of intentions and shynesses in which it shapes the knowledge of the opposite poles with a special mastery – one extremely capable of specificity. Such specificity can sometimes be perceived as specialness and this is the moment when the red column of the sanguine thermometer (which stiffens deep and painfully in our veins with every uncertainty or bewilderment) ascends towards the idyllic crimson sunwaves – as if trying to settle on their frequency and thus escape the monstrous waves of the ocean below. This sinister and overwhelmingly imperial water-presence, possesses that special force of feeding that accompanies a feeling emerged straight out of Darkness, and remains, no matter what, an empty and emptying mixer of matter, murky, dim and acrid, like the rancid-dark shadow left by a sleepless night over the days immediately preceding: “(…) no emotions, feel changes through the ocean (…) Great cosmos, crimson ocean, waves riding empty motions.” (A Crimson Cosmos)

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4. Time and toes; ganders and ghastly waters of seclusion All that the music of Lake of Tears elegantly proposes can be seen as an attempt to sail this ocean towards better climates. This journey is a very special one, as Lake of Tears brings forth Nils Holgersson’s gander (from the novel of the beautiful Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf entitled Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige) and invests it with strange, extremely relentless (cruelly persistent and unremitting) and tricky but deliciously dark and vampish features, denoting pagan pride and a way of being-there meant to deliver pagan punishment and reward. The gander stands as the most powerful pagan symbol present in the music of Lake of Tears and it occupies a very unusual position for that matter: a quintessence of magic and myth born not so much from Viking heavy legends of prideful satisfaction and slaying, as from the child’s lonely nights of hope, fear and wanderlust, when the maternal and paternal figures are no longer ever-present and the youngster feels somehow uncomfortable with the transformations that he has to go through. For this reason he withdraws himself into the old enclaves of reality of the childhood. In both cases (the hard-hearted Viking legends and the strengthened-by-graceful-silence child) we are dealing with wide-ranging efforts to preserve the human capacity for representation as an implement for the most humane of all virtues – imagination (creativity and vision): the warriors aimed at exposing and at taking into possession the sources of regression of history (regression back into chaos and into the primordial forces that do not stand any kind of representation or interference from man’s frail energy), but the youngster goes even further with this presentiment of the disaster of the Self, and tries a full-fledged metempsychosis – he tries to recapture the parental warmth in its most archetypal possible form, that of a generous and cosily-protective birdwing, one which provides both a masculine (in matters of flight and the power to open perspectives and approach horizons) and a feminine principle of warm-heartedness and stability (as the protective figure of the mother, of the “goddess” that governs the entire universe of our childhood, is probably the one that gives the centre of gravity of the child's identity and further destiny). The archetypal nature of the presence of the gander in fancies of forlorn souls can be sustained with etymological arguments as well: “The word goose is a direct descendant of Proto-Indo-European root, *ghans-. In Germanic languages, the root gave Old English gǀs with the plural gƝs and gandres (becoming Modern English goose, geese, and gander, respectively), New High German Gans, Gänse, and Ganter, and

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Old Norse gƗs. This term also gave Lithuanian žąsìs, Irish gé (goose, from Old Irish géiss), Latin anser, Greek ȤȒȞ / khƝn, Albanian gatë (heron), Sanskrit hamsƯ, Finnish hanhi, Avestan zƗǀ, Polish gĊĞ, Russian ɝɭɫɶ, Czech husa, and Persian ghƗz.”7

The flamy white chest of the gander (a symbol of wealth and abundant protection) darkens and is wearing thin in time…as the extinguishing fires leave room for growing scavenger-like shadows, which anticipate the total darkness of a brutally open, spineless and steadily harmful (corrosive) ocean, where nothing glimmers and no spark can emerge out of the thick, murky sleek matter. This is what happens when the plumage of the gander is replaced by the rancid feathers of the ravens – your deepest decayed premonition turns its face towards you and confirms your fear of future putrefactions in black coldness (abrasive ice and eternally-sunless dust on Earth, and viscous heavy downpouring waves and strong implacable torrents in the ghastly depths of Ocean): “Do you know what you fear of the ravens dark Do you know what they hide, hide within their hearts Can you see the sorrow within their eyes Can you hear their cries, when the fiddle dies... Mistletoe, friend of foe, so black upon the moor Fallen leaves coloured red, blood of all the dead Into mist they'll take you soul, they'll take your heart And none of flames shall burn with the ravens dark Raven land – mistletoe Raven land – friend of foe Whispering winds from the land of the nevermore Bringing tales of the dead, dead in times before Can you hear the shadows within the night Can you see the flames, as the fire dies... Mistletoe, not a foe, black friend upon the moor And the leaves coloured red, tears from all the dead In the mist they keep your soul, they keep your heart And all of flames shall burn with the ravens dark.” (Raven Land) 7

Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goose#cite_note-Partridge-1, last consulted on the 22nd of December 2012, 22:43. The site indicates as sources for this indexing mainly two books: 1) Partridge, Eric (1983). Origins: a Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. New York: Greenwich House, and 2) Crystal, David (1998). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.

