The Truth in the Mirror
Sometimes, truth is best seen in a mirror
Warning: mildly schizo
One way to the truth is to state things directly. This approach does not always work however. We see its failure in how math cannot be pinned down in words and it is said that the highest metaphysical truths cannot be expressed in words. This necessitates a via negativa approach at times: to understand something by understanding what it is not.
Once, in the gym, I saw a nun on the TV say that we can learn things about God by talking to each other, in justification of the First Council of Nicaea. The idea struck me as utterly ridiculous when I first heard it, but as I recalled this vignette, I realize I now think that’s the only conversation we are ever having. It’s like the nun planted a seed in my mind that has now sprouted.
And in this conversation humanity is having with itself, sometimes we express false things to get a clearer outline on the truth. Like seeing in a mirror. The truth in the mirror. So let’s take a look at some truths in the mirror that have been uttered.
Event Horizon is a schlocky sci-fi horror film in which a lost spaceship suddenly reappears. As the ship is explored, it becomes apparent that the ship somehow got sucked into Hell, much to the detriment of the crew. There is footage of the crew in Hell:
and it sure ain’t pretty. There is also the rather memorable line that blows the whole thing open:
Delivered by Sam Neill, who ripped his eyes out (of course). It is this that reveals the movie as a truth in the mirror, because if you think about it, that idea is actually incredibly beautiful, and therefore true. It just is saying that the delight of vision will not go away with the destruction of our eyes, and you suddenly realize the line could have come from a movie that is the mirror image of Event Horizon: a lost spaceship is found and the logs reveal the crew somehow found their way to Heaven. They realize it is real, but not a physical place, and at one point Sam Neill turns to Laurence Fishbourne, beaming: "Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see!". It’s just an amazing idea that I think is true, and it makes me realize that we don’t have such a thing as the opposite of a horror movie, similar to how there is no antonym for nihilism1. Comedies are not as intense as a horror movie, so they are not the real opposite. In other art forms, such as painting, and literature, we see great exercises in beauty, but not so often in film. It could be because film was invented in a nihilistic era where we believe ugliness is true, so it is easier to accept an excess of ugliness than an excess of beauty, or it could be that the brutality of evolution left us with strong reactions to death and gore, but no equivalent sentiment in the opposite direction, since what would be adaptive about that?2
Which brings us back to the mirror: some ideas can only enter your skull through the via negativa, and it seems this is one of them, because stated beautifully and optimistically, it wouldn’t hit as hard.
If genetic engineering ever comes along, we definitely have to make ourselves feel beauty as intensely as we do gore.
And honestly, the opposite of Event Horizon could work as a film: there would be a lot of drama around the crew trying to decide whether to leave the world behind. I think I would watch that movie.
Another truth in the mirror is the highly esoteric music video of MGMT When You Die, which I recommend you watch before reading on:
So what is going on in this video? We have this incompetent magician who dies and is being told (along with the viewer) that “We’ll all be laughing with you, when you die”, and he goes on a journey through a very morbid underworld. Once, I was so ego inflated I thought I was Jesus (it’s pretty interesting, you should try it yourself because it may be true), and that video really hit different then, like the universe was telling me personally to fuck off and die, that the only way to fix this mess is with my death, so that it becomes “permanently night”, the only real solution to all problems. This would be especially true if a version of solipsism is true, such that with my death the universe ends, and it seems they’re getting at that when they sing “We’ll all be laughing with you, when you die”, because my death will be their death, and therefore the end of all their troubles also (“I won’t feel anything”, i.e. no more pain).
And of course the video hit me like that when I thought I was the Messiah, because the target demo of that video is literally Jesus! It is the most extreme reaction possible to Jesus, actively mocking him and his miracles as the acts of a sham magician3, telling him, the light shining in the darkness, that “it’s permanently night”, and telling the incarnate Word, “that words don’t do anything”. It is basically a music video version of The Grand Inquisitor.
And as Jesus (and Buddha and Mohammad) showed, words do quite a lot actually, but this only is seen clearly when considering the mirrored notion that “words don’t do anything”. As to “permanently night”, well, that’s one to ask yourself if you really believe it is true. We can weigh it against what Rust said at the end of the first season of True Detective (SPOILERS!):
Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.
Which is huge within the context of the series. Is what Rust said ridiculous or true?
