Irrationality and the Artist: What we can learn from Werner Herzog

© Shamoni Sarkar

 

This year, I saw and heard Werner Herzog live, twice in two months. Anyone that knows his work would say at this point: “Isn’t that enough? Wouldn’t writing about a madman kill his madness, and then what’s the point?” But there is a point. If there weren’t, Herzog himself would not have agreed to talk about his madness to enthralled audiences in formal settings. If there weren’t a point, he probably wouldn’t be making films. In director Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams, his closing words are “We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be like cows in a field.”

How does artistic genius or productivity relate to irrationality, and how exactly can irrationality be articulated? Is articulation of irrationality not counter-productive? The first time I saw Herzog was at Amherst College in New England, on March 24^th, 2012. He screened excerpts from Into the Abyss, his newest documentary on death-row inmates in Texas. While his conversations with the inmate Hank Skinner were sad and illuminating, I felt that Herzog was trying to get too much out of Skinner; his questions were too well framed. For example, he asked Skinner to talk about time and how he related to the whole idea of the movement of time while sitting in death row. But as soon as he transitioned to scenes in which he is driving through the Texan countryside, he did not speak but instead let his camera do the work. But as viewers we could still sense his presence in the scene, and we knew he was still controlling it. Even back inside the prison, when he allowed Skinner to do the talking, the scene was more effective. In a way, when he stepped back, Herzog allowed the cruel irrationality of his subject blossom. But when he tried to attach too many words to it, the real feeling went away. In this case, too much articulation harmed the mysteriously powerful effect Skinner and his setting already had.  

Perhaps because we were a room full of students at Amherst College, Herzog seemed much more ‘normal’ than what I had expected him to be. Maybe because I was another immature fan, I expected to see the kind of manic director that made Aguirre: the Wrath of God. In that film, Herzog sticks with his lead character Don Lope de Aguirre as he leads his men into the deadly interiors of the Amazon in search of El Dorado (a search that is ultimately futile). One by one, his men are struck by arrows shot by Indian tribes from ashore. The last to be struck is Aguirre’s own daughter, and she falls limply into his arms and dies. He is the last one standing, and as he surveys the scene of death around him, an army of monkeys climbs onto the raft, claiming it for their own. Aguirre is deluded by now, but not enough to let go of his savage ambition. “I am the wrath of God,” he declares to no one, staring into the distance with mad eyes. He vows to find gold in El Dorado, and recapture most of the lands of New Spain for himself, to rule like a king. “Who else is with me?” he asks the dead and the monkeys. As the camera pans around the ruins on the raft, we hear the music of Aguirre by the band Popol Vuh, the same music that opens the film as the seekers of El Dorado climb down a dangerous mountain. The music is hauntingly epic and lamenting— it laments fallen heroes and the impending death of a dream. In Aguirre, there are many fallen heroes, and Lope de Aguirre is one of them. In the first scene, the music eulogizes every one of them. But in the last, it is played for Aguirre only— for what he is and for what has become of him. It does not pity him, but rather it understands him and feels sad. Again, Herzog speaks for Aguirre through music, landscape and images of madness. It is very likely that he sees something of himself in Aguirre’s irrational but dedicated drive, and so the film is as much an introspective project as a work of fiction.  

So why did I not see Herzog the crazed director that evening at Amherst College? It was not just because of the over-articulation in Into the Abyss, but something about the lecture itself. It seemed that Herzog had come here to give advice and not to converse. Instead of letting himself unfold, he again articulated too much. It seemed like he was moderating his own personality because someone had told him to be safe. However, the advice was often beautiful, and there were three sentences that I will always remember:

1. Psychoanalysis was the mistake of the 20^th century

2. It is a mistake to scrutinize the self

3. If your soul is dark, let it be dark

Although these three statements befit Herzog, it was difficult for me not to question them. Is not what Herzog was doing in this lecture, and through the characters in his films, a form of self-scrutiny? And does not this prove that it is an unavoidable process for any artist, and perhaps not even a process they have control over? What exactly did he mean when he said to allow the soul to “be dark”? Incomprehensible darkness may make up most of the soul, and allowing it to flourish produces many great things. But is not the basic function of psychoanalysis to make us aware of the dark parts of our soul, and not, as Herzog seemed to imply, to get rid of them? And only once an artist becomes aware of or acknowledges the darker part of his soul can he begin to articulate himself.

