Post by johnbc on Aug 3, 2020 18:01:08 GMT
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans by F. W. Murnau (Sunrise, 1927), based on Herrman Suderman’s novel Journey to Tilsit, is for me the best movie in the world. When we see that the great Eisenstein did no more than collect images with so much effort to produce, by association, some patriotic set at the service of communist propaganda, that is where Murnau’s art surprises us with its ability to lead, through the game of images, to something that is above each image and even above our ability to express ourselves in words.
The plot develops on three levels: the character (the human being), nature and the supernatural, all perfectly matched and without any appeal to an indirect or “hermetic” language, in the sense of obscurity, although there are great doses of hermeticism there in the sense
of spiritual alchemy.
Sunrise’s theme is the game between human decisions, the forces of nature and the mysterious providence that commands everything without altering the apparent order of things, without producing events of an ostensibly supernatural order, and playing only with the natural elements.
The film begins with two lovers — a farmer from Tilsit and a tourist — making the most arbitrary decision imaginable, a decision that is not founded on anything: to flee, having to kill the farmer’s wife. This decision stems from a momentary passion, an extravagance based on a mere desire, which does not correspond to the meaning of life of either the woman (the girl who wants to run away with the farmer) or the farmer and is not logically fitted into the normal picture of possibilities of their lives. The normal possibility would be that it was just a random episode, something like a dating vacation — which really was the bottom line. When they decide to turn this vacation dating into a lasting union enshrined in murder, then Murnau begins to put another plot on top of the initial plot.
If the character’s life before the affair had a certain solidity, he himself was not aware of it, or else he would have absolutely rejected the lover’s proposal. But he accepts it. And let himself leave the logic of his life to enter the mists of the imaginary. Not coincidentally, the scene in which they meet to plot the murder takes place in a mire and between mists. He goes through a mist, like someone who is going to leave the real plane to enter the imaginary plane, where he will meet his spectator.
The film’s summary is the progressive return of this mythical world to the reality that the character had abandoned. After that brief moment when he prefers the imaginary rather than the real, for the rest of the time what we see is the operations of destiny to return him to real life. But this return is not easy. At first, the farmer’s reaction is simply sentimental, the feeling of pity for the wife he did not love, and regret. But this regret is not yet an achievement of him, because it occurs passively and in the immediate sphere. The return to reality will have to go through the reconstruction of all the elements that were part of his life.
When, after the failed assassination attempt, he accompanies his wife to the city, she is still very sad and he tries to start the dialogue with her again — after all, he had become a stranger. He tries to resume his status as a husband, as if to say: “I am not a murderer, I am not a stranger”, but he, in fact, is no longer the same. He will have to rediscover his old identity, and this is obviously not so easy.
We then have two decisive scenes: the one in which at the teahouse he offers her a cupcake, and she ends up not accepting it; and the wedding scene they attend at church. In this wedding, again not by coincidence, the guests are at the door, waiting for the bride and groom to leave, and they are the ones who leave, who came walking in front of the bride and groom and do not even notice what is going on around them. In the church, he becomes aware again of the meaning of the marriage, that is, of what he had gone to do there, of why he was next to that woman that until a few hours ago already meant nothing to him. In a way, he has a recap of his entire existence.
By the time he gave up on killing his wife, he had already repented inside, but that was not exactly a repentance, in the Christian sense. It was remorse. What is remorse? A desperate sense of guilt. Repentance is a feeling of guilt accompanied by relief, the hope of being able to somehow recover what has been lost. Man only goes through this in the church: at this moment, he exchanges remorse for repentance.
But then the plot has not yet complicated. He needs to confirm this intention. He must acquire absolute certainty of his recovered identity.
The instant he agreed to kill, he threw away his whole life, he acted like he was someone else. Another who would have another life, in another place, with another woman. In the scene in which the lover talks about life in the city and he finds himself dancing in the nightclubs, he imagines for himself another biography, which would start miraculously from nothing. After having built a whole life as a country man, he suddenly finds himself in another scene, and to really live it he would have had to have a whole other life, he would have to work in something else, be born elsewhere. The appeal of this imaginary life numbs him in such a way that he loses his identity: he is no longer connected neither with his wife, nor with his profession, nor with the material environment, with anything. He is disconnected from the meaning of life, and for this reason this life seems empty and tedious to him — it is psychological vanity, which projects in life around the inner misery of man unable to assume his vital duty.
The rest of the film will fit him back, first, into his life; second, in his marriage; third, in the place where he built his life, to somehow return him to the meaning of life that he had momentarily abandoned for a crazy dream. And how will this happen? He will be forced, over the course of events, to bet again, repeatedly, on the value of everything he had despised, and he will have to bet higher and higher. He regain by an effort of conscious will everything he had abandoned out of vanity.