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The phenomenon was perhaps best captured by painters, and Lynn Hassler presents us with Vincent Van Gogh’s famous case: “One of Vincent Van Gogh’s last paintings in 1890 was of a wheat field with crows. The eccentric, troubled artist reportedly borrowed a gun to scare off the crows while he was painting, purportedly to capture their essence in flight. The painting shows the black birds flying in a starless sky and three paths through the wheat that lead to nowhere. Shortly after finishing this painting Van Gogh used the gun to commit suicide. Some say the crows in his painting symbolize the inevitability of his death.” (Hassler, 2008, pp. 89-90)

As an eventual symbol for all reduced and expanded safe pressures and for all the selves contaminated by instincts in the ecosystems, the mistletoe is used by Daniel Brennare in order to highlight the fact that the Background (Earth or Ocean) and / or the Chaos remains inherently parasitical, in the sense that it will always grow attached to our “branches” (limbs) and it will always penetrate them through innumerable tubes and proboscises, until it will eventually absorb all the nutrients from our bodies (be they alive or dead). The French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas makes an interesting point here, claiming that every distinct entity forced against the background (which he reduces to its most basic, primitive or primordial function, calling it “the elemental”) is essentially a human wonder or an act of magic, namely an impossible relation of possession situated in the very heart of the “non-possessable”; a property or a collection of properties in the middle of the most massively undifferentiated masses; a law of equilibrium applied to the chaos itself as a result of the discovery of a safe (in the sense of “navigable“, “traversable”) frequency within the otherwise inexorable vortexes (see the example with the navigator in the citation below). According to him, we basically live immersed in “the elemental”, enclosed, overwhelmed, surrounded by it, as it flows down upon us constantly. We are the magic presence of a living or of a crafted dimension (with its distinct sides and surfaces) inside the sideless, the fearless, the loveless, the lifeless, the indeterminate one that has no opposition against which (or in comparison to which) to be able to delineate a notion of dimension. We are, consequently, the dimension of the undimensional – the will to uncertainty and creativity inside an otherwise complete destiny. We can’t change the background or possess it, but we can survive it, and we can even take advantage of it (sailing the sea for example): “(…) things (…) take form within a medium [milieu] in which we take hold of them. They are found in space, in the air, on the earth, in the street,

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Chapter Four along the road. The medium remains essential to things, even when they refer to property (…) which constitutes the things qua things. This medium is not reducible to a system of operational references and is not equivalent to the totality of such a system, nor to a totality in which the look and the hand would have the possibility of choosing, a virtuality of things which choice would each time actualize. The medium has its own density. Things refer to possession, can be carried off, are furnishings; the medium from which they come to me lies escheat, a common fund or terrain, essentially non-possessable, ‘nobody’s’: earth, sea, light, city. Every relation or possession is situated within the non-possessable which envelops or contains without being able to be contained or enveloped. We shall call it the elemental. The navigator who makes use of the sea and the wind dominates these elements but does not thereby transform them into things. They retain the indetermination of elements despite the precision of the laws that govern them, which can be known and taught. The element has no forms containing it; it is content without form. Or rather it has but a side: the surface of the sea and of the field, the edge of the wind; the medium upon which this side takes form is not composed of things. It unfolds in its own dimension: depth, which is inconvertible into the breadth and length in which the side of the element extends. To be sure, a thing likewise presents itself by but one unique side; but we can circle round it, and the reverse is equivalent to the observe; all the points of view are equivalent. The depth of the element prolongs it till it is lost in the earth and in the heavens. ‘Nothing ends, nothing begins’. To tell the truth the element has no side at all. One does not approach it. The relation adequate to its essence discovers it precisely as a medium: one is steeped in it; I am always within the element.” (Lévinas, 1991, pp. 130-131)

Unfortunately for us, in the modern era we can control “the elemental” (the background) only by tools and machines, generating, as Rorty says, those “(...) stories about machines chewing themselves to pieces.” (Rorty, 2010, p. 277) But the message of the pagan “nostalgic” will and kind heart is that, by accessing in an authentic way, our archetypal structures and spiritual legacies, we could communicate with our animalistic roots and regain the lost virtues encapsulated in totemic logics. Reuniting our souls with those of the birds and of the fishes we could sail the oceans and the horizons biologically, that is, in an unquestionable (genuine) act of transgression and powerful evolution and conquest – escapisms and motivating perspectives that are definitely needed because, as Lévinas points out once again, the chaotic fury of the elemental is just the manifested side of the Absolute Death Principle. This principle eventually swallows everything by means of the unpredictable dynamics of “the elemental”. This Absolute Death lurks around every piece of earth, fire and wind, it is the sad principle of every instinct, urge or motivation (or, to

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put it otherwise, it haunts like a crushing promise of an unbelievable storm the fragile island of the self from everywhere), and it is inside ourselves that we could hide from it and try to develop defensive strategies: “The absolute void, the ‘nowhere’ in which the element loses itself and from which it arises, on all sides beats against the islet of the I who lives interiorly.” (Lévinas, 1991, p. 147) Cultivating an obsession for a rich and powerful (reliable) inner-world is perhaps the main message of the music of Lake of Tears and its most important charm and contribution to the beauty of this humanly-defined world (we are speaking mostly of that particular light of victory irradiating hard from our soul and through our eyes whenever we “make it on our own in this world of stone”): “Light in your eyes, a shine As you made it on your own Throughout a world of stone You made it on your own.” (Planet of the Penguins)

