In view of the release, scheduled for January 14, of the third season of "True Detective", we propose to our readers the cycle of articles we curated for YAWP on the esoteric elements of the successful television series.
di Marco Maculotti
article originally published on YAWP: Journal of Literatures and Philosophies
"He who devours time ... his clothes are a wind of imperceptible voices ... rejoice: death is not the end. "(T, episode 7)
In the previous appointment of this cycle [1] we analyzed the Worldview by Rust Cohle tracing a number of literary and philosophical influences that they allegedly inspired Nic Pizzolatto for the genesis of the character. Now, in this third article of the series, we aim to discuss the time theme which appears absolutely central in the first season of T. Our intent is - as the reader who has already had the opportunity to read the previous contributions will already know - to dissect the themes of the series from a point of view traditional e mythical. We will see how these interpretative tools will be fully satisfactory here, as several key points of the TV series recall lessons almost literally wisdom e mystery of archaic civilizations. We will refer above all to the classical Greek tradition, to the Hindu one and to the work of the historian of religions Mircea Eliade.
The "life trap" and the chronic curse
All eight episodes that make up the first season of T appear permeated by an atmosphere of left inevitability. The main witness of this sort of illusory curse is of course the protagonist Rust Cohle, who more than once has the opportunity to translate his pessimistic ruminations on the subject into concepts, involving - despite him - his colleague Marty Hart. In the third episode Rust puts this chronic curse in relation to what he defines the "trap of life":
“We all run into what I call the 'life trap'. This deep certainty that things will be different, that you will move to another city… and you will meet people who will be friends with you for the rest of your life, that you will fall in love and be fulfilled. Fuck you at the realization and the resolution. […] Realization is not achieved, not until the last moment. And the resolution. No… No. No. Nothing really ends. "
From his first monologues, one immediately understands how Rust is almost overwhelmed by this feeling that he feels like a real curse - anathema that hangs like a sword of Damocles over all humanity, even if few are really aware of it: and the case of his colleague Marty is emblematic in this sense [2]. The realization , resolution in Rust's eyes they are nothing but illusory, yet harmful, chimeras. The structure of time, similar to a gigantic organism-phagocytic mechanism, does not at all allow consciousness to come to a realization, let alone a resolution, since everything is cyclical and situations - especially dramatic ones - will repeat themselves forever, cycle after cycle. Thus, upon the discovery of the corpse of Dora Lange in the pilot episode, Rust comments with exact words:
« You'll see, it will happen again. Or it has happened before. Or both. »
This bitter awareness of the existence of an implacable mechanism that is founded on the eternal return of the same [3] of Nietzschean memory re-emerges several times in the series, both by Cohle and by other characters. In the fifth episode, following the location and elimination of the Ledoux brothers, Rust states:
“I don't want to know anything more. In this world nothing can be solved. Someone once told me that life is just one circle repetitive. Everything we have done or will do, we will be forced to repeat it again, and again, and again. And that little boy and that little girl will still be in that room, over and over and over. Forever. "
And, in the seventh episode:
“My life was a circle of violence and degradation, since I was little. Time to close it. "
These flashes of disillusionment - and at the same time of lighting ("When I had those visions most of the time I thought I was crazy, but there were other times when I thought I could uncover reality.à secret of the universe», Says Rust in ep. 2) - led Cohle to develop his own philosophical theory on the nature of time and human life and consciousness in relation to it. Thus, for example, in the fifth episode he vaticina:
«In eternity where time does not exist, nothing can grow, nothing can become, nothing changes. So death created time for the things that she will kill to grow and everyone is reborn but always in the same life they lived in before. Nobody is able to remember their life, nobody can change their life and this is the terrible secret of life itself. We are trapped like in a nightmare from which we keep waking up. […] Our life proposes itself again cyclically like karts on a track ... »
Similarly, although with a much more simplified and we could say 'popular' language, Marty disconsolately expresses his own frustration and helplessness towards the events of his life (ep. 7):
«Father Time makes us what he wants. "
The God of Time, the circle, death
“(He is) all around us. Before our birth and after our death. "(T, episode 8)
At this point it must be emphasized that in T this monstrous, omnipotent and far from merciful force that manifests itself through the passage of time is in full line with the archaic tradition. A excursus.
Il character circular weather, clearly recognizable in the dialogues of the series that we have mentioned, it was well known to the ancients. The oldest time god in ancient Greece was Okeanos, whose etymology Paula Philipsson [4] it derives from Sanskrit achayâna, "The surrounding". Okeanos presented itself as the cosmic river that surrounded the earth as a ring and also included the universe in the form of a circular stream or a snake eating its own tail (Ouroboros) and who wears the zodiac on his back [5]. According to Homer Okeanos is the origin of all gods and, indeed, of all things. Of everything it is there source. "Genesis of every thing and every phenomenon that it contains in itself, has, in its closed circle, neither beginning nor end: these concepts indeed lose all validity in him" [6]. The symbol of the ring from which the world imagined itself surrounded expresses at the same time the idea of fluidity and that of constraint: and therefore the situation of human consciousness within this universe was perceived as a situation of fluidity (relative freedom) in constraint (Kronos, but also Fate). Moreover, it is no coincidence that the Orphics considered Ananke (Necessity) the paredra of Kronos.
