Laughing in(side) the Face of Evil: Notes on Mandy

Q: Why is there evil in the universe? A: To thicken the plot.

– Sri Ramakrishna

I like villains, heroes, angels, devils — anyone who acts their parts perfectly!

– Meher Baba

If I start laughing during a take, it’s almost like a guarantee that it’s going to be in the movie. [Laughs]

– Panos Cosmatos

Mandy’s vengeful victory over evil—as if there is or ever need be such a victory, a victory over nothing—is grounded in the power of laughter, that inexplicable capacity of consciousness or the soul to exult in joyful sovereignty and spiritual freedom over whatever, to become the yes of a total NO to anything. Spontaneously—for no reason at all. To laugh in the face of … everything, oneself, in the face of God—becoming God. I am your God now.

THAT [laughing at myself] is exactly what Jeremiah Sand cannot or fatally fails to do. Named after the ‘weeping prophet’, he is a primo example of the permanently sad and ever sadder separative ego-self as trapped in its own hallucinatory dereliction. “I AM the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light. Surely against me is he turned; he turneth his hand against me all the day” (Lamentations 3:1-3). Sand is an identity simply too special, too much of a face and appearance and form for himself to ever be laughed at, much less by himself. So the end of the day he is not special at all—save in a moment of invisible self-recognition, gazing at into the fire Mandy’s burning body—but just another depressive super sickie or ‘Jesus-freak’ living out his days in an auto-repetitive mirror-state of alienation from reality from which he ‘saves’ himself by imagining it as his own divinity. Alienation, being abandoned by Truth/God/Reality, being other than himself, is his illusory God-himself, his wearisome trip, with all the unoriginal trappings of a hippie-consumerist parody of natural deoessence or absolute individuality. Accordingly, Mandy Bloom’s laughter, the flowering laughter of a being worthy of love (amanda), sends Jeremiah immediately back to the mirror, desperately seeking security in the certainty of the impossibility of self-doubt. If you believe in yourself, you will believe anything!

Laughter is what makes Mandy’s murder a martyrdom, what makes her not only a victim but a witness to something that sees through the “crazy evil” which kills her (and can only kill upon being seen through), as if realizing the spontaneous power of the wind or spirt which blows across the embers of her own bones and scatters the ashes of her skull in Red’s hands. To laugh in the face of evil is to see through evil, to perceive its transparency, its insubstantial shadowiness, its nothingness. Is that it? You made this song? Yes. I did. And it’s about you? Yes. It is. [LAUGHING]. Supreme auto-affection of a fiction. “Tra l’erba e ’ fior venìa la mala striscia, / volgendo ad ora ad or la testa, e ’l dosso / leccando come bestia che si liscia” (Dante, Purgatorio, 8.100-2) [Among the grass and the flowers came the evil slither, now and again turning its head and licking its back like a beast that smooths itself]. Seeing Mandy’s lovely laughter I am tempted to translate it into the kind of divine critique of human religion we hear in Amos 5: 21-4: “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them . . . Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” I hate your whole phony, religious, phonographic self! But the laughter is more and beyond that, something more perfectly carried away with itself. Yes, the saint could always have followed instructions, performed the demanded sacrifice, and extended her life. But how much better, how much more FUN not to, to find by seeing through evil, this so darkly seeming thickener—I see the reaper fast approaching—something better than its opposite, something unspeakable which sees and cuts through everything. “And suddenly she saw it coming towards her with the eyes of her soul, more clearly than can be seen with the eyes of the body, and as it approached her it moved like a sickle” (Angela of Foligno, Memorial). Hearing this pivotal laughter echo backwards and forwards through the film, we see that the question of humor and comedy is there all along, from Red’s starless expression in the helicopter as musically glossed with King Crimson’s “Old friend charity / Cruel twisted smile / And the smile signals emptiness for me” to his final weirdly comic gaze at Mandy’s spectral presence in his car. 

