inhabitatione le consciousness

"ooh OOH ooh, woh-oh-oh, oooh OOOH ooh, a higher power"

I am writing about a song by a Swedish poppist, the Lekman; the story of a love discovered as divine through blasphemous acts of irrational ecstasy.

"In church on Sunday making out in front of the preacher/You had a black shirt on with a big picture of Nietzsche/When we had done our thing for a full christian hour/ I had made up my mind that there must be a higher power"

I'm on a god kick: yesterday I woke up and watched Bergman's Winter Light, a film that worships god in the only way I regard meaningful, ridiculing every solidified notion determined by the christian institution: trust in a creator that has created so much sorrow, participation in the holy communion between characters without any hope of communicating their hopelessness, and punctuating the revelation of godlessness with the suicide of Max von Sydow, Bergman's devout knight of ceaseless hope and terrible vengeance.

I also enjoyed "The Virgin Spring", which is back, as far as I understand it, in medieval Sweden. Two images from that film are still with me weeks later. After the revelation of his daughter's rape and murder, Max von Sydow leaves his family and wordlessly approaches a lone ash tree; the ambivalence of his place and intention, his purpose for the tree, one might fathom, in each of their solitudes, his and the tree's, may be a sort of pained repentance, a focus on young beauty, the tree is only a few years old... growing as true and healthy as his his untainted daughter before her murder.

But, as we see, the violence must be consecrated through the sapling's brutal destruction- not with the elegance of a blade, the tree is ripped down by Von Sydow's broken heart and merciless hands. The struggle endures a poignant lapse of terrible bending, powerless, but ceaseless exertion, in one direction, but back the other, back and forth the tree is categorically doomed, weakening and weakening in the knight's hands until its foundation is irreparably compromised, and the young plant rests on the ground, to whither on its lonely bluff. I find this scene infinitely more poignant as a representation of violence than almost any human to human representation; it even might trump cruelty to animals, which always inspires faces pinched with disgust, gut-reactions of coercive vengeful energy, loud cries of incoherent anger, etc. To compare these representations, one has to contextualize the inspirations for violence. In the gut-reaction to defend the life of a weaker "loved-thing," the polarity of good and evil is definite and simple: kill the cruel fucker. The energy crescendos and climaxes like an orgasm of hatred, which it is.

When Von Sydow approaches the tree, his hatred is either concealed or neutralized. His energy is not chaotic, but persistent, and in the context of the film, resigned and fateful. It occurs within a context of immense, inexpressible sorrow- in that the evil is internalized, the color of the pain is understood as unfathomable, in how Von Sydow's act occurs in silence: the destruction is not accomplished with a naive intuition that all will be set right again, but with a determination reflecting the irrevocable weight of all that has occurred in this life that up until then was governed by a just and loving god: this violence against nature consummates the fear that god has retreated and left humans to fend for themselves. call it existential violence, sublimated vengeance.

The other, literally magical scene is the final miracle at the site of the virgin's death, and I'm going to pretend to work now so let's look at that later.