Yet, the background aesthetically represented through the effigy of the mistletoe is not so much a “foe” as a “black friend”, one operating in a vicious circle of parasitism: the decompositions performed by it assure fertility for future generations. The birds seem to be the entities that escape the most from the attack of the parasitical forces of the Ocean and of the Earth, and for this reason, finding a way to communicate with them (a common language) remains a great aim for any (artistic) imagination. Here, in front of the threat of the all-swallowing Nothingness, their cries and our screams become “a discourse that consists in a solitary voice crying out into the night against an utterly undifferentiated background.” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, p. 313) While taking a gander at the Gander himself that challenges you with his defiant gaze from the cover of Crimson Cosmos, you realize that life in its fullness and joy begins somewhere out there – about the point where the downward meaning of decomposition (into the Ocean and into the Earth) begins to fade and flee. By means of enjoyable delays – beautifully and elegantly calculated so as to fit usefully into the geometry of the day – Daniel Brennare reverses H.G. Wells’ cold-scientific concept of “time machine” into that of “dreams machine”, still without betraying the fantastic atmosphere and the romantic aspirations of the astonishing novel “The Time Machine”. This happens since the “dreams machine” is also a “time machine”, but, if you wish, an improved and more revolutionary time machine that has the capacity to effectively process the time in interfaces of youth without old age and of life without death – and already this is no longer the

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conventional time but a “spellful interval” (sometimes known as “that time”) in which, for example, the hero of traditional fairy tales makes his great number of magic and evades the rigidity of his destiny: “Would it bring us comfort say, just a rainy day away I've got a little something on my mind [...] Come let's dream some, come take a ride in my dream machine Let's make a funny one, let's take a ride in my dream machine And when the dream is done, it's time to have another one.” (Rainy Day Away)

The birds are masters of dreams and of all the spaces “in-between the time” – maybe the opposite function of Charon and the persistent scent of change. They radiate and sustain this sense of magic. The “in-between the time” or the “spellful interval” is captured by Daniel Brennare in the picture of the wavy steps of time (“A ripple forms on the brinks of time”, Forever Autumn). This period of betweenness is the farthest possible point from death (“Blinded by dawning so you would take me / Futher away, away from the fall”, So Fell Autumn Rain), as it remains floating above all linear torrents, unaffected by their devastating inertia. If we are to assign this “timeless boogie bubble” to an effective place, I think this should be that particular spot in-between the wings of the gander, at the base of the neck of the bird, where Nils Holgersson holds on tight (with the only difference that Lake of Tears transfers this journey to a raven-fall, in which the bird assumes the destiny and the dying season of a leaf): “When I close my eyes tonight Down my dreams the velvet raven flies So I hold on Whither goes the way I ride In the moonlit ravens eye Staring past the purple sky tonight I'm holding on and I Find out the only way goes down And the weary drowns Better hold on tight Where leads this way I go Velvet one I only know Every raven craves a crimson stone

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I'm holding on and I Find out the only way goes down And the weary drowns Better hold on tight.” (Hold On Tight)

Coming back to the lizards in a metaphoric and symbolic way, we could say that the toes with which we could hold on tight, above the merciless temporal torrents of pointless scorn, are those of the Geckos – definitely the lizards that are most compatible with the birds, as they are unique among all reptiles due to their vocalizations (they use chirping sounds in “social interactions”) and due to their toes (they are the greatest climbers, as they can adhere to almost all types of surfaces without the use of liquids or surface tension, in an almost magical way – in the sense that this ability remains even nowadays a sort of mystery or matter of speculation for the men of science). So, when the Gecko attaches to the Gander, life and death undergo a process of artistic resemantization into a bio-oneiric ritual of the pure ideas contained in each of them. In remembrance of the sublime adventure of Nils Holgersson, I think we all agree that, to say that “everything is an illusion” is ultimately nothing more than to recognize that there is a high degree of reality on the side of the illusion. And from here on everything becomes tangible...

5. Rains and simpatico-curious frogs The rain in the music of Lake of Tears comes from dark shadow left by the white nights over the following days and from the vibrant silence of the Swedish forest (the one which makes you whisper not because of fear, but simply out of respect for the intense harmony of nature). With the forest assuming the conductor’s verve, one rain gives her hand to another one coming from over the hill, and together they turn on the effluvia of the afternoon and the later strong torrents of the evening, and unleash the insane dance of the delicate shadows of the leaves – something that gets reflected solely on the most solitary roofs: “So the season of the fall begins Down the crossroads in a sleepy little inn By the fire when the sun goes down (...) And the season of the fall begins Out the nightlands when the thunderstorm sets in The secrets clear in the cloudy night

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Chapter Four But the night becomes you And the secrets of the rain they will stay the same And the time will come soon With the secrets of the rain and the storm again Coming closer every day, forever autumn And the season of the fall begins Past the passingbell past willow’s weeping A ripple forms on the brinks of time.” (Forever Autumn)

