That’s All There Is: Depeche Mode’s ‘World In My Eyes’, Olga Tokarczuk’s 'Flights', and Maddie Mortimer’s 'Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies'
I’d heard but never really listened to Depeche
Mode’s music until recently. Where have I been, you might ask? (Elsewhere). But
with the internet, one thing leads to another, and I was led down the path of delving
into Depeche. And there was ‘World In My Eyes’, hidden in plain sight. I joined
the dots, followed the threads in my mind’s eye, so to speak, and found myself being
taken on a trip alongside Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights and Maddie
Mortimer’s Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies. The connection? Well, all
three consider linkages of mind and body, prompting reflections on existence seen
from macrocosmic and microcosmic aspects, both literal and figurative. What is
our world, and how do we see it? Is it no more and no less than a fortuitous
but impassive elemental fusion? A vast, anthropomorphised Gaia upon whose voluptuous
islands and mountains of haunch and bosom we bewilderedly walk awhile, suspended
in a chaotic void? On the other hand, ‘the
world will fit within, into a groove of the brain’ (Flights), made up as
it is of ‘[f]ragments. Visitors. Fingers’ (Maps), and ‘[m]oments,
crumbs, fleeting configurations’ (Flights) shaping our experiences. Meanwhile,
‘all the islands in the ocean’ ('World In My Eyes') can be seen in one individual, who forms someone’s
whole world. After all, as Tokarczuk states, ‘There is too much world, so it’s
better to concentrate on particulars, rather than the whole’ (Flights),
and ‘[w]e have no choice now but to learn how to endlessly select’ (Flights).
Maybe the most vital component of life’s ‘long, long trip’ is having ‘your lips
close to my lips’ (WIME). How do we define and understand all this? Tokarczuk claims: ‘Life?
There’s no such thing; I see lines, planes and bodies, and their
transformations in time’ (Flights). These works all provoke questions as to whether vitality exists
in stillness or the constancy of movement; and musings not just about what the
world and life really are, but what they mean, and how we chart their course. Perhaps
life isn’t so much a journey as a collection of tracings: fragmentary,
nonlinear, sometimes vivid, sometimes faint. We look, we discover, we wonder,
we try to make sense of it, of our relationships, to decide what matters, and
then we simply have to try and tell someone else. Anyone. Everyone. You.
Life
plays out in counterpoint to itself: an overwhelming existence in which you
just can’t move for space, packed with possibilities limited by that universal
microcosm: our physically entrapped state, with its entropic tendencies, alongside
our inevitable attachments to all things close and known. Composed of such
strange, contrasting elements, we are, in a way, the Wunderkammer, or Cabinet
of Curiosities which so fascinates Tokarczuk: grandiose, exposed,
insignificant, and curated, perhaps haphazardly, by Nature. How can we navigate
the dark, beautiful, marvellous, tragic unlikeliness of being ‘Here’ now, whilst
wondering always about ‘There’? How can ‘I’ understand, express, and relate to
both ‘It’ and ‘You’?
We have our instincts; we have unfathomable faith,
so ‘we won’t need a map, believe me’ (as
per Depeche) is often spot-on. But we also instinctively crave illumination and
connection. We need direction, often failing to find it. Says Tokarczuk: ‘Life
always managed to elude me…By the time I had determined its location, it had
already gone somewhere else’ (Flights). Mortimer observes that ‘it is the
hardest thing; the difference between where you are and where you want to be’ (Maps).
Tokarczuk tells us that the heart is ‘the colour of insides, of darkness, of
places light can’t reach’ (Flights), and Mortimer that life is ‘[a] perpetual
hunt for that unsurmountable thing’ (Maps), which presumably has no
name, but is a secret, buried treasure with no X marking any spot. Of course,
sometimes we like to keep our own treasured secrets, mapped into our
consciousness for our use only, ‘[a] little private collection of Best Sights [we]
occasionally dip into when night shuts and [we] must fill out the darkness’ (Maps).
