In the Dark:

Where We Unfold

Anna Ellinor Sundström

BA (Hons) Fine Art
Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design
Thesis
2011

Tutors: Karl Baker & Anne Tallentire

Content

1. Caviat 2

2. Prologue 4

3. The Dark 8

3.1 Vision in the Dark 10

3.2 The Pure Stage of the Conscious 13

4. Correspondences: The spectacle as an ‘unfolder’ of the intimate Being 16

4.1 Spectacle of Nature: As found in ‘unfolding’ qualities of birds 19

and the depths of the sea

4.1.2 Birds as ‘unfolders’ of one’s intimate Being in film: 23

‘I Am Love’

4.2 Spectacle of Modern Culture: A Religion for the Folded 27

4.2.2 Water as the Dark: The work of Bill Viola 30

concerning water

5. Epilogue 33

6. Bibliography 35

1
1. Caviat

I will close your eyes and lead you into the dark.
(At the beginning of the introduction, please listen to track 1 on the accompanying
CD.)

As a preparation for external correspondences, I will make sure you have found
yourself in your right and pure stage of the conscious.

Within these correspondences, I will take you through two spectacles: within those
one of nature and another one of modern culture, in which each of one I will analyze a
case study.

Finally, I will open your eyes and have you understand that you will never be able,
nor want to, escape the dark ever again.

2
Close your eyes

It’s dark
but you recognize it

You have no history

you are new to this world

You are safe with me

No one belongs here

but I remember

I remember you

This is the image of everything,

now I have to be yours
Still nothing is to be found
It was always too bright

Mirrors reveal
once deeper they conceal

You’re on your own now

Your own image

Disappear

Entering the light is entering the dark

You are safe with me

3
2. Prologue

You have died ‘the great death’1 of Rilke, and you are thus in his open2. You are
within the forests of Bachelard.3 You are within your own vast intimate immensity of
Baudelaire,4 whose origin is enclosed by the Chora of Kristeva.5 You are now your
own image, re-directed only to yourself by Bergson:6 a tabula rasa onto which reality
announces itself as it is writing your history. You are in the dark. Its infinite
immensity takes you deeper inside. Nothing here is worthy of your attention unless
you allow it. All you know is what you have not yet heard, what you have not yet
seen. Knowledge here is definite and infinite, created only by and for you. What
unfold in the beginning of the dark are the memories that turn into dreams in the light.
Here, in the dark, everything is possible: it is a pure space, full of potential. It cannot
be possible to long for what you have not yet met. Consciously, you never wish
yourself out of this place, there is simply nowhere else. You are being drawn out of it;
in fact you fight against it. It is your first traumatic experience from which you will
never heal.

Later, when found in this world, you are running. You are running towards the hole
you came from while simultaneously running into the direction of the light. You
fought it, however, you are dragged into it. It sheds light onto your conscious, each
beam rendering apparent each bone in your body, each muscle in your body, each
nerve on the border of your body and outside of it: everything that was hidden. You
fall into a mingling with everything, which is not you, and into a constant process of
translating. You feel cheated on knowledge, the one, which, was created for you. The

1
Rilke, R. M. Requiem and Other Poems. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1949), pp. 36.
2
Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930), pp. 132.
3
Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), pp. 185., where he
contemplates over the forest as the realm of one’s being.
4
The vast, describing the unlimited immensity within oneself, objectified when used as
adjectives, “as vast as night and light”, in his Les paradis artificiels, among others. Quoted in
Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), pp. 192.
5
“The Chora is a modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as
the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic.” Kristeva, J.
Revolution in Poetic Language.. (New York & Surrey: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp.
28.
6
“I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit
movement to them.” Bergson, H. Matter and Memory. (New York: Zone Books, 1995), pp.
19. Bergson’s images would correspond to realms, of either one’s Being or the projected
reality.

4
grief of the loss of trust once violated creates a suspicious shield around you.
Remembering brings you to tears, which leave you with a hole within not so different
to the infinite immensity of the dark. You feel relieved designating parts signifying
this world into memories. Within the realm of memory, you are once more reassured
and find yourself turning to the dark, that pure space, at times when held hostage in
this filled space. The characteristics of this filled space are identified by noise,
gestures, overloaded impressions to the extent of exhaustion: means of language.
The only promise kept by the dark is regarding its own short loop of existence
within the light through memories turned into dreams, from which there is always an
awakening. So, here you are in the illuminated side of life.7 You are in the world-
image of Bergson. You are in the light, the so-called reality. The fear of dying and
returning is haunted by and attached to the pain of the resistance of the transcendent
transferral remembered when being delivered here. You will dedicate your Being in
this world to revenge. The power it lies within; forgetting and letting no one in. In
secret, however, you search for consolation within correspondences.
Correspondences, which must be the embodying force of the external I find necessary
when successfully ‘manipulated’, or impressed, here also expressed in the writings of
Bachelard: “It is the principle of ‘correspondences’ to receive the immensity of the
world, which they transform into intensity of our intimate being.”8 The search for
these “external equivalents”9 impels us to madness. Following the linearity of the
history of life here on earth since the beginning, these correspondences have been
designated means of religion and rituals: its methods of cleansing and consolation,
which, because of a more advanced and technological mode of searching, has turned
into a more ‘sophisticated’ means of correspondence, as spectacles. These spectacles,
or rather its unfolding elements, are to be found in everything external. We make
them commodities of ours almost as if they never existed naturally, in spectacles of
culture and society. However, the most useful ones are the most apparent: the ones of

