Tomasz Kozak
Yoga Lesson, video, 20 min, DVD, Ed5.
(…) This situation raises the (perhaps exaggerated or not entirely justified) suspicion that contemporary culture has forgotten about the most tragic moments of modern history,
or that it remembers them but carelessly exploits the memory to play with dubious phantasms,
or – and that is the worst supposition – that it remains under the power of larval, archaic yearnings that not so long ago caused a worldwide catastrophe. TK
Yoga Lesson is a film project inspired by the writings of Tadeusz Miciński (1873-1918), one of the most prominent, and at the same time controversial, Polish modernist writer; author of the novels Nietota (1910), Xiądz Faust (1913), Wita (published posthumously 1926), Mené – Mené – Thekel – Upharisim (published posthumously 1931), the poems W mroku gwiazd (1902), Niedokonany (published posthumously 1931), theatre plays Kniaź Potiomkin (1906), W mrokach złotego pałacu (1909), Termopile polskie (published posthumously 1980), and essay collections Do źródeł duszy polskiej (1906), Walka o Chrystusa (1911).
The Miciński project is an attempt to fulfil, again, in the postmodern conditions, the Benjaminian postulate of awakening the revolutionary powers present in the ‘outmoded’ . The author of the Arcades Project so defined the postulate: “«Apart from a certain sophisticated charm (…) the artistic draperies and wall hangings of the previous century have come to seem musty today». We, however, believe that the charm they exercise on us is proof that these things, too, contain material of a vital importance for us (…) In any case, material of vital importance politically (…) We would recognize today’s life, today’s forms, in the life and in the apparently secondary, lost forms of that epoch” .
One of such ‘secondary’ and ‘lost’ forms is certainly the Young Poland discourse, the most radical example of which are Miciński’s texts. Texts that are charged with the ‘inertia of violent, mad, raging oppositions’ , texts that symbolise – like the dual, fire-and-ice, angel from Mené – Mené – Thekel – Upharisim, a condition of culture characteristic of times of transition.
It is a peculiar condition of simultaneous decay and peak development. A condition of the soul ‘half of which’, as one of Miciński’s characters says, ‘already glistens with dead branches’, while the other is ‘still green – still fresh – perhaps eternally young’ (it is worth remembering at this point the Baroque emblems Benjamin quoted to illustrate the condition of the 20th-century spirit – one of those, for instance, is a wilted, but blossoming, rose ). The condition can be described as a painfully realised, and at the same ecstatically experienced, simultaneity of extremes.
This sense of equally powerful polar opposites, characteristic for times of crisis and revaluation, is also present in contemporary culture. It is a culture (it is an open question whether it is really in peak development or in a standstill) that feels immobilised in the superficially de-mined field of post-history and post-art. This petrifaction, or, to use Arnold Gehlen’s term, ‘crystallisation’ of culture, is connected with a sense that ‘the possibilities implanted in it have all been developed in their basic elements’, that the ‘counterpossibilities and antitheses have been uncovered and assimilated, so that henceforth changes in the premises have become increasingly unlikely. […] If you have this impression, you will perceive crystallisation… even in a real as astonishingly dynamic and full of variety as that of modern painting’ .
In this situation, post-historical inertia is a condition that is hard to overcome – because it provides an anaesthetic surrogate of security, and security, as Nietzsche would say, remains ‘the supreme divinity’ of the (post)modern society.
However, the ‘security’ of inertia is not genuine security – it is but a temporary absence of danger resulting from lack of movement. This absence neither soothes nor calms – rather, it silts and dopes culture, so that it drifts into a half-sleep of melancholic aboulia. Naturally, all the anxieties and dreams rinsed out of consciousness return in this half-sleep. The weakness, passivity, inertia, boredom, and dullness of post-history unconsciously surrender to the repressed laws of dialectics and start demanding their antitheses (at first phantasmal, then real ones). Thus the immobilised, locked up and seemingly secure, present is attacked by the demon of dialectical Movement. As a result, the gates of history open again, and against its fiery background we see the rising figures of Will, Power, Tragedy, and Historic Drama, ready to destabilise the crystallised structure of the status quo.
In this subversive process, an important role is played by the ‘revolutionary’ power of the ‘outmoded’, or, speaking more precisely, the power of the anachronism, meant as a dynamic, opposite element introduced into the pattern of the present to undermine its inertia. So understood, anachronism is a factor of cultural animation and inspiration, but it can also be extremely dangerous. The essence of its nature is an irremovable and uncontrollable ambivalence. Due to its bipolar dynamics, anachronism can spur progressive change, but it can also provoke a barbarian regression. One example of anachronism’s regressive subversion is the German conservative revolution which managed, to quote from Thomas Mann, to ‘combine revival, and even archaisms, with revolutionariness’ . This example clearly illustrates the, shocking from today’s point of view, in a way ‘primeval’ (in the etymological and mythological sense) notion of the ‘revolutionary’ nature of ‘antiques’, and, more broadly, of the ‘old’ in general. As Hannah Arendt writes, ‘revolution’ initially meant a ‘restoration’ – and therefore something that, for us, is the exact opposite of what we assume the term to mean . ‘In the 17th century, when the term “revolution” was used for the first time in the political sense, its metaphorical content was even closer to the original meaning, because it denoted a movement returning to a certain previously affixed point, and, consequently, to a former order. The term was used for the first not when what we call a revolution broke out in England and Cromwell established the first revolutionary dictatorship, but only […] when monarchy was restored’ .
