Someone once told me there were no answers, just things that allow you to ask more precise questions. Back then, I was studying Philosophy, so it sort of made sense.
Actually, I say that it sort of made sense, what I actually really mean is that it made total and utter sense. Bolt from the blue kind of sense. The kind of ephiphany usually reserved for soon to be prophets and/or religious zealots of any particular stripe.
I went so far as to grow the long hair and beard, of the kind associated with with Old Testament patriarchs. Sadly, at that point I lacked the requisite gravitas, and instead looked like a man who lived in a bush.
However, my lack of Old Testament chops withstanding, I soon realised that I was in somewhat of a minority. Most people, I am informed, like as little ambiguity as possible. It helps to plan your day, to determine right from wrong and that sort of thing.
And I'm not against planning things out, far from it. But, as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men...something, something. But here you see what we're up against, because we automatically revert to tried and trusted ways.
Humans are fundamentally conservative. Even the most neophillic of you has a certain way they like to view the world, or some sort of framework for whatever it is they do.
So when a work raises more questions than answers, what then? When things get weird, and unpredictable, do you try and seek out a way to discover the sense of them? Do you build, try, test and model? Try to connect what you're experiencing with what you know, with what you understand?
Or do you let it wash over you, and experience it as-is?
You might think the first is more useful, and perhaps it is, but the fact is, the world is far vaster than your experience. There are always going to be things which raise more questions, for perfect modelling is not possible with our human hardware, and not even with our most advanced technology.
As it is, we're still limited to estimating, to shortcuts and best-fit lines. Which means there's always going to be a place beyond the edge of the map, a crazy, uneasy place where you're not sure what's going to happen.
FoolishPeople live there, in that place. In coming to experience our works, there's every possibility you'll go beyond your map, into an experience which won't conform to the standard question and answer set.
In this, perhaps magick and phantasy are more real than what you think of as reality. More quixotic, chaotic, unpredictable and open to undreamt possibilities.
Listless, bored and unnaccountably discomfited? You could be suffering from Novelty Comedown. Check with your physician immediately! #ministryofinformation
"Try as they may to savour the taste of eternity, their thoughts still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short moment, they would glimpse the splendour of eternity, which is forever still". - Augustine of Hippo, c. 400 AD.
It is no secret that the initial idea for Melancholia came to Lars von Trier whilst the filmmaker was being treated for severe depression. More specifically, von Trier was inspired by a theory gleaned from one of his therapists at the time- that depressives and melancholics are more likely to act calmly in violent situations than "happy" people, who have a tendency towards panic. As the Danish film critic Per Juun Carlsen writes in a 2011 interview with von Trier, "Melancholics are ready for it. They know everything is going to hell". Carlsen also observes that von Trier "does not consider Melancholia to be about the end of the world and the human race but about humans acting and reacting under pressure".
Indeed Von Trier openly rejects the way in which Melancholia has been marketed by Hollywood, right down to his own PR department's tagline - "a beautiful film about the end of the world". Instead he makes clear that the film's entire plotline - of a distant planet colliding with Earth and bringing about the end of human life - serves as metaphor for depression and the melancholic state. This is evident particularly with regards to the relationships between characters, the ways in which they interact with one another and the very different ways in which they attempt to cope with the coming apocalypse.
I have already described in a previous article the way in which there is a rising sense, within cultural theory and the cinema of the past few decades, of being on the brink of what some have termed "inertial destiny". This sense is particularly prevalent if you are of what we shall call a "melancholic" disposition (and judging by the statistics we're all depressed nowadays so that probably includes you), if you're a left-wing activist or ponderer, or if you have a stockpile of tinned baked beans in the basement for when 2012 hits hard. But what exactly is it that we are holding out for? Nuclear holocaust? Mass flooding? A supervolcano? An alien invasion? Or, perhaps, planetary collision...? Contemporary financial crisis porn might drive us wild with its motifs of chaos on the streets and daily despatches from the most recent pockets of doom but as far as wiping us from the face of the planet goes, as yet, it's not much of a contender. Oh yes, we're going to need something much bigger than the end of capital to satisfy our eschatological yearnings...
