The Times Quotidian

Hidden in Plain Sight
by Guy Zimmerman

Revolutionary Road is a film centered around the emotional state referred to in Buddhist literature as “lack.” Leonardo DiCaprio, working with Kate Winslet and director Sam Mendes, made Revolutionary Road as an homage to the novel of the same name by Richard Yates. Showing the same restraint the Coen brothers brought to the filming of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, the makers of Revolutionary Road get out of the way and let Yates’ text have it’s say. And, again like No Country, Revolutionary Road concludes in an enigmatic way that indicates the presence of a rich vein of meaning.

Set in the stratified social hierarchy of 1950s America, the story begins as Frank and April Wheeler move into a new home on Revolutionary Road in suburban Connecticut. Already the Wheelers are afflicted by a nameless malaise; behind the breezy, self-confidant banter, lack casts its corrosive shadow. Ready to seize the day, April pleads with her husband to move to Paris and pursue his literary calling. Frank agrees initially, then balks at the last minute, choosing instead to climb the corporate ladder at his firm, which is devoted to the selling of business machines. Cycling through episodes of rebellion and self denial, April spirals down until one day Frank arrives home to find medics out front and a pool of blood in the middle of his living room. On foot he races for the hospital, the camera tracking with him as he runs through the placid streets, arriving just in time to hear news of April’s death. We are given a glimpse of Frank  some months later sitting in mute incomprehension on a park bench in Manhattan where he has moved with his children. The film then veers off, returning to Revolutionary Road where the Wheeler’s realtor, Helen Giving (played by Kathy Bates), is showing their former home to a new pair of up-and-comers. Later that night, Helen gossips unmercifully about Frank and April to her husband Howard. The camera moves in slowly as Howard, a peripheral character up to now, reaches down and slowly turns the volume on his hearing aid down to zero. Through his eyes we watch as Helen’s lack-infused slander is slowly engulfed by the deep silence that underlies the false solidity of this world.

I happened to be reading David Loy’s A Buddhist History of the West when I saw Revolutionary Road and I realized that the novel’s central focus is the feeling of lack that Loy views as a defining feature of our collective life, the Rosetta Stone of Western history. You can think of lack as original sin if you want to be pre-modern about it; or you can adopt Marxist terminology and call it alienation; or free-floating anxiety if you’re a psycho-analytically inclined. In Loy’s view, this sense of lack is linked to our fundamental groundlessness in the world, and our inability to make peace with that groundlessness. Contact with other people only fuels the emotion. From the outside others seem so effortlessly rooted in the specific, so solid and grounded, that we fear we alone are deficient. For some the resultant feeling of lack is a nagging doubt, for others a consuming fire, but we all suffer from it to one degree or another, and our history of domination and social inequity can be viewed as an expression of lack.

Richard Yates, the author of Revolutionary Road, was no stranger to suffering. The product of a broken home, Yates struggled all his life with alcoholism, isolation and marital difficulties. His burnished, understated realism delivers knowledge earned the hard way, breath by breath, face pressed hard into the rough surfaces of experience. A Yates sentence feels as though it has been dragged shining out of a crucible where each moment has been reduced to molten silver searing to the touch. If you want to understand lack and what to do with it, read Trungpa, Pima Chodron or Stephen Batchelor. If you want to experience it directly, read Revolutionary Road, or, if time is short, rent the movie.

The image of poor Frank Wheeler on his blind run toward the hospital came to my mind a month ago. Driving home from delivering my daughter to school I got a call from my wife. The results of the fine needle aspirant, she told me, indicated that the lump beneath her ear was malignant rather than benign. Blood pounding in my ears I drove fast along side routes through the burnished, sunlit world to get home faster. I felt as if a large hand had taken hold of a branch of my nervous system and given it a good strong yank. Neurons entangled during the twenty years we have shared experience with each other were being pulled apart emitting bursts and tiny screams of light. All my self-centered ambitions, my trespasses and infidelities large and small, my many imagined glories, shames and failings seemed to trail behind my speeding mini-van – the meaningless streamers and confetti of the ego. There is no safety for us in this world.

