tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62514115490168830982024-02-21T00:17:25.285-08:00Mything MeExplorations in Art, Mythology, and Women's Studies with Angela Sells, PhDAngela Meganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12566872903954566952noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6251411549016883098.post-73994109254670501492015-04-27T19:40:00.002-07:002015-09-09T11:54:27.408-07:00Solaris<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 18px; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><i>Solaris</i> (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky</span></span></div>
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(Image from still of <i>Solaris</i>) </div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> I have just been witness to sublime violence. Immanuel Kant, in</span> <span style="font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">Analytic of the Sublime</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> from </span><i><span style="font-size: 18px;">The</span></i><span style="font-size: 18px;"><i> Critique of Judgment</i> (1790)</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">, relays: “The sublime . . . is to be found in [the] formless . . . for this directly brings with it a feeling of the furtherance of life, and thus is compatible with charms and with the play of the imagination” (83). He continues by suggesting that the imagination is at once being enticed by this play and “repelled” by it, which may lead the experience of</span> <span style="font-size: 18px;">“violence to the imagination” that is paradoxically “judged to be only the more sublime” (83).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> What does that have to do with Andrei Tarkovsky</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">s 1972 film</span> <i style="font-size: 18px;">Solaris</i><span style="font-size: 18px;">? In brief, the film follows Russian psychologist Kris Kelvin on his futuristic journey to outer space to study the strange effects that the oceanic planet Solaris has been having on scientists stationed nearby. Solaris is sentient, and its waters prey on the human mind: its dreams, conscience, memories, and--</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">especially--its wounds. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> Through these memories, projections of flesh and blood from individuals'</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> pasts are conjured, notably Kelvin's ex-wife Hari who, we learn, </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">committed</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> suicide years prior. Strikingly, she becomes aware that she is not in fact his wife, but her own autonomous person. </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">She slowly grows into a unique identity, apart from Kelvin</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">s memory, but ultimately decides to “</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">annihilate"</span> <span style="font-size: 18px;">herself (there is a machine for exactly this purpose) </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;">in order to free Kelvin from the shattering disruptions of the</span> <span style="font-size: 18px;">“illusion</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">.</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">” Additionally, she rebels against being manifested in the image of another woman, fated to always return to him</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">—even through death</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">. However, at the end of the film, though we are made to believe that Kelvin has been saved from apparitions, we are also forced to wonder whether or not the last scene, if not the entire movie, has perhaps been only a figment of Kelvin’s imagination.</span></span> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> We are left with </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">Kelvin's unsettling transformation as a result of his interactions with multiple figurations of Hari.</span> <span style="font-size: 18px;">As she came to know her herself apart from his vision and idealization of Woman, she and Kelvin were able to form a mutual and raw connection. </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">The</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> more time spent with Kelvin, the more human she became. The more human, the more authentic their relationship. It seems that for a moment, when they both were able to recognize each other as two distinct Selves, without expectations or projections, there was love between lovers for the first time.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> Near the end of the film, Kelvin proposes that the exceptional power of being alive is in fact through our connections to one another. I recall Martin Buber’s <i>I and Thou</i> (1923), in which every connection to an-other becomes a moment of an I meeting a Thou, or a Me meeting the vibrant spark of a You; but You is too profane a word for the wonder that You are, so I will say Thou: “The primary word <i>I-Thou</i> can only be spoken with the whole being . . . I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become <i>I,</i> I say <i>Thou</i>. All real living is meeting” (11). Thou is what transforms us by a meeting of minds and hearts.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> So, why does this incite sublime violence in the psyche? </span></span><span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Another scientist's words in the film (Dr. Snaut) reverberate deeply: “And you? Who the hell are you?” </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;">This film causes a confrontation with one's own inner desires and regrets. As viewers, we are left counting our own </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">conjurings—memories that</span> <span style="font-size: 18px;">return over and over again, uninvited (or invited). In short, we are left questioning the line between Reality and Illusion.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;">But, what</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">s the difference? </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><u><b>Mythic Imagination:</b></u></span></span></div>
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(The Vedic God Vishnu)</div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> I am reminded here of August Strindberg's</span> <i><span style="font-size: 18px;">A Dream Play</span></i> <span style="font-size: 18px;">(1901), notable not only for influencing filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, but for its seamless blending of dream and reality. The dreamer, embodied in the character of Agnes, daughter of the Vedic thunderstorm God Indra, decides to visit earth to investigate human suffering. Ultimately, after finding humans pitiful and tormented creatures, she returns to the realm of the gods, preferring its peace and calm to the world of </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">Real.</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">” Actually, her descent is at the end treated as a Dream, and her return to the dream world</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> hailed as Reality.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> Incidentally, this brings us to the idea of the Vedic Maya, meaning </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">Illusion</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">” in Sanskrit, and its relation to Vishnu, or the Supreme God. He is seated on Maya</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">s waters of Imagination and from his bellybutton births a lotus flower, and from this flower, </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">in a</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> dream-state, so-called </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">Reality</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> manifests. We are the Dream of God. At the same time, we are also the Dreamers of Maya. This begs the question: Are we figures in our own dreams? In an-other’s? In a lover’s?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> To dive into water in mythology is to quest for and to confront the mysteries of life</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">s secrets: Dread, Love, Temptation, Loss, Joy. Maya is at once the </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">illusion of the Gods as well as the creation of all Existence. A</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">ccording to Heinrich Zimmer and Joseph Campbell in</span> <i style="font-size: 18px;">Myths and Symbols of Indian Art and Civilization</i><span style="font-size: 18px;">: “Maya [is] the spontaneous self-transformation of an originally undifferentiated, all-generated divine Substance. And this greater maya produces, not the gods alone, but the universe in which they operate” (25). Further: “The maya of the gods is their power to assume diverse shapes by displaying at will various aspects of their subtle essence” (24-5). Are these the </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">awe-inspiring and terrifying gods that take literary and visual</span> <span style="font-size: 18px;">shape to confront us with our own depths--no matter how dark, no matter how buried?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> Moreover, Vishnu is teacher to Indra, who is father to Agnes, the </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">embodiment</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> of the dream world who walks into waking life. And here we have circled back to <i>Solaris</i>, in Hari, our own female manifestation of Illusion. She is, of course, at once being dreamed by Kelvin and creating the dream through the waters of Solaris.</span></span><span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="color: red;">“All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.”</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">—Kahlil Gibran, <i>Sand and Foam</i> (23). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b>On the Book <i>Solaris</i>:</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I can also now officially vouch for Lem Stanislaw’s <i>Solaris</i> (translated by Bill Johnston in the first Polish-English version) as perhaps the most important work of fiction ever written. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b>A sneak peak:</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Expectation lived on in me [….] What further consummations, mockeries, torments, did I still anticipate? I had no idea, as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over” (Loc 3387). [Loc=location of kindle file]</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">(Vishnu image belongs to DharmOnline.com) </span></span></div>
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Angela Meganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12566872903954566952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6251411549016883098.post-30586963754780020402015-02-27T15:04:00.002-08:002015-02-27T15:04:11.062-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The Call to Adventure </div>
<br />Angela Meganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12566872903954566952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6251411549016883098.post-1350772888174627222015-02-27T14:49:00.001-08:002015-02-27T14:49:53.302-08:00<span style="color: red;"><b>Upcoming Classes: </b></span><br />
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<span style="color: red;"><b>TBD</b></span><br />
<b>Love of the Beloved in Ecstatic Poetry</b><br />
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<b>The Power of Myth Series: Fairy Tales and Re-visions</b>Angela Meganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12566872903954566952noreply@blogger.com0