John Ruskin observed interestingly that “there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather”. Indeed, if everything and everybody lives in its own fashion, we definitely assume from time to time the friendly and resplendent sadness of a tree standing alone in the rain and gently allowing the free falling raindrops to endow him with a compact resistance and shielding made of last exits, of no giveaways and of no donations, and of incurable sentimentally-unrealistic dreams (and Daniel Brennare stated in many interviews that this kind of a tree was a constant reliable source of dark, strong and comfortable melancholic essence with which to balm his frayed dilemmas): “So fell autumn rain washed away all my pain I feel brighter somehow lighter somehow to breathe once again So fell autumn rain washed my sorrows away With the sunset behind somehow I find the dreams are to stay (…) So fell autumn rain but all things must pass.” (So fell autumn rain)

This structure of withstanding the falls of time and light and the dissipations of hope is made of the ideated travelling sources or mere vagabond suggestions which float encapsulated in each and every magic raindrop. They (such sources and suggestions) are sometimes invading our blood-vessels via the effluvia of trees with their dancing leaves, and result into a poetry speaking about the sweet separations of times into spaces contorted by sorcerous silences: “Should we come to sail for the mellow and grey Would it bring us comfort say, just a rainy day away I've got a little something on my mind A little line of evening rhyme, a boogie bubble refrain again.” (Rainy Day Away)

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* Constantin Noica in his Philosophical Journal urged us to try to somehow become “not the one who still tries to collect something; but the rain, that autumn rain which knows nothing about harvests ...” (Noica, 2002, pp. 127-128, our translation). The rain remains a creator of opportunities, a living liquid entity that knows nothing about decomposition or about infrequentability, and for this precise reason it plunges exuberantly into the first and throws you irresponsibly into the second (forcing you to take refuge, taciturn and humped, beyond it and on the other side of misanthropy). Yet, it does so in an inviting way, deceiving you along some slippery vampish looks, to come and to taste her strong flavours from the paths and from the grass scented with sublime notes of past nostalgias that will probably return someday. It pulls you through unseen strings towards her, towards the open field or into the glade, where it discharges over you, in glimmering twilight drops, her entire bazaar of questions, with the purpose of robbing you of your answers. Anyway, you need a certain place where you can meet with the rain, in a mysteriously-crafted depression, alias a carefully constructed despair, adorned with passion and meticulosity, like a Chinese sculpture achieved with the needle in an oyster (this being perhaps one of the acutest way to interpret the lines “Coming closer every day”). This place is an enchanted zone (“Down the crossroads”) towards which you proceed with a special love for everything that you divine that the forest could reveal only to you, after you will have surpassed all the crossways and false problematizations (“Down the crossroads” represents everything that exists beyond the dilemmas, the hesitations and the mistrusts). The rain possesses this great ability to construct incantatory and senseindependent principles, and also the capacity to crayon for them divinatory and therapeutic geographies. The drops come from the heights, and from there they bring pure fragments of light – as if broken from a friendly-mellow sun and encapsulated hermetically in the globule of the drops (“Boogie bubble – Upon clouds of purple they ride”, Boogie Bubble). They gather all this light in the ground, stamp on it and bury it lower and lower in the night of predestination: the idea of “Leaving with twilight though I was chosen / To wander the way in the darkest of nights” from the So Fell Autumn Rain, with the ending “But the night becomes you” in Forever Autumn, is,

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virtually, a sort of chthonic gnosis expressed in the revulsion of an existential blessing. And here it lies, I think, the great beauty of the music of the Swedes (well, one of them anyway) – the way in which they manage to tame and to overcome the suffocating funereal hue which connotes the rain in symbolist poetry (where it appears as a fabulous solvent, as an acid that burns and liquefies everything in its path). From a dirty symbol of a death bloated from so much imbuement with moisture and rottenness, the music of Lake of Tears sheds a new light over the rain – one from which the element of hysteria and nervousness have been driven away, in their place being brought some suave-frolicsome silhouettes (in a “sink” previously held by heavy and flat bodies). Silhouettes of calmness (resulting, as the prisms of light – from the routine of splendour) which cannot be inhabited but which pass through you, blessing you along this transition with their freshness of trans-liquid and chromatically-scented glasses. The secrets by means of which the rain performs a magic euphoric reconciliation of the individual with his most innocent and melancholically-authentic self (“And the secrets of the rain, they will stay the same”) are, most surely, reverberations of the fact that it doesn’t know and will never know anything about ‘harvesting’, but only about the joy of washing fresh forms in order to return their shine to them, once more, and again and again – a pleasant and neutralized radiance, a sweet autumn twilight glow. The rain is impeccably captured by Brennare as being something more than just a promise – a reminiscent afterglow and a safety which quietens and calms the soul (“And the secrets of the rain, they will stay the same”, Forever Autumn). Whatever it may be, we know that soon there will be a new autumn (“And the time will come soon / With the secrets of the rain and the storm again”) in which the poisonous light condensed to the limits of darkness in the pearls of our symbolic self-cancellations will dilute its intensities and will neutralize itself once again in the gentle trances of contentment of the ripe fruits, divinely-perfumed by their very ripeness (a fairly unusual euphemism for death, or, better said, for a rather strange death). Such fruits appear for us only when the two meanings of the unconscious melt into a single vibrant formula of fusion of the outer sun with the inner solar system, one achieved along the endless chains of glitters from the rain drops; or, in other words, when the archetypal reservoirs are captured, like watercourses, into our well-articulated systems of creation and selfdevelopment:

