“Survival” As War-making – When Fight For “Survival” Intensifies, Human Soul Dies

The only meaningful way of relating to the stories of Primo Levi, Imre Kertesz’ novel “Fatelessness”, Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales” or Herta Muller’s novels and short stories from totalitarian Romania is to read them as testimonies of a total collapse of human conduct and responsibility: a collapse of such a nature and on such a scale that it transcends any attempt to explain them exclusively in terms of historical, political or psychological concepts; a collapse that is like a contagion, and like a contagion penetrates our self-knowledge at all levels… There are no unblemished witnesses, as it is perfectly possible to be a victim yet not wholly blameless. And there is no language… through which pure, unsullied experience could find expression.
Steve Sem-Sandberg, “Even nameless horrors must be named”

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Mother (about the daughter) – She was seen in the woods with Monblat’s son.

Father – So what? He is rich. His father made a bundle during the occupation. The kid joined the Resistance at the last moment. Now he‘s a businessman, like his father. That why she likes him. Am I right? It’s sad but it’s true. The only thing that counts in life is money. Your mother agrees! If you (to the daughter) marry him, she’ll forgive you.

Mother – Marriage? He is just playing around!

Father – A smart girl can gain a lot by being a rich man’s mistress.

Mother – Even if she’s pregnant?

Father – That should be avoided. Kids are expensive and cause trouble. You (to the daughter) have time. You want to go to Paris, be an actress. Do it. You flanked out of school, but you’re pretty. Anyway, actors don’t need a diploma. Your mother is right. Stay out of woods. Do it in a room.

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Leopold (to his wife) – We got into beer in 1933, went to war in 1939 and got bombed in 1944 just so that I could become a poet!

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Archambaud – I feel dirty deep down in my gut. I have been a part of so much slime and crime.

Watrin – By staying silent. And so have I. We are hypocrites, like most people. The times demand it. Do you know a lot of brave people, heroes, friends? But men are still wonderful. If a man lives to see a single daisy it’s all worth it. And there are woods, elephants…

From the dialogues in “Uranus”

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The characters in “Uranus” represent variations of condition of the human soul in circumstances when humane life is impossible. On this poster, from left to right, we see in the background: an engineer Archambaud (a sympathizer, during occupation, with Nazi ideology), a teacher of poetry Watrin (a man “not of this world”), his son who has returned after the end of WW2 from a German camp for French POWs, communist railway worker Rochard (a scoundrel, motivated by hate), Gaigneux (a “pragmatic” communist), Jourdan (a militant communist), Archambaud’s daughter (intelligent girl trying to be a decent human being), Mme Archambaud, Maxime Loin (Petain loyalist), Monblat (a “multibillionaire”), Leopold’s wife, policemen, right wing fanatics; and in the foreground – a jingoistic boy with a toy-machine gun, jingoistic girls with French flags, and Leopold (the pub-owner and drunkard – personification of the human soul lost and trapped in impossible circumstances).

This shot represents Dr. Archambaud, a senior engineer at the local plant, as a person who saw something terrifying, something that is unbearable for the human eyes to see, what wasn’t meant for the human soul to witness. What can that be? – The war that recently ended with the German capitulation? – The bombing of his town by the allies that killed so many innocent people? – Human cruelty towards other people? Yes, but he saw more than that. What he discovered is that in order to “survive” people will do everything, that they can “swallow” their fellow humans without any or with only minor torments of conscience. It is this knowledge that is reflected in Archambaud’s gaze we observe in this still. Is he looking at us, the viewers of the film? Is he looking only at his contemporaries or at us in the beginning of 21st century?

Reaction of Watrin, teacher of literature at the elementary school, on seeing the corruption and corrosion of the human soul (moved by ideological idolatry and human desire to survive and be saved by any price), is even more radical than in Archambaud. While Archambaud still keeps the ability to look at the world (with a terrible price of hypocrisy and cynicism to balance the unbearable reality: hypocrisy is a sign of split between positive self-image and the objective truth of how we really are – of our immoral behavior), Watrin completely lost the ability to see the truth. He looks through the factual world – at the sun and the moon, at the good potentials of our human nature, at the very innocence of human sinfulness, at embarrassing but redeeming coexistence of human naiveté and human criminality. If Archambaud becomes psychologically fragmented (loses human wholeness), becomes “post-modernistically” schizoid, Watrin is maniacally, absurdly, saintly, insanely positive and “optimistic” in spite of everything

Archambaud helps Watrin to put on an optimistic bowtie for the event of celebrating the return of the French POWs released by Germans after the end of war. Amongst the returning soldiers is Watrin’s son who doesn’t know yet that his mother is killed during one of the bombing raids on the city by the allied forces.