He begins by asking for forgiveness; then offers the cookie; then, in the church, he has a second regret and takes a vow; then take a photograph, which is like a wedding photograph; and finally he goes to an amusement park, which would be the equivalent of a trip during a honeymoon. With all this, he regained his married identity, but he has not yet recovered the meaning of his life. For this he will still need to bet a little more.
And the bet will be a second temptation, which no longer comes through human means, but through the elements of nature, almost purposely mobilized for that purpose, that execute his intention, that is, it really drown the woman he had tried before drown. Look; what he dreamed, he is no longer executing, it is a power immensely greater than his, that is, he asked and heaven performed. At this time, he has to make the decisive bet to save that woman he wanted to kill.
As he returns home, the storm occurs, and in that return he also returns to full possession of the meaning of his life. He goes on saying a series of “yes” to everything he had said “no” before. But who is opposed to that yes, who is the tempter who offers him no again? Now it is no longer the devil: it is God Himself, to know if he really wants to. The film is theologically accurate in showing that the devil acts by dominating imagination, fantasy and desires, while God acts through real events, the kingdom of nature transformed into a messenger of the supernatural.
The character will then be forced to reaffirm much more strongly his adherence to all the values he had despised. And now he will have to risk his own life to defend them and, even more, to risk in a certain way the very salvation of his soul; for he cannot avoid the feeling of revolt against the heavens when he thinks that the woman has died, and he feels trapped in a terrible trap set by the devil, who executed the request that he had already given up. He has to reaffirm and bet everything again, this time fighting against all the apparent odds.
Sunrise, in fact, runs backwards. The farmer’s move to the city, planned in the beginning, does not take place, and everything that is important happens when he returns from the city to the countryside, where he will again set foot on the ground. The film has something of a “formation novel” (Bildungsroman), a typically German genre, which has as its conclusion the formation of the human personality, where the individual, through his mistakes, becomes a real man. An example is Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years; Herman Hesse also did this in Steppenwolf and Demian. They are novels whose only conclusion is human growth towards maturity. But this growth is always a decrease, it is always the individual returning to earth, after having dreamed of some madness and traveled through a false sky. It is a characteristically Germanic apology for “bread-bread, cheese-cheese” as the supreme value of existence. The idea, therefore, is that the meaning of existence is placed in existence itself: it has meaning in itself, and not in another world placed above this, like the imaginary world that the lover offers to the character, which is more or less like the world of Wilhelm Meister’s false theatrical vocation. Meister has a dream of being an actor, but he is not meant to be an actor, he is not an actor, he is a bourgeois after all, and his discovery that he is an upper middle class bourgeois, a solid bourgeois, is his real education. The bourgeois’s daily life, insofar as it is real, and for the simple fact of being real, has in itself a magical force superior to all imagination, because it is not constituted of images, it has a three-dimensionality that fantasy does not have.
The imaginary as an alternative offered by the diabolic tempter is a two-dimensional world, a world only of images, images in the middle of the fog. The scene in which the farmer and his mistress talk in the swamp refers to the Tarot card 18, which is The Moon: the man on one side, the woman on the other, like the dog and the wolf; the water below and the moon in the middle, forming a rhombus. This “one’s head in the clouds” is the world of reflections in the water, where things don’t really happen, it just looks like they’re going to happen. The image may be charming, but it lacks the three-dimensionality, the depth of real life. It is in the return to earth that man finds the true heaven, the meaning of life.
Now, the most amazing thing about this real life is precisely that things do not have a final explanation in it, while the imaginary world is easily understandable and explainable, simply because you imagined it yourself. When the character imagines another life in the city, everything makes sense to him, because he is the one who wants things to be like this. There, the cause and effect relationship is perfectly clear, whereas in the return to real life, the game of cause and effect is infinitely more complicated, more subtle, and it can never be said that this happened because of this or that exclusively; there is always a fabric, a tangle of causes, and a single causal line can never be identified.
So, why does the storm happen just when he was returning? It could happen at any other time. There is no magical hint in the film about this. It was not an angel who caused the storm to fall, but if it did not happen, certainly the resolution of the meaning of this individual’s life would take a different direction. Natural causes interfere and it is never known whether there is a purpose in them or not. It cannot be said properly: “God caused the storm to fall for this or that purpose”, because God does not appear in the film, only the storm. Everyone is free to interpret this as a divine intentionality or as a chance, but in both cases this fact comes as a component of a general sense.