After Okeanos, in fact, the function of god of time was attributed to Kronos. in Saturnalia Macrobius reads: "Since time is a fixed measure, it is derived from the revolutions of the sky. Time begins there, and from that moment it is believed to have originated from Kronos". Of course, with the "birth" of time (world of becoming) also death comes into existence, which is closely connected to it. Thus Saturn-Kronos was always represented with one sickle in hand, with which rent their victims. This image will remain in vogue even in the Middle Ages in thearchetype of Death as «Great Reaper". Time and Death, therefore, appear so closely connected that they can be considered indivisible - two aspects and functions of the sinister god Kronos [7].
Likewise, in another Indo-European tradition such as the Persian-Iranian one, the god of time Zrvan it was considered the cause of decay and death and was sometimes even identified with Ahriman, the principle of evil. However, his worshipers saw him as the source of both Ahura Mazdā, the principle of good in Persian dualism, and of his antagonist Ahriman: he was therefore considered "a god beyond the cosmic circumference and time that we know, which clearly leads us to think of a supra-cosmic divinity " [8]. In other words, behind the illusory 'mask' of time there would be eternity, imagined as an a-temporal dimension in which there are no polarity or divisions of any kind. And in which, it goes without saying, the continuum space-time that distinguishes what the hermeticists define as the "sublunary world".
Kronos and Aion presented themselves, in the Hellenic tradition, as two manifestations of the same numinous force or, more correctly, Aion it was configured as the pre-temporal and a-temporal manifestation of Kronos, preceding the original partition between space and time, spirit and matter, light and darkness. If, in fact, Aion represented infinite time (originally not separated from space), Kronos was instead the finite, cyclical and inexorable time, the bearer of death and destruction: the continuum space-time that distinguishes the world of becoming in which humanity spends its existence. So he writes Marie-Louise von Franz, a student of Jung [9]:
“Aion is an eternal being, the celestial sphere of the fixed stars, which were believed to be eternal, not subject to suffering and change. It moves in an eternal circle. Only under the moon does the world of Cronus begin to exist, the futile, transient 'sublunar' sphere of decadence. "
The longing for eternity
Let us now compare these traditional doctrines that we have mentioned with Rust Cohle's philosophical-existentialist externalizations. In the fifth episode he exclaims:
"In this universe we manage time linearly, forward ... but outside our space-time, from a perspective that would be four-dimensional, time would not exist ... and from that position, if we could reach it, we would see that our space-time is as if flattened, like a single sculpture whose matter is superimposed on every place it has ever occupied. [...] All that is outside our dimension is eternity. Eternity watches us from above. Now for us it is a sphere, but for them it is a hoops. »
To this trap of life, to this chronic nightmare, Rust therefore contrasts the dimension of eternity (the fourth dimension), predicting how it would be perceived the deception of the continuum space time from the axial position, immutable and a-temporal from one dimension other and higher, "if we could reach it."
The obsession of Rust - and, to a lesser extent, of the other characters in the series - for the relentlessness of the passage of time, for the recurrence of certain situations in the human existence, for the impossibility of escaping one's destiny, are indeed the same anxieties of the ancient man who, imprisoned in the flow of Kronos, dreamed, listening to the mythical narratives, the return of his soul to a paradisiacal and pre-temporal dimension, removed from the flow of becoming, in which there are no causes and effects but only a timeless eternity: the kingdom of Aion. This is religion, but it is also science.
The "All-Devouring Time"
And here we return to the symbolism of Saturn-Kronos in his function as god of time phagocytator. He was, as everyone knows, the god who devours their children. Likewise, in Vedic India, of Yama, god of death and king of the dharma, he affirmed: «In truth Yama it is death. He is about to devour everything" [10]. These sapiential and initiatory maxims were naturally linked to the conception, found in numerous Indian schools, of the entire cosmos as "sacrificed and sacrificing", "devoured and devouring".
The most illuminating exposition of this doctrine is found in the Śivaista School. One of the main appellations of VAT è Kala Rudra, "The all-devouring time". According to śivaita wisdom, everything that is born must die: the principle of life is therefore associated with time, that is, the principle of death; in other words, since life feeds on death, the creator god is also the destroyer god [11]. In this, the beginning and the end of the circle coincide. Furthermore, it should be added that Kala, as well as «time», it also means «black, obscured, stained». According to the exegesis of Mircea Eliade [12], «Time is black because it is hard, irrational, merciless. Those who live under the dominion of time are subject to sufferings of all kinds and their liberation consists above all in the abolition of time, in escaping from universal change.».
