A Long Road Out of Hell
thoughts on Jacob’s Ladder, the bardo, horror and the mundane.
Like many kids in America, I grew up on the programming that is made available through the mass media. We take it in as a given. The innocence of childhood is just a simple willingness to accept statements at face value. Whether or not it represents a lack of critical thinking, I don’t know, but it is a kind of wonder that is incredibly easy to manipulate. How advertisers must wish we could remain so unjaded?
I grew up before the Internet went mainstream, even before the real boom of cable television, so especially before my teen years I remained relatively inexperienced about what was out there, and what the possibilities of cinema really are. I watched PBS like it was crack. The rest of my subconscious was populated by the likes of Transformers, or a sneaked peek at Friday the 13th. Movies were entertainment, nothing less, nothing more. I thought the only way to tell a story was from the beginning to the end.
Then I saw Jacob’s Ladder. I can’t remember how. Maybe it was on late night. It doesn’t really matter.
The main thing I remember is a first inkling of a sensation I had never before experienced: existential terror. Despite its somewhat lurid imagery, Jacob’s Ladder is not horrifying because of what it shows, like Hellraiser, not even because of what it doesn’t show, as with Hitchcock’s Psycho. It is horrifying because you never know how solid the ground beneath you is.
You start out with the mundane, and with the assumptions of the mundane: “I’m a Vietnam vet who works at the postal office.” The question is how those mundane assumptions are going to be challenged, and the layers of concealment serving as the primary forward movement of the plot (“actually it’s a government conspiracy,” “actually I’m going mad”, “actually I’m already dead”…)
If you let you take it in, if you begin to apply it to your perspective of your own life, you might begin to wonder: am I dead already, living in the feverish flash-forward of the impending end? Is my entire life a moment like this, a white-hot moment lived and relived from different angles, a moment simultaneously already finished and not-yet-begun?
Not to over-editorialize, let me say that at the time, I didn’t know why it made me feel so uneasy. Not really. It seemed like a weird movie about a troubled Vietnam vet who was uncovering some kind of government conspiracy. I wasn’t at first aware of the fact that this “story” was just the feverish delusions in a dying man’s mind. But I couldn’t get the movie out of my own mind. I found myself playing it over and again, piecing it together in different configurations, and then it dawned on me.
Later, I came to understand and to love the idea of a tale that contains many stories or layers within it; a story that changes, like a hologram, depending on where you are standing or what you bring to it. (A “non-linear meta-narrative,” if you want to be obscure, perplexing, but essentially accurate all at once.) Jacob’s Ladder isn’t the only instance of this approach. I’d find in Grant Morrison’s Invisibles, in Alan Moore’s Promethea, a technique I’d find rendered differently in the hands of hundreds of different artists.
This is an idea and approach to myth and media making that has inspired my work ever since. I can’t say it is the technique I employ in every work I’ve done, but certainly many.
By the time I had started writing my first novel in my early college years, I had completely forgotten about Jacob’s Ladder. It was only by sheer chance that I saw this movie again, and was reminded where many of these seeds were first sewn. Almost two decades since I first saw it, I could recognize this piece of storytelling for what it really was, and just how much I was indebted to it.
So let’s get to the movie itself, since I’ve talked around it so much. If this story isn’t really “about” Jacob Singer, a man with post-traumatic stress disorder, forced to re-live his past again and again, then what is it about? It is a modern re-interpretation of many of the ideas of the Christian Mystic Meister Eckhart, and the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is about the timeless final passage into the hinterlands which all of us must take — and which, in a manner of speaking, we have already taken. And which we are taking right this very moment. This is the only true hell, which results from clinging to the things of this world as they are stripped away, one at a time. The beings we encounter there, they too will be demons should we resist them.
Or like Jacob’s chiropractor, they can be angels, if we follow the natural order of things and let the bliss shine through. Every character serves as a metaphor for this psychological process: Jezebel, an emissary of the lower realms of lust as a form of attachment; Sarah, his wife in an alternate life, a form of more sentimental attachment, and Sarah, mythologically, the first wife of Abraham, the princess, and the counterpoint of Jezebel, who could just as well be considered a stand-in for Lilith. There comes a point in film analysis where clearly the analyst is projecting, but there is amble evidence that most of this symbolism is intentional. Even when it isn’t, a truly successful work of art succeeds both through intent and as a blank mythic canvas. In a sense, it is what we say it is.
In the process of building a modern myth, original sources must be bent and re-worked to fit the new form. Purists will snub their noses at this, but artists should recognize it for what it is: creativity at work. For instance, an original Eckhart passage relevant to the subject of this movie goes:
They ask, what burns in hell? Authorities [the Fathers] usually reply: “This is what happens to willfulness” [to individual will, self-interest]. But I say it is “Not” [it is the Nothing] that is burned out [that burns] in hell. For example: suppose a burning coal is placed in my hand. If I say the coal burns me I do it a great injustice. To say precisely what does the burning, it is the “Not”. The coal has something in it that my hand does not. Observe! It is just this “Not” that is burning me — for if my hand had in it what the coal has, and can do what the coal can do, it, too, would blaze with fire, in which case all the fire that ever burned might be spilled on this hand and I should not feel hurt. (Speech 5b, DW Ι)
Interesting, but not exactly riveting material for dialogue in a screenplay. In the movie, it becomes:
The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they’re not punishing you, they’re freeing your soul. If you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. If you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.