In such times I give thanks for the various awareness and asana practices that help me stay open and present in the face of fear and despair. I’m fortunate to live in a time and place where the fruit of the great Asian wisdom traditions are readily available, often in a pragmatic, practice-based form that has been distilled by capable Western-born teachers. In January, for example, I was listening to a series of pod casts the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod gave recently as he worked out a new translation of the Ganges Mahamudra. This is the song the great 11th century renunciate Tilopa delivered to the scholar Naropa after suitable period of instructional abuse. One section of McLeod’s presentation in particular had a powerful impact on me, and the sense of stability and peace has continued to unfold through the stressful weeks since Jenny’s cancer was diagnosed.

But I also give thanks for a tradition that is equally transformational in its dogged way, an awareness lineage so secret it remains unrecognized even by itself. I’m talking about the tradition of modern art and literature as it has unfolded in protest against our prevailing materialism since the end of the 18th century. While the Ganges Mahamudra has been a source of strength in crisis, for example, the story Errand by Raymond Carver has also been coming to mind. The most beautiful description of dying I can think of, Errand recounts the final moments of Anton Chekhov’s death at the age of forty-two of tuberculosis. Carver wrote the story while he himself was dying of lung cancer. Like nothing else I know Errand captures the sense presence and ease in the face of whatever is arising that is the aim of mahamudra practice. To stay open and entirely present, at ease, even as death approaches is to give life its proper due.

It would not be so difficult for me to compose a list of eighty-four literary and artistic masters to hang alongside the traditional depictions of the eighty-four Mahasiddahs of the tantric traditions. Kafka and Beckett would be on that list, no doubt. Proust and Joyce would be included. Duchamp and Van Gogh. Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Milosz and Celan. Rilke, certainly. Juan Rulfo, Harold Pinter, Isaac Babel, Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Bernhard. Raymond Carver, Richard Yates…I could go on (and on) and so, probably, could you. It’s easy to forget how radical the Romantics were, Byron and Keats in England, Holderlin and Novalis in Germany – these artists were filling a gap that had opened in the West when the Industrial Age began. Bereft of a viable means of engaging with Being via religion we developed a new mode of making art, a mode oriented toward forging new paths to the open ground of experience. Confronting an essential vulnerability, these pioneers opened new doorways into Being. There we can find timelessness and joy, which are the experiences lack can open into if worked with correctly.

There are times when I believe this movement reached its conclusion in the 1970s with Burroughs, Warhol and Ashberry. Now, as this new mode of Being percolates out into the population (we’re all artists today), the role of art itself moves around again in the Classical direction. In a world full of YouTube-auteurs simple skill – craft – becomes again a relief. Be that as it may, I want to close with the image of Frank Wheeler on his park bench in Manhattan. Devastated by the sudden loss of the familiar emotional coordinates of his life, he is unable to recognize himself in the luminosity that surrounds him. What he needs at that moment is an eloquent and convincing bodhisatva …or at least a good novel to point out where to look, how to stay open.

Holi, Festival of Colors
by Marla Apt

Hi Friends,
Only on the drive back to Rishikesh this afternoon from Haridwar did I recall that my horoscope in the newspaper yesterday (which I read before departing on my-cross country journey to Rishikesh from Pune via taxi, plane, train, and jeep) advised that I should be careful of long distance travel and take special precautions when traveling by car.

The International Yoga Festival at the Parmarth Niketan Ashram on the banks of the Ganges river in Rishikesh began this morning in true Indian form, with a change of schedule. As festival participants from around the globe arrived at the ashram, the infamous television yogi, Ramdev invited Swami Chidanand Saraswati (the spritual head of the ashram) to attend a celebration of the national holiday, Holi at a leper colony in the neighboring town of Haridwar. Haridwar also happens to be the host of the current Kumbha Mela, a religious festival that occurs when the planets align once every twelve years. Full of a who’s who of Hindu saints, mystics, and sadhus, Haridwar is pregnant with pilgrims and celebration. The trifecta of the yoga festival, Holi, and Kumbha Mela brought us (an international group of yoga festival teachers accompanying Swamiji) together with Ramdev, and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (another famous figure who founded the global meditation program, the Art of Living).