7
Rilke expresses this as in opposition to the unilluminated side of life: the dark. A concept,
which, is designated sides rather than an end. Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1930), pp. 151.
8
Bachelard analyzes Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘Correspondences’ rendering the utmost
significance of mingling with the world in Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space. (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1994), pp. 193.
9
Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930), pp. 16-17. “Rilke’s
problem was to find symbolic, or what he called ‘external’ equivalents for experiences that
were becoming more ‘inward’ and incommunicable, and which, when he tried to
communicate them, were continually bringing him up against the limitations of language.”

5
nature, found in the depth of the sea and within the wings of the birds. Yet, we have
not succeeded to rationalize the void and its questions of our intimate being, reaching
out for an immensity to connect with.

This is thus an attempt to prove that the dark, as a pure space, brings out the only
sufficient stage of the conscious, which, connects the intimate being with an immense
infinity, reached by a pure correspondence, with elements of the spectacles of culture
and nature. I manifest these truths by rendering the qualities of each of them all, and
furthermore link them together as a whole, with which depth they create an ultimate
dimension of being. This is made possible with some examples of spectacles; pure
and artificial, with which we both naturally and forcefully, unfold our intimate being.
As a spectacle of modern culture, birds as ‘unfolders’ in film through a cinematic
setting are analyzed. As a spectacle of nature, water as the dark is analyzed through
the work concerning water of Bill Viola.

6
For this opens up the dark hole,
not the one that creates but transforms
To see what it is for
gives so much more
I should be grateful to whom tore it open
for I share with the pain this immense eternity
where time is blind
and the wind is wild

7
3. The Dark

The dark is a space like no other; it can be argued that it is no space at all. If one
enters the dark bearing no fear, it has qualities of release and consolation. It will share
the inner depth within you with the immense infinity, and empty you out, as your soul
is laid out bare on the dunes of the desert, with the waves of the deep sea, carefully
tearing you apart and away with them. Entering the dark really is dying, however not
the death of Socrates, for example, as an escape for which life prepares itself, but the
‘great death’ of Rilke: “It is simply the final transformation or transmutation in a life
that has been continually […] gathering itself together and projecting itself forward,
never resting, always becoming, again and again ‘dying’ to the old self in order to
‘live’, death may be regarded not only as the temporal but as the metaphysical end.”10
Dying can thus be regarded as an alternative end in life, one of consolation: the
transformative. Death is therefore a part of life, in as much as life itself. It gives one a
chance to empty oneself out (as the last exhalation symbolically and clearly
manifests) in order to become a tabula rasa, similar to a new born. Evidently, it has
similarities to Buddhism, which regards death as a reincarnation, perhaps into another
form of life. It can, indeed, be a comforting thought to regard oneself as a continuing,
ever transforming cycle, rather than of a forever-closing one. However, if one is not to
believe in any religion, this consolation is yet there to be found. Dying is merely an
abstract justification of however small a passage, which is put to an end. An end,
which, brings us back to the very beginning. This is, then, our reminder of the Chora,
this space in the womb, which, keep turning us inwards, and the further we follow it
the more intimacy we feel with it, and thus it slowly reveals itself to us and
subsequently offers great comfort. As with the other notions of this dark space: the
open, the forest, the imaginary state, the vast immensity and an image of its own, it
shares the same qualities, those of pure intensions, not yet intoxicated with reality of
the external world and its light.

10
Rilke, R. M. Requiem and Other Poems. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1949), pp. 36.

8
For light in the dark,
where memories are reflections
of a once felt spark
Thus act impressions as the holy
filling the gaps
solely

9
3.1 Vision in the Dark

Rilke’s idea bases itself upon, what seems to me, as a state one has to enter to really
see, a vision that exists because of an openness that in that other side of life, the
illuminated, is blinded by light to be literate. Thus is the dark, the opposite of what
holds light together. And to attain this vision, it is, as one first would have to return
from the other side into this, with eyes closed, being born again with no history yet
written, for oneself to be applicable as a tabula rasa. So this vision is, as established,
not based upon light, which would indicate an already inhabited space: a filled space,
but instead a pure space. I will have to disagree with Merleau-Ponty, saying that “to
see is to have light or colours”11, as it charges vision with a threat rather than a
consolation, as this seems to me as an artificial way of seeing: seeing the way we are
used to it: objects, shapes and errors, all in all a very judgemental vision. If Arthur
Holmberg, when commenting on Robert Wilson, director and light designer, is right
in saying that “light constructs our sense of space”12, it must mean that darkness
manifests a kind of non-space, to say the least. If purity is constituted by nothing, or at
least hidden in the dark, light does not only defines space, but filled space. Therein,
everything seems to mingle exhaustingly, which leaves no space for own
interpretation. The purest way of them all must be to be able to see in the dark. Seeing
then becomes what approaches us, as that is what happens within us with our eyes
being closed, rather than us searching for it: vision becomes remembering. If we are at
all to go after Bergson’s idea about images,13 one would imagine that the mental
images: memory, dreams, expectations, which all are traces of mirrored world images,
begin where the world image ends. This means, as subjects would then merely operate
as image storers in a filled space, a pure space is required, such as the dark, to let go
of that burden, and finally release the ‘pure’ images from within.

