Where Seas and Fables Meet (5 page)

When the Structure turns psychotic –

We are in a place and time in institutions, in corporate systems, when they've turned paranoid. Call these with one name: the Structure. You can tell it's turned paranoid when the Structure asks you to suspend your faith and beliefs, your passions and visions, for the sake of security or its order or its power or its advancements. The Structure can appear human or like a monster (Leviathan). People may even begin to grant it “rights.” The Structure turns psychotic when it makes people justify its existence over the respect and love and imagination and dignity and liberty of a person.

And the personal should be everything.

It is through you (your incarnation) that the cosmos flows. But when the Structure prevails over the person, the Structure can become more than oppressive, more than a weight: it can become deranged. It will ask you to sacrifice what is meaningful to you: your time, your vitality, your love, your dreams, your ability to be in your own world (your imagination), your quest to be honoured, your opportunities for a good life, your hope for the future.

The outline of the Structure is eerily clear in Franz Kafka's prophetic unfinished novels,
The Trial
and
The Castle
. The Structure is called the Law or the Castle in those fragments. The labyrinthine Law snares the individual. The enigmatic Castle demands obedience but refuses entry to the individual (everyone waits outside for the word that will give them permission to enter). One aspect of Kafka's genius is to give us parables of the Structure becoming the tyrant God. The Structure is so absolute that people automatically snap into slavishness. The Structure has names, the Law, the Castle, but they are both aspects of the one on earth, the power that the Structure has to make you feel small, dis-honoured, incapable, unimaginative – unloved.

Kafka makes banal bureaucratic operations appear like the sacred. There's transcendental light in his world and there are voices from elsewhere (the mysterious voices on the telephone line in
The Castle
). These seem beyond the realm of the personal: they're part of a sublime but terrifying impersonal splendour thriving out of view.

It sometimes seems that his parables of power are more than tales: they're blueprints for how institutions run when they turn psychotic.

We feel at fault for crimes we didn't commit. We feel at fault for not following the rules set out in advance by the Structure (which, after all, we've been told, is there to help us).

But what's the crime we feel we have committed? Being here. Being a person. Being me. Being you. Being flawed. Being wrong about things. Wanting to be alive. Wanting to love, to be the beloved.

Maxim on any institution you may happen to work for that seems Cosmo-Demonic: It's run as if by Kafka, but minus his sense of humour.

Why do some people gravitate towards the systems and mechanisms of the Structure? They crave its protection. They want its blessing. But those who truly become part of the Structure do so to screen the personal (you, me) out. This is the fear of people and their energies – intellectual, imaginative, spiritual, erotic, passionate.

If you truly wish to follow your pilgrimage, your path, then it's likely you will collide with the blocks and mazes of the Law and the Castle (Kafka's enduring metaphors for the ravening entity I call the Structure).

If someone keeps trying to stuff you in a box, then make sure that the box isn't a coffin.

The Structure presses us. Its brutalizing imprint we often call depression or stress. These are presences felt on our souls and on our bodies. The pressure can be so intense it can crush and sicken.

You can feel squeezed and restricted by authority, by accreditations and precedents.

“Why should we make an exception for you?” One of the most oppressive of all questions...

When tradition should be a ground from which we leap... When sequence should be the order from which we break... When accreditations should be used only for an acknowledgment...

When authority should be merely a guideline...

What accreditations did Socrates and Jesus possess?

The way of fear in the Structure –

It works by withholding.

What is withheld? Finances and respect... In an abusive relationship, a person damages the other by withholding love. You experience this abuse when what's withheld is affection, tenderness, kindness, intimacy, mutuality of touch. The abused one hopes this will stop. If you're just good enough, patient or quiet enough, if you forgive all this time, the abuse will end.

This becomes the same arrangement of abuse we find at work in institutions. We hold out the hope that the abusiveness will end – most likely when you retire. But if for one moment you think you can exist without their protection, you will be made to feel you'll die of exposure in the wilderness.

The Structure says: better abuse than loneliness.

The pilgrimage lesson: we're all in the wilderness. Every step outside of the Structure is into a frontier. “Breakdown leads to breakthrough.” – R.D. Laing, Marshall McLuhan

“No breakthrough without breakage.” – Norman O. Brown

Origins. This is what the Structure fears in us: that we will wake up one day to find ourselves at the start, in the now,

here, beginning again.

Anything original could break out.

You may find yourself receptive and enthusiastic.

You may find yourself rolling away the stone that's been

rolled over your heart.

“Exuberance is beauty.” – William Blake

The more powerfully repressive the Structure, the more likely the desire to breakout will appear in alternative life- styles and practices.