The absurdity of cheap (completely imaginary) joy that war ended (when narcissism of self-assertion and egoistic joy of individual survival prevail over compassion and the ability to assess what’s happened) is emphasized in this shot by the clownish attire of Watrin and mixture between the Communist, French and festive flags. A psychologically defensive need of the French masses to vengefully cheer the defeat of Germans, who earlier prevailed over them, makes people turn away from questioning and analyzing what happened with the world and them.

Jourdan is a French communist dogmatic and militant fanatic presiding over the post-war hunt after Collaborationists and Petain loyalists. This small, thinly framed and personally timid creature who still needs his old mother’s emotional encouragement and who in his letters to her often confesses about his political ordeals, has an inflamed socio-political passions. He prepares himself for the ultimate battle for the “communist’ heaven against the “capitalist” evils. This personage is Berri’s parody on numerous “positive” heroes (meant as role models for the viewers) of Soviet propaganda movies. With his irrationally obsessive political “activism” Jourdan is responsible for many mistakes in judgment and for many innocent victims wrongly accused of collaboration with Germans. Jourdan is an explosive mixture of political idolatry and a fundamentalist inability to differentiate between logic of the ideas and logic of the social reality.

Here we see Jourdan in between two portraits of his mother, behind him on the wall and in front of him on the desk, in an epistolary contact with her. His political fanaticism cannot be separated from his psychological infantilism, from being emotionally completely inside the imaginary (covered up by his blind belief in communist doctrine). His deductive thinking (neglecting complications and ambiguities of reality) is completely “geometrical”. His psychology is very close to the American “theoreticians” of economic “shock therapy” and “austerity measures” who apply combinations of concepts to reality without taking into consideration their real price in terms of the human deprivations as a result of implementation of their “theories”. For Jourdan victory of communism is beyond human cost, like for today’s Wall Street schemers and today’s corporate entrepreneurs their perfumed profits.

Gaignaux is a “communist pragmatic”, a moderate/rational political believer, the type that in Soviet Union was completely destroyed during Stalin’s purges of late 30s – early 50s. Following Marcel Ayme (the author of the novel the film is based on) Berri provides Gaignaux with four characteristics meant to emphasize his ordinary humanness and not being fanatic and dogmatic. It is his love for children, his amorous need (both features are absent in the dogmatic/fanatic politicians for whom their children are an extension of themselves and love is reduced to sexual victories), absence of vengeful feelings, and loyalty not to a political doctrine as such but to an existential stance of political fight.

Gaigneux is not a sexually promiscuous type. He like almost everybody reacts on beauty and purity. He is not a particularly humane person, he is also a political functionary, but he is without a psychotic streak of people like Jourdan.

Instead of using the return of the peace for trying to understand better what’s happening with people living under inhumane conditions, the world after the war occupies itself with new rounds of political propaganda and pop-entertainment, and, of course, with feverish money- and career-making. Pay attention to the co-existence of Christian symbols and entertaining movie-ads (psychologically, cousins – both exploit the human proneness to prefer imaginary bliss on the swings of identification to facts, analysis and truth) in Archambauds’ bedroom.

Why Archambaud’s wife couldn’t resist “emotionally helping” Maxime Loin, a conservative political activist under Vichy government, when her husband moved by humane impulse let him to hide in their place? She herself refers to Christianity as a religion of forgiveness. But more detailed impressions from her personality tell us another, less noble story. Maxime Loin is doomed. Earlier or later he has to surrender not to endanger even more people who helped him. Like Gaigneux he is in love with Archambaud’s beautiful and intelligent daughter. Maxime Loin knows he will be executed by the Communists; he trembles with fear and dreams of what will never happen in his destiny. He is an ideal person to be used as an existential stimulation (on somebody’s despair it’s possible to harvest passion that is the last flash of life, last outburst of vitality). Mme Archambaud feels predatorily triumphant around Loin (like a female spider eating her mate).