11
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1962), pp. 4. He contemplates on sensation as a unit of experience.
12
Holmberg, A. Directors in Perspective: The Theatre of Robert Wilson. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 122.
13
Henri Bergson assumes of the idea that one’s own image: oneself, cannot create an image
of its own but rather collects, and projects images onto it, from the world image: reality.
Further on this in Bergson, H. Matter and Memory. (London: Zone Books, 2005) He
comments on memories as following “It is shown that in reading of a book the speed of the
eye leaves gaps in the retinal impressions; therefore the sense data must be filled out by a
projection of memories.” in L’energie Spirituelle (Paris: University Press of France, 1919),
pp. 184.

10
This vision is to be compared to another mode of vision: the haptic14, which uses the
body as eyes to be literate, and thus perceives visually through the tangible senses;
one is ‘touched’ by what is rendered visible to oneself. It may be argued that these
visions, (which reminds me of vision in the dark, where one has to ‘find one’s
bearings through touch’) perceived onto the senses rather than the rational, make up
their purest forms. The sense of touch easily draws connection to affect, and
furthermore to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of its quality,15 whose qualities depend
on which space in which it is experienced, or ‘seen’: filled or pure space. One could
say that what is worth seeing, is rendered visible in the dark.

14
As opposed to an optical mode of perception. It origins in the Egyptian art, used to decipher
three dimensional art works, among others sculptures, pottery and architecture.
15
Affect discussed in relation to cinema: good versus bad affect, whether it leaves space for
own interpretation, or fills you up to the extent of exhaustion in Deleuze, G. Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image. (London: The Athlone Press, 1986).

11
The bridge is tempting
for I am weak
The crossing between light, and dark -
its peak

12
3.2 The Pure Stage of the Conscious

The dark establishes a setting, which, as much as it is a space, also is an instrument

with which we extend our intimate being. A being, made up of different stages of
consciousness, which in the dark to a certain extent loses awareness of itself. This loss
is probably rather a transition: “When consciousness makes its way beyond this wall,
it achieves the greatest of all transitions: the transplanting of the inner man.”16 The
dark releases and numbs one’s conscious, and thus fills it up with the same void.
Arthur Holmberg expresses the imprisoned self as “an awareness of self is an
awareness of solitude; we are all locked into the solitary confinement of individual
consciousness.”17 If one’s own consciousness operates merely as a function, one held
hostage within oneself, and is let out only in correspondence with the consciousness
of other subjects or objects, how does one lose its own function, when determining
such a choice means making use of it? If one succeeds in losing awareness of the self,
and the idea of solitude, one has created a platform where no points of references of
external correspondences will enter, for which one’s conscious figurates as a filter.
This way, the consciousness of the self, will be an embodiment of the dark, pure and
filled with nothing. However, this stage of the conscious is not to remain in this
position, unfulfilled, it is rather the depending function, which enables pure
correspondence. This perfect consciousness may be comparable to Rilke’s angel, not
to be mistaken for the angel of the Christian heaven,18 rather some kind of spirit: “The
Angel may be described as the hypostatization of the idea of a perfect consciousness,
- of a being in whom limitations and contradictions of present human nature have
been transcended…”19 One starts to question what was intended for the consciousness
of the human being, whether it was a meeting point of references in which one either
thrives or endures, when an opted stage of the conscious is forever in change.

16
Diolé, P. The Most Beautiful Desert of All. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1959), pp. 14. He
refers to the sea, revealing “the depths of being within us” and therein one’s solitude and
anonymity. As an adventurer travelling the depths of the sea and the dunes of the desert, he at
once assures us with his in-depth knowledge that “a man that was familiar with the deep sea
could never be like other men again.” in: Ibid., pp. 207.
17
Holmberg, A. Directors in Perspective: The Theatre of Robert Wilson. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 67.
18
As he writes in a letter to his Polish translator: the distinction of Christian angels and his
own idea of them. In: Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930), pp.
101.
19
Ibid. pp. 101-102.

13
Perhaps, this constant movement is the right stage of the conscious, expanding it into
sub-consciousness, onto where a pure correspondence will fill the holes, however no
more than just that, of the realm of one’s Being.

14
“The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.”20

20
Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), pp. 182.