The project adapting Tadeusz Miciński’s writing for the purposes of the present – basing on the assumption that all the problems of contemporary culture ‘find their definitive formulation only in the context of film’ – reflects the ambivalent status of anachronism in film iconography which, at the beginning of a new millennium, regressively (not for critical purposes but to satisfy unconscious yearnings) exploits archaic mythologisms in fantasy and history superproductions.
The main theme of Yoga Lesson is the Young Polish phantasm of the ‘will of power’ embodied in the peculiar form of an Aryan myth, which, in Miciński’s work – above all in Nietota, his most important novel, assumes the shape of “Indian Poland”. The main protagonist of Nietota – a highlander named Ariaman (marked with a swastika-shaped scar) – travels through the Tatras-Himalayas in quest of the ‘great valiant tribes of ancient crusaders’ . As the narrator writes, ‘An eastern wind blew here, and instead of false diplomacies, armed hands strove to embrace the Pole. It was wonderful to see these warriors practice in the woods. On the carpets, in a smoky hut, amid the mountain nights, he vowed they would never betray the Swastika’ . In the final scene, Ariaman climbs down from the mountains towards the ‘world besieged by the Snake King’ (a symbol of initiation into the arcane knowledge of the demonic secrets of life). Miciński writes in the novel’s closing sentence, ‘ He walked in a profound, tragic joy, thinking that everything was motivated by the Inexpressive Knowing Gloom, that in every human existence there flickered a spark that wanted to turn into the Giant’s Will’ .
As Leon Poliakov writes in his book Aryan Myth, modern Indo-Aryan mythology has its roots in the writings of French Enlightenment thinkers who sought arguments against the thesis of the Judeo-Christian origins of European culture. In early 19th century, the revisionist discourse was adopted and fully developed by German idealism and romanticism. Inspired by Voltaire’s concept of humanity’s Indian roots, Kant chose Tibet as the birthplace of culture. Herder, in turn, situated the cradle of civilisation in the Himalayas. In 1819, Friedrich Schlegel ultimately legitimised with his authority the name, borrowed from Herodotus, of the mythic Indian ancient tribe which from then on was referred to as the Aryans. Schlegel connected the root Ari- with the German word Ehre, honour. Schelling, who initially saw Hinduism as the source of ‘ancient idealism’, with time, inspired by Lutheran orthodoxy, turned into an opponent of the ‘Hindu obsession’. Goethe, in turn, felt a deep aversion towards the Hindu pantheon and always expressed his disgust at the ‘Hindu monsters’ and their ‘idolaters’ .
At the same time, it needs to be remembered that the majority of the Indo-Aryan phantasms, especially in Germany, were fuelled by a negative reaction to the intense emancipation of European Jews at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. From its very onset, the Aryan myth was infected with anti-Semitism, and the idea of the Indo-German race’s supremacy developed throughout the 19th century in a direction that, in early 20th century, gained a proto-fascist shape in the ideas of such precursors of Nazism as Guido von List, Lanz von Liebenfels, or Rudolf von Sebottendorff.
It needs to be noted here that, sadly, Miciński – a real child of his epoch – failed (despite his assurances that the ‘soul was something deeper than the nation and the race’ ) to avoid anti-Semitic enunciations. In the novel Xiądz Faust, one of the main characters, Imogena, carrying an ‘ancient Indian lamp’, sees the ‘horror of Jewish corruption, their egoism and furious lust for power’, and states, ‘We are the Aryans, our fathers are Rama, King Asoka, the sage Wiswamitra. Little appeals to us, disgusts us often and repulses us the cruelty, cowardice, degradation with slavery, and arrogance of the Jewry’ .
Complementing these words is a curious expiation prayer of Rabbi Newach who, beating his breasts, says, ‘We apologise for the sins of the Israeli nation […] We are a thorn in Polish wounds, a sore and gangrene. […] Israel is more guilty towards Poland than some enemy of it’ .
In Yoga Lesson, a local and seemingly outdated form of the Indo-Aryan myth is confronted with its grotesque update – an idea known as ‘Hitler-Kalki’. The idea emerged in 1984 in the legendary book The Last Avatar by the Chilean writer Miguel Serrano who suggested that Adolf Hitler survived the fall of Berlin in 1945 and went into hiding in the North Pole and from there continues to lead (precisely as the last avatar, or the Kalki, the tenth incarnation of Vishnu, the Apocalyptic horseman on a white steed) an esoteric war in the defence of the Aryan race.
Aryan mythology – constitutive for the 19th-century imagination – was politically and morally discredited in the 20th century, anthropologically debunked, and, it might seem, ultimately buried under the ruins of fatal historical errors. And yet today, at the onset of a new millennium, this mythology is being updated in an alarming way not only on the margins of politics (the New White Aryan Movement) but above all in mainstream popular culture. It turns out – and the Yoga Lesson proves that – that the Aryan myth discourse can be almost literally illustrated with quotations from the latest Hollywood blockbusters (such as the Lord of the Rings or Passion). This situation raises the (perhaps exaggerated or not entirely justified) suspicion that contemporary culture has forgotten about the most tragic moments of modern history, or that it remembers them but carelessly exploits the memory to play with dubious phantasms, or – and that is the worst supposition – that it remains under the power of larval, archaic yearnings that not so long ago caused a worldwide catastrophe.
Tomasz Kozak, Lublin 2007
shown in lokal_30, May 2007
[Ed. 1/5 in Kulczyk Foundation Collection, Poznan (PL)],