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“(...) one makes a clear distinction between two senses of ‘the unconscious’: (1) a sense in which it stands for one or more wellarticulated systems of beliefs and desires, systems that are just as complex, sophisticated, and internally consistent as the normal adult’s conscious beliefs and desires; and (2) a sense in which it stands for a seething mass of inarticulate instinctual energies, a ‘reservoir of libido’ to which consistency is irrelevant. In the second sense, the unconscious is just another name for ‘the passions’, the lower part of the soul, the bad, false self. Had this been the only sense Freud gave to the term, his work would have left our strategies of character-development, and our self-image, largely unchanged. What is novel in Freud’s view of the unconscious is his claim that our unconscious selves are not numb, sullen, lurching brutes, but rather the intellectual peers of our conscious selves, possible conversational partners for those selves. As Rieff puts it, ‘Freud democratized genius by giving everyone a creative unconscious.’ (Rieff, 1961, p. 36)8” (Rorty, 2010, p. 264)

The calm smile of satisfaction diluted in the faces of the eternallycurious frogs reflects this ripeness, this special kindness on the side of the nature accompanying each end of the rain: our ample green inner leas were able to absorb completely the dark furies of the suffocated accumulations and to rinse the dark clouds once again. If the rain is goodhearted enough to stop while there is still daylight out in the fields…then the Swedes are known to unleash Små grodorna (The dance of the little frogs enchanted with childish-incantations such as “Små grodorna, små grodorna är lustiga att se.”) and many other Dionysian Midsummer celebrations of the return of the sun filled with flirtatiousness and provocative radiances. * If the rain continues hard into the bleak-black night, compressing and ramming even more of the darkness into itself, then, even if it starts as a promise of deletion of erotic funerals, of aerated reliefs and, we could say, of lethean rejuvenations, it ultimately reveals itself as a container and as a bringer of an unknown, hallucinating and repellent substance, about whose real abusive impact on people’s invisible emanations only a few are aware: “Oh you told me I must never dream again A true damnation you left me the pain So fell autumn rain but all things must pass.” (So Fell Autumn Rain) 8

Richard Rorty’s quotation: Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.

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It darkens the scars and the stars alike, constituting the real but impossible to alter coagulant of the Northern Darkness (the one which makes all the waters reflect the colour of drowning and announce the arrival of the end of nothingness) – and we will give the becoming surreally-dark colour to this observation with the help of the poetic lyrics conceived by Ihsahn (Vegard Sverre Tveitan) and Ihriel (Heidi Solberg Tveitan) for the avant-garde neo-classic Black-metal Norwegian project entitled Peccatum: “I am the black star hostess of your dead hearts hymn my heart explodes in your ecstasy you drink me like poison I am the water wherein you drown your love is reflections of death beyond night you are no longer excess of light beyond the hours of darkness you are mine.” (Peccatum, Black Star)

But the greatest overwhelming scar is the background itself, and here is the final and the most important allegoric instance of mise en abyme: scarred people live their scars inside the greatest fanged scar around them – a dangerous contiguity where apertures call and magnetize each other; and man has to resist this tendency of the hungry flesh to become one mass. Allowing the personal scars to fuse with the horrendous Mother-scar (the queen-scar or the matrix-scar) would equate to simply pour, like water from a bucket, the unconscious into and all over the conscious, and to watch as the first slowly devours the latter, as an amoeba. When the rain darkens the scars, the attraction between personal scars and the matrixscar becomes unbearable: depressions and suicides occur here. The distance between personal scars and the Mother-scar is the very distance between the species as well as the (necessary) distance between consciousness and unconsciousness – the one that we have tried to engage in our observations. The adventure of frogs, lizards, and birds was, for each of them, one of finding the necessary demons in their wills, so as to be able to become a travelling nerve, one seeking its most raptorial tooth (in each case, the one that helps its possessor feed on his background, bite back or prevent the scenery from pressing too hard on his limbs). At the level of the consciousunconscious distinction, it remains unclear whether these evolutionary transgressions of frogs, lizards, and birds create a biologically-dual self (animal and rational) – one which uses the purity of instincts and of impulses in order to keep open the ontological gates of creatures (their