Between that initial non-smile (and weirdly proto-smiling non-non-smile) and his final hyper-smile (and weirdly astonished mad grimace), there are several conspicuous jokes, all rather nonsensical and anti-witty except for Brother Swan’s about the “porker” they offer to the Black Skulls: That is such a good idea. That lard-ass, he couldn’t find his nose in a mirror (again the mirror, anticipating Jeremiah’s begging of his own image what to do; also note how the image of porker is given a virtual role in the vengeance by Caruthers:  It cut through bone like a fat kid through cake). Red’s humor is nonsense, but in two different keys, descending and ascending, separated by the absurdly irrelevant relevance of what he sees, in exhausted shock, in the random mirror of television (Cheddar Goblin, Emergency Broadcasting System). Before Mandy’s death, his jokes (Erik Estrada, Galactus) breathe the contrary comic-melancholic air of his saturnine temperament (What's yours? Um...Saturn, probably. Yeah? Saturn’s pretty cool), the atmosphere of a man of sorrows making jokes which achieve laughter only by playfully ridiculing humor itself. After Mandy’s death, in devil-may-care vengeance mode, Red’s ‘jokes’ acquire the power of a divine or sovereign absurdity, becoming spontaneous movements of his soul achieving instant recovery from and victory over his situation: Ah! That was my favorite shirt. Ah! You have a death wish. I-I don’t want... I don’t want to talk about that. You’re a vicious snowflake. Now nonsense has become the logic of victory and vengeance itself, the opposite of defeated, world-weary therapeutized consciousness and at the same time the perfect expression of a heart who has experienced, through and against itself, the agony of the worst defeat: “This is the greatest pain: to see your love suffer” (Julian of Norwich, Showings).

Opened thus by “the tainted blade of the pale knight, straight from the abyssal lair,” Red becomes capable of swimming the mystic sea of hell and despair in which Jeremiah is drowning. “Their heart remains devoid of hope. This way leads them very deep into God, for their great despair leads them above all the ramparts and through all the passageways, and into all places where the truth is” (Hadewych, Letters). Ergo the supreme meaning and nonsense of Red’s final unjoking joke: I am your God now. The truth is the truth—whatever that is.

“Doing and laughing, machen/lachen, doing evil and laughing at evil, making each other laugh about evil. Amongst friends. Not laughing evil away, but making ourselves laugh at evil. Amongst friends” (Derrida). Like Red’s becoming like the monsters he fights, the simple genius of Mandy’s laughter is seen in its own shadowiness, in its flame-like oscillation between the vertical and the horizontal, between liberating joy and confined, monstrous spite. Laughing in the face of evil means laughing inside evil, passing though one’s own evil [laugh]. This is the meaning of the imaginal merging of Mandy’s and Jeremiah’s faces from the perspective of Mandy’s gaze.

“And what is laughter but a flashing of the soul, that is, a light appearing externally as it is within” (Dante, Convivio). One does not laugh at evil without laughing at oneself. One does not laugh at oneself without laughing at evil. “This is the sign of the spirit of truth: to realize that God’s being is total love and to acknowledge oneself as total hate” (Angela of Foligno, Memorial). Otherwise there is no true laughter, just another cruel twisted smile. The joke is there is no joke, the evil is there is no evil—what an evil joke! Now there is really something to laugh at after all, to laugh . . . Yeah it’s pretty awesome.

Fire & Iron [seminar]

Fire & Iron: On Mystical Becoming—and the Question of Culture

Nicola Masciandaro
Escula Incierta, Lugar a Dudas. Cali, Colombia. July 2018.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.

– Romans 12:2

Let despair and disappointment ravage and destroy the garden of your life;

Beautify it once again by the seedlings of contentment and self-sufficiency.

– Song of the New Life

Make it new.

– Ezra Pound, et al.