The Holi celebration at the leper colony was mostly for the benefit of the children of the lepers who live separated from their parents to avoid contagion. The “play” of Holi involves smearing the people around you with brightly colored powders as well as showering them with colored liquids and rose petals. The game is not limited to children however. Adults (mostly men) take to the festivities with an enthusiasm that is fueled by the accompaniment of alcohol and the perhaps the opportunity to grope women when applying color to their body.

After being publicly doused on stage in front of television cameras by the honored guests, we drove in a caravan of spacious SUVs to the kumbha tent of Sri Sri Ravi Shanker to join his Holi celebration. I remember looking out the window at the scene of camps of endless pilgrim tents when the car jolted. Sitting in the middle of the backseat row with no seatbelt available and nothing in front of me to break my thrust, I flew forward and opened my eyes to discover them two inches away from the dashboard. The hood of our car crumpled into the SUV we rear-ended. Both cars however continued to drive without even stopping to review the damage, let alone discuss the notion of fault. The only issue of concern was whether or not the car was functional enough to reach the next destination. It is said that our karma cannot be avoided. If we are meant to be in an accident, it is destined. But the circumstances of our lives, the company we keep, and our sadhana (spiritual practice), can minimize the severity of the manifestation of karma. I’ll choose to regard it as a blessing that I managed to burn some due negative karma unscathed.

We dusted ourselves off and proceeded to the stage of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar where the guests of honor were greeted like rock stars by a packed audience. The three long haired, bearded, robed holy men smeared each other with colors, embraced, sang and danced like a group of schoolboys. They gave speeches and the famous percussionist that had been in our party roused the crowd while pounds of rose petals were tossed through the air. After returning to the ashram stained in bright green, yellow, fuschia, and red, we bathed (fully clothed) in the sacred Ganges. All in my first morning in Rishikesh.

Thinking of you all with love,

Marla

The Art of Pam DeLuco
by Naomi Pitcairn

On a recent foray to Michael’s – “The Arts and Crafts Store”, amidst a jungle of fake flowers and pre-assembled memories I had an “epiphany beside the wall of Easter Bunnies”. It would appear that hand made has not only lost its place in “art” but also its place in craft. It seems to have morphed into a ready-made elite pastime fashioned on figurines, stickers and plastic jewels. As we carefully decorate, glue and frame with pre-packaged stuff made in far away lands, are we not just supporting the art of mega industry? In our attempts to feel a feigned sense of loving hands of home are we not undermining the very politics of hand made?

The time honored politics of “hand made” are those of self-sufficiency; the practice of traditional craft an act of independence. Now in the face of an extinction trend, the skill and personal production of useful objects have become potent form of protest. The convention of the reactionary has produced a new kind of rebel. A post-modern protester whose work involves an intimate connection both to their materials and to the land.

The Bay Area has always been a petrie dish for all movements of protest and one such notable group of rebels is chronicled by Philip Leider, then editor of Artforum (June 1962–December 1971), who upon returing from a road trip to the West Coast in 1970, published “How I Spent My Summer Vacation… Or, Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Fransisco and Utah.” Leider had become disillusioned with the political potential of art and looked to the pastoral craft ethos as a possible solution.* Leider argued the future of not only political radicalism, but art making itself, lies in an intimate connection to the land instead of New York art galleries. He found, in the separatist commune near Berkeley, named Canyon potential. [In Canyon] “it is worth your life to cut down a tree” as the inhabitants are determined to “effect no change in the natural ecology of the region.” Leider was particularly keen on the leader of the Canyon commune, David Lynn, a sculptor from Berkeley, who had rejected the avant-garde to become a house builder. “…it seemed pretty clear that as far as Lynn was concerned, every sculptural idea he ever had was in his building. The revolution in Lynn’s art, if there was one, was dictated by the terrain…”

Like the Bay Area innovators of Canyon, whose work involved an intimate connection both to their materials and to the land, so does current SF based artist Pam DeLuco practice her art. There is an ethos behind the work. Ethos defined as “morality, expertise and knowledge.” Her pieces are an exploration of their own provenance, investigating the origins of materials and techniques involved by the cultures where they are practiced. Years traveling and living with people in remote areas of Central and South America gave DeLuco the opportunity to study up close the Ngöbe women of western Panamá where the elaborately patterned Chácara bag is crafted and The Choco people of Panama where the fruit of the jagua tree is used to produce decorative pigments for body paint.