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orifices of expansion through physical and mental excrescence [as it was the case of snakes growing legs and becoming lizards]); or “just” a complexly-unified human soul, bearing (preserving) the marks, the shades, and especially the tones of the old beasts from which he gradually rose, but only in watered down, filtered, intellectually abstractized and heavily synthetic expressions. Richard Rorty, when reading Freud, seems to tip the scales towards the second version: “So we need to distinguish the unconscious as ‘the deepest strata of our minds, made up of instinctual impulses,’ strata that know ‘nothing that is negative, and no negation’, in which ‘contradictories coincide’ (S.E. 14:296)9, from the unconscious as the sensitive, whacky, backstage partner who feeds us our best lines. The latter is somebody who has a wellworked-out, internally consistent view of the world – though one that may be hopelessly wrong on certain crucial points. One needs to distinguish Freud’s banal claim that ‘our intellect is a feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our instincts and affects’ (S.E. 14:301) – which is just a replay of Hume’s claim that ‘reason is, and ought to be, the slave of our passions’10 – from his interesting and novel claim that the consciousunconscious distinction cuts across the human-animal and reason-instinct distinctions. If one concentrates on the latter claim, then one can see Freud as suggesting that, on those occasions when we are tempted to complain that two souls dwell, alas, in our breast, we think of the two as one moreor-less sane and one more-or-less crazy human soul, rather than as one human soul and one bestial soul.” (Rorty, 2010, pp. 265-266)

In any case, the ways in which frogs, lizards, and birds colour the music of Lake of Tears, as well as the manner in which this music colours their conceptual spheres, help us get a better understanding of that which is strange or distant (and still permanent in ways that we don’t know so much about) in our present nature. Knowing ourselves equals knowing how we survived the background when we were something else, and our manner of relating to our present becomes the sense of demise (of certain characteristics) as well as the sense of the sacredness of evolution: allegorically, frogs, lizards, and birds function as punctuation marks (and also as a multifaceted “electrified 9

Rorty’s quotation: Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited and translated by James Strachey. 24 Vols. London: Hogarth, 1953-74. Here the quotations were extracted from “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), vol.14. 10 Rorty’s footnote: “Any associationist psychology will make that claim. For it is a corollary of the claim that reason is not a faculty of contemplating essence but only a faculty of inferring beliefs from other beliefs.”

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fence” that keeps the darkness from invading and shutting down our essence) in the poem of Being which is man (“The world’s darkening never reaches to the light of Being. / We are too late for the gods and too early for Being. Being’s poem, just begun, is man.” [Heidegger, 1971, p. 4]), a creature still swimming naked in the seas of his instincts and impulses, whenever he / she is truly fascinated by something.

6. Fragile embraces At a first glance, “Nathalie and the Fireflies” might seem a mere digression (one made, it is true, with a distinctive lyricism) from some fairytales; just a shadowy philosophical polish applied to the fantastic motifs within Swedish folklore. It is not a great crime or the proof of a lack of depth or acuity to see things like this, but it is nevertheless the evidence of an early myopia regarding the real meaning of metaphors: “Comes within, comes without, what's the scarlet about And the one from the sun for his fires and few Soon comes the sun, soon comes the morning here baby Comes the morning with scarlet and black there for you Oh, do they come there anew.” (Nathalie and the Fireflies)

What we have here is a right-down Existentialist incantation in which the lovers talk to one another while they breathe into each-other the refreshing and sweet flavour of the pleasantly ripe autumn leaves that fall over them, slowly forming a particularly soft, intimate and fragrant quilt. They sit in each-other’s silence (“Comes Within, comes without”), under the cold but invigorating lights of October mornings, trying to generate an island that could extract them from the historical flow. In the doing of it, they live a joy so frail and timid that, in order not to damage it, they have to experience it from behind the forgetfulness and away from the cage of any idea, we would say, along that productive, enjoyable and permissive distance that exists between ideas, between the self and its representations. And, at the level of this phenomenological distance of enabling, one could rightfully place the images of the road in the music of Lake of Tears: “A road dark, where the damned walk A road old, open arms to fold me I recall the crossroads, the junction of the ways The misty morning fog, when I chose my faith.” (A Foreign Road)

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If we interpret “faith” from the lyrics above as a way of approaching the world around us, or as a way of thinking and feeling, then the Heideggerian reference (concerning the connection between thinking and journeying towards a new / “new” self) becomes more than evident: “A note about the term Denkweg. The best translation for this term is ‘way of thinking’, in the sense of the ‘course’ of ‘path’ that thinking takes. The crucial connotations of journeying, being underway, and travelling which accrue to ‘way’ must not be overlooked.” (Pöggeler, 1987, viii)

There appears a strange relation between absolute meanings and the swarming of ways throughout our visions, desires, manners, values, customs and tortures. Such an augury is achievable by introducing a balancing in the energy of the straight line of the supreme disciplines of the last bullets at the level of the cultural canon, and, at the level of primordial geneses receiving the first human presences, by breathing heavily a continuum of transforming (transubstantiating) knives of excogitation and of design into Lévinas’ Absolute Death Principle (the manifested chaotic fury of the elemental). The edgy virulent presence and multiplication of ways increases the fertility of any absolute concept or presence. We could say that it introduces a condition (of possibility) into the unconditional; an expandable ambiguity into the unambiguous stone of destiny; and it de-ices (releases) the storms of creation (it puts into action the previously frozen preludes). Along such evolutions, one should notice (as we have already explained the phenomenon in the first chapter of this book, when analyzing Burzum through Democritus and Winnicott) that the absolute voids of compactness – those absolute meanings (Patoþka), or those “‘nowhere(s)’ in which the element loses itself and from which it arise” (Lévinas) – are, in fact, providential non-meanings activatable and achievable by the faith in the inherent possibilities quiescent in any monolithic structure. And these are the ways of cultivating the roads – where the road as such remains the ultimate master of the unseen: “the genesis of a perspective on an absolute meaning…on condition that humans are prepared to give up hope of a directly given meaning and to accept meaning as a way.” (Patoþka, 1996, p. 77) The final remark that should be made in the end of this essay, via Patoþka, is that the music of Lake of Tears and the Heideggerian philosophy share a taste for historical escapism in the magic energetic spaces that are intuited to exist between ideas and between representations. The line “Comes Within, comes without” localizes such spectrums of enabling – which are the only ones that can open the closures of history

