In Anima, Thom Yorke follows a trail that was set out for his soul when his European ancestors crossed paths in the great forest.
For this new audiovisual feast from Paul Thomas Anderson is fairy tale, folks, mark my words. And as a writer who has long explored the deep trails made across our psyches by the play of light and darkness since time immemorial, the idea of ancient tales with modern significance is something dear to my heart. This isn’t myth as falsehood, but myth as powerful storytelling, opening doors to our secret longings, our hidden hopes, our romantic selves.
So how does this modern mythmaking work? Well, where once wise old crones shared secrets beneath the wild spreading branches of an oak or elm, or curious children allowed themselves to become enchanted by the thrilling call of a songbird until they were lost in the forest, Yorke is drawn along this heartfelt tale by similar instincts. His character in this romance is on the scent of the chase, following a girl of his dreams, yearning to return her lunch case, which is as precious to him as any other form of lost treasure could be. By the time he has woken up on his crowded train, dodged countless commuters on crammed escalators, and faced other barriers to his distant love interest, Yorke is following the golden imperative of the mythic journey: the hero is inspired to set things right, by returning the case and maybe meeting someone to care about in the deal. The foes and barriers, the challenges to his path, the obstacles that threaten to derail the fruition of his dream … these are all inevitable in the hunt, or life is not being lived. The thorns cross the path, the villain stands in the way, the mountain must be climbed. Our goal may seem just out of reach, but it is in such a quest that we are reminded of our power, as Joseph Campbell so often reminded us.
But while the chase is timeless, the imagery of Anima reflects our new ‘natural environment’: the city. The opening, submerged in the subway, enfolds us within a train shooting along a tunnel, like a probe into our everyday underworld. We don’t want to over-analyze the film – as Martin Shaw wrote, the best stories remain dark around the edges, they leave us in mystery, grappling with our own inner truths and conflicts, unsure rather than overly confident in our self-knowledge. But the nodding of the commuters, Yorke included, seems to stand as the inevitable process of socialization, a dance we all join in order to get by, a way of being that lets us be in the world. Turning it into dance is the magic that art, in this case film, allows us – to settle into the truths of our lives while also making them part of a greater whole. We play the game, we know we play the game, but we know we are also more than this, that we come from a place of unlimited potential and ultimately we belong in that place, as much as we do here, in our world of limit and dissolution.
In this world, Yorke and Anderson play with the familiar while feeling out its edges. As soon as Yorke glimpses his Anima – a Jungian term for the feminine within – his otherwise tired character is opened out into new worlds of excitement, with the possibility that everyday life might not leave us flattened but invigorated; that something might change for the better, after all. The chase includes a classic flying dream sequence, as well as epic scenery, and Yorke’s character responds with passing episodes of passive acceptance, fleeting anger, playful exploration and hopeless resignation in turns. All of these human responses are bound within another mythic signalling: towards the wonder of awe. Can it be true? Is it real? The dream of Anima speaks of these gentle inner experiences, which we all know and hold dear but too often let slide along the rigmarole of modern life.
The eventual meeting, the reuniting of two lost souls who complement each other in the endless dance of being around being, rolling along a laneway wall, is a testament to the hope of our unquenchable longing. Anima draws us down and reminds us where we come from and where we belong. This is Home, a place we have sometimes forgotten is also a planet with limits, forests and lakes, seas and other creatures that need protecting.
Whatever parts of us face the world – our Persona to society, family and each other – find relief in the depths of Anima. Psyche, or mind; self, the individual, you person, the mind/body, your vehicle for getting by … that person seeks their dance partner beneath the surface, where she lives and breathes and waits for us to remember. Take the trip, again …
Geoff Berry wrote his PhD on the symbol of light, his MA on dreams and myths, and sings along similar themes with Melbourne post-punk band SEVERINS.
Not all Severins songs are about cosmic power, depth psychology, ecosoirituality, animism and the like. Some are about plumbing. The unrelenting pressures of parenthood, including showing loving kindness to children even when they are unravelling our patience faster than a kitten works over a ball of wool, only not so cute. The need to clean up after ourselves and take care of water. The desire to just get the job done, as best we can, and then put up our feet. You know, the everyday stuff we can all relate to (with a subtle message of the cosmic psyche business woven throughout – I can’t help myself 🙂
The big gig where we play this psychedelic post-punk indie art rock for the world, the album launch for the Severins vinyl record “Reconnect”, is coming soon.
Friday the 28th of June at the Northcote Social Club in Melbourne, Australia. If you’re there, be thrilled by a cosmic wondershow, a passionate call to arms for the ecospiritual rebellion, and a laugh, to be sure. Listen to all Severins songs and check out some film clips, including a new one and some archival footage of our sonic madness, here.
The Plug – lyrics
I wanna hold this water, Do I gotta? Yeah I oughta
But I got a screaming daughter, I gotta get my house in order
We used up all this water, Now it’s dirty and it’s sordid
The toys yeah they’re my daughter’s, I gotta sort this bricks and mortar
Coz it’s in and it’s out and it’s up and it’s down
It’s all over the shop and i’ve gone out and bought the wrong part
Now it’s swirling around, if I slide the blade under
I can take out the broken bit and then I can get some relief, yeah, and put up my feet
If I cut it too short then I’ve really mucked up
But if I leave it too long I’ll be doing this over again, yeah, all over again
Coz it’s in and it’s out and it’s up and it’s down
It’s all over the shop and i’ve gone out and bought the wrong part, again,
Initiation makes us into something we weren’t before. Successful ritual transforms our consciousness, expanding our minds beyond a little circle of desire and gratification, connecting us to the more-than-human world of nature all around us, the ecosystem we depend upon, the creatures who are our earthly kin, as well as connecting us to the spirit of life in the cosmos itself. This is what we used to get consistently in premodern society and what some people in more traditional societies, which are more resistant to the modern disease of disconnection, still get.