Back state side, she uses the deep crimson dye, carmine, extracted from the female cochineal larvae and indigos collected from the Indigofera tinctoria, a member of the pea family. Cochineal is one of the few water-soluble colorants that resist degradation with time while her Indigo is processed using the preindustrial method of reduction (chemical alteration), dissolving the indigo in stale urine. Not an easy system to put into routine practice.

Behind the innocent facade of a crocheted pillow cover lies a patient connection to the hand-spun, 6-strand, Tussah silk, cable yarn and end medallions from her hand-reared Bombyx mori silkworms. Over a period of 60 days she carefully charts the progress of the eggs as they hatch, eat their way through tasty Mulberry leaves, become fat juicy worms who then cocoon producing the silky fuzz that is spun into thread. Allowing the cycle to complete the moths emerge, mate, reproduce and the new eggs are stored until the following spring when the process will repeat.

When the fur of an animal required, DeLuco is unflappable in her sympathetic acquisition of raw materials. The hand-knit sweaters require only the hand-spun Angora from her house pet rabbit, Jambo. The braided horsehair tassels, belts, hatband, and stampede strings are procured from the horses under her care. When hand-spun Qiviut down is required for knitted gloves, Pam is there at the San Francisco Zoo collecting the precious material off the fence.

As newcomer to the Bay Area, where artists and craftsmen like DeLuco have migrated in order to be with like-minded thinkers and rebels, I, like Philip Leider and others before me, am humbled. These practitioners are our seed banks, protagonists in the technique of know-how and self-reliance. More than a self-conscious authenticity, or token tribute to ennoble the vernacular, DeLuco is prepared, indeed steeped in the politics of hand-made; not a backwards looking nostalgia, nor revivalist idealism, but a proactive pursuit to find equanimity within our time.

The White Ribbon (DAS WEISSE BAND ), 2009, a film by Michael Haneke
By Rita Valencia

The White Ribbon, the award-winning new film from Michael Haneke, is sub-titled A Children’s Story. The children of a small village in Northern Germany are at the heart of this film. Haneke contemplates the process of evil’s origination in the raising of these children, a process that requires the repression of all joy and openness and the nurturance of fear and loathing. The titular white ribbon is tied onto Klara and Martin, two young teens, by their father, the town Pastor, who explains that the ribbon serves to bind them to innocence and purity. Of course that is a lie, just as the quiescence and purity of the village is an illusion that conceals horrors. The cruelty shown the children is normative behavior in the village’s rigidly patriarchal, feudal environment. The placid town slumbers, its resentment and fear festering, as we know full well that its reawakening will be in the Third Reich: the village children are the generation that will form the backbone of Nazi Germany. From one languorous and bleak scene to the next, the psychopathology of fascism unfolds, with methodical precision. The breaks of sweetness, a romance between the town schoolteacher and the nanny of the town’s manor house, only serve to heighten the contrasting gloom and cruelty. Haneke drops into this setting several unsolved and seemingly random crimes and fatal accidents, from which a mysterious horror hangs in the air like a tasteless and odorless poison.

A group of village children march in step on what they claim is a kind-hearted mission to see Anna, a girl whose father (the town doctor) has been injured in a riding accident. On its face the spectacle of the girls walking in unison is a bit somber, but innocent enough–still there is an unsettlingly sadistic shading to their mission. Anna’s father had fallen victim to a deliberately strung wire that tripped his horse. Are the children really on a visit of good will, or are they returning to the scene of a crime? Later, the same children are seen being severely reprimanded at dinner for being out too late. Their father, the town’s pastor, announces he will beat them all on the very next day, a form of sadism which I only hope is rare these days (my Italian mother used to tell me with great disdain that only cold-blooded Germans allotted time between the sentencing and the execution of punishment, and boasted that Italians believed in beating their children only in the heat of anger!!) The horrific anticipation drives one of the young victims to a suicide attempt. Some time after the pastor canes his children, the child of the town patriarch is found half dead and half naked, having been served up an uncannily similar beating. More incidents follow, all of them seeming to make a certain sense, but blame is never fixed, and despite the lumpen attempts of an outside police force to solve the crimes, no single culprit ever emerges. The townspeople are frozen in silence.