When the storm falls and the woman drowns, nothing in the film allows us to interpret that it was God who purposely made her to fall to teach the character something. God does not appear, there is not the slightest hint of an evident religious sense involved in the case. We just see the storm, we see what happened. We cannot say that it was a divine cause, or a fortuitous natural cause, but in any case this event fits not in the order of causes, but in the order of meaning, and the divine causal force does not appear as an efficient cause, but only as a end cause, which acts through the natural combination of efficient causes. Whatever the cause, for the character, that event has a very clear meaning, not subjectively, but objectively, within his real life. And what sense is that? That of the evil intention which he had already given up, and which is carried out precisely at the moment when he had disowned it and when he feared it. His thoughts turn into actions at the very moment when he no longer accepts them. This sense is not subjective, it is not the character who interprets things like this: they are just like that, in themselves and objectively. Without having to resort to the idea of a measure that is purposely “making” this or that happen — and this is one of the most beautiful things in the film — the event has an objective sense, and this sense, by purely natural means, goes in the direction indicated by divine intentionality, which is to regain the meaning of life. It is a kind of irony of nature, and for a moment the character feels the victim of this irony. It can be premeditated or fortuitous, that does not make it any less ironic. For him, at that time, it doesn’t matter if it was the devil that made it rain, to harm him, or if nature innocently and almost mechanically produced the rain. The storm is ironic in both cases, and in both cases it makes sense.
There is a very clear distinction between the order of causes and the order of meaning. But this sense is not subjective, it is not only human, it is a real sense; within the context of events, the storm has a clear meaning, it is a cruel irony of nature, regardless of whether it was intentional or not. In fact, if it was not intentional it is even more cruel, because then the fate of the character seems even more absurd. Suddenly, he falls completely into the absurdity that he himself had premeditated. If there was intentionality behind the facts, it was pedagogical intentionality, and if there was not, it was an ironic coincidence.
This irony already appears in the dog scene. Why does the dog, when they go out on a boat, go out barking, running after the owner? Is it because he foresaw that a disaster would happen? Or is it simply because he wants to go after the owner? The film says nothing about it. You are free to interpret as you wish. But how you interpret the cause that made the dog move, what matters is not the cause, but the meaning that this scene ends up having in the set. Because? Because, on returning to leave the dog at home, the man could have given up the trip and the murderous plan. The dog appears either as a fluke or as an intentionality, which could have saved the woman in advance and blocked the further course of events. It could, but it failed. The dog did not have enough strength, it is a natural element too isolated and weak to determine the course of events for itself. The dog, for pure natural sanity, is powerless to stop the evil; for that it will be necessary to mobilize all the elements of nature — the storm.
But at all times what you see is that, regardless of the cause, the meaning is clear. And that meaning is not subjective. In fact, the dog’s action at that moment could have prevented doom. It almost stopped. And this is another feature of this film: all the time you try to predict what will happen next, and that prediction takes the aspect of a vow of faith: you want things to take a certain course, you hope for that to happen — and, never what you want happening, in the end the result is, by the most unpredictable and surprising means, exactly the one you wanted. When you know the guy is going to take the boat to kill that innocent little woman, you wish he wouldn’t do that. And by the time the dog starts to bark and goes after him, the dog is fulfilling your wish in a certain way, but he fails. In this scene, everyone hesitates: you, the dog, the character, the woman — she also doesn’t really know what’s going to happen. She is also in question. All these elements, all these facts always have a very clear meaning, always referring to the antecedent and the consequent. At no time do you depend on the subjective interpretation that the characters do.
Based on simple psychological elements, this profoundly enigmatic story is created in which all elements contribute, after all, to awareness and the character to take back his life. It is understood in the entire film that everything is contributing to a final meaning. But whether this occurs as a premeditation or not, this is a question left unanswered. It is part of the reality of life that you do not know what are the elements that determined your destiny. But it is also part of life that you can understand the meaning of what is happening. I don’t know who made it rain, nor with what intention it made it rain, I know that for the constitutive order of my life, at this moment, rain has a very clear meaning. And the meaning, what is it? It is the moral obligation of an action, which in turn makes sense within the path of my life and within my own identity. Being who I am, living the way I live, I have an obligation to do this like this and that, because only then will my life make sense. Viktor Frankl would jump with enthusiasm if he saw this film.
The metaphysical interpretation is conditioned to an ethical interpretation, which precedes it in a certain way. Regardless of whether there is a measure behind everything or not, the meaning of the facts is imposed insofar as it imposes the obligation to act in a certain way, because it is the only one that makes sense. The problem of providence is posed not in the causal sphere, but in the sphere of meaning, regardless of whether that providence acts through natural or supernatural causes.