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(break anew the hidden and refractory occlusions) and release the ways towards the infernal inseminations taking place at the level of the foundations of life: “Modern civilization suffers not only from its own flows and myopia but also from the failure to resolve the entire problem of history. Yet the problem of history may not be resolved, it must be preserved as a problem. Today the danger is that knowing so many particulars, we are losing the ability to see the questions and that which is their foundation.” (Patoþka, 1996, p. 118)

The fragile embraces recaptured and restored through translations (interpretations) from the reflections in the dead eyes of storms, perform, in the musical flavour-fields generated by Lake of Tears, guiding illuminations, indicating the position of the founding archetypes. Daniel Brennare’s lyrics act as stylistic drawknives and open a common formative space between the artist and its “translator” (interpreter). The faith in the personal fires remains capable of warming up the distances by mastering the non-meaning and the otherwise venomous absolute void that exists between ideas and between the self and its representations. The lines “Seeds of starlight turn day into night / Burning horizon (…)” from the song Twilight could be read as a departure from a standardized (cultural) light towards a light of personal fascinations, one able to awaken the sleeping twilight and to enlighten the horizons of meaning, by operating interpretatively at the level of fertile darknessess and by decanting a fresh new light from there, one extracted from the vestal depths of the archetype. When operating with this energy of the origins man can “invent new field[s] of inquiry and [a.n. make] the whole sequence start up once again.” (Rorty, 1982, p. 100) And at the level of the universality and of the ubiquitousness of the archetypes, all those self-destructive attitudes and the greedinesses of native bloods disappear and are replaced by appreciated, being necessary and formative (as in the case of continent-collisions), cultural clashes that open up new dimensions in the phenomenological geographies. New openings offer to this World the dark radiances (the “fragile embraces” or the “seeds of starlight that turn day into night”) delimiting the first spaces for those particular roads (of thinking, of feeling and of acting) that will lead to new integrities. If we are to follow this statement at the “strict” level of the texts of Lake of Tears and to read here for a final time the entire phenomenological infrastructure that we have attempted to implement in this chapter, we will conclude that Lake of Tears issued a magic chain of warm open roads –

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open because the lyrical empire of each and every one of their songs is an intention producer at the level of the listener / interpreter. Furthermore, they foster intentionality-transfers and a greater involvement of the translator, when it comes to contorting the thresholds of meaning, or to examine human emotions through variations in styles and metaphysical colours. And, in our radical poetic phenomenological approach, to arch something severely out of its shape and out of its function, means to truly “intend beyond our consciousness” and beyond the tiresome routines of our senses. But it also means to genuinely find, in the sense of “to bring to life” and “to make distinct”, that famous Husserlian “meaning more” (Mehrmeinung) of the Same, through poetic intuitive uncoverings, that is, through artful appropriations of the absoluteness of the void of darkness surrounding us from everywhere, simultaneously (in an integrated function), as a non-space and as a Democritean trans-space, which welcomes and hosts essences in the guise of movements, along its continuous and unbroken lengths: “(...) each phase of perception was a mere side of ‘the’ object, as what was perceptually meant. This intending-beyond-itself, which is implicit in any consciousness [a.n. we are speaking about an active consciousness that means something, focuses upon something, aims at something], must be considered an essential moment of it. That, on the other hand, this intending is, and must be, a ‘meaning more’ [a.n. an extra-intentioning; an always-one-more-intentioning – in German, “Mehrmeinung”] of the Same [a.n. object] becomes shown only by the evidence of a possible making distinct [a.n. through descriptive explanation] and, ultimately, [a.n. by the evidence] of an intuitive uncovering, in the form of actual and possible continued [a.n. continued = in the sense of subsequent] perceiving or of possible recollecting, as something to be done on my initiative.” (Husserl, 1982, p. 46)11

What we are discussing here could be regarded as a new phenomenological Surrealism – one extracted from the warmth that persists in the ground, in the trace left by the paw of an ancient and now forgotten transitional animal (maybe a quintessence of the transformative qualities and capacities presented in this chapter, for instance, in the case 11

Considering the fact that, in the fanciful and almost surrealistic context of our essay, Dorion Cairns’ translation is rather elliptic or too technical, we complemented each problematic segment from the quotation with additional information (always marked with a.n. – author’s note), in order to offer a more explicit and expressive picture of the role of the phenomenological concepts and operations in the economy of our interpretation.