Monblat is a crushing power from behind his desk (that is the 1945 equivalent, for example, of the office of Goldman Sachs’ CEO today). Pay attention to several phallic symbols around him including the angelic figurine keeping the light – financial power is means of wealth but its goal is to reach the godly might dressed in angelic kindness.

Monblat is a successful business dealer under any system of power. He made money under Nazis; he will make more under French Communists. Politicians and administrators always love wealthy people (they need money) and this gives Monblats of the world incredible advantage. For them money/profit is priceless. Money, like god, is beyond human frame of reference.

Rochard represents in the film a type of communist who is ready to try anything immoral not for the sake of success of his political belief but for the sake of being ahead and above others. He is ready to intrigue, to lie, do anything just to win. Stalin’s KGB guard in the late 30s was made of Rochard dough. Bush-Rumsfelds and Rove-Cheneys belong to the same category. Rochard is tragically a universal type of lout under the mantilla of political righteousness.

Rochard deserves to be treated like Leopold treats him (after he lied that he saw Maxime Loin hiding in Leopold’s pub), even though Leopold is wrong to treat him like this.

Claude Berri is rehearsing a scene with Gerard Depardieu.

Leopold is worried because of Rochard’s open menaces to report him to the Communist authorities for the crime he didn’t commit.

When a person is innocent of a crime he is accused of he is worried even more than when he knows that he is actually guilty – the guilt is not primarily a matter of legality, the Law, prosecutors, judges and Jury. The guilt/innocence is, first of all, connected with the truth of our identity. This truth is what makes us what we are; it is our personality, our very essence. To be accused wrongly drives us insane exactly because it’s crumbling our personality, distorting and violating it, making us, as if, not-existing.

Leopold escapes into poetry – so unbearable is for him the world that insinuates his identity. Yes, he wasn’t rebellious against German rule, but so the majority of French. Yes, he had his small business. But Rochard just to revenge him for being successful represents him as a pro-Nazi.

In magnificent constellation of personages in “Uranus”, Leopold plays a similar role as the double of Shingen in Kurosawa’s “Kagemusha” (1980). Instead of being one of the characters Leopold personifies the very condition of the crumbling soul in all of them. Gerard Depardieu acts the agonizing death of the human soul in those who survived the WW2 – exactly what so frightened Archambaud and what made Watrin turn away from the reality. With each war we become more and more inclined to start the next one.

The death of Leopold signifies the death of the soul of the modern man who in order to survive has lost with his humanness his humanity. The scene of Leopold’s death is one of the most impressively acted scenes in the history of intellectual cinema.

Claude Berri with his youngest son, the film actor – look at Berri’s gaze, it’s not like Archhambaud’s and not like Watrin’s. It is a gaze of a person who has taken to himself all the burden of the truth about the condition of human soul that he is trying to describe in his films to make a difference. And his son respects and loves him for this incredible courage.

This is a commercial poster of “Uranus” with reduced quantity of characters. Pay attention to how the right wing insignia in the upper right corner of the poster is symmetrically contrasted with left wing banners.

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In the very beginning of the film we see a man’s big fat rear pulling itself up from the prostrated body of a beautiful girl with a gaze of compassionate distance. The faceless, flabby guy is pulling up his pants as if after using toilet. The connotation here is that the survivalism under extreme conditions is destructive for the human psyche (only calculating mind is left from it), and then only body can be a channel for human self-expression and self-realization. Fat guy steps away from the place of sinful embrace. He is a billionaire Monblat’s son, and the girl with him is the daughter of the engineer Archambaud. Both fathers during the occupation sympathized with Nazi ideology and Monblat did more than that – he collaborated with the right wing pro-Nazi French government and had business relationships directly with German entrepreneurs. But what is the significance of the fact that Berri starts the film with a sexual intercourse in the forest on the outskirts of the town? Is he making a point about animalization of love – its reduction into sex as a result of war and pauperization? Or is he trying to say about the necessity to hide whatever it is – love or sex, from other people because of fear of enraged gossip among neighbors polarized by ideologically enhanced mutual hate? Or the point here is that love that people are unlearning (because of over-occupation with “hate, fight and survival”) hides not only from gazes of others, but hides from itself behind/under sex? Is war achieved “sexual revolution” – freedom of sexual self-assertion by the price of destroying the very ability for (disinterestedly) loving?