The rain may be a mere coincidence. Look at this from God’s point of view. If it was already predetermined by natural laws that it was going to rain at that particular moment, God certainly knew that, and he would not need to send a rain especially for things to be resolved this way or that. The simple sum of natural and human causes is enough to create meaning. The providence is there for what, then? To create and maintain meaning.
Providence, being supernatural, does not, however, need to resort to supernatural means. From the simple game of natural and human causes in an indefinite number, there will be a result x. There was no need for a premeditation for that specific case: everything was already organized, in such a way that the man, who is a thinking being and who always tends to create a unity of meaning in his life, would take advantage of the events whatever they were. In this way, the very fortuitous character of events is somewhat overcome. They are fortuitous as to their efficient causality, that is, what triggered them, but not as to their final cause. In other words, a lot of efficient causes randomly dispersed can compete for a final cause of a fundamentally good nature. This is an element of Leibniz’s philosophy (Principle of the Greater Good). I don’t know if Murnau thought about Leibniz at that time, but to be a Leibnizian it is not necessary to have read Leibniz: it is a matter of personality and spontaneous spiritual affinity. In any case, it is not useless to remember that, before dedicating himself to cinema, Murnau studied philosophy and theology.
In another of his films, Tabu, there is a message with a seemingly opposite meaning: human and natural causality contributing to a tragic outcome. This can also happen. Anyway, if everything ends in comedy (when everything ends well it is comedy, no matter how much we suffer) or in tragedy it is not decided in the order of the efficient causes, but in the order of the final cause, and with that we escape the famous controversy between determinism and free will.
The two things in a way are mutually demanding; there is no way to conceive one without the other. There is determinism whereas certain triggered causes are bound to produce certain results. We can take the natural causes that appear in this film, such as the dog’s behavior and the storm, as simple results of natural laws. There are natural processes that explain these facts. Everything can be predetermined in the order of efficient causes, but nothing can be predetermined in relation to the end, the purpose. There would be no point in creating a being capable of choosing, capable of acting, capable of even guilt, if his life purpose was already given unfailingly in advance. This would be nonsense: a conscious actor is not necessary to play a mechanical role; it would not take a being as intelligent as man to play this role. Therefore, there is a certain amount of room for maneuver even within the determinism of nature. The meaning of life exists, but its realization by man is eminently fallible.
We can say that the dog “would have” no alternative but to go after the owner, because that is his instinct, and the rain would also have no alternative but to fall at that very moment. It is man who has the alternative of understanding or not understanding what is happening and of directing his life in a sense that is harmonized with a natural framework, with his duty and the meaning of his life. To realize the meaning of his life, he needs to understand what is going on around him, and to understand what these things influence him.
The facts (such as the lover, who did not exist in the life of the character and who arrives on vacation at a certain place at a certain time, that is, makes an intervention) are happening and come from the surrounding environment. It is the individual who understands or does not understand. And in order not to understand, it is enough for him to disconnect for a moment from this dense tissue of causality and enter another world where he himself is the only cause; which is the imaginary world, an entirely logical and clear world, where he invents causes and effects follow in the most logical way possible. It is the logic of the criminal plan proposed by the visitor: we kill your wife and go to the city, and you will live there with me and we will dance in that nightclub where I always go, etc. All of this is very logical, in a linear way.
But, in the return to real life, the causalities are no longer linear, but concomitant and in an unassailable number. The connection between them can be perceived or not, because the individual himself is a link in many crossed causal chains. It is one thing to have a rain and another thing to have a rain when you are there. Even from a purely natural point of view, from a physical point of view, it is not the same thing to rain on a land where there is no living being, on a land where there are plants, on a land where there are animals and on a land where there are people. The consequences of the rain are bound to be different in these various cases. In the present case, it rains when that citizen is there, so this rain is no longer the same for everyone, it has different meanings.
He might not have understood the situation. He could be so stupid about the woman’s death that he didn’t even feel the irony of the situation, didn’t take the moral lesson from it. He consents to take this lesson because he continues to dialog morally with nature, asking: “What do you want from me?”, that is: trusting in the meaning of life even when this meaning has become invisible due to the mistakes that he himself made. Now, nature never fully answers, but it is the human being who completes its answers. And as he responds, he responds by assuming the meaning and implications, the real implications that it has. Or else fantasizing on top, making up, running away from duty and the meaning of life.