What melancholics really crave is a permanent release from the perpetual state of depression, boredom and lack of meaning in which they are trapped. That is, to say, a reprive from feeling obliged to put on a brave face, pretending that everything is ok, that you're happy, you're participating, you're "normal" and you most definitely, definitely, do not want to go back to bed and sleep for a year or worse, die.
In short, the best thing that could possibly happen would be for the world to end and for everyone you know and love, nay, everyone in the whole entire living world, to be wiped out. That way (a) you don't miss out on anything because all of the vital actors and reactors within your life are dead too; and (b) it's not your fault.
For the melancholic the worst thing that can possibly happen is for the clock to just keep ticking with no skips, delays or major cataclysms. As David Ewing Duncan so eloquently describes,
"This is our blessing and our curse: to count the days and weeks and years, to calculate the movements of the sun, moon and stars, and to capture them all in a grid of small squares that spread out like a net cast over time: thousands of little squares for each lifetime".
It is no coincidence that a painful life mapped out in small squares can be a life of extreme creative action. Von Trier stands out as one of thousands of examples of artists whose depressive inclinations have inspired artistic greatness. This I shall take as given. What I'm more interested in is the possibility which this creative sensibility gives rise to - that melancholics do not long for nothingness in their cravings for Thanatos, their taste for oblivion. Instead I posit that they long for something much more ambitious - immortality.
In an interview from 2004, Zizek claims that "[Freud's concept of the] death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called Nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner's operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying. Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death".
Viewed as a drive towards immortality rather than inertia, the death drive (Thanatos) becomes a macro version of the will to survive, create and procreate (Eros) which can only ever exist on a mortal, finite scale. It is well documented that in completing his work on the drives, Freud was very much aware of the parallels between his investigations and those of the philosopher Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer the misery inherent in the world stems from the gap between the world as we see it (Phenomenon) and the reality of the world (Noumenon) which is, rather irritatingly, unknowable to us. Desires (unfulfilled) and our Will (thwarted) form the greatest sources of suffering and so it follows that the only way in which one can attain peace is to forego all desire, to negate the Will. Such negation of the Will, of Eros, is necessarily this longing for death, expressed most satisfactorily by the savvy melancholic's desire for the end of the world.
It is no coincidence that the composer Wagner, whose Prelude from Tristan und Isolde is used to overbearing effect in Melancholia, was greatly influenced by the work of Schopenhauer. It also no coincidence that like von Trier and Freud, Wagner was chiefly interested in expressing ideas about sex and death. Whilst Isolde's Aria in Act III is often referred to as Liebestod, Wagner himself used this term (meaning love-death) to refer to the Prelude. His ecstatic visions of suffering, longing for what one cannot have, the juxtaposition of creation and termination, of sex and death; the beauty inherent in suffering; such visions looms heavily in von Trier's work. In many ways it is possible to view Melancholia and the earlier Antichrist as parts of the same whole - the Thanatos to the latter's Eros. Tod und Leben.
The rapture and melodrama inherent in the works of Wagner and von Trier stands in stark contrast to the shades of grey in which the melancholic sees existence. Both von Trier's Melancholia and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde painfully build towards their ecstatic crescendos - the narrative points of no return which the depressive mind so desperately longs for. But real life is not like the movies; there's that gap which Schopenhauer was so devastatingly fond of. Love is never sweet enough, pain is never agonising enough and the Prelude never does strike up in the background of those cathartic moments.
Yvette Biro writes of the way in which cinema "redeems" physical reality by charging the everyday with the emotional content of ceremonies. So surely it is worth stopping to question why it is that we seek out these extremities of emotion and why it is that human beings have, throughout history and the world over, grappled with and been drawn to eschatologies as ideals.
