Hunters: outbound
(with Mireille Astore)
“We are human beings because we are outbound (en partance), disposed towards a departure about which we can and must know that no definitive arrival is possible or promised. It is in this impulse (elan), in the obligation of departure, since we cannot do otherwise, and in this risk-taking (prise du risque), in the wager of departure, that we can live a life worth living.” [i]
“Man is that inability to remain and is yet unable to leave his place. In projecting, the being-there (Da-sein) in him constantly throws him into possibilities and thereby keeps him subjected to what is actual. Thus thrown into this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence... Man is enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially `absent’. Absent in a fundamental sense—never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future—essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence. Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment.”[ii]
* * *
The serpent opposes the bird as earth opposes heaven; and intelligence, says the RgVda, is the swiftest of birds. The flight of birds—aerial, atmospheric beings; creatures of the ambient midst—takes place in the interstice, the in-between. Their trajectories are gestures tracking relations between earth and sky, tracing thermal contours, weaving networks between matter and spirit: spiritus, animus, psyche, flight, lift, luft, aloft, leavening, leaving. They are matter released of gravity and weight. There is then the levity of flight—instability, swarm, shifts this way and that, geometries of primordial spontaneity, diversion and interminable modulation, diversification and improvisation: everything that order immemorially considers uncontrolled, unpredictable, un-designable, un-plannable, un-bearable. Hence the violence. Hence incarceration, erasure, elimination – or control, discipline, projection, predetermination, design.
“In diverse traditions there is a mysterious language called the `language of the birds’: an evidently symbolic term, since the importance attributed to knowing this language as a prerequisite for initiation of high-degree excludes it being taken literally. Hence we read in the Q’ran `Know, my people, we have been taught the language of the birds (‘ullimna mantiqat-tayri) and we have been endowed with all good things.’ [iii] Elsewhere we find dragon slaying heroes, like Siegfried in the Nordic legend, who understand the language of the birds, enabling us to interpret the symbolism. In fact, victory over the dragon has the immediate consequence of achieving immortality, represented by some object which is guarded by the dragon; and this conquering of immortality essentially implies reintegration at the centre of the human state, that is to say the point of communication with superior states of being. An understanding of the language of the birds represents this communication; in fact birds are often taken as symbols of angels, that is, precisely, of superior states of being.”[iv]
* * *
Fari-od-Din Attar’s 13thC Mantic ut-tair (Conference of the Birds) is an epic poem about the spiritual quest of thirty birds to find their sovereign homeland in the Simurgh. Modelled on the 12thC Risalat Al-Tayr (Treatise on the Birds) by Ahmad Ghazali, the founder of Sufism, it recounts the fate of a group of `freely flying’ birds who, facing obstacles and setbacks, fall into the traps of hunters and attempt to free themselves. ‘Flying freely’ symbolises unmanifest existence unbound to the conditions of concrete spatiotemporal reality, unattached to the material world—its dangers, its forgetting of origins and the vagaries of its processes and evanescent rewards. Release comes through the different stages of a spiritual journey through seven valleys: The Valley of Longing and Searching, The Valley of Love, The Valley of Intuitive Knowledge, The Valley of Detachment, the Valley of Unity, the Valley of Bewilderment and the Valley of Poverty and Annihilation, leading to the ultimate state of fana, and reabsorption into the divine: ‘When I saw the rays of that sun,” says Ghazali, “I was swept out of existence. Water flowed back to water.”
The word `trace’ derives from the etymon *TRA, to draw, pull. The lexicon is multivalent: traction, tract, trail, trait, treat, trajectory, distract, subtract, extract, attract, contract, abstract, entreat, train, draw, dredge, drag, dray, tray, streak, strike, (traitor)… In Mireille Astore’s film Hunter, traces saturate the images and sequences. They are not projective but residual—kinematic after-images, memories delaying or tarrying in the grain of recollection; like dreams fading into forgetfulness upon waking, yet leaving indelible impressions. Such streaks and traits of the film’s gestural texture produce an altered temporality: at once slow and staggered, severed and continuous, distinct and transmuting. A durational languor frames particular kinds of attentiveness during which fleeting instants, minuscule objects and minute details—leaves, slithers of sunlight, scarf, nap or stitching of cloth, plumage—become paramount. Not only the narrative but also the filmic materiality of succeeding images undergoes something like a rhythmic transport, a deceleration into viscosity and pure compacted chromatic weight.
We know they are hunters, even before we see them. One, then two figures—one doubling the other, shadowing the other; one in the other’s stead—streaks across a landscape, smudge stains in time. Together and apart they weave fractured instants of continuity in motion: stop-start, still-moving—the crisis at the core of cinema’s 24 frames per second; the image subject to catastrophe; the disaster of representation.
What designs do these trackers have on the world? What landscapes, topographies and contours do they transect? What is the rhythm of their gait, the schema of their disposition and countenance? Their site of passage is agricultural land; neither horticultural nor wilderness. It is domesticated, civilised territory turned over to production, capitalisation and material augmentation. Do they amble or seek? Wayfarers and strangers, they are evident hunters in it for the chase: for cutting, hoeing, tilling, trenching, furrowing. But they are not nomads or citizens. Neither are they hunters and gatherers. Their purpose is not subsistence but recreation. Like all of us they can only be wanderers and tourists. They are in the world, or in some world, but their being is in discontinuity, disorientation, displacement, dislocation, distraction. The French say dépaysement: the pleasure of being homeless, of being without-country, of being out-of-one’s familiar world, in the unfamiliar, interminably threatened by the uncanny and unhomely potential of the constant foreigner who haunts the known.
Can there be purposiveness without purpose, means without ends, absolute process?[v] What do we see, exactly? Two with no direction home, philosophers maybe, seekers of the way, peregrines. Their ploughing through the grains and resistances of space, their chasing into ambiance and atmosphere, their graphic trails produce lines of graft, craft, creation, disseveral graphics of traces. They move with ease; but this ease diffracts into disappearance and erasure, into dis-ease. They gain no traction; have no purchase. Their subsistence is precarious and subject to the interminable threat of withdrawal. Like the gods who have long retreated, they come and go. Their coming is made up of their going and undergoing; they are in-departure, in-passing:
“Nowadays we also have to take account of the possibility of gods wandering from place to place, without allotted temples or established rituals. Einasi gar kai entautha theous: ‘Here too are the gods to be found’; these words of Heraclitus can today be given one further meaning at least (it could also be that they now have only this meaning), according to which `here’ can be without place, nowhere, or from place to place, a ‘here’ wandering in and out of places. It could well be—this is all that can be said—that it is henceforth to a wandering of the gods that divine worship and its permanent locations must be adapted: not so as to disqualify these, but so as to assert that in temples or outside of them, in rituals or with no ritual, what henceforth is divine, or that part of the divine that withdraws and confides itself, is a wandering, not to say a straying (égarement) of the gods.”[vi]
Notes
[i] Jean-Luc Nancy, Partir—Le Depart. Montrouge: Bayard, 2011: 29-30 (my translation).
[ii] Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, translated by William McNeil and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995: 365-6.
[iii] Q’ran, 27: 16.
[iv] René Guénon, Symboles de la Science Sacrée. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1962, Chapter 7 (my translation).
[v] Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End. Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesan Casal'ina. Minneapoli: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
[vi] Jean-Luc Nancy, `Of divine places,’ in The Inoperative Community, translated by Peter Connor, Losa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991: 134.