In an extraordinary scene, the town’s schoolteacher, an innocent man who is an “outsider” from a neighboring village, and therefore out of reach of the psychic oppression that rules these folks, confides certain suspicions to the Pastor, bits of evidence that imply the Pastor’s own children may have something to do with the crimes. Of course, the Pastor becomes enraged and threatens the schoolteacher with ruin. But nothing ever happens. The final sealing over of the mystery occurs when the housekeeper of the doctor claims that she knows who is responsible for the crimes. She rides off on a bicycle to tell the police, and we never hear from her again.

This unwillingness to investigate, to purge, to accuse, to “bring to justice” represents a collusion of the oppressor and the oppressed–and here is the real mystery that Haneke presents to us: why this silence? The core thesis of The White Ribbon, and the reason for Haneke leaving unsolved the crimes of his allegorical village, is all about the human desire to remain sleeping, to resist the psychic rupture that truth threatens, to resist change even when the habits and practices that bind us produce illness and misery for ourselves, our loved ones and our children. The people of Haneke’s village will slumber on, through dreams, through nightmares, through self delusion (the Pastor really believes he loves his children). The political, economic and social repression so imbue the personal realm that individuals are immobilized in a sleep-like passivity, that is, until “the reawakening”, that age-old tragedy of Oedipus, finding the remains of crimes scattered about in so many open graves. The themes that Haneke opens up in The White Ribbon may apply pointedly to the process of fascism, but are deeply resonant wherever a culture of concealment and repression buries the hope of significant social or personal change in falsehoods, trivialities and distractions.

[Academy Award nominations for Best Foreign Language Film & Cinematography--Christian Berger]

North Atlantic, Wooster Group at REDCAT, February 10–21, 2010
by Guy Zimmerman

Many things went through my mind walking away from REDCAT after seeing the Wooster Group’s North Atlantic, but one of them was surely hats off to the company’s artistic director, Elizabeth LeCompte. First created by LeCompte and company in 1982, North Atlantic holds up remarkably well. The writer, James Strahs, pulled from texts by Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Gertrude Stein, and the company, anchored by Francis McDormand, Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, hit their marks with style and precision. Set on an aircraft carrier moored off the coast of Holland, the piece juxtaposes tough-talking military exchanges with kinky sexual banter, presenting life during the Cold War as a fever dream full of violence and desire. Devoid of the multi-layered video projections that play a major role in later Wooster Group productions, North Atlantic features the fast noir rhythms and the Grotowski-esque physicality that define the company’s approach to performance. Evidently LeCompte remains as sharp as a tack.

North Atlantic was created shortly after LeCompte took the reins from founder Richard Schechner and changed the company’s name from the Performance Group to the Wooster Group. Schechner had been one of America’s earliest and most energetic proponents of the visionary Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s laboratory aesthetic. This past summer I saw Schechner at the Grotowski Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, where the elite of the global avant-garde gathered to pay tribute to the legendary Pole. Schechner spoke to our group about Grotowski’s impact on American theater, the rigor and seriousness he demanded from performers in every aspect of their craft. The Wooster Group’s highly physicalized performance style and their intensive working methods are among the most visible examples in America of Grotowski’s belief in theater as transformative ritual grounded in fully embodied presence in action. Beyond any rigid doctrine, the stamp of Grotowski is the absolute conviction that theater is linked in crucial ways to our collective sanity and, as such, merits the highest level of commitment.

At the same time I got the sense that Schectner’s earthiness and urbanity helped to limit the transcendent aspirations of Grotowski, pushing things in the direction of a kind of neo-Brechtian irony and spectacle. Or perhaps LeCompte is the source of those qualities in the Wooster Group’s basic affect. Either way, part of the reason the Group has found favor with the American art world is that they don’t mess all that much with depth. If American theater is a vast inland sea, wide and shallow, the Wooster Group is one of the bigger crocs, sunning themselves on their mossy log just North of Canal. Their productions are best thought of as comedies that don’t really have time for a sense of humor. It’s interesting to compare with the Polish company Theater Zar, which is Grotowski-inspired work at its most achingly transcendent. Unlike Zar, the Wooster Group does not traffic in reverence; leave the tragic dimension to the Eastern Europeans and pass the smutty jokes.