Poi s’ascose nel foco che li affina. [Then he hid himself in the fire that refines them]

 – Dante, Purgatorio 26.148

A common medieval figure for divine union—that of the iron in the fire—will provide the model for this three-part seminar on mystical becoming and the question of culture. Essential to the logic of this figure is the paradoxical power of the iron, representative of the individual or soul, to remain itself in the midst of becoming fire-like, to be transformed precisely through its capacity to resist or withstand the power that alters it. In this sense, the properly mystical or hidden nature of the iron lies, not in conforming to, but in renewing itself in the fire by intensively not being it, by hiding more and more the depth of its originally black metal substance and thereby becoming transformed into something at once thoroughly different from and ever more purely itself. This paradox suggests a crucial relevance to the issue of cultural becoming and the ongoing conflicts between traditionalisms and modernisms, between the forces that would bind the present to past forms and those that would sever the present from them, insofar as both fail to fulfill the paradoxical process of authentic transformation whereby something acquires a truly new nature by preserving at all costs its individual essence, even to the point, as Richard of St. Victor says, of “resist[ing] the omnipotent” (Four Degrees of Violent Love). Accordingly, this seminar will trace the contours of mystical becoming while keeping an eye open at each stage for their present cultural and occultural implications, the hidden dimensions of inner resistance and negation which hold the key to true renewal. Pairing medieval texts with select discourses by Meher Baba touching on the future of humanity, we will hide the question of culture in the fire of mysticism in order to see and not see what emerges.      

Day I: Black—Sorrow and Self-Negation

Readings:        John Climacus, “On Mourning,” Ladder of Divine Ascent.

Cloud of Unknowing, chapters 43-5.

Meher Baba, “The Travail of the New World Order,” Discourses.  

Extras: “Sorrow of Being: In Calignem” and “The Tears of Matter: On the Crucifixion Darkness,” On the Darkness of the Will (Mimesis, 2018). “Secret: No Light Has Ever Seen the Black Universe, Dark Knights of the Universe (NAME, 2013).

Day II: Glowing—Desire and Movement

  

Readings:        Richard of St. Victor, On the Four Degrees of Violent Love.

Thomas of Cantimpré, Life of Christina the Astonishing.

Meher Baba, “The Life of the Spirit,” Discourses.

Extras: “Firebox,” in Black Hyperbox (Punch, 2017). “Nietzsche’s Amor Fati: Wishing and Willing in a Cybernetic Circuit,” in Digital Dionysius: Nietzsche and the Network-Centric Condition (punctum, 2016). “Because It’s Not There: A Vision of Climbing and Life,” in On the Darkness of the Will (Mimesis, 2018). 

Day III: Liquid—Union and the Now

Readings:        Ibn Arabi, Whoso Knoweth Himself ....

                      Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls.

Meher Baba, “The New Humanity,” Discourses.

           

Extras: “Non Potest Hoc Corpus Decollari: Beheading and the Impossible,” in Heads Will Roll (Brill, 2012). “Never Born, Never Die: Individuation, Mutation, and Mystical Birth, via Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin,” Diaphany (2015). “Inner Life | Inner Death: On the Threshold of the Sacred,” On the Darkness of the Will.

On the Darkness of the Will

On the Darkness of the Will. Milan: Mimesis. ISBN 978-8869771569. 178pp.  

“For the will desires not to be dark, and this very desire causes the darkness” (Jacob Boehme). Moving through the fundamental question of this paradox, this book offers a constellation of theoretical and critical essays that shed light on the darkness of the will, its obscurity to itself. Through in-depth analysis of medieval and modern sources―Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Dante, Meister Eckhart, Chaucer, Nietzsche, Cioran, Meher Baba―this volume interrogates the nature and meaning of the will, along seven modes: spontaneity, potentiality, sorrow, matter, vision, eros, and sacrifice. These multiple lines of inquiry are finally presented to coalesce around one fundamental point of agreement: the will says yes, yet only a will that knows how to say no to itself, entering the silence of its own darkness, will ever be free.