Everyone must have darker shades in themselves that they cannot or choose not to explain, and these are the parts we would call irrational. What makes artists act on their irrationality? Herzog is also known to have eaten his own shoe, and plotted to kill his lead actor Klaus Kinski, who plays the role of Aguirre (incidentally Kinski too hatched his own plot to kill Herzog). Do even these irrational tendencies somehow make his artistic personality more whole, or are they just the childish, self-indulgent behavior of a man that believes he is entitled to it? It is too much to say that as an artist, his irrational self is more powerful or extreme than a regular person’s, or that it is in any way special. But perhaps his self-awareness, or his compulsion to act and to make is stronger.  

Burden of Dreams is about the making of Fitzcarraldo, another Herzog film about a man driven by unreasonable desire. Fitzcarraldo wants to pull a boat overland from one river of the Amazon to another, so that he can construct an opera house on the other side. The project is threatened from the beginning. For the shooting of the film, Herzog actually wants to perform this action of pulling a boat overland— a stunt that apparently carries a 70% risk of causing casualties. “I don’t want to live in a world where there are no lions or no people like lions,” he says at one point.

Herzog knowingly risks not only his own safety but also that of his crew, and he cannot quite explain why. In apophthegm 154 in Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “everything absolute belongs to pathology”. Nietzsche’s absolutes are “evasion” and “joyous distrust”— tendencies that make a person go against norms. To embrace these tendencies is a sign of health— bodily as much as mental health. A strong, powerful person will find that his body and mind are in tune with a common urge— the urge to make, destroy and digress. By becoming Fitzcarraldo and filming against the wishes of nature, Herzog is putting himself to the test physically as well as mentally, and he is willing to take himself to the extreme. Irrationality is as much a bodily experience as an intellectual one.   

There are irrational compulsions, inspiration, self-knowledge, and risk-taking, but to produce a complete body of work, something has to bring these together, or it would be too simple. For Nietzsche, sensuous experience could blossom into intellectual activity, provided the person maintains a “cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste”. Then artistic conscience too must be relentless and cruel so that it can acknowledge lack of knowledge, darkness and risk, to show what can be learnt from these things, and ask even more questions. So the artistic conscience is what stretches uncertainty to its limits to show what is beyond.

The second time I heard Werner Herzog was at the Whitney museum in New York, where he spoke more substantively about his own artistic process. He talked about the importance of craftsmanship in every kind of creative activity, and the value of study and technique. “I have always tried to decipher signs”, he told us. He reads “signs” in music and painting and learns from them. Making movies allowed him to learn from the world, putting together images, sounds and words. He may not know why he chooses the stories that he does, and he cannot quite explain much of his behavior as a director, but he knows for sure that his work is not fruitless. He does not work to come to some sort of conclusion or find answers, but to learn more and more about the possibilities of his craft— a process of learning that is most probably infinite. For Nietzsche, a real artist must be rigorously inquisitive, have complete faith to form, and pursue the unintelligible without guilt.

However, like the intellectual conscience, guilt too brings discipline to the spirit. Aguirre and Fitcarraldo do not feel guilt and drive themselves to ruin, but Herzog their creator does feel guilt. Maybe he even feels guilty on their behalf. He eventually completes Fitzcarraldo, but his later words betray something resembling guilt. Talking to Les Blank about the extent to which he had taken himself and his crew, he says, “No one can convince me to be happy about it when I am finished.” At most public appearances, he is a sort of role model or example to emulate, and so he is probably required to present a nice, easy version of himself.  He must not seem too crazed among impressionable young people or interviewees who help keep him in the public eye. But more importantly, he talks to students, museum visitors and documentary filmmakers because it forces him to keep evaluating his work so that he knows where to take it next. It helps him to stay productive.   

So why did it bother me that Herzog articulated too much in Into the Abyss, or advised too much at Amherst College? Possibly because I didn’t want him to censor himself; I wanted to see a mad artist in the flesh. But then I realized how childish this was. It is more likely that his innate irrationality is deeper and more complicated— to the extent that it affects the way he looks at life and his relationships with people. So I would never see an artist’s madness so easily in the space of two hours. To see Herzog ‘in the flesh’, I would have to go back to his films, and I would find the irrationality in the faces, in the landscapes and in the music. I would see the cruelty of his intellectual conscience. But I will still never be able to separate the real man from the ‘nicer’ man, because maybe they need each other and so will co-exist, separately and together.        