Rigor without transcendence manifests as kinetic energy, which is LeCompte’s forte as a director. Energy is where the agenda of art links up most easily with the American mindset, and this helps to explain why a counter-cultural enterprise like the Wooster Group has managed to slip past the informal censors that guard American sensibilities from challenge. One searches in vain, in a Wooster Group production, for the subversive silence in which self-recognition can bubble up. And yet one reason North Atlantic holds up so well is that America has matched the shallowness the piece is intent on satirizing. North Atlantic feels much darker now than it would have in the early 1980s. The addition of a Moslem call to prayer way in the background and some references to water boarding are all LeCompte needs to remind us of Abu Graib and Blackwater – of how far we have fallen. North Atlantic does not lack edge, it just aims its edge at tissue where the nerve endings long ago died.

For me the most successful Wooster Group piece was Hamlet, which came to REDCAT in 2007. The piece showed LeCompte’s command of a full high-tech barrage working to support her performers, and the brilliance of her meta-theatrical staging. And yet despite all the distancing and irony, the grandeur of Shakespeare’s mythic text came through loud and clear. To me, and as a playwright I am fully biased here, theater remains at root a literary activity. It’s when rigor in performance meets an original text with true depth that the full transformative display of the art form arises. This is why the highest points in the history of world theater tend to center around a significant playwright rather than a director. Think of fifth century Athens, Elizabethan England, the European era of Ibsen, or to a lesser degree the post War Europe defined by Brecht and Beckett; the playwright-centered convergence seems to occur when a culture begins to run a kind of maximum energy, an energy that translates into a willingness to collectively engage with the radical freedom of the present moment. We do not seem to be currently living in such a time, but perhaps the best way to move in the right direction is to pretend that we are.

That said, it’s impossible to overstate the challenge of maintaining an American new work theater company over the last thirty years the way LeCompte has done, much less a company that has consistently produced such excellent and original work. Theater is pre-eminently an emergent art form, each performance resting on a huge web of complex social and artistic interactions. From the banality of board meetings to the Shakespearean treachery of inter-company politics to the ecstatic energy of performance, an artistic director like LeCompte has to engage with the full spectrum of human experience and remain operative. We are lucky to have artists as strong as LeCompte and her Woosters, and we should treasure every performance.

Dark Hope in No Country
by Guy Zimmerman

That Oscar gold will shower down this year on James Cameron’s Avatar, with its connective planetary goddess, says a great deal about how deep a ditch we have dug for ourselves. The central idea of the film, after all, is that while the ruination of our own ecosphere is a done deal there exists, somewhere far far away, a planet where human greed and aggression will finally meet their match. If hope is your cup of tea you might want to look a little closer to home. For that purpose another recent Oscar winner comes to mind – No Country for Old Men by the Coen brothers, based on the noir thriller by Cormac McCarthy. The hope it contains may be on the dark side, but so are the forces that have pushed our world so dangerously out of balance.

In my last post, Theory of Miracles, I wrote about emergence, a concept central to many intriguing developments in the physical sciences. It’s a concept expressed in deity figures like the benevolent life force in Avatar. A good candidate for the opposite of emergence, in my view, would be reification. Reification is a fancy word for a kind of collapse we all encounter at various levels of experience throughout the day, and it is central to the culture of materialism. To reify is to reduce a complex process to a static thing, separate and apart, unique unto itself.

If you made a deity figure out of reification (as opposed to emergence) that deity would look very much like the Protestant God of Capitalism. This deity is all about breaking connective bonds (social, psychological, chemical, molecular, atomic, etc…) in order to exploit the energy they contain. And along with the boundless dynamism and creativity that have given us automobiles, moon walks and the small pox vaccine, this God of Thingification has also bequeathed us species extinction, nuclear weapons, and a badly damaged ecosystem. He is the Christian God shorn of the Virgin Mary, who represents that balancing, feminine instinct for staying in touch with Being.

Karl Marx wrote a lot about reification and so, in his own way, did William Shakespeare. Read Shakespeare’s great tragedies and you will find the theme everywhere. King Lear’s root error, for example, is to turn love itself into a thing that a father can demand from his children. And in Macbeth we see the concept of a king get plucked out of the complex web of relationships that supply its meaning and become centered in a thing, a crown, that can be seized by an act of violence.

