Documentary on the Aokigahara Suicide Forest

Note: This video is not for the weak of heart. I warn you it will disturb many. It is a documentary on the suicide forest at the base of Mt. Fuji where on average a hundred suicides are discovered a year. It becomes a study in the existential nature of humanity, what Albert Camus considers the ultimate question. The geologist Azusa Hayano provides a deeper insight into this question. Insight that is perhaps more profound than much of western existentialism and the essentially annihilatory core of Being found in thinkers such as Sartre, Camus, and even Heidegger. We are not a singularity. We do not die alone. The act of suicide always brings others into the very act. Even in the depths of a forest. It affects more than just the self. The action is taken against the self in the context of a world of others. Others will always become affected. If care is the core of Being, of Dasein, as Heidegger claims, then Dasein, that is what it means to be human, must experience care as the core of how it interacts with others. Dasein is not a singularity but an ecology. This might take Heidegger out of context, but, I was never one for context. The point is we exist in a world with others. Our given Being is a being-in-the-world with others. We cannot exist apart from others. To exist is to be a part of a world of others. As the video is concluded the deeper question of life often interpreted by existentialists as the question of suicide loses its singularity and gains itself in an ecology of others and care for others. “You think that you die alone, but that’s not true. Nobody is alone in this world. We have to coexist and take care of each other.”

Lacan and other philosophical short-circuits in David Lynch Films.

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek has a profound interest in all things David Lynch. This is evidenced in his filmwork “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”. Watching Lynch’s movies, I have come to agree with Zizek’s premise: cinema is the ultimate pervert art and also David Lynch is perhaps one of cinema’s great perverts, and therefore, perhaps one of the greatest film makers. What I think is most promising about Lynch is that in watching his films you can see the influence of Lacan’s psychology. His films bring Lacan to life. They provide the viewer with a means to see Lacan in artistic practice. Through Lynch’s films we have a system of ready-made examples that allow us to further understand the often difficult relationship between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the Real. Here are three examples that I have pulled from Lynch’s films.

1. The Elaborate Fraud of Emotion and the Real

The moment when our deepest emotions are betrayed and exposed as the imaginary order, where the real creeps in as something ultimately tragic. Tragic because we realize the feelings we were made to endure were the consequence of an elaborate fraud on the part of the other. And we don’t care. Because they were precisely what we wanted to feel, the emotions we were expected to have: which is the goal of any great cinematographic experience.

2. The Transcendent Perversion of the Mystery Man

What happens when the observer lets the inmate know he is interned within the panopticon a la Foucualt? The mystery man isn’t frightening because he is watching, but he is frightening because he is both omnipresent and diabolical, he knows we know and he knows we know he most likely doesn’t have our best interests at heart. He is the ultimate pervert, an represents the base willfulness of a society, such as ours, that likes to watch more than it likes to participate in the act itself.

3. What is in the box: Pain and the imaginary order

“What is in the box?” “Pain.” Real or imagined? Once again: an elaborate fraud. One that the character feels down to the core. It doesn’t matter whether the hand is actually disintegrating. The pain is experienced despite it being revealed as a hoax. The imagined becomes more real than what is actually going on in the box, which, in this instance, is actually mundane, as the hand is removed without a scratch.

Haven’t posted much. Plan on doing more. Haven’t had much to write about since most of my energy has been devoted to my professional writing. Here is a short poem I wrote after spending time reading William Blake. The idea was to get a similar childish musical rhythm like his Songs of Innocence. As with most of my poems, it was written while trying to fall asleep after the ambien wouldn’t kick in.

“There is a wall upon a hill”

There is a wall upon a hill,
With roses, lilacs and daffodil,
Greens seas of grass surround about
This aged granite and stone redoubt.

Upon the wall, first cracks appeared
As rains and snow and ice so sheared
The mason’s work of ages past,
Now faded green with moss at last.

From rock to wall, to pebbled dust,
Time’s hand upon a dagger thrust
Souls of men each come around
To feed the roses, worms, and ground.