For those of us born into large-scale modernising cultures, religion tries to fill the gap, which is left as we turn away from this world of animistic life, but it gets so cold in those dusty halls and generally misses the meaty, gristly, blood-pumping point of the matter. That is, the living matter …
The best book I ever read on this subject was “Nature and Madness” by Paul Shepard. He pointed out what we had lost, how the turn towards technological domination of the planet came at such a great cost, as we allowed our initiation rituals to become severed from the word around us, and led by new types of elders, whose loyalties were to king and army rather than our fellow animals, our ancient homes in the forests and the mountains, the deserts and the seas. It’s a great book, but like my PhD on the meaning of light, it spends most of its time diagnosing the problem, leaving us to find solutions.
So I wrote this song, as a hint towards some things we could be doing to take our power back, as a signpost, a call to arms, an ecopoetic symbolic evocation of that world, as it calls us back to ourselves and to its living significance, within and without …
Everyone knows that Easter is based on an ancient pagan festival of rebirth – hence the eggs and bunnies, fertility symbols par excellence, aligned with a full moon of pregnant portent. Historically, Christianity overtook every sign of an alternative spirituality that it found, building over sites like Notre Dame as well as converting seasonal celebrations like the winter solstice, now swamped by the commercial celebration of Christmas.
In both of these cases, the major Christian celebrations are removed from the earthly and seasonal reasons behind them. Trying to explain this to my children, i spoke about the difference between Catholic and Protestant forms of the dominant western religion. Catholicism kept the rituals, the incense, the Saint days and other ways of representing the mystery of life alive. Meanwhile, Protestantism rejected the priestly power games to argue that each of us could work out our relationship with the divine within.
Meditate on the fact that you are the universe aware of itself.
While i wholeheartedly support any shift away from power dynamics that privilege middle managers and disempower any individual, i also know the cost of our modern dissociation from ritual. We are no longer proficient at dropping into the subliminal otherworlds beneath and within this physical reality. The ‘techniques of ecstasy’ that Eliade called the skills of the shamanic class are limited to (mostly) desacralised trance-like artists, the aforementioned priests (where they find an audience), and psychotherapists in their clinical rooms. Rarely do any of these settings provide us with the deep connection that we crave, to the cosmic spirit of life that courses unheralded through our veins, the planet, deep space and time.
Ritualise your relationship with nature at every opportunity
What we need, at Easter and Christmas and the solstices and equinoxes and every day, is that sense: that we are part of a living world, filled with the spirit of life, confirmed in our minds and bodies so completely that we no longer question it. This is what great myths always did – as Joseph Campbell described it, they put us in touch with the universe and keep us there. So, enjoy a chocolate egg or three, but also take time to meditate and ritualise your relationship to ultimate power, in the here and now, at whatever time you can. This is one of the greatest lacks in modern life and another reason we remain so disassociated from the natural world even while we destroy it in our ignorance.
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I stood in awe, inside the sacred space inside Notre Dame, after walking the circuit around the building and its impressive gothic architecture. While we tourists gawked, the faithful worshipped, as they did every day, as they did regardless of our other, more secular interests. The smoke rose from the Catholic censer, the light shone down through the majestic stained glass, and the place emanated divine presence simply because so many had called upon it for so long. Their God shimmered through the space because they called upon it; because they took solace in it; because they made it real.
I have a complicated relationship with Christianity and no desire to absolve it for its heinous crimes against those I consider to be my people; the heathens, the pagans, the natural healers, the Druids, the ones who worship the Old Ones. But calling in the sacred is something that should be beyond religious differences; beyond your cult or my mythic reality; beyond conflict.
Sacred flames for departed souls
When I was Director of Studies at the Phoenix Institute I decorated my glass office wall with these abstract images, all taken from a set of photos I took from within Notre Dame that day. I felt like I had accidentally made modern art out of sacred art, which had been captured out of focus. Maybe it was meant to be; maybe I was reframing coincidence for meaning. I don’t mind which – that is matter for everyone to interpret for themselves. (Those pictures are lost in time now, like the Notre Dame we remember is.) Regardless, at the time, it seems that while we were studying holistic counselling and creative arts therapies, we were all trying to tap into that inner light that gave us the insight to find guidance in healing – for ourselves and for others. That’s something I want to remember today, as we grieve for this loss of the sacred dimension in Paris.
The faithful – and the not-so-faithful, in my case – in the sacred hall
Although I cleave much more closely to the sacred in nature – to what some call ‘the church not made by hands’ – I recognise any space made sacred by the attempt to be in conversation with the creative face that is beyond the human, that is greater than anything we can conceive, that puts us back in touch with the divine spark behind all life and the very existence of the cosmos. I give thanks for this space and what it meant to anyone exposed to its magnificent Gothic beauty and the way it gave access tot he otherworld within and beyond this one. Amen, Om, Aum, Aho, Home: may all the scared words be spoken in reverence on this day of mourning for one of the great sacred spaces of the world.
It’s gloomy, compared to a sacred grove, but the effect is inarguable.