"At a time when much philosophy still stubbornly clings to the legacy of modern humanism and its attendant species-superiority, Masciandaro's On the Darkness of the Will provides a counterpoint, examining a whole premodern repertoire of thinkers delving into the nebulous, unhuman terrain of 'the Will.' At once sorrowful and joyful, ecstatic and exegetical, these essays offer a welcome respite from the otherwise obligatory narcissism of the current cultural climate." 

Eugene Thacker

'Masciandaro gathers the roses of the mystics, and the non-mystics, and extracts for us their attar. These essays in unknowing are true transmissions of the self-secret.' 

Jordan Kirk 

CONTENTS

Introduction
I. The Whim of Reality: On the Question of Will
II. Of a Leaden Hue: Chaucerian Non-Mysticism
III. Sorrow of Being: In Calignem
IV. The Tears of Matter: On the Crucifixion Darkness
V. Because It’s Not There: A Vision of Climbing and Life
VI. The Inverted Rainbow: On the Color of Love
VII. Inner Life | Inner Death: On the Threshold of the Sacred

Glossator 10: Thrones

HERE

Building Climbing Thinking

[draft essay for forthcoming volume on the UW Practice Rock]

UW Practice Rock, 1985. Photo: Jeff Smoot

I was but an inverted Tree.

– Andrew Marvell 

That it is known as the ‘Rock’ is in retrospect a marvelous index of the not-so-simple relation between building and climbing (and thinking) which this essay will explore. The Rock is of course not a rock but a room-less building of walls meant for climbing composed of crack-featured concrete slabs elevated at different angles and embedded with a variety of stones. Concrete, from concrescere, ‘to grow together’. This stony conglomeration of metal, concrete, and rocks rising from a bed of pebbly gravel is thus also not not a rock. In other words, the Rock is a building that is analogously a rock, recalling that analogy—a term between univocity and equivocity—concerns a relation or participation among things that are categorically different yet bear a substantial connection to each other, as when we say (to follow the classic Aristotelian example) that an apple is healthy. Likewise in nick-naming the Rock with the word ‘rock’ we are not so much signifying what it is as calling it by what it does for other beings in relation to rocks, both despite and because what it does is also formally inseparable from its sharing rock’s nature. What makes the Rock ‘rock’ is that is a rock for rock-climbers, at once a practice rock that becomes rock in being practiced upon as rock and a not-rock that is rock in the sense of something whose being or essence, whatever makes it what it is, is itself to practice being rock, insofar as being the Rock can be thought of as an activity, which I think it can seeing that being is a verb. Rock is what the Rock does (for climbers)—a climbing rock: rock to climb and rock that climbs.

We may see the Rock as a kind of concrete shadow of Mount Analogue,[1] not in the sense of a model of some ultimate rock, but something more useful and homely. Where Mount Analogue is the imaginary cosmo-geological mountain of mountains which must by analogy exist somewhere on earth, invisible yet accessible (i.e. the more-than-mountain that all mountains are analogies of), the Rock is analogue rock in the sense of being an actual as opposed to imaginary construction that functions as rock, an accessible yet ‘invisible’ less-than-rock that is an analogy, however imperfect, to all rocks. The correlative ‘invisibility’ through which the Rock functions is the measure of eliminative not-seeing that activating its potential requires, namely, the physio-imaginative act of climbing as if some holds were not there, as in above image where I am laybacking the left side of a hand-crack instead of jamming it. Such seemingly artificial or contrived invisibility actually has a very close inverse relationship both to how one naturally uses things in general, how the instrument or tool “disappears into usefulness,”[2] and to how one dwells in and with them, how “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space” and the house becomes “both cell and world.”[3] Hold-elimination is the haptic mirror and a kind of reverse engineering of phenomenal depresencing, the harvesting of a potential that appears when its means is taken away, just as the vital form of building and dwelling coincide in what cannot be touched: “We make doors and windows for a room; / But it is these empty spaces that make the room livable. / Thus, while the tangible has advantages, / It is the intangible that makes it useful.”[4] Off-limits features are windows.      