“Uranus” classifies the types of people whose souls were either completely or in a substantial degree destroyed by the “tough times” they were moving through. The analogy with Kon Ichikawa’s “Fires on the Plain” (1959) may be helpful here. Watching this film about the predicament of Japanese soldiers at the end of WW2 we cannot avoid noticing a similarity with today’s American life – comparison of times of actual war with so called peaceful life in US. Like Ichikawa emphasizes the intensity of a naked fight for survival amongst the Japanese soldiers trapped in the Philippines in 1945, like Berri underlines the condition of brutalization and atrophy of the soul in the French population in the same historical period, the both directors on the level of semantic (deep) structure address the desperate fight for survival in general (including fight for financial “survival” according to the norms of American life in 21st century). Brutal behavior of the American right wing corporations taking away from their fellow Americans the right to work and sending American jobs to other countries, recent administrative and political attacks on American education, pensions for elderly and help to an enlarging segment of the poor – create similar psychological effects on American life today as what is described by Ichikawa and Berri.

Berri provides a detailed criticism of both – collaborationists and communists because he sees the same moral degradation in both mutually antagonistic camps. The film is about immorality of the both sides involved into a hateful fight for an unconditional victory of their side in the fight.

For people who joined hate (regardless of which side they are on – extreme right or extreme left) to morally survive the war is no brainer. These people are always on the moral side of the universe in their own eyes, even when (and especially when) they behave immorally. That’s what pop-morality is – the person takes refuge in the alibi provided by the political system which guarantees that our sins and crimes, as soon as we are committed to official jingoistic ideology, are no longer considered sins and crimes and by the very magic of the political/ideological belief are transformed into heroic deeds. That’s what “Uranus” is all about – it shows how severe conditions of life and tricky cultural clichés neutralize our moral consciousness and then we become “tolerant” of our behavioral immorality in the name of our political/ideological fetish, be it belief in the Communist future, in superiority of the Third Reich or in “American democracy”. Feeling of hate to whoever it is then is a proto-immorality, a psychological trigger of immoral behavior.

In one of the most important scenes of the film (when after the end of war the city celebrates the return of French POWs from German camp) we see violence unleashed by the French right-wing nationalists celebrating final triumph over the “krauts” and their contempt for the French POWs who “surrendered to the enemy” – we feel that lessons of war are not understood once again, that war is interpreted not in term of its tragic results for everyone, but in the spirit of the primitive right wing hate and competitiveness for the place of winner over loser. Barbaric emotions which have led to war in the first place are unleashed again, after the war is over.

According to the film, six basic motivations determine human behavior during “hard times” – trying to succeed in survival and salvation by any price (everybody), money/profit/power idolatry (Monblat), political ideology idolatry (Jourdan, Gaigneux, Rochard, Maxime Loin), intolerance: sharpening teeth for revenge (Rochard), common sense (Archambaud, Watrin), compassion (critically problematized by Berri) complicated by egoistic psychological motivations (Archambaud, Watrin).

“Uranus” is an impossible (admirable) cinematographic poem about the (terrifying) deadening of human soul.

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Transcendent Eroticism and Existential Spirituality In Tsvetaeva’s Erotic Poems

One of the most linguistically original among the Russian poets, Tsvetaeva has an exceptional ability to realize her visceral vision of the reality through new lexical combinations and semantic clashes and juxtapositions.

The world migration started in the darkness:
It’s trees stroll along night earth,
It’s bunches of grapes ferment with golden wine,
It’s stars wander from home to home,
It’s rivers start to flow backward!
And I want on your chest – to sleep.