15
4. Correspondences:
The spectacle as an ‘unfolder’ of the intimate being

Wherein lies reassurance and consolation, when the consumed and empty void of our
intimate is dying for ‘correspondence’21? This image of ours, slowly distorting, feeds
on the mainspring of mere existence, which, leads us into the depths of our own room.
A room, in which we endure if we do not allow it pervasion of space, one acquired in
the translation of another depth. Reassurance is a mirroring translation, and is only
attained when understood. However, the feeling of being understood is an illusion; “a
satisfactory relationship is the result of a misunderstanding” 22, claims Baudelaire. In
this gap of translation, we will have to add our own images, and thus we live merely
with ourselves even in a world mingling with other subjects, objects or events: those
here referred to spectacles. Ultimately, the spectacle functions in two ways: as a
mirroring, corresponding medium and as a therapeutic reassurance for the
intersubjective. The spectacle, then, lays a puzzle within us, as an impression filling
the gaps of our own image. Rilke seems to view the spectacle, be it whatever comes
his way, as an image, one of which together with others create a collage: one’s own
image: “At bottom, one seeks in everything new (country or person or thing) only an
expression, that helps some personal confession to greater power and maturity. In fact
all things are there in order that they may in some sort become images for us.”23 It
really must be comforting to see everything, and us, as images. We thus designate
responsibility onto a collage, where images mingle by chance and not by choice. The
outside image, the spectacle, is thus a self-produced function in the equation of ‘I’,
nevertheless necessary. Additionally, it is a way of seeing ourselves as a part of the
eternal and infinite, that we are an “infinite in little”.24

Language of this world becomes an extension of the occupied, the busy: a means of
expression corresponding to a world that absorbs rather than gives. To be seen, we
have understood that we must communicate. We long for words that would describe
21
When Baudelaire speaks of corresponding qualities, I believe him to refer to the embodying
force that animates forth and back and translates the external into the intimate, and back
again.
22
Baudelaire, C. Intimate Journals. (New York: Dover Publications, 2006), pp. 89.
23
Rilke, R. M. Requiem and Other Poems. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1949), pp. 19-20.
24
Baudelaire, C. ‘LXXVIII’ Intimate Journals. (New York: Dover Publications, 2006), pp.
90.

16
the realm of our intimate immensity. We turn to glimpses, touches… “Rilke’s
problem was to find symbolic, or what he called ‘external’ equivalents for
experiences that were becoming ever more ‘inward’ and incommunicable, and which,
when he tried to communicate them, were continually bringing him up against the
limitations of language.”25 In the dark, language is encoded to symbols, a religious
kind of language, which, is ‘pre-linguistic’ and communicates a dimension of depth of
the self, rather than a surface of it. It speaks the void of our loneliness. Language in its
ideal way should only play a minor part of all externality communicating with you,
considering authorship and ability to manipulate, but also its limitations.
Evidently, it has been important for us to correspond the shades of our own being
with the light of Jesus and the darkness of death, from religion to modern culture.
Even though it does not give us answers, it must to some extent ease the turning to
one’s own room. Thus does never an external spectacle take place in front of us, or
rather, it is not important what it renders visible, but what it conveys and unfolds for
the intimate, and is therefore utmost subjective.

25
Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930), pp. 16-17.

17
Translate me
and set me free
Relocate me
to where I’m bleeding to be

For I am forever awaiting a storm

to take me on board

18
4.1 Spectacle of Nature:
As found in ‘unfolding’ qualities of birds and the depths of the sea

Where else should a genuine correspondence lie, if not in the realm of nature? There
seems to be a need, which resists to be tamed: origin of man. Of course, there is a turn
in every cultural tendency, seemingly alternating between threatening and nurturing
the origin of the movement. However desperate, we seem not to be able to resist this
law of origin, which turns us inwards, and encourage us to discover the depths of our
own immensity: the immensity of nature. After all, we have found a similar nature
within our own vast intimate. Take elements of nature, which, lie deep within one’s
own being, and when they there again are rendered projected, they must function as a
link and an understanding of that very depth.

Therein, we escape and unfold with the help of the rising and the movement of the
birds, their smooth nature of commencing over and over again and adjusting
themselves. An animal in general, whose vision is directed to and seem closer to the
other side, the dark, because it is “sad with the memory of a more intimate life in the
womb”26, reminds us of how disconnected we really are from this place we too long
for. Birds specifically, have since the beginning been represented in mythology,
religion and later also in society.27 Man think of himself as an owner of the elements
of nature in this world, superior as a distant and jealous onlooker, and thus merely
dream to fly away from here. We regard of its opposite; to fall, as a defeat, as if the
dark would be connected to the Christian hell (which is a terrible mistake) and
therefore are we held hostage by ourselves on this plane earth: “There is one thing he
must again grow capable of: falling, patiently resting in heaviness, - he who presumed
to surpass all the birds in flying.”28
They are widely represented in poetry, as part of this dark so exhaustingly re-
discovered again and again, whose wings poets fear and adore, as the element that
would deliver them this eternal immensity. Yet again, Rilke puts it beautifully: “And
26
Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930), pp. 133.
27
For example, the Goldfinch represented healing and renewal; the death of a Crowe cleansed
battlefields and the Eagle stands for money and both individual and political events.
According to Wheye, D. and Kennedy, D. Humans, Nature and Birds. (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 5; pp. 15.
28
Rilke, R. M. ‘Stunden-Buch’. In: Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press,
1930), pp. 147.