Gaston Bachelard gives a beautiful description of the way using and dwelling are blended through housework into the fashioning of the present, life’s ongoing building of itself within/without buildings:     

Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order. From one object in a room to another, housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch. The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.[5]    

The Rock is such a community in an inverse sense, an exclosure of walls made for climbing, a practice which likewise connects using and dwelling in a manner that reflects back upon building as a means of navigating the space between these functions. Enclosed in a building, one may in a flexible sense dwell without using (think) and use without dwelling (work). Exclosed at the Rock, one may in a flexible sense dwell while using (as when pondering boulder problems) and use while dwelling (as when climbing on the walls). Like the housewife of one’s climbing’s life, the rock-practicer moves among the Rock’s roomless rooms awakening its stones into the building of oneself and others as climbers. I am not alone in having spoken of myself as a ‘product’ of the Rock and returning there, reversing the inner-outer expansion of geometric reality, gives me that paradoxical spatial sense of mnemonic shrinkage/expansion one typically feels revisiting an old home. The whole thing seems so much smaller, yet larger and taller next to the thought of repeating the circuits that once made the tower’s top feel close to the ground.   

However one considers these dimensions, the Rock demonstrates that the complex ways in which climbing practices stone beyond itself definitely concern the using/dwelling boundary and reflect back upon the nature of building. From the Tower of Babel to skyscraper builderers, building and climbing are non-accidentally related. The whole sphere of climbing itself exists through an open collection of constructed enclosures, things that hold and keep and protect us from the world and ourselves. That artificial climbing walls have continued to evolve more and more towards forms of dwelling, into inclusively exclusive urban entities selling and developing the space of climbing as community, work-play, lifestyle-domicile, etc. only presses further the issue of climbing’s relation to building, the question of what it is that climbing builds, the horizon of its dwelling, and above all, the order and dimension of its homelessness.   

The Rock, like other kinds of human buildings, is something between a rock and a construction, part of the continuum between nature and architecture, from cave-dwellings to skyscrapers, but also something curiously beyond-within that continuum, namely, building materials petrobatically repurposed to mimic their own natural formations.[6] There is a beautifully weird creativity to this progressively atavistic way in which climbing leads architecture (and architecture leads climbing) to the construction of bouldering walls which in turn become a tool for building climbers capable of ascending the hardest and steepest natural shelters like the now famous Hanshellern (lit. Hans’s cave) in Flatanger, Norway. Really speaking the first artificial climbing walls are built dwellings made into climbing walls by the simple act of practicing climbing upon them, as documented by Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s anonymous Roof Climber’s Guide to Trinity (1900), just as early artificial climbing walls resemble buildings, or like Schurman Rock (1939), ruins. As mountains develop in the form of geologic ruins—Ruskin’s gloriously gloomy “great cathedrals of the earth” and index of the planet as “wreck of Paradise”[7]—so do modern climbing walls take place in the fertile ruin of architecture, in a zone where the climbing human can like an animal vine again take hold in new ways of life’s in/organic interface. If climbing is primordially related to the desire, as per Plato’s exemplary allegory, to ascend not only up but out of things, then we may surmise that there is a deeper secret relation between climbing and building as intertwining paths twisting upon-through earth as our temporary dwelling-place in the ‘hanshellern’ of this cosmos, the overhanging divine underworld of the universe.[8]              

For all these reasons, the Rock presents one with the imperative to (re)consider climbing as a middle term between building and thinking, reprising the terms of Heidegger’s essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking.”[9] Switching out the word-holds—exactly the procedure that climbing walls have plastically evolved to allow—produces the following problems/solutions which this brief essay has perforce failed to send:

1. What is it to climb?
2. How does building belong to climbing?

1. Building is really climbing.
2. Climbing is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.
3. Building as climbing unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings. 