When we see that all this was said only with silent images, we notice that this film is truly an amazing masterpiece
In the sense of playing with a lot of causes to cause a final effect, there is an analogy between Sunrise and Shakespeare’s Tempest, but the difference is that in this one there is an agent governing the causes, which is the Prosperous magician, whereas here, there is no magician, you don’t even know who is directing the scene or even if it is being directed. What you know is that it makes tremendous sense. To ask whether this was premeditated or not, in this case, is entirely otiose, because that is not the question. The question is not who is driving and for what purpose, the question is: What precisely is happening? Is it rain like any other? No. It’s the rain that happens at this moment and kills the woman that the guy wanted to kill half an hour ago. The moment when this happens is not indifferent. Real life is precisely that density in which all factors are absolutely inseparable, and the only thing that is really at stake is whether you are going to accept that density or are you going to escape to another world, flat and weightless, the world of subjective fantasy. It is precisely this drama that gives the film its full value and impact.
The story that the character had invented himself, he understood perfectly, but what about this other story that actually happens to him? There are so many factors at play that he could not have a complete explanation. To understand everything that happened, he would need to be God. Imagine the number of causes that would have to be investigated to know why there was all this convergence of events. No one will ever have that. In no time will there be a complete explanation of everything that happened. However, far from understanding this in the common sense of the “limitations of human knowledge”, we have here a precious indication of the very nature of reality: reality is only real when, in it, the finite set of known elements, and which in itself they may not make sense, it is encompassed by an infinite that, unknowable in itself, gives the unity and meaning of the finite picture. Whenever the finite closes in on itself, pretending to be self-explanatory, we are in the realm of optimistic and Promethean logical fantasy. And whenever the finite dissolves into a meaningless infinite, we are in the realm of macabre fantasy. It is in the sensible articulation of the finite in the infinite that knowledge of reality is found.
The meaning of the character’s life is not only not subjective: it is, so to speak, a historical meaning. The character is this man and not another, he had this life and not another, in short he is not free to feel what he wants when he wants. He will feel according to what happened before and according to what he intends to happen next.
Just when the individual returned home, hoping to return to his domestic peace after all that he lived, after temptation and remorse, at that moment the rain hits and it has this meaning because it fits in the sequence of that before and that afterwards, and not because the individual “felt” this or that. In fact, he could not feel it, he could be stupid. Many people, facing such suffering, at the time when life fulfills his macabre fantasy, go crazy and do not want to think anymore. Then they lose the perception of the meaning of what is happening, but that meaning is still present and can be recognized by those who, outside, observe what is happening.
The price of the meaning of life is to understand what is happening, no matter how much it hurts. But always understand only from a human point of view and without having a global explanation. Now, this is very important for the philosophy student, for the following: in any investigation of the metaphysical type that is done, the human tendency is always to fly straight to the problem of providence, determinism, divine intentionality, dealing with these themes in a generic and abstract way, without having this previous entrenchment of the meaning of personal life, which is, of course, the only intermediary through which one could arrive at the understanding of divine intentionality.
If you do not even understand what the events represent within the plot of your life, how will you understand the intentions of the Writer who produced the work?
If you don’t even understand the story, how will you understand the Author’s psychology? It is ridiculous that people with a rude soul, unable to apprehend and responsibly assume the meaning of their own lives, start to give their opinions on philosophical issues simply because they have read Kant or Heidegger. Primum vivere deinde philosophari has precisely this meaning: the true philosopher is a philosopher in real life and not just a scholar who talks about philosophy. That is why metaphysical investigation can never be a mere abstract investigation in the scientific and impersonal sense, it will always imply a personal responsibility. And the question is: do you accept to understand what is going on in your life? And how far will you take it? Eighty percent of the philosophers to whom you asked this question would run in fear, because there are certain things that are terrible to understand, especially the consequences of what each has done in life.
Build the hypothesis that there is a God, that He knows your thoughts and that He can, as in this case, make your worst thoughts come true. Do you want to know this God? Most people, there, will no longer want. It is better not to know. Here comes the famous emotion of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “the machine of the world”, when the individual, after investigating and asking his whole life, at the time when the Universe will finally open up and show everything, he says: — “No, I do not want to know“.
“my defunct beliefs far below
weren’t as quick as to color or to repaint
a neutral face: faith was too slow
to build a newer face upon the faces
I go on demonstrating pale and faint
to each path I tread upon of late;
as if another being, a distant mate
of the one I had been, had now replaced
for years countless what of me became,
I resigned my will and thus abandoned
what I might have wanted — no command
was offered: as some flower, say a rose
reluctant to being open is well nigh close,
as though a tardy gift were now too bland
to be longed for — how much less
possessed! — I set my eyes upon my feet
and proceeded uncurious, void of sense
and tired, quite tired and quite unfit
to behold any splendor, any gift.