Jan. 14, 1917

Erotic process as a spiritual experience starts for Tsvetaeva with the “world migration” felt simultaneously in and outside the soul of her lyrical heroine. Trees start to move along the earth, the stars to wander “from home to home”. The whole being of a person is awakened within sleep like “bunches of grapes ferment with golden wine”. Mutation of nature – a radical change in the direction of the rivers is a prerequisite for the appearance of the desire to sleep on the chest of the beloved.

What Tsvetaeva is telling us here is that eroticism as a spiritual process takes mystical preparation and concentration (that without this erotic yoga, love is only a fear of loneliness and need in symbiotic response – a psychological defense, and sexuality – a predatory vanity).

The chest of the beloved for Tsvetaeva’s heroine is a “magic flesh” she feels herself “on” regardless of the position of bodies in love.

To O. Mandelstam

From where such tenderness?
And what to do with it, the sly teen,
a vagabond singer,
with eyelashes – there are no longer ones.

Feb 18, 1916

The first stance underlines the incompatibility between emotion of tenderness and assessment of the “attractive qualities” of the loved one. For Tsvetaeva’s lyric heroine it is not Eros that triggers erotic response but a combination of Agape and Amour. From the very first words of the poem, Tsvetaeva “dares” to take the reader directly to the bed of love.

The second stance introduces the most “revolutionary” lines in the Russian poetry (in the genre of meditation on erotic experience). Rhythms of cosmic life (“Stars rose and faded”) coincide with human bodily love (“Eyes rose and faded/Near my very eyes”). The readers are invited to try to understand exactly what Tsvetaeva means when the eyes of the beloved (during love making) rise and fade.

The third stance as if awakens doubt of the first stance – Tsvetaeva’s heroine is in love even more because her beloved’s lips “are not dark enough” and his songs to her are not the most perfect ones.

The last stance defines the impossibility to resolve love of tenderness in a diachronic world of time (it’s congruent only with a synchronic universe). The beams of the eyelashes of Tsvetaeva’s beloved point to nowhere except the eternity of memory, art and wisdom.

To kiss the forehead – wipe away worries.
I kiss you on your forehead.
To kiss the eyes – take away sleeplessness.
I kiss you on your eyes.
To kiss the lips – quench thirst.
I kiss you on your lips.
To kiss the forehead – wipe away memory.
I kiss you on your forehead.

June 5, 1917

The forehead is not the most erotically arousing part of the human body. Still, in Tsvetaeva’s poem the forehead is invoked two times, ahead of eyes and lips – Tsvetaeva’s spiritual eroticism cathects the forehead more than the eyes (outside poetry usually the focus of “romantic” adoration) and lips (usually the rainbow entrance into the dark cave of the flesh). Tsvetaeva’s understanding is that refined (effective) sexuality is impossible without the participation of the mental factor and that without the “forehead’s” involvement sex becomes of the size of human genitals or conventional social rituals.

Kissing on the eyes and kissing on the forehead (healing the beloved through wiping away worries and memory) are oriented on elimination of the hindrance for love (removal of the need to observe, to visually and/or situationally control), while kissing the lips is the only “positive” reference to the role of erotic togetherness, but not in the conventional sense as triggering of the “unconditional” reflex of sexual arousal, but rather as an eroticized Agape’s reaction on the human emotional need to be attended. Tsvetaeva saves the “lips” from the intruding intensity of yearning for sexual release – from penetrating impatience.

Tsvetaeva’s emphasis on “worries” and “memory” as radical obstacles for love is important – a too overwhelming present and past, both are hostile to love’s self-realization and to life’s ability to promote it. The result is the destruction of emotional sensitivity – transformation of tremble into trouble, Eros into Icarus, and sex into socks.

*Literal translation by V.E.

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Global Corporations and Wall Street Money-dealers Are the Unconditional Authorities In the 21st Century US As the Communist Party Was In Soviet Russia

The matter here is who is in charge of the government. In Soviet Russia (SRussia) to be in command meant to give orders and punish those who don’t follow. But in US today the situation is more complicated and at the same time more basic – here to be in charge of the government means to own the politicians: to have the power to provide (or not) the money that are desperately needed for politicians’ survival (for sustaining their ability to keep their job, careers, future). The professional politicians are fed by the donations of the financial elite without which they will not be elected/re-elected because they will not have the money to advertize themselves to the electorate and denigrate their opponents. Wealthy people’s money is a survival kit for the politicians “elected” by simpletons who think that election is the main step in the politicians’ political career while in reality it is a preliminary, almost a tentative step to the grand money-future of the American politicians.