Neverending Faces: A Brief Visit to La Plata, Argentina

© Shamoni Sarkar

Whoever thought absence could have such a presence in so many different ways? “Absence” is a word that Severo Sarduy uses repeatedly in La Simulación, his collection of essays on metaphor. The absence that he speaks of is the absence of a fixed essence, or a referent. He seems to be saying that our world is filled with copies, representations and re-representations that make us feel that we have lost track of their origins (or our origins). Then he goes on to make an even stronger statement: There is no origin; there never was.

Thinking about origins and absences reminded me of my day trip to the city of La Plata in Argentina in October 2011. La Plata is a city that was built for a purpose. By the late 1800s, Buenos Aires Province was expanding too quickly for the government to control. Buenos Aires City was at the time both the provincial and national capital, but this dual responsibility was gradually taking a toll on the distribution of administrative duties. The governor Dardo Rocha founded La Plata in 1882, naming it the new capital of Buenos Aires Province.

The city was one of the first few in the world to be “rationally planned”. Unlike other cities, it was not a space that grew and evolved organically. Instead, it was “built” from scratch on a large plot of previously barren land. The dimensions of the city were clearly mapped out. It was to be a uniform grid. Streets would not be named but numbered (streets in Buenos Aires are named after generals, politicians or other Latin American cities). There were to be small plazas with “espacios verdes” (green spaces) every six blocks. One long diagonal would cut across the city, while Street #32 would encircle it, forming its periphery. La Plata is sometimes popularly referred to as “The City of Jules Verne”. Some believe that its design was inspired by the utopian city France-Ville in Verne’s 1879 novel The Begum’s Fortune. In the story, public health and sanitation were priorities in the design of France-Ville. Like France-Ville, La Plata was to be a truly modern city— rationally ordered, clean, and existing for the good of the citizens only. The term coined in the 19^th century for this kind of engineering was ‘hygienism’.

Sarduy speaks of the ideas of recreation and copy when he speaks of the Latin American Baroque. For example, in the art of the Americas, he says, one sees an attempt to assimilate the religious and mythological codes found in Spanish Renaissance painting and reproduce it as something different— something that transgresses the limits of the ‘original’. But the new work retains all the while evidence of the intent— of the struggle to break away. It retains the presence of what preceded it. Likewise, new urban utopias (like La Plata) and the incorporation of rationality too are forms of a Baroque ideal because they attempt to recreate. Although they do not seem to be influenced by the old, as is the art that Sarduy speaks of earlier, they nevertheless recreate themselves because they see the necessity to be something new, unshackled from history. Sarduy’s assertion that neither originals nor copies really exist seems strangely encouraging when seen in the context of the Latin American city. But if there is no original, what do we have? Sarduy thinks that all we have is ambiguity, struggle and incompletion. And he sees potential in incompletion— grey space for the creation of new things.

But as I walked down the streets of La Plata, the air felt different from the way it did in Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires’s grandeur and rustiness were natural and palpable. Remnants of Europe left in the architecture were given new life by the swagger of the city around it. In La Plata, I felt like I was walking through a slightly mythical space— space that existed in dimensions but whose physical presence one could not feel. Someone told me that La Plata was constructed as a city that did not change with the progression of time. Reading Sarduy on absence reminded me of my visit to this city because it seemed ‘absent’ in both space and time. But it wasn’t a sense of absence that pushed me away. Rather, I felt the urge to take in more. There was a sense there that could be touched and defined. I just had to come upon it suddenly.

According to Sarduy, portraiture and mimesis are ways for human beings to leave their imprint on the world; in portraits people tend to leave signs of what makes them human— dark eyes, the shape of the face, or ways of dressing. The canvas not only immortalizes the human form, but also gives it wholeness and a truth. But for Sarduy, the wholeness of form can never be reached. The only truth exists in hints and fragments. 

This idea that wholeness can never be achieved, and that our repeated attempts to assert our selves are futile made me wonder if the same could be said not just about Art but about cities as well. I could now look back on La Plata in a different light, and consider why I went there in the first place. One of the main clandestine torture centers during the years of the dictatorship in Argentina had been in this city. There is now a criminal court there that tries cases of human rights violations that occurred during those years. On that particular October day, I had gone to attend the witness testimony of María Isabel Chorobik de Mariani, the founder of the organization Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo). It was the first testimony in a trial that was going to last for the next several months. Mariani grew up in La Plata in a house of musicians and architects (creative people were the preferred target of the military, she told us). From the night of November 24^th, 1976 onwards, she would go on to see the deaths of her son and daughter-in-law, and the disappearance of her granddaughter Clara Anahí. During the years that she searched for her grandchild, she founded the organization to help other women who were also searching for lost loved ones. She continues to search for Clara today. She put whatever energy she had left into the running of her organization so that other women could see that collectively, there was a way.