Night had finally landed, thick and strict;
a quiet darkness was all round, all dense,
almighty… The machine of the world
recomposed itself as slow and wordless
as it had been repulsed. I weighed the cost:
my hands hanging by my sides, tense,
my whole body bending on the road
of old, stony Minas, there I strolled”
(Excerpts from “The machine of the world” — Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in Claro Enigma, Translation by Bruno Tolentino)
Access to knowledge of a metaphysical order must first pass through a moral and ethical knowledge that does not consist of “following” a morality or an ethics already given and ready, but, on the contrary, in fact wanting to understand one’s own life and realize its meaning, assuming duty with all its strength, because it is in real life that the link between the natural and the supernatural will be found. And where else could operate such supernatural, if not in the real, in this historical and human world where we live?
Nature is already given, it is a fact that is before us. It is already resolved, if not in an eternal way, at least in a habitual way; although there is a coefficient of indeterminism in nature, at least in the macroscopic plane, in the plane of visible nature, things work according to a certain regularity in which you do not interfere. Man’s interference in natural processes is minimal. Well, where else are you going to interfere? In the supernatural? No, the supernatural is God, He is omnipotent, you cannot move there. So, you can’t really touch either the nature or the supernatural. You are placed, as it were, in nature, but a little above it, as you can see nature as a whole and ask about something that is beyond it, but where you cannot go. So, where are you? Exactly between one and the other. Between a set that you see but don’t understand and another that, if you know it, you will understand it, but you don’t know it. Nature is visible and knowable, it is before us, but we do not understand it, because it does not seem to have intentionality. Sometimes it seems like it, sometimes it doesn’t, so you don’t know. How do we know? Well, we need to question what is beyond nature, what is above it and what determines it. In short, we need to talk to the Author of the story. If you knew the Author of the story, everything would be explained; but you don’t know Him. What you know, you don’t understand, and what you understand, you don’t know. God is perfectly understandable; the moment you start thinking about God, you see that everything makes tremendous sense, but we don’t see Him, we don’t listen to Him and we don’t know Him. And everything we see, hear and know doesn’t always make sense. You have the fact at the bottom and the meaning at the top. You would like to go up in this direction. But where is the link? In you, because you also exist materially, that is, you are the object of your knowledge, you know your own body, your own life, just as you know nature. And what is the meaning of your life? You have the reality of your life, but what is the meaning of it? With regard to yourself, you are also divided. You know the reality of your existence, but not the meaning of it. The sense, of course, makes sense, but you don’t know it. And life, you know, but you don’t know if it makes sense. So, you are that link, because at every moment you can connect the sphere of facts with the sphere of meaning. How do you do it? Understanding the meaning that the facts impose, not abstractly and in themselves, but in relation to your historical life.
Only to the extent that you accept to understand this meaning that is in your own life, is that you have at the same time the opening for that greater bond that exists between the natural and the supernatural
The relationship that exists between your life and the meaning of your life is the same as that between nature and God
As you are the only link, there is something that has to be resolved in your sphere and scale before you can seriously ask any metaphysical question.
Now, when we understand this, each of us can also ask the following question: What were the facts that were determining my destiny? And, if you start telling your story straight, you will see that there were facts that determined your real destiny, without your opinion about it, without being consulted and sometimes without you even realizing it. In the lives of others, we see this very well; in ours, it takes effort.
For example, you set up a warehouse. After an economic crisis in Zambia, which changes international trade in a product, your warehouse sinks. You don’t need to know this entire economic crisis, you don’t need to know where it started and you don’t need to know its size. You just know that your warehouse has sunk. Now, I ask you: do you want to see the size of the enemy that wiped out your warehouse? Do you want to see the size of the elephant that stepped on you, or not? Do you really want to know what determines your life? Note that we are not talking about supernatural causes, we are talking about socio-economic causes. At that moment, most people look down like the “Machine of the World” character. He does not want to see, and if he does not want to, he returns to the condition of an animal — the living creature whose life has no meaning, whose life does not need to have meaning, and who only hopes to die as soon as possible. From that moment on, even the effort that the subject makes to attend to his vital impulses, his desires, will be attending only to a death instinct. What is the end result of biological life? The death. It is the only result that biological life can lead to. Therefore, when you limit your life to the biological, as enchanting as it may still seem, you know that you are only going towards death and nothing else.