In SRussia the “Commander-in-Chief” of the Soviet government was the Communist Party, but today for many Americans it‘s more and more obvious that their “democratically elected” government is just an obedient clerk of the corporate elite. Still, is it correct to compare the Soviet Communist Party (the cult of utopian political doctrine) with American big business, “pragmatic people occupied with personal profit” amidst real life, even although they may be not the most generous people in the world? How business elite can be considered similar with ideological elite? – By applying the operational criterion of how much power it has over the political decision-making, and secondly, by considering the common psychology of the power-keepers (their tendency to manipulate the reality to keep and enhance their dominant position).

Like the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party lived on taxpayers’ money, American business/financial elite is grazing in the same meadow (by enjoying massive subsidies and finding endless loopholes not to pay taxes). If so, why the poor Russians and poor, near poor and at risk of becoming poor Americans agreed/agree to admire their elites, to make sacrifices for the sake of the masters of their countries, and be ready to sacrifice their lives defending in wars those who rule over them? Is it only the question of the power of the financial and ideological elite encircled by the army, police and secret agents? Or is it also the magic power (seductive influence) of ideology over human imagination – in SRussia the ideology of Communism and in US today the ideology of money/profit as the ultimate value of human life? Like SRussians were dreaming about Communist prosperity and loved Communist idea (of brotherhood, equality and prosperity in the future Communist society), Americans not only enjoy cheap/fake prosperity of mass-culture society but their common dream of becoming wealthy (the American dream of being rich feeds the ideology of money like SRussians were dreaming of collective happiness with militant jingoistic loyalty that, as they believed, will take them there).

As simplemindedly trusting Soviet propaganda Russians believed in Communism like virginal souls, mass Americans today are not less naïve believers in glory/glamour of money-profit. Ultimately, the both ideologies promise unconditional prosperity, well being, and consumer paradise. Even today, after “disappointment” with the extremist behavior of corporatists and financiers who learned how to become even subtler crooks and more sophisticated robbers, Americans are still susceptible to the right wing propaganda claiming that “democratic government’s regulations” are the reason for all bad things. Pop-Americans are full of irrational hope that by magic combination of financial manipulation tricks – ultimate prosperity will eventually come down on them from the sky that will release an unlimited amount of money like manna. People are believers by their human nature (for so many centuries they were trained by their leader-bosses that one day their religious and later political ideological beliefs will reward them with a paradisiacal prosperity). In SRussia credulity in relation to Communist propaganda made dreams of SRussians false and their proclivity to believe wasted. In US identification of the meaning of human life with material achievements, consumerist/possessive pride and professional career has led to a social climate that nurtured Wall Street speculators, corporate greed and absurd militarist adventures.

Only democracy corresponds to the possibility of reaching a rational level of understanding of a humane meaning of material prosperity and moral sensibility. But today American democracy is endangered by the invasion of oilnivorous (eating petroleum to have more controlium over human life, nature and the world) corporate giants-tyrannosauruses and by moneyvorous Wall Street banksters, these equivalents of the ruthless rule of Soviet Communist party.

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Video-games and Pop-entertainment as the Commercial Equivalent of Fundamentalist (Religious and Political) Beliefs

Fundamentalist perception of oral or written narratives (tautological, without any sense of connotation, like an automatic action) and authoritarian/totalitarian communication – ATC, which corresponds to it – is a way to transform narratives into a toy, and listening, reading or watching them into a child’s game, into a make-belief. Religious fundamentalism as a tautological perception of stories and ATC communication are the equivalent, in the area of religious beliefs and practices, of what mass-cultural perception and communication is in the secular area. In mass culture we observe the same fundamentalist tautological perception and the same type of communication that we see in fundamentalist religious perception of reality. What is perceived is identical or near identical to what is communicated – no connotation or interpretation intervene between the communicator and the receiver, no mental space mediates between what is communicated and what is perceived.