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of birds, reptiles and frogs). It can also be felt as an autumnal Surrealism that preserves the energy and the accumulations of summer, by overdosing the interpretation, with the aim of achieving an outcome similar to what Nancy Fraser labelled as “radical theorizing” – an unusual poetics of intellectual methods and of self-fashioning: “(…) radical theorizing, which is itself treated as a species of poetizing. As a result, radical theorizing assumes individualistic connotations, becoming the very antithesis of collective action and political practice. Radical theory, in other words, gets inflected as a sphere apart from collective life, a sphere of privacy and of individual self-fashioning.” (Fraser in Malachowski, 1996, p. 314)

Radical, because it is a well-known fact that new artistic means will always produce new philosophers and atypical cultural critics, and because the friendliness and the glowing effect of warmness emanating from the music of Lake of Tears compels its listener to go against the barren accepted cultural stream and to invent (decant) new streams out of his inner vectors.

Bibliography Barthes, R. (1977). “The death of the author”. Image, music, text: Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (pp. 142-148). Glasgow: Fontana / Collins. Bracken, C. (2007). Magical Criticism, The Recourse of Savage Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Fraser, N. (1996). “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy” (pp.303-321) in Reading Rorty. Alan Malachowski (ed.). Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell Publishers. Freud, S. (1987). “The Ego and the Id”. In On Metapsychology. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Hassler, L. (2008). The raven: soaring through history, legend & lore. Tucson (Arizona): Rio Nuevo Publishers. Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row. Husserl, E. (1982). Cartesian Meditations (An Introduction to Phenomenology). Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague, Boston and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Hutcheon, L. (2006). Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo (Ontario): Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press.

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Johnson, B. (1992). The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. London and Baltimore (Maryland): JHU Press (John Hopkins University Press). Lévinas, E. (1991). Totality and Infinity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Libb Thims (2007). Human Chemistry (volume two). Morrisville (North Carolina): Lulu.com Mathews, R. (2011). Fantasy. The Liberation of Imagination. New York: Routledge. Noica, C. (2002). Jurnal filozofic (Philosophical Journal). Ed. a 3-a. Bucharest: Humanitas. Patoþka, J. (1996). Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Translated by Erazim V. Kohák. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. Pöggeler, O. (1987). Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking. Leiden: Brill Academic Pub. Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism, Philosophy as a kind of writing (essays: 1972-1980). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. (2010). “Freud and Moral Reflection” (pp.259-278), in The Rorty Reader. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein (eds.). Malden (MA) and Oxford (OX): Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.

Internet sources http://www.absinthe.se/absinthe-poetry#fere_and_cuvain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goose#cite_note-Partridge-1 http://www.darklyrics.com/l/lakeoftears.html

INDEX

B Bachelard, 35, 41, 42. Barthes, 1, 9, 117. Baudrillard, 23, 58, 59, 69, 121n. Berger and Luckmann, 13. Bernstein, 63. Bracken, 122, 123. Burke, 79, 80. C Carson, 36, 48, 49, 50. Ciomoú, 1, 12, 13, 16. Cioran, 2, 3. Czemiel, 49.

H Hamsun, 61, 62, 81, 87, 88, 97, 100. Hassler, 131. Heidegger, 1, 2, 8n, 14, 15, 16, 45, 51, 52, 57, 58, 60, 61, 67, 68, 69n, 73, 74, 82, 83, 85, 86n, 88, 89, 94, 104, 142, 143. Humboldt, 1, 5, 8, 9. Husserl, 19, 27, 28n, 36, 45, 46, 47, 71, 104, 145. Hutcheon, 36, 42, 48, 103, 112, 113, 116, 119. Huysens, 37.

D Dreyfus, 14.

J Johnson, 114. Jones, 28n.

E Eco, 66, 84, 98, 99. Evans, 22.

K Kant, 1, 3, 10, 12, 19, 91n, 117. Kierkegaard, 1, 5, 22.

F Faludi, 37. Findlay, 69. Foucault, 36, 42, 52, 53, 54, 80. Fraser, 60, 61, 70, 71, 77, 78, 104, 117, 118, 133, 146. Freud,10, 35, 38, 40, 103, 104, 115, 122, 123, 126, 139, 141.

L Lacan, 1, 20, 22, 23. Lévinas, 58, 79, 98n, 103, 104, 131, 132, 133, 143. Libb Thims, 116.

G Giddens, 57, 61, 71, 72. Grassi, 14, 17, 18, 94, 95, 96. Guignon, 36, 51, 53.

M Mathews, 119. Maturana, 43. Merleau-Ponty, 36, 45, 96. N Nietzsche, 6, 18, 19, 37, 38, 39, 50, 57, 61, 89. Noica, 137.

150 P Parsons, 71. Papu, 35, 39, 43, 44, 45, 47. Patoþka, 7, 8, 68, 69, 70, 72, 104, 143, 144. Plato, 70, 72, 74n. Pöggeler, 104, 143. R Rebreanu, 18. Rorty, 58, 77, 104, 115, 116, 117, 132, 139, 141, 144.

Index S Ströker, 46n. U Ungaretti, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19. V Vico, 17, 18, 57, 63, 94, 95, 96. W Winnicott, 2, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30n, 143.