This is where we may find the hunger to tattoo the body, to pump the body into muscle-bound shapes, to seek out different sex activities, to find moments of liberty in sex clubs and strip joints. These are often expressions of the imprisoned spirit and soul.

The more mechanized and codified, rule-bound and closed, is the Structure – the more an openness will be sought through the panorama of stars (astrology), individual spirituality (seek and you will find), homeopathy (the herbs of the world will restore you), and the stretching and heating of the body (yoga).

Doing anything to keep your breath and blood flowing... Going outside the walls of the Structure, the walls that we've built to prevent the Spirit from seeping in, seeking soul chaos...

The Structure has many names:

Moloch

The Dark Satanic Mills

Urizen (Blake's dark, limiting horizon)

Big Brother

Hitlerism/Stalinism

The Party/The Committee

Force (Simone Weil's description of the energy that “turns man into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” This is not to be confused with the benign Force of
The Star Wars Saga
.)

The System

Ahriman (the state that crushes diversity)

The Military-Industrial Complex

Interzone

The Tri-Lateral Commission

The G.W. Bush Administration (the Skulls)

These descriptions and terms are all one. They're manifestations of a single thought pattern – a Tulpa, in Buddhist terms – that rises from our minds to become an entity of control. We make the matrix and it becomes the embodiment of anti-life. It seeks to dominate and crush contrary ideas (love, light, liberty, soulfulness, poetics, sensuality, peace, camaraderie, feasting, Eros) in favour of the uniform or the dead. The Structure persuades you that you can't live without it.

Why are Self-Help books popular? Why do they sell by the millions? They're frequently books that offer advice – and prayers – on how to restore self-esteem, to restore thriving to the soul. Sometimes they provide simplistic recipes: sometimes they offer comfort. They ask you to rise.

If you go to low places, then prepare for a steep ascent. If you go too quickly to a high place, prepare for an even steeper fall.

The extraordinary success of Self-Help books must give us pause. (The frame is often more interesting than the picture.) They are signs of stirring, of rebelliousness, of hunger, of passion, of feeling sucked dry by the Structural force that is in conspiracy against life. (This may help us understand the popularity of Vampire stories: people feeling drained of precious life-blood by a creature that relentlessly hunts us.) To live risk free, people believe they must abide with the routine that promises safety. Self-Help books sometimes seek to lift the weight of the Structure from the shoulders of people who want to live with courage and wisdom, revelling in the Ithaca of their dreams.

Self-Help books seek to retrieve the part of the soul that (inadvertently, unconsciously) gave the Structure its power. The books try to enhance the mission of living. They have tapped into yearning. Yes, they flip easily into banality and cliché – trite bumper stickers and captions for positive thinking. But the books have become again a representation of how the words, the voices, in the ancient wisdom still speak, reaching out to us in new incarnations and variations. They're an expression of the desire to recover soulfulness and stamina, the codes of inspiration. This is because one of the feelings of those who inhabit the Structure is guilt: the sense that being passionate or loving is somehow misguided.

You take wisdom where you can find it. It may come in forests, on DVDs, on paths through a field, in a poem, in a film, in Ralph Vaughan Williams' “The Lark Ascending” or U2's “Bullet the Blue Sky.” It may come in a small glossy paperback remaindered on a pile of books at Chapters. It may come in the reminder to look up.

The trite and the clichéd carry their portions of truth.

On the elevation of the self into poetry:

Your soul is bruised. Hurt and baffled, it's withdrawn into a dark corner where it quivers in fatigue and terror. Your fear is so strong that the soul erects barriers. The barriers threaten to become prison bars.

But you invite your soul back. Slowly she eases towards you. You lean and maybe see a spear of summer grass. Slowly your soul will whisper the origin of all poems, in the sun of yourself and the earth of experience, in the feelings of vigour and delight, the songs of the streets. This is a key to surging against the entity we call the Structure.

It's the poetry behind the quests in those books that wants to restore the soul to the equations of passion. Walt Whitman's 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass is a counter-light to the pressure of the Structure that won't let us create or recreate. We've been extending his vision ever since.

Stanley Kubrick was a master film-maker obsessed with showing how the Structure has appeared over time: the anti-life energy that seeks to arrest a rogue or an innocent or a valiant soldier or a naïve couple in an arrangement that is larger, more powerful than he or she is.