Strangely, I did not note down the names of the ‘accused’ that she named in her testimony, nor any other official details. I was too lost in the sound of the flow of her words. For most of the time, I felt like I was watching the staging of a tragi-comedy. Mariani had an extraordinary, matter-of-fact sense of humor, and it was as if she felt entitled to use it after having gone through so much without humor. Also ironically funny were the adolescent scribbles on the backs of the chairs that made everything seem so trivial. One of them said ‘Blink 182’, bringing back my boy-band memories, and then I looked around and realized that many others in the ‘audience’ were also part of the punk-rock generation. For a few seconds, I even felt like none of us had any right to be there. On the platform, I saw the 26 accused sitting on the far left, well-dressed, with calm faces, as if they had long retired from ordinary jobs. None of them stirred as Mariani narrated calmly the sequence of events of those years. She had her back to them, but there was very little space between her chair and their section of the platform. I was convinced that this part of the room was filled with the most anger and violence. At one point, Mariani had to pause after recounting to the jury (and to us) one of the more difficult parts of her testimony. The audience, who had so far been hypnotized by her composure and her incredible story, suddenly broke into applause, offering their admiration and encouragement to keep going. The policemen lining the front stirred, as if expecting us to start a riot. But calm ensued.

I had to leave early to go back to Buenos Aires— back to the real world of classes and chaos.

We were once told about the “logic of fear” adopted by the military government. I tried to figure out what this could mean. Was it that the environment of fear was so pervasive inside and outside the torture chambers that it had reached the point that no other way of controlling things was possible anymore? Were torturer and tortured locked in some kind of silent agreement that order would be maintained only through fear and obedience? And was this why it was logical? However, there was no logic in Mariani’s trial, but only a sense of theater, fragments of history, and the slightly unbelievable physical presence of those involved in that history. La Plata was a rational utopia that hosted an irrational, non-utopian event. What did it mean hosting trials from such an important period in history in La Plata in particular? Was it not a way for people to leave an imprint of themselves in a new space, to conserve traces of their history to give the new space a ‘truth’?

La Plata is the true Baroque city— it searches for a truth through order and rationality. Having a criminal court there is like painting a portrait of history, also to immortalize a truth. But perhaps Sarduy would say that even then it is still only constructed from diverse fragmentary representations from different times. But I think La Plata does receive a strange kind of wholeness by being so new while at the same time giving voice to the old. However, it is a wholeness that is unstable and could break up into fragments at any point. Despite this disconcerting sense, why did I still want to go back? Was it a perverse wish to be caught between the perfect grid and the imperfect history again? Or did I actually want to come away with something concrete and good?

I wouldn’t know, unless I went back.                  

The Truth about Acting

© Shamoni Sarkar

          The bright red lipstick matches the red beret. The black leather jacket balances out the redness and gives everything an air of casual coolness. I step out of the house feeling like one of Woody Allen’s breezy new heroines.

        Then I see Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. Suddenly I am self-aware— aware of everything that goes on inside my head as I put together my looks for different occasions. My look is done, undone and redone, until it fits with a mood: relaxed, worried, thoughtful, or Woody Allenesque. When the look complements the inner mood, I hear a voice of approval, and then I’m ready to go. I construct little film stills of myself ever so often. I am my own actress.

         But what is the point of all this acting?  

         In Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, Liv Ullman’s character Marianne reads aloud to her husband Johan from her diary. She has written of a childhood spent on being pleasing and obedient to her parents, but completely ignorant of who she was or what to make of her own life. The greatest deception, she writes, came at puberty, when her mind was flooded with thoughts of sex and secret wishes to become an actress. At her father’s insistence she finally became a lawyer, but, like everything else she had done in her life, her lawyer self was also an act. Even in her relationships with men, she invented herself, because she did not know what to present to them otherwise. When she finishes reading the entry she looks over at Johan, only to find him fast asleep on their couch. If acting is a lie, then Marianne has been lying her whole life. Now, when she finally reveals the truth about her lies, there is no one awake to acknowledge her.