As Mortimer says, with secrets, it can be ‘a surprise how physical they fe[el]
some days’ (Maps). Here we are, so much inside our outsides. Each of us
is ‘walls of skin [with] a singular sense of self’ (Maps), drawn up,
devised somehow as a makeshift energy container. Perhaps our ‘own presence is
the only thing with a distinct outline’, yet it is one which ‘quivers and
undulates, and in so doing, hurts’ (Flights).
I’m
not sure whether we chiefly need maps to understand what’s within, or without. To
try to delineate, or conversely obscure where we start and end in mind and body,
as in the suggestive sensuality of ‘World In My Eyes’? To question our
identities, as in the collective yet fragmented perplexity expressed in
Tokarczuk’s Flights? Or, to attempt both of the above, via the
disembodied voices of Mortimer’s Maps? Maybe we simply need to safeguard
and maintain matter that matters. Loss is a constant; therefore likewise is the
necessity of recovery, and to achieve this, we must note, understand, remember.
According
to Mortimer, ‘Sometimes you feel the pulse and ache of a place long after it’s
gone. In the body, there is a technical term for this. Phantom limb pain. The
following of the twinge right back to the source only to find that source does
not exist any more’. (Maps). Tokarczuk recounts a seventeenth-century
Dutch anatomist, Filip Verheyen, who dissects his own preserved amputated leg
over a period of years, saying “We must research our pain” (Flights). He
still feels the ‘phantom’ of that severed limb, “swollen and inflamed, the skin
itches” (Flights). But then, as Mortimer tells us, ‘[t]he feet are
incredible things…Each ligament is connected to a very specific part of your
body – they act as a tiny map of your entire person’ (Maps). And, of
course, they lead us everywhere. Eschewing faith, the anatomist must understand
‘the paths of that most complicated labyrinth’ (Flights), the human body:
‘Seeing, after all, means knowing’ (Flights), and ‘in order to see, you
have to know how to look, and you have to know what you’re looking at’ (Flights).
However, this thirst for knowledge of ourselves, of ‘Me’ and ‘You’, can be seen
as an act of violation, dehumanising, leaving one at another’s mercy. Tokarczuk
describes the autopsy of a woman hanged (or, perhaps one could say ‘hung’, like
dead meat?) before an intrigued seventeenth-century audience. A North-African
born slave who became an Austrian courtier is stuffed and displayed after
death, his physical movement across continents and social mobility in life
stilled, arrested, not only by death but also by the unfeeling preservation of
his remains, rendering him an eternal curiosity to be gaped at. But we are
always struggling against degeneration. ‘Every body part deserves to be
remembered. Every human body deserves to last. It is an outrage that it’s so
fragile, so delicate’ (Flights). Tokarczuk’s fascination with preserving
the body after death is understandable, because it is the part of us which represents
tangible proof of being in the world. But preserved immobility surely does not mean
that we endure…it is not, after all, immortality; it is simply proof that the
opposite is true.
Maps’ Lia knows she is facing death, the cancer eating her
inside becoming its own character, with its own moods evocative of the Greek
humours: ‘Yellow’, ‘Velvet’, and ‘Dove’. The men in her life are there too:
‘Fossil’ and ‘The Gardener’. They all bleed into her, into one another, every
memory a formation which quite literally consumes her life. Where would we be
without the imprinted fragments of lasting memory? And who would we be? ‘That’s
all there is’, as the song goes, the paradoxical infinite moments that make us and which we create and recreate for ourselves and others. Contradictions
abound in memory: truths and falsehoods, certainties and uncertainties, alongside
dulling or stimulating effects. Mortimer reflects that ‘[l]ong after it is over
[…] the brilliant sharedness of [a] lost love…for a moment…exists again, only
far better than it ever really was’ (Maps). Whether this is helpful to
human existence or not, a thread we should cling to or not, is open to debate. Memory
preserves and cherishes, but we must move on, changing and growing, not
permitting the landscapes of memory to obscure our futures. But after all, most
of us want to make an impression of some sort, even if we touch the world
lightly. We want to leave an imprint on the future, some kind of legacy, to
fill some kind of space, and to fill our own. Memory is a form of possession,
bestowing identity and control in our lives. A young man in Tokarczuk’s novel
sums this up well as he considers how the places he has visited have affected
him: “The things I’ve seen are mine now” (Flights). It is in travelling,
in motion, that memories are created, in turn shaping our identities. We are,
of course, part of the endless evolving thread, so that ‘a thing in motion will
always be better than a thing at rest […] [and] that which is in motion is able
to last for all eternity’ (Flights).