Only if we are capable of climbing, only then can we build . . . Climbing is the basic character of Being, in keeping with which mortals exist. Perhaps this attempt to think about climbing and building will bring out somewhat more clearly that building belongs to climbing and how it receives its essence from climbing. Enough will have been gained if climbing and building have become worthy of questioning and thus have remained worthy of thought. But that thinking itself belongs to climbing in the same sense as building, although in a different way, may perhaps be attested to by the course of thought here attempted. Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for climbing. The two, however, are also insufficient for climbing so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation, instead of listening to the other. They are able to listen if both—building and thinking—belong to climbing, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice.

Monitor Rock (aka Schurman Rock)

---

[1] See René Daumal, Mt. Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures, trans. Carol Cosman (New York: Overlook Press, 2004).

[2] Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 171.

[3] Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 51.

[4] Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching, trans. John C. H. Wu (Boston: Shambala, 1989), 23.

[5] Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 68.

[6] I am coining the word from Ancient Greek πετροβατικός ‘given to rock-climbing’.

[7] John Ruskin, “Of Mountain Beauty,” Modern Painters, Volume IV, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31623/31623-h/31623-h.htm.

[8] The name Hans (John), from Hebrew Yôḥānān, means ‘graced by YHWH [God]’. Norwegian hell, meaning ‘cave, overhanging cliff’ and cognate with English hell, derives from the root *kel- ‘to cover, conceal, save’. So there is something playfully symbolic, at the verbal level, in the present fact that the hardest route in the world, named Silence and climbed by the tautologously named Adam Ondra (lit. ‘man man’ or ‘manly man/earth’, from Greek aner, andros, ‘man’ and Hebrew adam, ‘man, human,’ fr. adamah, ‘earth’; cf. human, fr.  root *dhghem- ‘earth’)—“Life wants to climb and to overcome itself by climbing” (Nietzsche)—hangs there like an open secret upon climbing’s inverted horizon. Indeed the crux move of Silence, involving a full body inversion, performs the self-inversion that the spiritual ascent of man as arbor inversa, “a plant whose roots are not in earth, but in the heavens” (Plato, Timaeus, 90a), necessarily involves. See A. B. Chambers, “‘I was but an inverted Tree’: Notes Toward the History of an Idea,” Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961): 291-9. In hermetic terms, as “the Fall of Adam [is] the passage from a spiritual gravitational system . . . to a terrestrial gravitational system,” so spiritual freedom “live[s] under the sign of celestial gravitation instead of that of terrestrial gravitation,” via the inversion represented in the figure of the Hanged Man as symbol of the human reordered according its highest will: “The other characteristic trait of the spiritual man is that he is upside down. This means to say, firstly, that the ‘solid ground’ under his feet is found above, whilst the ground below is only the concern and perception of the head. Secondly, it means to say that his will is connected with heaven and is found in immediate contact (not by the intermediary of thought and feeling) with the spiritual world. This is in such a way that his will ‘knows’ things that the head — his thinking—still does not know, and so that it is the future, the celestial designs for the future, which work in and through his will rather than experience and memory of the past. He is therefore literally the ‘man of the future’, the final cause being the element activating his will. He is the ‘man of desire’ . . . the man whose will is set high, above the powers of the head —above thought, imagination and memory” (Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell [New York: Putnam, 1985], 316). Similarly, Aleister Crowley’s brief guide of 1898 to the Y-Boulder at Wasdale Head lists twenty-two problems, the first and last being inverted variations of “The Easy Way”: “1. The Easy Way . . . 22.  The Easy Way. Feet first. Face inwards” (John Gill, Origins of Bouldering, http://www128.pair.com/r3d4k7/Bouldering_History1.1a.html). “The way up and the way down are one and the same” (Heraclitus: The Complete Fragments, trans. William Harris, n.p., 2010).

[9] See Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, 347-63. 

Climbing Theory: A Handbook [project]

in the works via T.A.C.T.