Death as a manifestation of demonicity

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

When we talk about the manifestations of demonicism in contemporary Western society, we must inevitably discuss the concept of death. In retrospect, death remains one of the greatest and most threatening unknowns and fears, even in a secular society, while at the same time embodying the phenomenology of desire and fantasy.

Death combines reality, knowledge and the unknowable, a kind of passage into a non-human existence, into nothingness. Death can be seen from different perspectives. It is like a litmus test for reality and everyday life, showing how fragile and impermanent everything we know is. And finally, how culturally subjective it is to have an opinion or a belief in reality. The Indian yogi and author Sadhguru said that death exists only for the living. He asks, "Have you ever seen a dead person? No, you have only seen a body with no signs of life". Death is a fiction. It is a fiction, just like this life. And in the end, this belief, this notion that death is a fiction, is just a manipulative way of explaining what the human mind cannot comprehend.

Perhaps life is destruction, and total extinction, death a form of creation or creation? As for energy changes, which can be very pragmatic, but at the same time fall into the realm of the pseudo, the very notion of change already dictates a kind of loss and a filling up with something new and unknowable, even if it is absolute emptiness or nothingness. Yogis often use a breathing technique that aims to exhale all the old air and hold the breath for a while before inhaling the new air. So this exercise, too, could be seen as a kind of death, a letting go of the old energy before breathing in the new.

Abramović, who constantly explores the energies between people and things in her performances, presented in 2020 a performance called "7 deaths", in which she depicts 7 different deaths of Maria Callas. In this performance, it is hard not to notice the moment when reality, before it breaks, becomes seemingly unbearable. In one of the 7 deaths, Abramović states that when walking towards the fire, first it is warm, then with each step it gets hotter, until finally, the skin turns black and each step requires inhuman effort. This brief but rather dramatic moment reveals the sublimity of reality, an exit or passage that is unknowable and, as it were, one of the few that allows us to perceive reality not as a finite entity but as part of something complex.

Death is beautiful. Madness is beautiful. The aesthetics of death are perfectly captured in the endings of the films of R. Eggers and P. Greenaway. Although at first glance the shots are quite similar, as if young people lying in ribald poses are being butchered, a deeper look reveals that the two acts have different meanings and charges. In the case of Robert Eggers, the guts of the still-living protagonist are being butchered by seagulls (read a more extensive analysis of the film here). In many cultures around the world, birds symbolise the supernatural connection between heaven and earth and are a mythological symbol. In the Middle East and Asia, birds symbolise immortality. In East Indian mythology, birds represent deviant souls. In Christian art, birds are often depicted as saved souls. Thus, in the film The Lighthouse, the bird motif becomes one of the main motifs, constantly recurring and narrating different dystopias of the plot, and finally, feeding on human flesh, as if it were becoming an iconic act with multiple meanings. In the case of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, directed by Mr Greenaway, at the climax of the film, the serving of the human body as a dish used in a cannibalistic act creates, as never before, an aesthetic, theatrical and sublime image, with a content of multiple meanings, from the representation of the capitalist world, to the religious one, where the sacred and the sinful clash. These examples seem to inspire us to consider how subjective our reality is, how subjective the moment of death is, how stereotypes prevent us from seeing an individualised reality and how much they reduce it to a recognisable, archetypal visual experience. Eggers uses a surrealist mood in his films to confuse reality, as if to question it as we know it. By showing even the seemingly simplest image, the director always has a parallel story or even paths in his mind. His second feature film, The Lighthouse, is like a jigsaw puzzle that the viewer tries to unravel. The line of the film is the detachment of reality, which takes place gradually, with very apt and organic symbols, starting from the swim to the island, which can be seen as the evolution of schizophrenia, the detachment of consciousness and the unconscious. The bodies drowning in the water, the incessant screaming of the seagulls and the only human being who, in the end, questions whether he exists at all.

A somewhat similar narrative, but emotionally different, detachment is also demonstrated by Haruki Murakami's A Merciless Wonderland and the End of the World, a story of a utopian city in the mind of a character, intertwined with Japanese and Western tradition, where he stays after death. As in the series "Black Mirror", in the episode "San Junipero", people in the near future have the choice of dying or going to a utopian city where they can exist forever. However, this recurring motif in the stories seems to suggest the aspirations and fears of modern society - to live forever, but what is life worth if this reality lasts forever? In recent years, we may have noticed that we seem to have grown tired of reality and are asking questions such as: how will we live tomorrow, how will we live together? And finally, where will we live? Mortality seems to be becoming a ballast that we are trying to get rid of in any way we can, even if it is a thought experiment. And in a way, it seems that we are trying to avoid a reality that doesn't give life as much meaning as we sometimes wish it had. Although it is now fashionable to engage in self-reflection, mindfulness techniques, meditation, the bubble of individuality has become so entrenched in our society that we hardly notice the slight resemblance. One that is even frightening, because its essential characteristic is distinctiveness. Mr Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism, says a lot about this, exploring the expanded limits of capitalism. There are no limits to our individuality, we are, as it were, caught up in a cosmic acceleration towards annihilation. The death of Kurt Cobain, according to the aforementioned author, is an apt example of man's inability to withstand this immense cosmic loneliness and meaninglessness. Death, in our perception of reality, is just a fast-food joint on the way, where we inevitably fill our stomachs, think for a moment that it is unhealthy and move on. It is as if it does not exist. In us and in others.

Death can be seen as a liminal experience, and ultimately, it is one of the fundamental reference points of reality. Tarkovsky has always opposed the mystification of reality, which limits the creative power to the categories of the mind alone. In one of his interviews, the director said: "I would not agree if my films were called romantic... Because romanticism is a way of presenting reality that allows a person to see something more than it is. If we are talking about anything that is sacred, about the search for some kind of truth, for me that is not romanticism. Because I don't go beyond reality and change it. I am only opening up what is there, but is invisible."

Indeed, there is enough in reality to make its mystification an unnecessary means of presenting a surreal reality. Reality is, in itself, sufficiently vague, grotesque and dramatic.

The transformation of the world in Tarkovsky's work has been treated by him solely in the context of human transformation. "Everything that happens here depends on us, not on the zone" - this phrase from the film Stalker has become one of the foundations for Tarkovsky's work and even his life as an artist.

One of the most fascinating parallels between life and death is that death is not somewhere. The human journey, as in the plot of Stalker, takes place organically, travelling through this reality without flying away, without moving somewhere else. Death and life are accommodated in one line, affecting far more than the separation of these two constructs. The chronological sequence, travelling into Tarkovsky's zone, seems to hurt so much that you can even feel it with the tips of your eyelashes, because you realise that the separation has not happened. It is just a continuous, seamless process and, in the end, life and death are subjects of one reality, changing each other gradually and not suddenly. This perception is inseparable from Tarkovsky's phrase that reality depends on the human being, the zone depends on the individual, because space is itself fluid, changing energy with the human being, and cannot be defined as a monumental, clear place.