However fleetingly, we must always fight to prevail and to preserve. What? The contour lines, the topography of a face, before it ceases to exist in fact and in memory. We must ‘focus hard on the best fragments of [a] face so that [we can] project them like a lantern on the flat wall of [our] mind’s eye late at night, sketch out their glorious outlines’ (Maps). Crucially, it is as we see it, that hugely important, small World In Our Eyes. It is necessary, because ‘if…we simply saw the world as it was, with nothing to protect us, honestly and courageously, it would break our hearts’ (Flights). Perception is all. Yet, as it protects, it also destroys. Our paths are skewed, twisted. Power is assumed, offered up. Character traits overlooked, overwhelmed by somatic obsession. A person’s integrity may be lost. ‘Truth’ says Mortimer, ‘becomes all fluid in the face of Beauty and Politics’ (Maps). And how is it on the Other Side, ‘to feel…those eyes acknowledging only your spectacular surface’ (Maps)? Perhaps it’s like being inside a physical precursor of the internet where ‘[y]ou could track every human movement’ (Flights), such as Bentham’s panopticon, ‘a space [constructed to] ensure that every prisoner could be ceaselessly seen’ (Flights). Are you defined by your image in someone else’s eyes? Have they drawn you out of yourself and made you a shimmering tower, or left you as a line of dust, a ‘stain dictating the shape and structure of [your] life’? (Maps). Gore’s lyrics suggest an interesting power dynamic, The Other offering to show You their view in an act of mutuality, but nevertheless assuming control: ‘Let my body do the talking…I’ll take you…Let me put you on a ship’. And who is doing the moving, and therefore the influencing, progressing things? Not You: ‘You won’t have to move / You just sit still’ (WIME). I don’t think this is A Bad Thing, for what my opinion is worth. It’s an intoxicating and seductive mix, illustrating the subtleties of sexual bonds, roles, and the politics of power and consent.
Sensuality would be meaningless without sensation. We would, quite literally, be lost without our senses; aimless and drifting in silent darkness with nothing and no one to hold onto or hold us. ‘Nothing more than you can feel now / That’s all there is’ (WIME) isn’t a nihilistic message, it’s overwhelmingly positive, precisely describing what life is: experience, a story told millisecond by millisecond through our nervous systems. And this is all we know. So small and intricate a thing is what takes each of us from ‘the highest mountain to the depths of the deepest sea’ (WIME); yet the brain ‘holds as many neurons as the Milky Way holds stars…[and]…its vessels stretch 120,000 miles; [so] if you laid them out top to toe you would get halfway to the moon’ (Maps). It’s a remarkable thing, really. Each small impulse is intense, guiding and uniting, combining pleasure and insight: ‘Let my hands do the soothing’ (WIME) because ‘[i]n the fingers you can feel the poise and reach of a life’ (Maps).
And how do we (needfully) express perception? Like the connections within the human body itself, there is an acute reciprocal relationship between the senses and art, as they endlessly inform and suggest to one another. Art takes your senses on a ‘long, long trip’ everywhere, ‘let[ting] your mind do the walking’ from ‘mountains’ and ‘seas’ to ‘islands in the ocean’ and even (oh, if only it were more often) to ‘heaven’ (WIME). It is in ideas that we travel furthest, our expansive imaginations carrying all that potential to overpower narrow reality.