       Sherman’s film stills are also all about acting: trial runs, dressing up and recreating oneself. But, like Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage, she uses acting to get at a truth (or many truths). At first though, the film stills are deceptive. Each of them reveals itself to us at two levels: as a photograph and as cinema. As a photograph, each film still has a mood. Untitled 56 (1980) evokes “icy” or “cold contemplation”. The woman looks into the mirror, and her reflection looks back at us. We want to know what she is thinking, and whether she is using the mirror to validate her thoughts. But it is Sherman framing herself and posing for us. It is Sherman acting the part of a cold, contemplative woman. She has created everything that makes the photograph. But then what is true about it? Is she not doing exactly what Marianne says she has been doing her entire life— playing roles and acting?  

     At this point of doubt, the photograph becomes cinema by taking on a story. This woman could be plotting murder! I am reminded of the icy blonde heroines in Alfred Hitchcock movies. The Sherman of Untitled 56 could very possibly be a version of a Hitchcockian heroine— she is beautiful, someone who always gets what she wants, but who is generally unpopular and is about to unwittingly fall into a bad situation.

                                                                     

 

                                                                                              

      Almost all the film stills have elements running through them that we have learned to read from the cinema. They all have pointers that originate in fiction. For example, there are waiting women such as in Untitled 50 (1979) and Untitled 15 (1978). We also recognize and articulate that they are different kinds of waiting. The waiting woman in Untitled 50 seems wealthy but lonely. We assume that she is waiting for an uncaring husband to come home. But she seems disinterested and bored as well, waiting only because there is nothing better to do. In Untitled 15, the high heels, the short dress and the necklace with a cross all suggest a young small-town girl that has come to the city to chase her dreams. As she looks down from her window, she could be looking out for a man, for a friend or just for the dreams that she came to follow. There are many other pointers in the film stills, both concrete and suggestive. Though they exist in real life, we learn to identify them on screen. One notes short black hair, bonnets, staircases from which women look down or up, and shadows. They give the story to the initial mood set up in the photograph, turning it into cinema.

        When we see the film still as a whole, i.e. as one-dimensional mood and cinema coming together, we realize that we cannot really separate the camera from life, or acting from truth. We associate Sherman’s film stills with other filmic moments we have seen and probably did not even consciously remember. The cinema seems to be our only filter. In fact, even if we were not told that they were “film stills”, we would still associate them with cinematic images.

       But then is the mood fictional as well? Don’t we at least know, from our own lives, about the pain of waiting or the discomfort of coldness? And don’t we then make cinema by giving stories to these vague, but true, moods? So in a way, isn’t it all true, including the cinema? And so it would seem that Sherman is getting at the truth, or rather a truth, in each film still.   

      This still does not answer the question of why we dress up, or imagine ourselves in a certain way. Why do we want to dress up our moods? The search for a truth does not seem like a plausible reason because we cannot explain why we lie (or act) to get to it. We do not know why Marianne would need to write in her diary about her life of acting, or even why she would want to read it out to Johan. The only way she is able to get at her truth is by admitting that she has been acting. But does this revelation mean that she has stopped acting? And if she has not stopped acting, she has not been able to find that elusive truth.

      In an interview with New York Magazine, Cindy Sherman says that she wanted to “try on” all her film still roles. She herself is unsure about why she did them, but she wonders if maybe she actually did want to be her characters and not be herself. However, she also says that she was uncomfortable with the idea of going to work dressed like her characters, because she felt she wouldn’t be wearing her “normal armor”. “Normal” suggests that there is a real Cindy Sherman, but “armor” once again suggests dressing up. Perhaps there is a certain Cindy Sherman she is most comfortable being, if she were to choose among all the other possible Cindy Shermans. And maybe this is the self she wears when she is not dressing herself up for her art.      

      If one looks at Untitled 56 again, one notices the way the side of Sherman’s face is framed, as if she handled the light in such a way that it looks like a part of her hair. But of course it isn’t, because one can see through its transparency to the way her hair actually curls, away from her face. And then, one notices the circular black object near her chin, which looks like a flashlight. Perhaps the light from that, and the natural light from the sun (which illuminates a part of the hair) create the effect that we see. But one can only guess. What is clear, though, is that Sherman has ‘played’ with the photograph. She starts from a truth, whether it is a mood, or a certain mannerism, gives it a story, and then turns it into something completely different in the photograph, by introducing something unnatural into it. But there is always a truth in them, or in her, which never gets lost. This is why she is able to keep working and changing roles, without letting go of her mysterious core. Similarly, there is something true about Marianne (a certain way of being perhaps) that she must have recognized in herself, or else she would not have been able to admit that she had been acting.