The process of reification turns every man into a would-be usurper pursuing the tokens of material success. And sure enough, a short time after Shakespeare wrote The Tragedie of Macbeth the king-killer Oliver Cromwell appears on the scene, launching the modern era with his New Model Army. The various Protestant sects born in the fire of that Civil War left England to settle America, which has become a land of little Macbeths sharpening hidden knives. This kind of thumb-nail history is always tricky, but the fact that we still inhabit the world Shakespeare foreshadowed in his plays explains why Hamlet and Lear remain mainstays of global drama, and why Shakespearean writers such as Cormac McCarthy feel so relevant to our lives. In novels such as Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men and The Road, McCarthy has been tracking the trends that so worried Shakespeare.

One paradox McCarthy loves to illuminate is how desperately the god of reification strives to avoid being reified himself. No god wants to be reduced to just another thing, and especially the “jealous god.” And so he hides, receding into the woodwork of the universe where he masquerades as Natural Law. He is the one-God of Adam Smith and Isaac Newton, the deity of materialism who is difficult to free oneself from because he hides from view where his authority cannot be questioned. And this is where No Country for Old Men, becomes especially interesting.

Buried under the plot of No Country lies a complex meditation about fate, Ananke, karma American style. The hero, Llewelyn Moss commits a series of cosmic indiscretions and the hit man Anton Chigurh is dispatched by our implacable, impersonal deity to make a corpse-thing out of Moss. Moss’ first “error” is failing to kill the antelope he shoots at in the beginning of the film. Some little hesitation, perhaps, ruins his aim and the antelope runs off, wounded. Next comes Moss’ biggest error – he returns to the scene of a massacre to give a dying man water. Through these errors Moss identifies himself as an apostate in the temple of materialism. His heart is not true – he worships at some other altar. In the domain of the one jealous god this is not okay and Chigurh is sent to “thingify” Moss.

In numerous scenes Chigurh presents himself as an agent of “necessity.” In his vanity he refuses to acknowledge that he works in service of a god. And, again, this is fitting because Chigurh serves the god who conceals himself because he wants to be the only god. Hulking around with his pneumatic cow-killing machine, Chiguhr is a demon of the hidden monotheism that underlies the material view of the world.

After Moss is dead, Chigurh pursues Moss’ innocent wife, Carla Jean. Before taking her life, Chigurh tells Carla Jean he is only enacting a fate Moss himself set in motion for her. Carla Jean scoffs – Chigurh has come to kill her because he likes to kill, plain and simple. No impersonal law is being served. This insight doesn’t gain Carla Jean anything – Chigurh kills her anyway – but driving away he is grievously wounded by a speeding car that appears out of nowhere. What is the meaning of this odd bit of seemingly random violence? The tables have been turned on Chigurh. Either the car slamming into him had no meaning at all – in which case his own acts of violence are equally devoid of cosmic significance – or the car slamming into him represents the intervention of some rival force or energy…in which case the “impersonal law” he claims allegiance to is the expression of one deity among many. Either way, Chigurh is revealed as a creature of delusion. As he hobbles away on his broken bones, we sense that he has been reduced in his own eyes.

As powerful as he is, all it takes to undo the god of materialism is the whisper that he is not, in fact, alone. In McCarthy’s understated, hyper-masculine way what No Country announces is the rebirth of the connective deity that reigns over the planet of Avatar. She is the great emergent rival of the reductive Protestant god, the presence the poet Ted Hughes identified as the “the Goddess of Complete Being” in his remarkable book about Shakespeare. In the four centuries since she departed from the scene the world has been transformed. In flight from the mystery of Being we have pulled nature apart to analyze matter and energy down to their smallest components. And there we have discovered…mystery. Particle-wave duality…action at a distance…non-locality…the materialistic exploration of the world has unearthed, not the longed-for certainties, but the most mind-confounding paradoxes ever contemplated. Every time we use a computer, a cell phone, or a microwave oven we are reaching down into a miraculous quantum realm where matter and energy are interconnected in ways we can scarcely comprehend. And now, having reached the bottom of the world, the scientists raise their eyes…and there she is, clothed in the very real hard science of complex systems and emergent form, like Venus rising up out of the waters…