The renouncement of meaning takes away life itself
Knowing the meaning of life presupposes knowing the meaning of the things that are happening as it happens. But the apprehension of this sense sometimes implies the knowledge of terrible forces, forces of historical, social, planetary or supra-planetary scale. Suppose, for example, that the planets have some influence on your life. Suppose a planet moving in its planetary orbit can have an effect on your life. How are you going to talk to a monster this big? Most people, for fear, do not want to look up to see what determines their life. But the acquisition of the meaning of life presupposes the acquisition of the sense of the cosmic scenario you are in; not in itself, as is done ecologically, but as a setting for the play that is your life. Starting from where you are, consciousness can widen in ever larger concentric circles, to gradually understand the set of factors that objectively determine your existence. And as this awareness expands, the personal duty that gives meaning to your life becomes clearer. And then you no longer seek protection in cowardly unconsciousness (pretended in the beginning, but over time it becomes unconscious), but in duty, which instills you with increasingly greater courage.
It turns out that when someone does this, they see that it is almost a miracle to make a decision amid all these enormously powerful factors. At that time, the individual is forced to see the most brutal reality of human life: the fragility of individual power. The expansion of consciousness presupposes a retraction of pretensions and a loss of self-centeredness, and at this point most people go back. In order not to lose that initial false sense of security, that illusion that he himself is the center of the world, that he himself freely decides his life, the subject closes his eyes before the world machine, lowers his head, and from then on it is like a sheep, or a pig, or a goose; but a sheep, a pig or a goose that continues with the illusion that it is a great thing.
In this specific sense, the character of the film accepts the human condition as fully as possible
He understands and assumes what is going on. He understands that his life is determined by a dialogue, a confrontation, with infinitely powerful forces, forces that can even make him a sinister joke. In fact, the title of the film, sunrise, has a very obvious reason.
The character of the film is the true twice born, the one reborn in God, the one reborn in the realm of the Spirit
It is obvious that there are factors that he can ignore, but that it never ignores him. We can ignore cosmic or historical phenomena, but they affect us; we don’t know about them, but they know about us. Like a Jew in Nazi Germany: he could ignore the Führer, but the Führer did not ignore him. As a Christian in the USSR: he can ignore Stalin, but Stalin knows him very well. At some point, this scenario actually takes on a sinister configuration. And can you stand to see it? Do you want to know or not? It is in this passage that it is decided whether the man will be worthy of the human condition or if he will be imputed to that spiritual self-castration, which is the worst loss that a subject can go through, and that no material reparation can compensate.
The man who has given up knowing what his life is, his biography, has given up this life and this biography
He no longer values it, he threw it in the trash. Now, at most, he is reduced to a child who, ignoring everything around him, asks for miracles or curses fate, society, God Himself; from this point on, just a miracle, really. But asking for a miracle is something cursed by Christ himself. “Damn the human generation that asks for prodigies”. And how is the subject going to obtain prodigies if he doesn’t even want to look at the surrounding nature, look at the real world where these prodigies happen at all times?
Here it is necessary to quote a phrase from old Gurdjieff (I don’t like him, but he has some incredible verbal findings), which says that most prayers consist of asking two plus two to give five. The individual does not know exactly what to ask for. Now, if he doesn’t even look around, he doesn’t know where he is, so he doesn’t know what he wants either. You’re going to ask for something, some nonsense. In doing so, he is refusing the gift of the Spirit, he is committing the first sin: “I don’t want to be a conscious and responsible individual, I want to be a pet that doesn’t know anything, I want to remain in the state of animal innocence.” Does he want to sin against the Spirit and still wants God to perform a miracle? All sins are forgiven, except this one.
That is why I see profound blasphemy in the vulgar apology for “simple life”, “simple people”. This is an aspect that has never been studied very well.
Authentic evangelical simplicity consists in asking for little, not needing much, and not about taking the life of a pet that ignores the world around it
To ignore is to refuse the gift of the Spirit, and this is the sin that is not forgiven in this life or the next, the worst of sins. Everything is forgiven except sin against the Holy Spirit. What is this sin? Voluntary ignorance — and some still call it “evangelical simplicity”.
The lack of questioning about the meaning of life, the depreciation of this search or its reduction to an academic curiosity, as if something disconnected from the axis of life, that is the contempt for the Spirit. If the guy does this and then goes to read the Bible, goes to pray, he is wasting time. It is nonsense: he has already informed God that he wants nothing to do with Him.
This de-spiritualization is the individual’s total absorption in subsistence tasks, including pleasure tasks, which are also for subsistence. You need a certain amount of , gastronomic pleasure, etc., simply to survive, just as you need a certain amount of painful effort to survive. While the individual is limited to these two things, he has chosen the natural life, he does not care about the supernatural. If he wants to know about the supernatural, he will have to go through this interface, which is the meaning of his life.