This possibility of aescape from becoming - which is at the same time a out of time and liberation — is perceived as a consequence of the eschatological function that the vision of Śiva that, through the Yuga and kalpas, dancing frantically, continually destroys and recreates the cosmos anew, impressed upon the consciousness of the meditator. Eliade sums up this question best [13], according to which the contemplation of the cosmic panorama formed by endlessly repeating cycles "terrifies man and forces him to convince himself that he has to restart this same evanescent existence billions of times and endure the same sufferings without end, and this has for effect of exacerbating his will to escape, that is, of pushing him to definitively transcend his condition as an "existing" ». And it is exactly the experience that Rust Cohle will have in the season finale, after being nearly fatally injured by Childress. [14]. And it is also the state that the latter yearns for, when in the final Vatican episode:
“My ascension will free me from eternal repetition. I'm nearing the end. Some mornings I already glimpse the infernal plane. "
The "terror of time" and reintegration
We could say with Mircea Eliade that the existential anguish that permeates the serial Nic Pizzolatto's television program is closely connected to the awareness of historicity: in the modern world, characterized by the phenomenon of the so-called "death of God" and therefore by the loss of a conception sacral of the world and of human existence, the absolutization of historicity leads man, now irremediably deprived of any superior hold, to identify himself completely with becoming, and ultimately with the abysmal nonsense of this experience. However, these themes are already recurring, as the Romanian historian of religions notes, in the Hindu tradition and precisely in the equation "History / Becoming = Māyā / Illusion = Anguish / Terror". In this regard, he noted [15]:
«By affirming that man is" chained "by illusion, the Hindu philosophies mean that all existence is essentially a rupture in itself, because it is a separation from the absolute. When Yoga or Buddhism say that everything is suffering, everything is fleeting, they anticipate the sense of "Time and time”By Heidegger, that is, they affirm that the temporality of every human existence inevitably generates anguish and pain. [...] The anguish arises from the tragic discovery that man is a being doomed to death, born from nothing and on his way to nowhere. »
It's still [16]:
“We are distressed because we have just found out that we are, not deadly in the abstract sense of the syllogism, but dying, on the verge of dying, as relentlessly devoured by time »
Not so much the fact of living in the world of becoming, but rather that of being it devoured, due to the lack of a superior grip to which one can 'cling', represents the reason for this modern anguish, perfectly staged by Pizzolatto through the main character of his serial. This must be read in conjunction with what Eliade stated elsewhere [17]:
« Cyclical Time becomes terrifying when it ceases to be a means to the reintegration of a primordial situation, and to rediscover the mysterious presence of the gods: it's like a circle closed in on itself, which repeats itself indefinitely. »
And it is precisely such "reintegration of a primordial situation, This definitive transcendence of the condition of existing in the world of becoming, the aforementioned escape from the "circle closed in on itself" which represents time and human existence that Rust Cohle experiences in the final episode of the series when, in a comatose condition, he ascends to the a-temporal realm and subtracted from the flow of the becoming of Aion, where the meeting with the prematurely deceased daughter takes place. But we will have the opportunity to talk about this shortly.
Note:
[1] Marco Maculotti, “True Detective”: Rust Cohle's Weltanschauung, AXIS mundi.
[2] In the fifth episode he states: «This feeling that life has slipped through your fingers as if the future was behind you as if it had always been behind you…». Even Marty therefore, although only occasionally, is able to guess the mocking and relentless role of time with reference to the facts of his life.
[3] See Marco Maculotti, The doctrine of the Eternal Return of the same: from Berosus to Eliade, AXIS mundi.
[4] Paula Philipsson, Origins and forms of the Greek myth, and. Boringhieri, Turin, 1983, p. 257.
[5] Marie-Louise von Franz, The experience of time, and. TEADUE, Milan, 1997, p. 10.
[6] Paula Philipsson, op. cit. pp. 257 ff.
[7] See Marco Maculotti, Cyclical time and linear time: Kronos / Shiva, the "Time that devours everything", AXIS mundi.
[8] Joscelyn Godwin, The polar myth, and. Mediterranee, Rome, 2001, p. 197.
[9] Marie-Louise von Franz, op. cit., p. 38.
[10] Jaiminīya-Brahamana, I, 28.
[11] For this reason Shiva also has a terrifying aspect (Bhairava) and is called with dark epithets (Rudra, The "Lord of Tears"; Mahakala, The "Time of Time", the "Great Destroyer"): in this capacity, it is venerated above all under the aspect of the energy it manifests: Kālī (from kala, «time ») the terrible black-skinned goddess. For this reason, Kālī / Durgā was erected as "Lady of Time" and of human destinies, as it mainly represents the destructive aspect of Śiva, the "Eater of Time".
[12] Mircea Eliade, Treatise on the history of religions. See also Mircea Eliade, “Indian Symbolisms of Time and Eternity”, in Images and symbols, and. Jaca Book, Milan, 2015, pp. 55 ff.
[13] Mircea Eliade, The myth of the Eternal Return, and. Borla, Bologna, 1975, p. 152.
[14] Marco Maculotti, "True Detective": Childress, Pan and the Wilder Mann, AXIS mundi.
[15] Mircea Eliade, “Religious symbolism and the valorization of anguish”, in Myths, dreams and mysteries p. 49.
[16] Ibidem, p. 50.
[17] Mircea Eliade, The sacred and the profane, and. Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 2003, p. 71.
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