19
louder once again rushes through my deep life, as through flowing now between
broader banks […] I feel more intimate with the Nameless: with my senses, as with
birds…”29 Animals are sometimes said to momentarily exist in the dark, where there
is no time; past or future, no end, no limit, no separation, or parting and no death
opposite to life. Children sometimes enter this condition of Being, which Rilke refers
to the “’open’, but are always jogged back again; lovers draw near to, but are
distracted by the interposing presence of their partners in love.”30
Hence what seems to be the responsibility of the correspondence by spectacles in
any form (or rather our expectation of their consolation) lies within the pulling back to
that state of Being. Birds are more than sufficient and justified in pulling us back
there. They are the symbolic merge between the subject and the object, as it is, but
also part of an otherworldly universe. Bachelard has us understand when discussing
the ideas of Diolé, that when entering a new space we rather change our nature rather
than changing place.31 Birds must enter many different stages, however the most
important and fascinating for us here on earth, must be the entering of the space above
the clouds. Of course, fascination lies within what we cannot reach. There is a sort of
melancholia, which first covers us as a light blanket, then slowly saturates into us and
fills us up. It makes us moist and heavy, and we are frustrated that we cannot fly.
Sadness is only reached when we find out we were never able to. We turn to birds,
when we feel deficient as human beings, while straining to unfold our intimate
immensity. They are thus an embodiment for us of life somewhere else, however, not
as someone else, again comparing to Bachelard’s interpretation of Diolé’s notion of
identification versus place. Perhaps we correspond with birds to this great extent
because we feel the urge only to escape and unfold; not to die. The escapism here,
then, is a setting, which requires no actual physical movement, and is comparable to
the depths of the dark. To witness a bird rising, before you, is in principle a mind-
blowing spectacle.

29
Rilke, R. M. Requiem and Other Poems. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1949), pp. 30-31.
30
Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930), pp. 133.
31
Diolé discussed in Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), pp.
206. Normally analyzing life under-water, Diolé projects the same process onto the desert in
Diolé, P. The Most Beautiful Desert of All. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1959), which is forcing
the subject to change its own nature and adjusting to its surrounding space. For me it is not
the opposite to change place, however, it must be the equivalent.

20
The deep sea within us reaches beyond us, and thus moves us in the search of
consolation and confidence. As it stretches out into for us an infinity, the most
intimate in us move along. “Like the sea, it reveals the depths of being within us”32,
says Diolé. The affect is at once overwhelming, and one’s immediate solitude
demands of us a melancholy but also an interconnection with our origin. Its richness
cannot seem to be conquered by other consolingly qualities in man, it will always be
superior as it holds us from within, reminding us of the maternal hole. We know of all
this, yet a reminder does not harm, as this information interposes itself as a connection
with the dark, and death therein. Sea, and water in general, thus share the same
principal qualities with the dark, where drowning is one’s death. Through the depths
of the sea, we experience an “ultimate birth”,33 throwing us back to the depths where
we once originated, almost as a closing of the circle of re-births (generated by the
dark). To drown is in fact to close one’s eyes. The consolation lies herein with the
idea of our soul being a part of this infinity, with which Baudelaire seems to be
content: “Why is the spectacle of the sea so infinitely and eternally agreeable?
Because the sea presents at once the idea of immensity and movement.”34 The
movement here, however, is contradictory: it encourages a growing depth within,
towards this immensity, as well as instigating a disappearance of the soul through
every new birth. Its own agenda is mastered by the intensions of nature. If we were to
origin from the deep sea, it would in this regard want us back. Hence we only borrow
our shell, and the correspondences made manifested to us, however vague, are merely
the voice from sea speaking to its child.

32
Diolé, P. The Most Beautiful Desert of All. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1959), pp. 14. He
refers to the desert, the earthly twin of the sea, required of man similar sensibilities to
appreciate each one of them.
33
Rilke, R. M. Requiem and Other Poems. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1949), pp. 27.
34
Baudelaire, C. Intimate Journals. (New York: Dover Publications, 2006), pp. 90.

21
“Oh, and there’s Night, there’s Night, when wind full of
cosmic space

Fling that emptiness out of your

arms
into the space we breathe -maybe that the birds
will feel the extended air in a more fervent flight”35

35
Rilke, R. M. ‘The First Elegy’. Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press,
1930), pp. 25.

22
4.1.2 Spectacle of Nature:
Birds as ‘unfolders’ of one’s own intimate being in film: ‘I Am Love’

Does the exterior subject help intimate grandeur unfold, if then, merely as a part of an
element, which combine them into a setting in which the intimate unfolds?
Let me take birds as an example, here used in the film as a mode of the modern
spectacle; in fact, their symbolism is never going out of style and they will remain to
us the way in which they always have been represented in ancient religions and
cultures. They resemble the link between, in some ways a lost and unattached state of
Being to that pure state of Being in the dark. They deliver to us a relief, especially
effective on a screen where experiences are turned into memories, from a burden we
carry in the unconscious. We know that the external corresponding image easier affect
and manipulate one’s hidden images, and that the procedure benefits from a setting
allowing its secrecy acts. One is really undergoing a treatment of therapy, for however
vaguely prepared one’s conscious is, and is theoretically comparable to a setting of
psychological treatment. Even psychoanalyst Momigliano draws to the cause of the
success in realized sets a quality “like the darkness in a cinema, like the silence in a
concert hall….”36 However, a setting does not suffice: to it an additional unfolding
element must be rendered in some way to nurture the soul.

In Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love,37 birds (and other flying creatures) appear in scenes
in which actress Tilda Swinton seems, through these creatures, to let go of her own
Being, transcending into another place, with them. They are in this light merely
visitors from the dark, introducing themselves as an escape. They arise in its most
literal meaning for us as a dream. A dream, of what we already know as brought to us
by the perception by the senses. There is a constant battle between the dream and the
true escape, as the senses have to be translated into reason. All this grows within and
represents the battle of a woman of sin and her sense of being held hostage by the one
she betrays.

36
Birkstead, B. D. ‘The Psychoanalytic Setting’. In: Albano, C. et. alt. Psychoanalysis: The
Unconscious in Everyday Life. (London: Artakt and the Institute of Psychoanalysis [to
coincide with the exhibition Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious in Everyday Life.], 2010), pp.
56.
37
I Am Love. Directed by Luca Guadagnino. (Magnolia Pictures First Sun, 2010), 120 mins
[video: DVD].

23
In [Fig. 1 - 3], after Swinton has ran away from her son’s funeral into a grand
centuries old cathedral and taken off her shoes (something that for obvious reasons
most certainly stand for stability and a solid sense of being on this earth) her husband
finds her, of course in a state of fragility. When he holds her in order to calm her
down: not only a comfort to Swinton, but a threat, she is self-conscious enough to
have her eyes open and recognize a bird in the ceiling. Situated in this large complex,
opened up under this high ceiling, perhaps manifests the unfolding of the character of
Swinton’s own intimate being throughout the film up until this point, but in most
certain cases her escape for consolation. If the room in Proust’s Swanns Way in a way
suggested a recycled intimate: “…little room with the high ceiling […] and partly
walled with mahogany”,38 this space rather resembles another, which is made enabled
and growing to unfold. She is not somewhere else or changed her nature just yet;
nevertheless, her own intimate being has stretched as if it were reaching for the
infinite.
This is a setting, which does not only include a bird as an unfolding element, but
also a window. The setting and the sense it delivers benefits from these diverse
elements, both means to an end that is shared. “Window is a symbol for longing and
expectation, disappointed and parting.”39 This fragility of hers, as of birds, has
culminated into a strong independence, as if she holds herself together and not by
anyone else, symbolized by the window, built up by a long enduring sense of having
been excluded from her own body.

How does this, then, comment on the dark? Whenever the light sips through window
into the dark, a feeling of relief and release arises. However, this is not to say that all
darkness implies fear. Although, it can be argued that the dark is not measured by
physical and geometrical size, rather it is a non-space, infinite and invincible, even for
powers such as light. The dark is merely a setting, in which the intimate being is
enabled to unfold into infinity, supported by these unfolders. The setting, and what the
spectacle resembles, operates in parallel towards a shared intention, when rendered
visible in cinematic settings.

38
Proust, M. Swann’s Way. (London: Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 8.
39
Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930), pp. 146.

24
 [Fig. 1]
Still from ‘I Am Love’

[Fig. 2]
Still from ‘I Am Love’

[Fig. 3]
Still from ‘I Am Love’

25
“From outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within”40

40
Rilke, R. M. ‘Wendung’. In: Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press,
1930), pp. 9.

26
4.2 Spectacle of Modern Culture: A Religion for the Folded

This need for solace and translation of our intimate being seems to be universal and
attached to the longing for that place before, and that place after. It is not by chance
that religion is connected to the spiritual, and represents a great role in society.
Rituals, a given act in every religion, do not merely conjure up an external spirit, but
the one within, similar to Rilke’s angel. Thus through its main effect: that of cleansing
of exterior threats such as demons in the ancient belief, and now of a different kind of
unknown daemonic occupancy of the intimate space (with crying as the utmost
example of release) that spirit is set free. It may well be that these two spirits; the
external as well as the internal, are connected but separated in the transcendent
transfer from the place before to here: that very change of dimension and depth.
However, fascination of death or search for a new becoming is not merely limited to
religious beliefs, it seems to be a universal and collective longing altogether. Hence
when religion became a subsidiary spectacle of commodity, new ones automatically
substitute it.