Back to the video, the non-schizo take is that it’s a song about a break up, but then, why would we “all be laughing with you when you die”? Why is it addressed at the viewer, and why would the viewer be laughing at their death? According to MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden (said to be “way more into the mystical side of things”) the song is about:
What Trump has done is just expose a whole lot of things that were there already. In When You Die, when we’re saying ‘I’m not that nice’, it’s owning up to existing in a modern United States of America: you’re kind of part of this evil whether you want to be or not."
The author is dead, but this certainly reveals so much of the mind of the artist, that they can think When You Die is about Trump! Truly, to reach that level of fame you have to grasp some strange things that cannot be put in words, and that you yourself don’t actually understand, you just express them.
The art of the video was inspired by The Heart of Man; Either a Temple of God, or a Habitation of Satan; Represented in Ten Emblematical Figures, so yes, there is some mysticism going on, I’m not like Charles Manson thinking Helter Skelter is actually about a race war4. At least, I hope. But one is not truly mad if one can entertain the thought "Am I mad?". Believe me, there is nothing so alien to psychosis as doubt.
There is also another esoteric meaning to the video, which is that you really do have to die, because as Meister Eckhart taught:
The kingdom of heaven is for none but the thoroughly dead
You have to die to go through the eye of the needle, and sometimes this gets interpreted literally, as happened to Megan Vogt, who after a meditation retreat thought she had to die to save her family and committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. She really did have to die, is the thing, but not literally! This also happened to the schizophrenic programmer Terry Davis, who built an entire operating system by himself called TempleOS, “a biblical-themed lightweight operating system (OS) designed to be the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible”. He deliberately got run over by a train, and in his final video, he said he had learned how to “purify” himself. He figured out, like Meister Eckhart and quite a lot of mystics, that he needed to die, but he took it literally. And Terry Davis, in spite of ranting about being followed by “CIA n-words” who “glow in the dark”, really was a mystic:
What would the opposite of When You Die look like? When You Live? A song about a birth? We’ll all be weeping with you when you are born (because you have entered the vale of tears)? But it’s temporarily day? I will feel everything? This song can totally be made, and it sounds like it would be pure glory. My favorite meme says among many other things “Infinite Joy and Sorrow”:
That meme is the only place I ever heard of such a notion, but When You Live sounds like it would be the maximum expression of it. And it reveals the true, mirrored meaning of When You Die, because When You Live would be the unvarnished truth.
A deliberately crafted truth in the mirror comes from comic book writer and magician Grant Morrison, of The Invisibles. It’s a 40 page comic called Ultra Comics, which Morrison calls:
...the most advanced thing I’ve ever done. I’m so excited about this. It’s just taking something that used to be done in comics and captions that they don’t do anymore and turning it into a technique, a weapon, but beyond that I don’t want to say. It’s a haunted comic book, actually, it’s the most frightening thing anyone will ever read. It’s actually haunted—if you read this thing, you’ll become possessed.
Some heavy words, especially if you have read The Invisibles, which is a magical artifact in its own right (seriously, the bad guys there are the most evil thing ever conceived, and it somehow managed to show a salvation that even seculars could get behind of). You really should read it before reading on (40 pages of a comic is nothing), but if you need more convincing, here’s how it does the most intense fourth wall break in history:
What Ultra Comics is doing, is planting a terrible idea in your mind.
Grant Morrison is red teaming you pretty much. What is he trying to plant? The idea that you are in the oblivion machine. “Oblivion machine” being an excellent name for the story science tells us about reality: the stars will wink out and even the black holes will evaporate. In the end, it won’t really matter if we escape the gravity well: eternal oblivion is our ultimate fate. This idea is something the comic calls a “Hostile Independent Thoughtform”, and represents with a… bad egg. It really is a wholly destructive thought.
And it is a reflection of a “Friendly Independent Thoughtform”: the Hiraṇyagarbha:
The Matsya Purāṇa (2.25–30) gives an account of initial creation. After Mahāprālaya, the great dissolution of the Universe, there was darkness everywhere. Everything was in a state of sleep. There was nothing, either moving or static. Then Svayambhu, self-manifested being arose, which is a form beyond senses. It created the primordial waters first and established the seed of creation into it. The seed turned into a golden womb, Hiraṇyagarbha. Then Svayambhu entered into that egg.