For you to know the meaning of a thing, you first need to know what it is. “What am I?”, “Where am I?”, “What am I doing here?”, “What is happening to me?” and “Where is my life going?” For example: Do you really want to know all the malignant hereditary impulses that you inherited from your ancestors? Murderers, rapists, traffickers, smugglers, pimps, snitchs — do you want it? Do you want to see all this? This Dante calls descent into hell: to recognize the lower possibilities that are still in you. Do you want it? “No I do not want” says most. So, if you don’t want to, there is no point in praying, because the Holy Spirit’s job is to reveal precisely that to you. By looking firmly and intelligently, you overcome all the evil in you: if you are able to know, to look, you are already above your own inner evil; now, if you don’t want to see it, you’re still down. We are not afraid of what is inferior to us. It is only when you want to see this set that, by the simple fact of being seen, these possibilities are then burned, they become part of your cognitive world and you are in a way already placed above them.
So, if we are going to think iron and fire, the idea we have today of the “realistic” concern with the repeatable daily life is an escape from the Spirit, a succession of painkillers
When a great misfortune happens, the individual asks “why did this happen to me?”. Good question, but before asking about the misfortune, I should have asked a number of other things. No, he leaves to ask questions only when disaster strikes. Now, misfortune can be complicated, and he may not understand it. The situation of the character in the film is obviously an ideal situation, therefore artistically simplified. It is the individual who has never thought of anything and suddenly has to understand everything. And he understands. Now, he understands because it is a film, it is a simplified, symbolic scheme of life. In fact, if the individual spends his whole life solemnly ignoring everything that happens, when the misfortune occurs he will also not understand, he will be even more stupid than he was before.
I don’t believe that leaving everything to the last minute will do any good, except in the movie. In the film, there is an idiot suddenly thrown into a tragic situation, where he has to understand everything and really understands, and when he understands, his understanding has a cathartic function. When he becomes aware of what happened, he discharges the evil that was in the situation and that evil instantly becomes good and his wife is rescued.
I do not deny that there can be, in this sense, a magical performance of the human being on the historical and even the cosmic scenario, insofar as he understands evil and, understanding, expresses and sublimates it in some way, exactly as Thomas Mann said, that some predictions we make precisely so that they don’t happen.
But, what if nobody wants to see evil? Then it will happen. If you don’t want to see it, you leave everything acting in the sphere of mechanicity, of the causes that are already working independently of you and that will inevitably reach your purposes. If you perceive and absorb this impact, it is possible that your awareness has a cathartic function capable of benefiting many human beings around you.
That is why in general prophets and great mystics are people who tend to be sadder than happy, because they know what is going on. They can foresee certain results that others do not foresee and already know what is going to go wrong. Muhammad looked at a guy and knew the guy was already in hell, knew he couldn’t do anything for him, so he cried. But this is a last resort. It is not necessary to foresee the subject in hell, but a subject in the gas chamber or in a firing squad is impossible that there is no one capable of foreseeing.
However, in situations where this evil is approaching, many wait to become aware at the last moment
Every tragedy has this element: to see or not to see. In the ancient tragedy, not seeing does not involve guilt. The ancient tragedy assumes that there is a certain limitation of human intelligence. It is an extreme case, where, even acting to the best of his ability, man would not be able to understand, so he becomes an innocent victim of the cosmic game.
In the Christian sphere, this is no longer accepted and there is always a guilty sense, and for this reason the tragic genre does not flourish here much. In the Christian world, what you did not want to see is to blame. There is always room for maneuver: things could be otherwise. There can be a horrible outcome, but not tragic, because it is not fatal. It was a wrong choice. In an apparently paradoxical way, guilt restores freedom, because in assuming guilt the subject overcomes, in a certain way, the fatal destiny. People today who speak lightly against the Christian sense of guilt do not understand or pretend not to understand that the only alternative to this is the return to Greek tragic fatality where the innocent is always condemned. The enemies of guilt are enemies of freedom.
But there are different ways of understanding, for example, the story of Adam. Did Adam made mistakes due to fatality, or did he have room for maneuver? Could he see what was happening or was he a poor victim of events? The Muslim interpretation says it was a simple intellectual lapse, so they do not accept original sin: there where Adam was wrong, anyone would be wrong. But it is necessary to understand that the Islamic perspective, in this case, is related to the human species and not to the individual. In terms of individual actions, there is guilt. What Islam basically professes is only that Adam’s sin was cognitive, not moral.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the work of a filmmaker who was a profound scholar of philosophy, religion, symbolism and esotericism, was a peak of artistic achievement that cinema had never surpassed, precisely because in it the images directly condensed and without any enigmatic language, the highest levels of metaphysics of destiny and providence problems, with a subtlety worthy of Sto. Augustine and Leibniz. I keep saying this and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau remains for me the greatest film director of all time, until proven otherwise.