In the next article in this series I shall outline the history of such thinking, tracing its roots back to the time of Zoroaster, in an attempt to determine where this taste for the apocalypse, this fascination with the End Times, came from. I shall examine the possibility that such eschatological hopes and suspicions are in fact variants of a vast socially constructed myth; the fallout from thousands of minor political, religious and military decisions, taken hundreds of years ago in a land very far away from here...
Ahead of upping sticks to our haunted location in the heart of the Czech countryside, self-proclaimed "bizango dominatrix" Xanadu Xero will be joining us here in London this week, raising the increasingly intense manifestations we are all experiencing to a a whole new level of lucidity. Radiogram IV is also currently manifesting. To make sure that you receive your passcode subscribe here.
"...the Fool goes his way regardless of all earthly objects around him; he has flung to the winds all caution, the worldly prudence of the Hermit, he is blind to everything but the City Beautiful of his ideal quest. In the highest sense he is the mystic, the dreamer, the beholder of visions. What matters the dog at his heels, he cannot stay to turn back in his march forward to his distant goal; he must not be retarded by any trivial passing events, all his thoughts are concentrated upon his high aim. The small things of this earth are of no account to him for whom the Kingdom of Heaven is already at hand. He has come to realise that all of this changing world is Maya, that man, however wise he may be judged to be by an earthly standard, is in reality a Fool. He who thinks he walks with wisdom, truly has folly for a companion."
- Frank Lind, 1969.
FoolishPeople have now entered into the penultimate week of rehearsals for Strange Factories. The manifestations grow more intense every day; the HUM crescendos as the story feeds and reguritates us, born anew into the narrative each night we await Stronheim. Can you hear that sound...?
"No one can be the person they were born to be if you cut out the most wonderful sections of the narrative"
Under the glare of last weekend's Full Moon the Core Creative Team behind Strange Factories once again embarked on a 48hour Tweetathon in the run up to the final week of our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign.
We heard stories both profound and provocative, secrets at once dark and delightful, dreams with the potential to rouse nightmares in our readers.
Thankyou to everybody who participated by sending in their fragments. At the final moment we announced the lucky winner of the Strange Factories Secrets, Dreams and Storytelling Competition. Huge congratulations to Adrian Giddings, who will now be joining us at Stronheim's Mansion in the beautiful Czech countryside!
So here are some highlights from the finale of our epic Tweetathon. As our funding campaign draws to a close we heard some amusing tales of the effects of sleep deprivation and workaholism on FP's Core Team, as well as some of the bizarre events that have occured in the pre-production phase of Strange Factories:
In a crazed moment of exhaustion, I lost all perception of common sense and stuck my hand in a live socket!
We intuitively feel and know in our bones when sacrifices have been made for a story to be built and told...
The burglar had dragged my violin case out of a cupboard and left it open on the floor, the instrument untouched and perfectly in tune..
We also heard many beguiling truths and fictions of magick and mystery:
Her hinged jaw opened impossibly wide, and her misshapen mouth somehow managed to form the words again: "Am I beautiful?"
The yanari were illustrated as tiny daemons…They looked like distorted humans with wide demented grins on toothy mouths.
I know woman who was turned in to a white rabbit.
A woman drugged her husband, tied him to a bed, cut off his penis, threw it in the waste disposal unit and switched it on, police say
And we pulled a few skeletons out of the FP closet too:
As with all magickal rites, sometimes the thing you don't want to happen is the thing that needs to happen. You have no control over it...
I think even Carrie was a little worried that we had all carried on with our manifestations when we thought she was dead!
FoolishPeople are akin to those Pioneer Village actors, and would be horrified to see the audience catch a glimpse 'behind the curtains'...Where dedicated actors never break their character, even when faced with a horrific hostage-situation!
This is one of many reasons why we will survive the zombie apocalypse and become a touring troupe of zombie fighting minstrels.
I had the pleasure of dunking her in the river, cleansing her 'soul' and then taking her home for a bath......