What for people who try to please God is religious fundamentalism and for the ones who try to please a commanding officer a commanding communication (CC), for mass-cultural consumer and the entertaining communication (EC) are images and goods he/she consumes/appropriates. Semantic tautology is the psychological mechanism in all three cases. And with it to people comes a fundamentalist pleasure of having precious privilege not to be occupied with connotations, to be free from the necessity to deploy interpretation with its relativity and insecurity.

It is the absence of connotation what transforms communication into a toy – into a consumed object, into pure energy of appropriation/consumption with resulting very rewarding pleasure. ATC (including commercial communication: the one between producer/seller and consumer) is a communicational aspect of the same phenomenon psychological aspect of which is tautological fundamentalism.

It is helpful to represent the instrumental form of ATC (for example, military order from higher to lower ranks) as a transitional form between religious fundamentalism (transforming religion into a toy of pop-belief) and mass-cultural entertainment. Like religious dogmas in fundamentalist perception are taken as commands – without any connotation, words and phrases of military commands and entertainment’s super-stars are taken with a passive imitation, through symbiotic identification. Religious and political dogmas, military commands and super-stars’ self-expressions are oriented on direct and immediate identifications on the part of those at the receiving end. This kind of non-critical identification is the psychological essence of the relationship between a human being and a toy. Like religious fundamentalist appropriates/consumes/identifies with the religious maxims, images and authorities, like a soldier appropriates his colonel’s order and his general’s commending and encouraging gaze, like a sport- or pop-music fan emotionally swallows/appropriates the star’s face and voice – in the same way a child makes its toy not only part of his body, but an object of his internal world.

But the age of technologically advanced toys has brought about a new epoch of a more profound fundamentalization of human communication and tautologization of human thinking about the world. High-tech toys come to children with the aura of independence from existential frame of reference; they are a goal in itself, their own world, other (better) planet. These toys are the new version of narratives (where connotation is destroyed not only subjectively, on the level of perception – through a fundamentalist [tautology oriented] psychological reaction, but objectively, through the elimination [in the toy] the existential reference, reference to the common good of the society). Communication between a high-tech toy, like, for example, video-game, and a human being, corresponds to a fundamentalist psychological code, when there is no room for otherness/dissimilarity between the sender and receiver – the more the receiver becomes identical with the game the more effective he/she becomes as a player.

While in religious fundamentalism identification with the dogma and religious authorities will always keep an inequality in the existential space, while in the army identification with the commander-in-chief will always keep inequality in real life situations, while in mass-cultural communicational relations between the star and fan and entertaining idea or image and their consumer the difference between the idol and its worshipper is blurred – the identification between video-game player and the video-game takes place inside a completely artificial communicative space. Such space doesn’t need the reality at all. In this feature of high-tech toys lies their destructive power. Now it is not only fundamentalism of toy as a narrative the problem. It is toy’s complete freedom from the existential system of coordinate, its complete independence from human life. And it means that the psyche of those who play with these toys is already not an existential psyche capable of balancing its imaginative needs by the awareness of its existential limits (the fragility of human body, identification with otherness of other people which makes us capable of developing empathy and compassion, and ability to take into consideration the vulnerability of individual and planetary life).

But now toy-me or me-toy becomes the king – not king of earthly proportions, but king beyond and above life. We are less and less interested in life and more and more are playing with super-toys – new weapon systems, incredible profits, and high-tech science. As soon as they are not regulated by life (but directed by our super-human ambitions), they are in a unique position of destroying life because they are not part of it. Our human part cannot control our toy-obsessions because the more we play with real weapons and “unreal” (super-human) profits we are weaker and weaker in our ability to improve our understanding of life and make it more refined and humane.

“Communication” between high-tech toy like the video-game and human being follows the archaic fundamentalist code when there is no semantic difference between the sender and receiver – when receiver blindly follows/identifies with message – acts according to prescription/command incarnated into the rules of the game.