From his early World War I film
Paths of Glory
, through
Spartacus
, and
2001
, on to
Barry Lyndon, The Shining
, and his unfinished
Eyes Wide Shut
(released without a final edit), Kubrick showed individuals caught in machinations too massive for one person to comprehend. With his exquisite aesthetic eye, his gift for contemplative images caught through unusual camera placement and movement, his pioneering experiments with lenses and lighting, his highly attuned sense of setting and music, he created environments – battlefields, government bunkers, space-ships, stately homes, a luxury hotel, a city blasted into ruins, a sex club – where the individual is dwarfed. His people are frequently stuck inside a process that won't let them elevate to grace and beauty.

Let's read his films as Kafka reborn as a cinema stylist. Kubrick expressed, through the wry detachment of his contemplations, the poignant heroism of those who find themselves in the labyrinths of World War I trenches, in Roman forums, at a haunted resort, among the titled nobility of aristocratic houses, in the cold halls and rooms of a masked orgy. Still he often shows his characters to be clueless or baffled – sometimes turning to a helpless sarcasm, as if they must use trenchant irony to mask their fear.

Colonel Dax, Redmond Barry, Jack and Wendy Torrance and Dr. Bill Hartford share this: they are inside experiences that are over their heads. Dax defends soldiers in a court- martial jinxed from the beginning by generals looking for scapegoats. Barry looks caught in a lush still-life painted with refined, precise strokes by an indentured portraitist. He's a rascal doomed to be wounded by the Structure that is embodied in that film by the British and German aristocracy. Jack Torrance is a failed writer whose energy is summoned by the entities of the seductive hotel, then re- possessed by their insidious infiltrations into his permeable consciousness. Wendy Torrance escapes the Overlook Hotel with her son, but her husband is frozen solid in the labyrinth (stuck in its evil). Bill Hartford manages to escape the orgy alive – still faithful to his marriage, but just barely: it is Alice, his wife, at the end, who must uneasily restore intimate domesticity (during Christmas). In all these films, the power prevails. Its dominance is not confronted or overthrown, eluded or replaced. Some characters rise to dignity and grace only through brief acts of courage or insight.

That Kubrick was able to make commercially successful and artistically satisfying films out of such fearful iconoclasm and recognitions is a tribute to his creative gifts (talent and wisdom) and his courage (stamina and patience).

Spartacus is an early Kubrick film that bears the mark of his iconoclastic perception. Kubrick apparently photographed most of the movie himself (although the cinematographer, Russell Metty, won an Academy Award for it). In this film the Structure appears in the form of Roman force, clamping down on the hearts of the slaves who've risen against their chains. In the last battle, Roman cohorts file out beautifully onto the battlefield. The gleaming legions are arranged like aesthetic objects. The strategic design of their march finds devastating contrast in the brutality of their victory: the mass crucifixion of the slaves along the Appian Way, the combat instigated by the First Consul Crassus in the dark between Spartacus and Antoninus. Varinia, her baby (“A son who is free”), and the treacherous businessman Lentulus, escape the purges and executions. These unlikely travel companions flee down an uncertain road. The tyranny of Rome remains.

“And what does it take to make the slave weep?” – Simone Weil

2001 depicts our first (close) encounter with a superior alien intelligence. Unlike subsequent (and memorable) films like
ET: The Extraterrestrial
and
Contact
, the aliens are never shown. They are revealed through artefacts (the black monolith) and sounds (the hissing and crackling and whishing and whooping in the hotel-like chamber where the astronaut Bowman finds himself after his descent towards Jupiter). Here the Structure becomes the other: the otherworld beings. Are they benign? Are they malevolent? It's hard to tell... In this film Kubrick achieved sublime ambiguity by leaving everything unresolved.

However, Hal, the on-board super-computer, also represents the Structure running amok. He goes mad with the desire to control the mission. The magnificent set of the spaceship turns and shimmers in its white luminousness. It supports life, but to venture outside it is to risk death, or transformation into another entity.

When Bowman becomes the Star-baby, in the film's final transcendent images, the child gazes at the earth from inside a floating crystalline womb. The total environment of the spaceship transforms into the protective membrane of this womb-cell. Will the Star-baby be wise or terrifying, or both? The sequel,
2012
, projects enlightened intentions on the (still invisible) ETs.
2012
wasn't directed or scripted by Kubrick.

A Clockwork Orange
is (I propose) an anomaly in the Kubrick canon. Why? It is stylistically daring – and animated by a bravura performance by Malcolm MacDowell. But the actor skews the film by giving Alex the evil droogie a James Cagney-like charisma. Still the Structure tries to turn Alex into a conditioned robot, incapable of free will. His conditioning is invasively experimental; while he may become docile, he's now a mechanical being. In the film's last frames, Alex discovers his conditioning has

been removed; he is liberated to continue his rampaging debaucheries, this time with the approval (and applause) of The Establishment. Liberty seems to mean the freedom to be a charming killer.