        Maybe the answer is that we want to know all of our possibilities, and so we allow life and screen to overlap, sometimes to the extent that we cannot differentiate between them. We want to know how we can dress up our truths because we do not want to remain static. But even if we resign ourselves to this answer, questions still remain. Do we really have a truth to dress up? If so, could it ever be lost under the layers of costume?

  

    

Madness and Yearning in Cindy Sherman and Pina Bausch

                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

© Shamoni Sarkar

                                                                                                                                                                    

All you can do is hint at things 

Pina Bausch

           If an artist’s “hint” is powerful enough, the audience, the art and the artist herself are embraced in a common relationship of madness. Speaking of photography in his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes describes this maddening process: “it bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being. It then approaches, to all intents, madness” (Barthes, 1981). Barthes says that photography is “mad” because it shows more than it tells. It traps a real moment in time, so in a way it captures a truth, but we can know nothing more of this truth except for the fact that it happened. So if we happened to see, for example, a photograph of a young girl holding an ice cream, but with tears running down her face, we would not be completely satisfied simply by seeing a touching photograph. We would want more to complete our story and answer questions such as “Why is the girl crying when she has what any child would want?” or “Who is this child?” We would want to have a concrete detail to hold on to, to pin down our brief relationship with the picture. Barthes seems to be saying that we want to experience our own “affect” instead of looking from a distance at another’s. So in a way the photograph cheats us by not giving us everything. It is a work of art in limbo, and this is why it is “mad”.   

        The art of Pina Bausch and Cindy Sherman is mad in a Barthesian way because it feeds on affects, especially desire and yearning, to bring out its reality. It is the madness of Bausch’s work that Wim Wenders pays tribute to in his documentary Pina. In an interview, he says that the only way he thought he could do justice to her was by making the film in 3D. He does not explicitly say why, but perhaps he saw the importance of making the audience feel the madness of her choreographies at more than just the visual level. In fact, the effect of madness in both Sherman and Bausch’s works is doubled because not only are the works themselves “mad”, but the subjects represented in the works too seem mad. Madness is a more exclusive state of being than the state of feeling desire or longing. So viewers may feel that they are denied any understanding of what the subjects themselves are going through. They are denied, as Barthes calls it, the guarantee of the subject’s Being. Angered, a viewer may even question Sherman and Bausch’s motives. Do Bausch and Sherman even know what madness is? If not, how can they attempt to depict it to ignorant viewers? Are they taking advantage of their mad mediums?

        But are they consciously depicting madness, or are they just hinting at unnameable things? In Cafe Müller, the madness is all in Pina’s body: her skeletal figure enters wearing a white nightgown, arms stiff and outstretched with palms facing outward, and eyes closed. For the next forty-nine minutes, she flails purposelessly, despairs silently and gets trapped in the circular motion of the revolving door. She strays away, but always comes back to the same position, and always uses the same wall as support. The initial hint is the entry. It is strong enough, and is used repeatedly throughout the piece to tell us that this woman is lost to herself, sad, desperate, and perhaps blind. She should feel lost to us as well, but yet she does not.  

       Igor Stravinsky composed the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps inspired by the story of the Russian pagan ritual of the self-sacrifice of a young girl to the God of Spring. Bausch’s choreography of it takes it beyond the simple plot and fills it with innumerable possibilities of meaning. One may think of coffee plantations, a violent rape or the loss of protection. Again, all that we have are hints: the bare setting strewn with something that resembles mud, the red dress that replaces the white after the girl has been “chosen” by the man, and the desperate, throbbing circle of bodies that the women form when they are threatened. The bodies of both the men and the women convey anger, power, necessity and desire in every collective gesture, whether they lunge forward at each other or contract their arms and fists, resisting. As they dance and move, their faces always look mad, but it is an internal, undirected madness. We do not know where so much feeling comes from, but we can still see it unfolding before us. “Where does all the yearning come from?” Bausch is quoted as having asked one of her dancers. Perhaps she worked only to answer this question, and found that she could only hint at the answer.

