There's a fascination for things that do not exist in the material/conventional ways of the world, “regulative ideals” or “virtual events”, spiritualities such as: justice, community, eroticism, love, mysticism, intoxication, etc.
Filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (the Blanchot and Camus of film) in his “beyond the clouds” quartet (four stories that have the theme of “im/possibility” haunting them from within) films the “im/possibility” that love, communication and eroticism are not of this world, but “are” at the interstices of the real and the imaginary.
Beautiful Ines Sastre in the foggy Italian town of Ferrara meets her love of all time, but only for one night; they refrain from making love. The male character (Silvano) performs a mime of caresses over Sastre’s half naked body as if to Platonise her body into a halo that will last into perfection. End of relation. And the male character leaves in the mist of the morning dawn.
A bodily Love so perfect it would not last a second of consummation; to carry on for another night, another day, would be to ruin and destroy - to refrain from the feverish embodiment of an “event” that could not possibly exist in the profane economic matter of things - an illusion born out of this world has no more chance to survive into reality than a mirage in the desert could be proven to be an oasis…
A Love so strong, a body so beautiful, that one cannot live “it”. By not actualising, what, by all regards is the strongest thing ever, they abstain from fulfilment, from fulfilling the event, and “win” by losing. Both partners in crime refrain from embodying a love that is too strong to survive into mediocre reality - paradoxically, all the stronger for not having been lived, for having never happed. To abstain is to preserve, a sacred caress without profanity: protected from the ravages of entropic actualisation, from the termite materialisms of actually living “it”. For not being equal to the event of their lives, for bodily recognising but not actualising or consummating the event, they fulfil another order: such is the temporal price of eternity.
But what a temptation to go back (in fact Silvano meets Sastre three years later) to actualise further and further that night, just a touch…just a touch to further caress the night into delirium…and all will be alright…if love is a drug, then we are all junkies, shooting up pure ideals, virtual crystallisations, in our, material far too material, veins…
The virtual preference of not actualising a physical lust, a psychic intoxication, a spirituality of mind and body (love) - what is in fact only a virtual idea (of the imagination?) - is almost never achieved in reality, we are too weak, so inevitably, as Oscar Wilde saysd “each man kills the thing he loves”.
But what if it was the other way round, as7 in the fear it would not work out, when in fact everything is in place to be one of the greatest actualities in existence. We “counter-actualise” the event. We ruin the actual with the apprehension that it could not possibly be anything that would last beyond a lustful kiss, and we move on, in our material ways.
An inversion like the Italian softcore film “l’anima del corpo” (“the soul of the body”, a Wittgenstein inversion: “the face is the soul of the Body”; to understand this is to apprehend the secret of the universe) in which an im/possible coupling attempts to exist, and in fact does exist: a beautiful twenty year old girl and a seventy year old feeble man (and talking about inversion, how come the other way round is not possible? it seems that even the event, spirit, has its limits…). Of course, the male character is not taken in by the erotic relationship; he knows that it is not possible. Money and other material interests are at play, as always, he repeatedly whispers…
But how can he resist (which he doesn’t) her “freely given” bodily gift? Why is she giving herself so freely? What’s in “it” for her? What does she want in exchange for her given youth? He’s so sure that she nothing but a whore, whoring after strange gods (economies of egos and deceits) that whilst they tumble in various erotic couplings, he becomes obsessed, not only by her youthful vitalism, which he sucks dry as if to invigorate his aging frame with new blood (she’s the vampire however, he’s convinced by that…) but in finding out that after all, her soul, her spirit, is only a simulacrum of eroticism, a simulation of orgasmic bliss without exchange…whore and only a whore, she will be found out to be just that…but of course, he never finds out…he cuts off the money…she comes back for more bodily ecstasies, and freer than ever…the more she fucks other men and women the more she comes back for him, freer than ever. She resists his every attempt of entrapment, all the traps designed to make her confess her simulacrum - her innocence is still intact after every chess move he makes.
On the chessboard of life, spirit is white and matter is black; but her white is never taken, his black matter loses every piece of evidence…the more he loses the more he becomes obsessed by her soul motives…
Is there a moral? Material scepticism destroys spiritual doubt. Maybe, in the end, he whispers, she may have been genuine after all…but it’s too late, he has poisoned the relation with matter. He has checkmated himself. Destroyed by not having faith in the event, he was not equal to the event that was actualised, he was not worthy of what happed to him, of the event that surged in him…for the body is the face of the soul, and he looked elsewhere, in thinking the soul somewhere secret, hidden away, separate from the body…
1 the event is not realised, even though the event has surged into the real; but it retains itself by not actualising itself. 2 the event has happed, but it is not recognised to78be the case. The event in both cases never happens…
How many times we spoil, desecrate and defile the event by over recognising “it”, over determining “it”, materialising “it” by wanting to embody “it” at all costs…
How many opportunities missed, how many potentials lost because we are too postmodern for our virtual heads and hearts to take the oblique ironies of things seriously…