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Pantheization of Love-object As One of The Unconscious Strategies To Make Separation Easier (To Make Torment Bearable)

…The blonde girl on the beach… The girl’s long hair…caresses his head, tying him to his vision, allowing him no escape from his memory. David Loshak, “Munch”, PRC, 2001, p. 62

Edvard Munch, “Separation” (1896)

The nature of personal love contradicts the nature of human life. While love is all about coming together and becoming one, life is about separation. We lose the maternal womb, after this – symbiosis with mother and later with our own body, and finally – symbiosis with life. Life is a chain of our attempts to survive our separation from love. Torments of love are our very transition from love to life.

To be able to survive the loss of love, the protagonist of “Separation” – a “romantic” with pale face and somber mimics, unconsciously helps himself by transforming in his imagination the lost love into the “part of landscape” – into the nature he then can solemnly transcend through his noble suffering. The world in Munch’s painting splits into past and present and simultaneously into external and internal world (nature and human consciousness).

The tree on the left of the painting marks the border between the past/nature where the protagonist as if disposes his broken love (mixture of a melancholic pale purple with the earthy brown under the black clouds), and the present consisting of the expressive and symbolic world of a sublimated (self-reflective) suffering. The lost object of our love that we unconsciously impersonalize, is then, as if, transformed into a “natural phantom” – we pantheize it to make it easier for us to survive its loss.

Separation in “Separation” is without hope and without future. The painting is a representation of past and present of human experience of separation from love, and of art as its symbolization. The past and the external world are painterly “incarnated” in the background of the painting, the present and the internal world – in the middle-ground, and the future – in painting’s absent foreground (in the very canvass). The present extends itself into painting instead prolonging itself into future.

The girl’s hair is a continuation of the landscape (the earth). And the landscape is a continuation of her dress-body (of the sunlight mixed with sand). Her face is generic – as if erased by the male protagonist’s pain. She is earth and air, and the curves of her figure are that of the water. But he is transformed into fire. If she is three of the four elements, what is left of him is just one, and even this one is self-consuming. His blood of grief is that of the fire of self-annihilation (the impossibility of losing love). The girl’s impersonalization and “dehumanization in “Separation” (her psychological destruction) is a prerequisite for the appearing of the very artistic form. According to the logic of Munch’s images, the pain of losing love leads to the transformation of reality into intelligence (reality of love into intelligence of life). The joy of loving is beautifully wasteful, while pain of separating from love is the accumulation of this beauty of love into artistic form. Intelligence inserts itself between love and life if the person is able to sustain the pain of love-loss.

Can the necessity to pantheize woman who “abandoned” our male protagonist be a sign that she was never much of a personality for him, that her image in his mind was not too individualized by him, that it always was close to be as generic as it is in this painting? The tendency to “generalize” the woman we love, to perceive her as a part of our own personality tells about the absence of interest on our part to perceive her as an independent human being, free from our projections. It tells about the narcissistic (self-occupied) nature of our love. While a narcissist with a superficial (shallow) character will not suffer too much about amorous loss, the narcissist with a profound personality is in the danger of not surviving separation (with the object of his love he loses too much of his self).

But what is the nature of this double-headed creature right in front of the main protagonist who has as if, stopped before his unknown future while being occupied with what has already become his past? “The lovelorn man appears about to move forward, into the future, but his path is blocked by the crimson plant, possibly intended as a mandrake, with its love and death symbolism.” (David Loshak, ibid… p. 62) This morbid two-headed plant represents, it seems, the destiny of the two beloved whose tormenting separation from each other is the topic of the painting. It is (like they are) in the process of being ripped apart. This surrealist image, ahead of its time, is made even stronger by its contrast with the rest of the painting.

In his “Separation” Munch (in order to express the complicated nature of human emotional predicament) uses three styles – Art-Nouveau representation of the lost love-object, realistic/symbolic style of expressing the hero’s suffering, and surrealistic representation of the amorous couple in the process of being ripped apart.

Munch’s creative intuition is so rich that when he is concentrating on separation and suffering (quite widespread topics) his painting opens an additional semantic/formal perspectives (like split – under the influence of trauma of losing love – of human experience on past/nature and present/inner world, representation of amorous separation as a morbid plant ripped off, or pantheization of the lost love object – its impersonalization and dehumanization, etc).

Edvard Munch in 1907

Edvard Munch in 1938

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