Let me connect this connection of correspondence and religion through Rilke: You
could imagine that Rilke, so celebrating the un-responded love, the one, which,
endures and strengthens within, is somehow connected to the love to God. Yet
instead, this very love, equivalent to the ‘great death’, is to be remained and preserved
within, and thus expands one’s intimate being, which, correspond more effortlessly
with Nature: the indirect link to God (if one believes). He expresses this when
speaking of Gaspara Stampa,41 and her possibility of turning her love to God, in the
becoming of a nun, but instead turning it inwards, and with his [Rilke] own words
”…she would have become an angel, within, in the depths of nature”42, he affirms the
power of one’s own nature, equivalent to the one of God. When, furthermore, religion
lies in so much more than merely a belief to a supposed Creator, but also in things,
who used to serve as objects of the sacred and be regarded as symbols of its intension:
an apple a fruit, a house a home, instead became products of the intension of the

41
Portuguese woman, whose object of affection ceased to respond to her love, and
nevertheless held on to her love.
42
Passage from Rilke, R. M. Briefe aus der Jahren. (1907-1914), pp. 175-178. In: Rilke, R.
M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930), pp. 150.

27
modern world, they lost their value and have to remain alive within us through
memory.

Thus with this internal image present, our eyes will wander from what does not satisfy
to the illusion of satisfaction. “The spectacle is hence a technological version of the
exiling of human powers in a ‘world beyond’”.43 As we evolve and artificially strain
for a better breed, we challenge nature and thus also religion, and place ourselves
superior to the nature of our origin. We seek, substitutes, as mentioned before, which
lead us to those artificially created by man, by many means far greater and
sophisticated than spectacles of nature and origin: spectacles of modern culture. Even
in spectacles that may appear chaotic and overwhelming, their creators aim for this
dark: “…the circus is a locus of spectacle, fun and abandon, it is also a twilight world
of refuge, danger and loss of self.”44

43
Debord, G. The Society of the Spectacle. (London: Zone Books, 1995), pp. 18.
44
Evans, C. Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness. (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 99.

28
For we do not wish an eternity here,
where rest is not enough
We thrill at the thought of death
and try to drown in the bath
For we know of water as a mere extension
that fills us like
ebb and flow

29
4.2.2 Water as the Dark:
The work of Bill Viola concerning water

Through a short analysis of the work concerning water of Bill Viola, (based especially
on The Messenger in Durham chapel [Fig. 4]) I will make apparent the connection to
the dark, and the transformative death therein.
We know already of the deep sea, whose symbolic I hereby let all water embody, as
one setting of the dark, which, brings one’s earthly consciousness beyond its borders
and hence is put into its subconscious. What I have found in the already made
analyses regarding the work of Viola, somewhat disappointed my expectations. This,
however, could be delusional in correlation to his own idea. According to Stuart
Morgan, “water has become increasingly important in Viola’s work, as a metaphor for
the subconscious mind.”45 What connection is he emphasizing and bringing forth in
us, when he so determinedly is trying to fix this stage of conscious in us? We know
that water is the indirect link to birth, as to re-births, and death. However, in the work
of Viola, in addition to these extremes of life, he seems to resemble life itself.
In analytical comments on his work before, regarding pieces like The Greeting and
Threshold, has been that the features, mostly the subjects, of his work are charged
with ‘more’ life, in order to make the invisible visible. They are beautifully yet
frighteningly slowed down to make the minor gestures grand. “…from the moment of
birth to the moment of death, and, between them, to a figure suspended underwater as
though in space, half realized in light and darkness. Thus we live our lives in ‘fragile
suspension’.”46 A confused state half realized in light and darkness, rather reminds me
of the stage of unconsciousness, a frustrated stage too occupied to perceive, however
pure the correspondences. The dark should not entail a ‘fragile’ suspension, but a
relief of ditto. Perhaps it is to be read as sensitivity towards correspondences in that
stage, and in that case I rather connect his work in water with the dark, sharing the
same qualities of the deep sea.
A life in water, with a vision distorted and blurred, whose richness found in the
immediacy and distance of images revealing themselves only to be concealed,
uncannily resembles a life made up of images. “The absence of images, such as with a

45
Morgan, S. ‘Coming up for air’. In: Sparrow, F. ed. Bill Viola: The Messenger. (Durham:
The Chaplaincy to the Arts and Recreation in North East England, 1996), pp. 9-10.
46
Jasper, D. The Art of Bill Viola: A Theological Reflection. In: Ibid., pp. 16.

30
black or white screen, underexposed or snowy images, has a ‘genetic’ power to
restore our belief in the world.”47

This is also what the images featured in Viola’s work convey: distortion in its
perfection, a dream state. Perhaps the ‘fragile’ state is the dream state, as the night is
the perfect setting of the dark, and thus recycles the death. Herein, as in the depth of
the sea, one’s solitude is one’s link to memories along the ‘z-axis’48. They operate as
one of the most pure of intersubjective correspondences, subconsciously
communicating one’s own images back into oneself.
Let me go back to the death. I was eager and certain to find this within the work of
Viola. And even if it renders itself visible in images of life, we have not passed it by
without the grandeur of movement, as death surpasses life, but we have recognized
the death also in life.

[Fig. 4]
Press image from video installation ‘The Messenger’

47
Deleuze, G. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), pp. 200-201.
48
Bill Viola uses his term ‘z-axis’ when rendering visible the perceived distinction between
experience and the memory of ditto.