In
A Clockwork Orange
, Alex's violence and lust are given sanction, but within set boundaries; we're not privy to knowing what will happen to him when he resumes his outrageous acts. Maybe the Structure will crush him eventually. Maybe he will grow out of his urges. (This is what Alex admits to in the denouement to Anthony Burgess' novel: his “ultra violence” was just a phase.) Will he become a policeman, in the way his droogie companions did? Will he run for office and eventually share in the privileges that the Structure bestows? We sense how Alex's vitality may erupt in unexpected directions. Alex appears to rise up with the Structure's blessing. This makes the film's conclusion unusual for Kubrick.

Kubrick likes to circle The System and its appearances in his films: his camera dollies, cranes, pivots, zooms, pans up, pans back, and tracks. He shows people crumbling or squashed in the face of the Structure's overwhelming influence and effect. But his craft is so cunning that he is adept at showing the greatness in the authority domain. We see this in his construction of environments: the awful beauty in the battlefield and luxurious mansion of the General Staff in Paths of Glory, the gladiator school in Spartacus, the bedrooms and living rooms of his flawed version of Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita
, the cavernous set called the War Room in Dr. Strangelove, the mazy design of the Overlook Hotel in
The Shining
, the ruined smoky city in the back-lot Viet Nam of
Full Metal Jacket
. These environments have an ominous presence, and yet they are constructed with meticulous detailing, a dwarfing grandeur. The Structure has a special look and atmosphere; its power elicits awe.

In
Eyes Wide Shut
the seductive wonder of that power is dramatically apparent in the sex club, a Playboy mansion for enigmatic elites. Here the masked orgy going on behind closed-doors becomes a metaphor for the secret privileges of the rulers and what can be gained by obeying the unwritten code of control.

Eyes Wide Shut
is more of a horror film than
The Shining.
The terror of the Structure, the malignant force, stalks Alice and Bill Hartford through the dream chambers and nearly emptied streets of their otherworldly city. (Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's
The Shining
is a satire on horror stories that is often wickedly funny; his adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story, retitled
Eyes Wide Shut
, is a satire on sex and marriage that is frequently terrifying.) The city is supposed to be New York almost at the turn of the millennium, but it resembles no cosmopolis truly.

In
Eyes Wide Shut
a couple, in a loving if unsettled marriage, blindly dance their way into the Structure that preys behind the expressions of their culture and society. Alice and Bill do this first together at a plush holiday party: then Bill does so alone when he ventures into the sex club with its Venetian masks and statuesque prostitutes. In the orgy scenes we see naked bodies arranged like shiny moving sculptures. Sex becomes an art statement that seems meant for the burnished lobby of an “enlightened” corporation. Bill is given a glimpse of the Structure's anti- life energy, through Eros abused, Eros misused.

The rulers are given license, but the sexual freedom does not translate into political justice. The subliminal message of the sex mansion appears to be this, everyone will prostitute themselves one way or another.

The Structure is seemingly held at bay in the last scene in the toy store (another impressive set), where Alice recovers the humour and loving connection of her marriage to Bill. But it's only a truce, not a victory.

That Kubrick managed to make his coded films is a sign of his dogged desire to capture grace and beauty in moments of technical virtuosity. He made art out of the anti-life energy of the Structure. Movie studios paid him large amounts of money to do this. It's a lovely and bitter joke. No wonder so many of his films have brittle, biting humour. We find this in the satires of
Dr. Strangelove
and
A Clockwork Orange
, in the numbed, mechanistic dialogues of the scientists and astronauts in 2001, in the singing of the Mickey Mouse clubhouse song at the end of
Full Metal Jacket
. Along with
Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket
is one of the few true anti-war movies. War is shown to be un-glorious – nasty, brutish, stupid, corrupting and long. Its characters speak only in abusive arias, in clichés, in bureaucratic platitudes, in military jargon, in obscenities. The one character that rises (somewhat) above “the world of shit” is, fittingly, named Joker.

Kubrick's determination to complete major films contrasts sharply with Kafka's instruction to Max Brod, his devoted friend, to burn his manuscript fragments. I'm grateful that Brod refused. I'm grateful that Kubrick found evasive strategies, by choosing exile in England away from Hollywood and America, making his elegantly cryptic and controversial films in a place where the overseers couldn't interfere much, giving himself permission to follow the pathways of his imagination and innovative photographic techniques.