Just as our physical forms are miniature embodiments of a greater, universal organism, we are driven to try to distil and capture the character of the world around us in lines and letters, notes, tones, semitones, hints, shades. The inevitable incompleteness of such a task seems only to increase our fascination with and determination to continue the endeavour. Artists are our interpreters, though they themselves (if they’re any good at all) will admit to imperfect fluency. Like a live performance, life veers between moments of practised precision and powerful emotion, suffering its glitches, forcing us at times to get by on energy and adrenaline. Maybe the world at large doesn’t notice because it’s fleeting and gone. Whatever; the show must go on. In a song, the dynamics of words and sound progress, expressing and evolving through connections, their constant mutability capturing our moments of pleasure as we go through life: ‘the heaven’s in the motion’ (WIME). When playing, a gifted musician’s instincts, together with their muscle memory, mirror human sensual experience and may mean ‘we won’t need a map’ (WIME). We may cling to familiar strands of melody. Yet we draw upon patterns of words and music, paragraphs and staves, building flesh upon these skeletons, which indeed do provide maps of our minds and reflections of our bodies. We can ‘dr[a]w out the shape of…language; the hills, the bends, the steady dips of it’ (Maps), trying to understand its topography as we try to understand that of ourselves and the world at large. Language patterns mirror our own composition, as our bodies are ‘peppered with all these surprisingly lovely parts; parts that ma[k]e sense together, like a perfectly punctuated sentence’ (Maps). Etymology corresponds with the human journey and the veering paths it takes: the word ‘yellow’ ‘derives from the proto-Indo-European root ‘ghel’, ‘to shine’ - the mother of some magnificent words’ which include both ‘Glee’ and ‘Melancholy’ (Maps). Just as we evolve with time, so do art forms. I think of Flights as a concept novel, a presentation of vivid vignettes of memory and experience rather than a coherent narrative. Which is what most of our lives really are. Tokarczuk has given us the novel remixed, as she moves to different rhythms, shifting focus, isolating, manipulating, reinterpreting its stems. If only we could remix our own lives and perception (perhaps that’s all going on in a parallel universe).
We
can only ever see fragments of the whole; of our lives, minds, and bodies, and
of the world. And, so often, these are opposites: large and small; moments juxtaposed
with infinity; fragments contrasted with connections; life set against death; stillness versus movement. Where exists our potential? Do we need to travel
far? Or, is it all within? How do we struggle against our limitations? What, and
when, is enough?
Tokarczuk
tells us that “[t]he body is something absolutely mysterious” (Flights),
and as we move inexorably towards ‘the vast and curious landscape of The
Afterwards’ (Maps), we wonder what will become of us. What will be left
to show we were here? One of Mortimer’s characters muses: ‘Does love even
continue like we think it does? Does love preserve itself?’ (Maps). I’ll
briefly mention another work that springs to mind here. In Philip Larkin’s ‘An
Arundel Tomb’, the poet describes the ‘stationary voyage’ of a long-dead couple
whose carved likenesses hold hands atop their final resting place. He suggests that
their ‘stone fidelity’ has come to ‘prove / Our almost-instinct almost true: /
What will survive of us is love’. Their effigies are the artistic expression of
their being, but perhaps representative of the ‘Untruth’ rendered by both art
and memory. Larkin’s final lines are subtly cynical, gesturing with his ‘almost[s]’
towards that very human mindset which combines optimism, expectation, desire,
and wishful thinking: Hope. Still, as we navigate our ways through life’s
journey, we must have something to drive us onward. What does it for you? I
guess it could be anything. We are all different, but we all need to connect, to
communicate and reciprocate. We do these things all our lives, ending as we begin,
with all we have and all we know. Here is the most vital thing for each of us,
and perhaps all a person can offer to another: Let me show you the world in my eyes.
That’s all there is.
Flights
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft ISBN: 9781910695821
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer ISBN: 9781529069389
‘An Arundel Tomb’ from The Whitsun
Weddings by Philip Larkin ISBN: 9780571097104
‘World In My Eyes’ by Martin L. Gore ©1990 Grabbing Hands Music Ltd/EMI Music
Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.
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