Svayambhu, according to the Upanishads, being you. According to Hinduism, you are in a golden egg. Whatever darkness you or the world faces, is the darkness of a womb. What will being born be like? Are we in that nasty egg from Ultra Comics or in the Hiraṇyagarbha?
Think about Ultra Comics whenever you encounter an idea like we have no free will (something my phone just notified me of as I was writing this) out in the wild. Because that’s not red teaming, that’s the real thing. Contra When You Die, words can do so much. You can never be sure what is actually entering your mind when you read.
Finally, we arrive at the biggest mirrored truth of all: the work of H.P. Lovecraft (quite the ironic last name, now that I think about it). Lovecraft lays out a universe ruled by the blind idiot god Azathoth, where there is the supernatural, and it is uniformly grotesque and inhuman. Why, Azathoth the Father has a Son too, in Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, who in a reflection of Jesus knows much of science and dazzles with electricity and psychology, spreading a madness that consumes the world, much like Christianity did.
A particular bit of the Lovecraft mythos that is less of a mirrored truth than an inverted prophecy is the Necronomicon, authored by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. It is not a real book, but many stories reference it, and it is where the famous couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die
comes from. The thing about the Necronomicon, is that a Mad “Arab” went and wrote the opposite of it in our world, but that is a subject for its own post.
His birth name was René Guénon, but he would later go by Abdalwâhid Yahiâ.
And he was the author of the Necronomicon.
It is an interesting question whether science reveals a universe consonant with Lovecraft. Some think so, but then, there really is quite a lot of order in the universe. And a lot of chaos also.
If there was a design sensibility that guided the creation of the universe, it was clearly wabi-sabi, the spirit of perfect imperfection. I also get a sense of Dayenu from it. Really, it would have been enough to have one sun, but we got 100 billion in this galaxy alone. It does not seem like the product of mad gibbering, though there is those mysterious gaps in physics to account for…
Sometimes, truth is best seen in a mirror. Seeing what is false can really clarify what is true. If nothing else, I hope you take Ultra Comics to heart. And again if someone knows of the opposite of a horror movie, I really want to see it!
I once saw nihilism defined as “the absence of anything”, leading to the name of this blog. It would be nice to have a word that means “the presence of everything”.
Art film could perhaps be considered to be the opposite of horror, but those films just are not as intense (if you know of a film that is the intense opposite of horror, let me know!). Ah, what about erotic films, like Blue is the Warmest Color or The Lovers? While these films are the mirror image of horror, as the emotions they arouse are the opposite of horror (sex being the opposite of murder), they are not the full inversion of horror, as seeing sex just is not beautiful or elevating: it arouses the bestial passions, same as horror. It’s inverted along one axis, but not on the other one, the one that runs from banal to transcendent. A true opposite would somehow arouse a transcendent emotion that is as intense as seeing gore. Or perhaps the intensity needs to be inverted as well? Maybe Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams is the opposite of horror?
There is a Gnostic sect called the Mandaeans who regards Jesus as a false Messiah, and I recall reading once, as a magician also, but I can’t source that at present.
I can totally see why he would think that, as Paul McCartney said it was a symbol of the fall of the Roman Empire, and it is part of the White Album. The wonders of schizo logic!
Thanks for another thought-provoking post Carlos. My own take on film's anti-utopianness is that our stories and myths have always been anti-utopian. There's a bit in The Hobbit where Tolkien addresses the reader directly and essentially says 'And then they had a great time feasting for a while, but that's boring to read about, so let's skip ahead to them taking up their dangerous quest again'. Narrative demands sin, imperfection, pain and drama, I think partly because that's what we know - it's the stuff of our mortal life - but also because peace just can't be talked about. It's so ineffable, but also so...static. It isn't about going anywhere, doing anything or being anyone, so by definition you can't tell stories about it. It's not the road you walk along, it's the end of the road where you finally get some rest.
Music seems to have an easier time representing beauty despite the fact that it's constantly moving - maybe because no words are involved. But even there, the ear generally demands some tension and release, some intriguing dissonance. It'd be hard to sit through a static major-chord drone for an hour, technically beautiful though it might be.
Awesome post 👍
Where did you get that second Terry Davis graphic from, the word cloud??