Desecration dealt with human demons. How they're created & constructed from the bleakest and saddest stories of our lives.
I miss Deluge still!
Finally, it was noted that:
Having strangers pledge and support Strange Factories who have never seen our work has been the highlight for me, personally.
I think this is a thought that all of the FoolishPeople team hold in our minds. We are so grateful to everyone who has contributed to our campaign so far. There are only a few days to go, so please, if you can, do not hesitate to join us on this wonderous journey:
I've recently been revisiting the songs of the brilliant Warren Zevon and was reminded of this glorious version of "The French Inhaler" (much better than the album version, in my opinion).
I remember first hearing this song after leaving drama school. For me it summed up everything that is wrong with the performance world today and captures the utter disillusionment I felt post-training, and the lives of so many so-called "actors" as they trundle round endless auditions for commercials and bit-parts in hospital dramas.
In "The Myth of Sisyphus" Albert Camus uses the actor's life as an example of an existence in tune with his own absurdist principles. For Camus, the life of the actor is defined by revolt, freedom and passion. Actors have an implicit understanding of what it means to live "in the fleeting moment", to live multiple experiences and lives intensely and to strive for unity even when the prospects are quite terrible. Or at least, this is what an actor's life should be.
The lives of actors have become embedded in an oppressive, judgemental, capitalist industry which strives to take away the power and creativity of actors and artists. It is a game to be played and there are certainly no end of fame-hungry, diet-mad actors to pimp out. This is a system reinforced by drama schools, agents, casting directors and producers. That is not a system I ever dreamed of becoming part of when I first felt the calling to performance. The image I had was perhaps a little more aligned to the travelling troupes of old.
The Core Team behind Strange Factories is made up partly of actors who believe in taking back the power of their craft. Because acting is so much more than hitting your mark, blinking at the right time and getting up at 5am to prepare for a Macdonald's commercial. Acting is a way of life, a way of being. Actors act as vessels for mankind's experience, providing one of our most vital forms of communication and expression:
"He [the actor] demonstrates to what a degree appearing creates being. For that is his art - to simulate absolutely, to project himself as deeply as possible into lives that are not his own. At the end of his effort his vocation becomes clear: to apply himself wholeheartedly to being nothing or to being several. The narrower the limits alloted him for creating his character the more neccessary his talent. He will die in three hours under the mask he has assumed today. Within three hours he must experience and express a whole exceptional life. That is called losing oneself to find oneself. In those three hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover" (Camus).
A writer, possessed by a terrifying fiction hunts for the heart of his story in a pagan landscape, haunted by the infamous hum emitted by a Strange Factory.
Strange Factories is the first feature film produced by FoolishPeople.
1957- Seascale, the North of England. Cirxus; an old English circus lost in the shadows of the smoke stacks of Calder Hall, the world's first commercial nuclear power station.
Athalia the ballerina waits in the ring for Loudon the clown to return with directions to the Black Pool, the mythic site of the Home Sweet Home, the final show of the season. Join her as she begins a bizarre and wondrous search for Loudon through the irradiated secrets of Cirxus, where she must face the macabre atomic menagerie, haunted by circus animals and navigate her way through the maze of strange, hallucinogenic sideshows to the other side of time.
Cirxus defies genre and form and offers a literary experience like no other. A combination of hallucinogenic novel and blueprint to a physical experience.
A rowdy gang of Tracey Emins wrestle half a dozen dazed Andy Warhols to the ground. IT IS THE FUTURE AND ALL FORMS OF ART ARE FREE. Perfect replicas exist of every masterpiece ever created, artworks and ideas are stolen from the mind before they’re even created.
Copyright or ownership is meaningless. FLESH-WORTH is all that matters. Arm yourself with weaponised art and explore the notions of open-source myth. What are intellectual rights worth in a decomposing culture?
Featuring full archival material from FoolishPeople’s performance run of Dead Language at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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