The Truth About The Fake: On The Necessity of Illusion
When you are full of your opposite you appear as yourself.
To be truly great at something, one must be just as full of its opposite.
As Heraclitus in Unity of Opposites implies;
They do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmonyconsists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.
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My parents feed a gaggle of geese wild bird seed from their back patio every day.
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To photograph is to preserve and protect— an image— from natural destruction, to kill is to destroy, to ‘cover from’ life.
To protect and preserve you must be ‘full’ of destruction.
What does it mean to be full of, to be ‘good’ at something you don’t yet understand?
The same instinct that motivates a woman to protect can become her own destruction.
The same instinct that motivates a man to protect can become his own destruction.
What can we see in the differences, in their respective motivations and capacities for sacrifice?
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In Alex Garland’s CIVIL WAR, the prize is null. There is no prize, like removing a splinter or draining a pus-filled wound—no apparent utility in what has been obtained, nothing tangibly won, the prize exists only as representation.
The representative prize could be taken as the beginning of some sorta healing process, in the film’s case the potential for reformation, but what is won by extracting the bullet from the soldier who is surely now to die?
Representation Rules:
Representation reigns
Representation, sometimes known as:
the unreal, the fictionalized, the unseen, the invisible, the made-up, the hope, the theory, the faith, the implied, the fake, the hypothesized, the hypothetical, the speculation, the illusion, the unproven—
is not something to rally against. It is a necessary guide on the path to experiencing the intangible directly, experiencing the real.
To avoid it is to avoid initiation entirely.
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The geese show up while I’m sitting alone on the patio.
I withhold their meal until my daughter wakes up.
She enjoys feeding the geese.
I enjoy seeing her happy.
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That illusion, maya, mirror-images, and the like are only something to train oneself to see past, to avoid, and to discard—similarly to the way some regard human beings whom they consider to be useless, vile, a lost cause— is a misprint on the birth certificate of modern spiritual philosophy.
Finally, it’s at that age— capable, and eager, to correct the mispronunciation.
In CIVIL WAR, references point aggressively to the very visible spectacle of widespread violence, destruction, to the group of photo-journalists who feel a tenacious, obviously flawed and purely imagined moralistic impulse to document it. We ricochet relentlessly between what visible, tangible, war in America The Unfathomable looks like in real time and in image form.
Those who leave the theater believing that what they have just witnessed was a film as representation of what civil war might look like in modern day America: it would be just as well to say that when we peer into a casket containing a corpse that what we see is a human being.
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“The soul principle does not live in what we know about nature; it lives in the process of knowing.”
Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Esoteric Science
To forego the fake for the sake of knowing is to forego the process of knowing.
To forego what is above the eye is to forego knowing what meets it.
late 18th century (originally slang): origin uncertain; perhaps ultimately related to German fegen ‘sweep, thrash’.
When one incarnates on Earth, formed then is the I-organisation (also called I-bearer or I-body) as the highest of the four fundamental members of the human being and as the source of I-consciousness.
The I as such cannot be grasped as existing somehow and somewhere.
It can only be experienced in its direct creative activity (…sweep, thrash…), through which it primarily creates itself constantly anew.
„The only reason why we can never be rid of our own I lies in the absolute freedom of our being, by virtue of which the I in us cannot be a thing, a thing capable of objective determination. Hence it comes about that our I can never be comprehended as a middle member in a series of conceptions, but always steps in front of each series again as the first member, which holds the whole series of conceptions: that the acting I, although determined in each individual case, is at the same time not determined, because it escapes from every objective determination, and can only be determined by itself, thus being at the same time the determined and the determining.“
– Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: Philosophical Writings
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Closer to the truth is this: what is truly real cannot be seen on earth.
Closer to the truth is this: to avoid illusion is to avoid initiation.
You need illusion to evolve; you: are on earth.
To deal in the unseen implies wading always within the water bath of the illusory, the fake, the artificial and I tell you what: avoiding your own dilution is futile.
CIVIL WAR blurs and charges its own definitions: protection and destruction with its characters, with the way they deploy their attention.
Dignity and honor appear and disappear in unexpected ways, like negatives, like life.
“Where this living death doesn't exist, life takes its place. Just as the person who loses his shadow becomes the shadow of himself.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
When I say representation, you say story. Representation: story.
I say to be real, you must be full of fiction.
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You ever notice how people committed to the idea of being real and never putting on appearances are the least honest, the least real, and the least themselves?
You ever notice how people who continuously change and experiment with how they present themselves are the most honest, the most real, and the most themselves?
How about that.
“Finally taking flight
I know you don't think it's right
I know that you think it's fake
Maybe fake's what I like
The point is, I have the right
Not thinkin' in black and white
Thinkin' it's worth the fight
Soon I'll be out of sight
Knowing it all this time
Going with what I always longed for”
Tame Impala “New Person, Same Old Mistakes”
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What is unseen was once the lynchpin (no pun intended) of cinema.
Cinema, like all art forms, was born of necessity to convey the unseen.
When you start to believe that the point is in the picture, you’ve lost touch with it.
Photography isn’t (and is) about the image.
The image ain’t no good if it doesn’t conceal, and thus provide, something imperceptible to the eye.
The same applies to film, to life.
People who don’t engage with story cannot grow as much nor in the same ways as those who do.
People who are not full of the “fake” will be unable to realize themselves because the fake is sacramental.
There is, of course, the danger of mistaking the fake for the real.
The process of knowing is in the act of discerning the difference with your very life.
Because without the fake, the real you think you’re full of is not really the real.
The real needs the fake to process into realness, to appear.
Without the fake, people become computational and they become pure spectacle. And they become synthetic, and they become “fake” non-real ‘human beings’.
And, eventually, they are tempted to make choices, that will inevitably be presented to us all, to solidify their non-humanness.
When you have invited, and consumed, your shadow you appear more and more with the aura of wholeness—
which is to say it appears more and more to you and you are consumed by it and consumer of it. This is alchemy.
You are ever drawn to those things that you would consider unlike you.
Believe it or not.
The trick, if you ask me, is to take them as your own.