                                 

         In Sherman’s Untitled 122 (1983), the body of the woman photographed also hints at her madness in very similar ways: stiff, straight arms, a thin body wearing clothing that is more protective than attractive or comfortable, and clenched fists. Her eyes are open, but mostly covered by her unruly hair— another hint. 
        Bausch and Sherman hint at things we have already learned to associate with madness: desperation, loneliness, gestures, and challenged femininity. But once we separate these qualities from the idea of madness, we realize that we have seen or known them in our own lives. We have known desperation and loneliness, and perhaps sometimes we have even felt as if our identities have disintegrated and we have been left with nothing. We have all been mad before, and we are able to see hints of our own madness in dance or in pictures. Madness is grief and desire, and understanding this much is enough, for the artist as well as the beholder.

                                 

           In Untitled 92 (1981), desire and madness are entwined to the extent that they seem perverse. The information on the wall tells us that the series of photographs in that particular room were modeled on pictures in men’s erotic magazines. Our eyes are drawn to the checked skirt resembling a school uniform, the way the girl poses on her hands and knees, and the ambiguous blue eyes. But her eyes do not look submissive, nor do they have the devouring stare of invitation that one normally sees in models in erotic magazines. In their unknowable blueness there is a hint of fear but an even larger hint of madness. The blueness of the eyes captures the blue lighting of the photograph and the blueness of the skirt, as if the madness of the entire photograph converges in them. The madness is adult and a startling contrast to the girl’s schoolgirl demeanor. Desire is engineered in this photograph: We imagine a man watching and wanting the girl, and the girl looking back at us and at him, conscious of being looked at. But unlike in Bausch’s work, there are no real feelings conjured by the photograph for us to identify with, so we can only be perplexed, and perhaps discomforted, by its madness. What draws us to the kind of madness in this photograph? What guarantees its Being?

         Barthes likens photography to a “science of desirable and detestable bodies” (in reference to the entire body of the photograph and not just the individual bodies portrayed in them). Cafe Müller is filled with darkness but we feel the warmth, or rather the consolation of it because we can somehow identify with what is being hinted at. We desire the body in Cafe Müller more. Sherman’s Untitled 92 is cold but we do not turn away from it. But do we detest it? Perhaps some would object to the suggestion of a child in the photograph, or to the uncomfortable position Sherman puts them in as viewers. But the most detestable thing about the picture is probably that we do not understand the truth contained in the blue eyes. We go back to madness— a madness that we cannot feel. But whether comprehensible or not, Barthes appeals to us to protect Madness and to save Desire to truly experience what a photograph can give us. “You just have to get crazier,” Bausch tells one of her disillusioned dancers. Both she and Sherman invite us to fall deeper into madness and desire instead of distancing ourselves from them. It is an invitation to go beyond incomplete understanding and lose oneself in one’s own mad feelings.                                          

Ungodly Innocence in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung

© Shamoni Sarkar

There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced. Because of this, even wisdom – which otherwise consists more in conduct than in knowledge – still needs science, not in order to learn from it but in order to provide access and durability for its precepts.

Immanuel Kant

          Innocence and wisdom are redefined in the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Wagner’s four-part Ring of the Nibelung series. In Norse mythology, Wotan, the ruler of the gods, pays the giants Fafner and Fasolt with a golden ring that is the source of supreme power, in return for building him the mansion Valhalla where the gods can reside. However, the wicked gnome Alberich who stole the ring from its rightful owners, the Rheinemaidens, has already cursed it. Wotan realizes that by giving the ring to the giants instead of returning it to its owners, his kingdom has been doomed by the curse. Valhalla must fall, but a hero that is free from any godly influence can save the rest of the world. The opera is devoted to the search for this hero. When one filters the auditory, visual and spatial cues, one realizes that the theme running through all four parts is that of unguided innocence. Wagner presents us with a fearless Nordic hero in Siegfried, and in him we see the splendor of innocence that Kant speaks of, but ultimately it is too splendid. His eventual death suggests that his untamed innocence is not enough, and is in fact harmful, for the collective safety of the realms of the dwarves, the humans and the gods. Perhaps Wagner is telling us that a hero needs something else— something that would guide his savagery in the right way.