31
Now,
slowly open your eyes

There is light
but do not fear

You are filled with this world

yet an escape away from within

You are still safe with me

This storm confuses

but I always find you

I still remember you

Within your own image,

you’ll have me near
where relief is sincere
and vision clear

Mirrors console
once we turned one we leave our soul

You’re on your own now

Your own image

Disappear

Entering the light is entering the dark

You are safe with me

32
5. Epilogue

What is one left with, after entering the dark and subsequently thrown back into the
light? We are lost, as blinded by the dark and attached to the memory of our own
intimate room. Significance herein is often made meaningless, and we violently push
boundaries, to the point of that the signifier is left neglected.49 On much we have
given up our hope: the ability to purely correspond and hence restore our confidence.
Nevertheless, only through these correspondences, however momentary, are we lead
back into the dark. It will come back to us by its own force, breaking mirrors and
through the dreams at night, “because the black of the night is the perfect setting for
dream and mystery […] A deep night from which we can draw the energy to keep
renewing ourselves.”50 It lives on in the empty hole within on which at times we
choke, off which at times we feed, like with salted tears, sheltered from yet exposed in
the world of light.

What, then, has my conviction of the dark to offer when made comparable to similar
ideas of great thinkers throughout history? This notion of a non-spatial setting is at
once an abstract state, yet a concrete room. Similar to Bachelard’s forest, where one
on this earth, too, can situate oneself and hence find whatever is searched for, that is
to be found as long as one travels inwards, accompanying a corresponding setting and
external perceptions, the dark could simply consist of a darkened room. It may seem
banal, but removal of external light is the key. However ambiguous the shape, size or
function: (qualities that disappear in the dark nevertheless) it does not matter, as when
one’s consciousness let go of oneself, it also withdraws from the externality to which
it previously has been attached. For obvious reasons, a room is normally easier to find
than a forest. In this room, all these other notions of imaginary states render
themselves apparent; you are ‘dying’; you find your vast intimate immensity; you find
the Chora and you are your own image.
Therefore, the dark is to be found in natural elements kept by its origin, now on
earth for us to be reminded of our own. The pure way back to our intimate room
interposes itself, in a sense, in the direction of where the birds fly and the water runs. I

49
An issue of post-modernism, further discussed in chapter ‘The Death of the Author’.
Barthes, R. Image, Music, Text. (London: Fontana Press, 1977).
50
Dumas, J-L. Editor’s note. Le Mode d’Hermès. (Autumn/Winter 2010/2011), pp. 2.

33
am most certain it does not only lie within the walls of a supposed house of one sole
God. Therefore, this dark is so widely associated with modern spectacles whose
typical setting is limitary of space and time, and whose unfolding qualities are applied
onto the perceived within those walls. Is there an issue in artificially replicating the
dark, translated into modes we have both pursued and dreaded? I am not sure if we
ever will reach for what we are looking, nevertheless until then, consolation lies
within every pure correspondence as a desire to “fling that emptiness out of your
arms”.51 Rather it is our responsibility to set ourselves in that stage of the conscious,
where it mingles with an external image, which has responsibility of its own to fulfil
ours.

51
Rilke, R. M. ‘The First Elegy’. Rilke, R. M. Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press,
1930), pp. 25.

34
6. Bibliography

Books:

Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.

Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press.

Baudelaire, C. (2006) Intimate Journals. New York: Dover Publications.

Baudelaire, C. (1986) Selected Letters of Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude.

London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Beardsworth, Sarah, Julia Kristeva Psychoanalysis and Modernity (State University

of New York Press, Albany: New York, 2004)

Bergson, H. (1919) L’energie Spirituelle. Paris: University Press of France.

Bergson, H. (2005) Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books.

Debord, G. (1995) The Society of the Spectacle. London: Zone Books.

Deleuze, G. (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: The Athlone Press.

Deleuze, G. (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press.

Diolé, P. (1957) 4000 Years Under the Sea: Excursions in Undersea Archaeology.
London: Pan Books.

Diolé, P. (1959) The Most Beautiful Desert of All. London: Jonathan Cape.

Evans, C. (2003) Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Holmberg, A. (1996) Directors in Perspective: The Theatre of Robert Wilson.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kristeva, J. (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language. New York and London: Columbia
University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge &

Kegan.

Proust, M. (2004) Swann’s Way. London: Penguin Books.

Rilke, R. M. (1949) Requiem and Other Poems. London: The Hogarth Press.

Rilke, R. M. (1939) Duino Elegies. London: The Hogarth Press.

35
Wheye, D. and Kennedy, D. (2008) Humans, Nature and Birds. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press.

Exhibition Catalogues:

Albano, C. eds. (2010) Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious in Everyday Life. London:

Artakt and the Institute of Psychoanalysis [to coincide with the exhibition
Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious in Everyday Life.]

Sparrow, F. ed. (1996) Bill Viola: The Messenger. Durham: The Chaplaincy to the
Arts and Recreation in North East England.

Films:

I Am Love (2008) Directed by Luca Guadagnino, Magnolia Pictures First Sun, 120
mins [video: DVD]

Magazines:

Le Mode d’Hermès. Autumn/Winter 2010/2011. Paris: Hermès.

36