                           

         Brünnhilde, Wotan’s favorite child, has inherited her all-knowing wisdom from her mother Erda. So her decision to help the human lovers Sieglinde and Siegmund against the wishes of her father cannot be a spontaneous act of sympathy but must instead be the result of deep foresight. Wotan has already told her that the world needs a hero that is free of godly laws. Maybe she intuits that helping the humans will benefit the world in the future and produce the elusive hero. Maybe she places hope in Sieglinde and Siegmund’s yet unborn son Siegfried, the man she will eventually marry. Ironically, it is the marriage and her subsequent submission to human passions that accelerate the process toward Valhalla’s imminent fall. Brünnhilde perhaps senses this downfall too, because when she agrees to give up her status as a god and live as a free mortal with Siegfried, she cries,

 My senses are reeling,
my reason fails:

            shall all my wisdom vanish?  

                                                      

Are these words of lament and doubt? But why should they be, because isn’t Brünnhilde by now aware that the self-restricting nature of the gods’ wisdom has led to their impending downfall? Siegfried seems to be the potential savior because he is fearless and guided not by rules but by his senses. But Wagner still treats the gods with respect, and a victory of sense over reason seems too easy a resolution for the complexity of his opera. Brünnhilde’s doubts must be well founded. Perhaps there is still a need for some form of wisdom. The music interprets the unstable situation with menacing low notes punctuating spurts of shriller ones that accompany Siegfried and Brünnhilde’s outbursts of passion.

          Siegfried is an orphan who has seen no other world beyond the forest he grew up in. He is the ideal hero because he does not carry the burden of an older way of doing things. But he has never seen a woman in his life, so when he finds Brünnhilde, he is scared and cries out “Mother, mother!” The orchestra plays notes of sympathy. Perhaps Siegfried’s confusion is Wagner’s warning that he may lose himself in this kind of innocence. Soon, his lack of wisdom and his uncontrollable passion cause him to be swayed by humans with corrupt intentions, and he betrays himself, Brünnhilde and Valhalla’s future. So does fearless innocence still need a parent to guide it? Does a hero need something to hold him down?

          As one approaches the twilight of the gods in the fourth opera, one begins to understand that most of the leitmotifs used during the course of the entire series contain contrasting emotions. Magic Fire, one of the most human leitmotifs, is first played in The Valkyrie when Wotan requests Loge to construct a fire around his daughter to protect her from cowards. She has been trapped in a deep sleep by her father as a punishment for disobeying the rules of the gods and the family. Magic Fire is filled with high notes of doubt and premonition before it lapses into assurances of kindness and safety. The leitmotif Valhalla is used to introduce the realm of the gods. Confidently, it moves from lower to higher notes, punctuated by the exalting sounds of the trumpet. As a musical cue, Valhalla on its own contains no uncertainty. But by the time we get to Twilight of the Gods, we do not hear it, because everything takes place in the world of the humans. This absence of Valhalla’s calming influence creates the uncertainty, which reaches its peak with the frenzied images and music of Brünnhilde’s self-immolation.

           As the opera closes, fire gives way to the water of the Rheine, giving the sensation of a world being cleansed. Strangely, when I hear the music of the finale I am reminded of scenes of both rising and setting suns in films. So perhaps it is the darkest as well as the brightest hour for the gods. We hear the creation of a new sound: it is a merging together of Magic Fire, Valhalla and Redemption through Love. Perhaps we can decipher Wagner’s final word in this last piece of music. Valhalla cannot be the single site of power any longer, but must burn to make way for a new order. The trouble had begun when the gnome Alberich had stolen the precious golden ring by rejecting love, but now, going by the leitmotifs used to close the story, it is as if the world is being redeemed by love. Although Brünnhilde is stripped of her godly wisdom when she gives in to human passion and becomes a mortal, it is her love that is redemptive. She recognizes Siegfried as a hero that was led astray and realizes that for the world to start anew, she too must burn along with him and Valhalla. Through Brünnhilde’s difficult choices, her consequent revelations, and Siegfried’s fate, Wagner tells us that no kind of love deserves to be given free reign, but must be treated with caution and reason. At the same time, Wotan’s errors prove that the wisdom and reason of the gods had been bound too tightly in rules of conduct, to the extent that it hindered him from breaking away when needed. Wagner’s music makes a plea for disobedience, destruction and a new order. To return to Kant, neither the innocence of Siegfried nor the wisdom of the gods is enough. The “science” required for the new order must be an ungodly, innocent reason. It is innocent because it does not know of the existence of other systems before it, and it is ungodly because it does not derive any of its power from the gods. This reason is bold and knows how to guide itself based on its own rules. But most importantly, it knows how and when to be bold. It seems that Wagner is appealing to measured passions. Could this be the driving force of the new order?