This idea of the dual nature of heaven and hell appears in Buddhism, in Hinduism, and Christian Mysticism. The same can be said for this idea of the duality of angels and devils, after all the root of the words “devil” and “deva” (angel) means “divine.” They are the psychological agents of the “inbetween lands,” depicted as the River Styx in Greek Mythology. The Bardo is the “inbetween state,” the state between here and there. When we reach divinity, or unity, or nothingness, as we choose to call it, there is no room for ego, for separate divinity. All of those things have been burned away. That union is annihilation. As we see in the Jewish tradition, in Greek mythology, and many other places: to look upon the face of God is to be annihilated in fire. Heaven or hell. The end or the beginning. Neither and both. They are right here, if we open our eyes.
The title “Jacob’s Ladder” originates from the Book of Genesis, where Jacob sees a ladder ascending into heaven. On the way up, one encounters different “spheres of existence,” which were associated by Christian and Jewish mystics alike with the ten Sephiroth on the Tree of Life, which presents a sort of Gnostic ex-nihilo formulation of divinity. There can be little doubt that all of these inferences were intentional on the part of the script writer and film-makers, they say as much in interviews on the Director’s Cut of the DVD.
Psychological facts such as these, which transcend cultural boundaries (even if they wear different garb or go by different names) can be called “myths.” So Jacob’s Ladder is an example of precisely what we mean by “modern myth.” They can occur in the public sphere rather than in a pedestal or in a temple in Tibet. They can happen in a place so profane as a movie theater. The producers just need to learn the tricks of the trade to sneak it by the profane gatekeepers that fund such endeavors.
The Bardo
When this film first entered my brain, I was young and had no awareness of the Bardo, or of Gnostic concepts of death and transcendence. I simply had a semi-conscious feeling, a mixture of dread, anxiety, and elation, that occasionally lurked close to the surface. What was it that? That I might already be dead, or dying, and that I was going through a process not unlike what Jacob was experiencing. Again and again he is told “you are already dead,” and he denies his impending condition, and then in the process of clinging, is tortured by the things that once brought him joy. I was moved, though I say again in an only semi-conscious way, by a sort of wonderment that someone else had felt this way. I had never articulated it to anyone else, or been able to articulate it. It was through this movie that I first came upon the Bardo.
As the world around us becomes more turbulent, so our lives become more fragmented. Out of touch and disconnected from ourselves, we are anxious, restless, and often paranoid. A tiny crisis pricks the balloon of the strategies we hide behind. To live in the modern world is to live in what is clearly a Bardo realm; you don’t have to die to experience one. … Because life is nothing but a perpetual fluctuation of birth, death, and transition, so Bardo experiences are happening to us all the time and are a basic part of our psychological makeup. — The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche.
Although we need to make many assumptions — as we often do in life, let alone death — there is often a connection drawn between life and waking, and death and dreaming.
This connection is specious, but not because it is shallow. It is rather wrong, and yet strikes very near to a profound truth about consciousness, if not the nature of reality itself. (How can we draw a distinction between the two when we are ourselves housed within a bio-mechanical walker?)
These epistemological uncertainties aside, death itself is the void of the great unknown. Whatever our conjecture is of this nether region, the underworld is the point beyond the point of no return — the dark side of the moon — a place that is no place, and certainly no story exists there. The world is full of damn near verifiable near-death experiences, but no verifiable death experiences. There is a reason for that. There is, in fact, no world there at all. We see the tunnel, but it leads to the ultimate totality: nothingness.
Thus, the passage from one realm to the next becomes more important than the destination.
The so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead is more accurately called the Bardo Thodal. This translates loosely as the “intermediary space.” And Bardos are spaces we are actually quite familiar with. When you are falling asleep, but have not yet hit the bottom of the well — that is a Bardo. When we are coming awake, but the curve of your lovers neck is still at one and the same time the scroll upon which the history of another world is writ in blood — a Bardo. I intend to extend from this idea and the general concepts therein, without making any claims as the following being textually relevant to Tibetan Buddhist practices.
It is in these spaces that all mythic artists carve out their homes. We may not even know it, making that rote flow a part of an unknown process. Or, like me, you might instead be very conscious of the process, intentionally allowing yourself to almost fall asleep, time and again, with notebook and pen in hand, dredging up symbols and the threads that connect plot, character, and something deeper than that — some archetypical knowledge that does not come from pat books on Jungian symbolism.
This reminds me a bit of the plot to the movie “Flatliners,” where med students kill themselves time and again, and then bring themselves back, all so they can unravel some mystery that perches at the brink between life and death, like a gargoyle, part stone and part something else though not quite flesh. This theme returns again in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, where one cylon kills herself again and again so that she can look upon the face of their archetypal parents, the faces of God.
This too is an archetype. To see the face of God is to not only court death: it is to die. This premise exists in Greek myth, where Dionysus’ mother is consumed in a pillar of fire when she discovers the true nature of her paramour — Zeus. It exists equally in Jewish mysticism. (The Zohar is laden with this idea).
Delving Into Story
Most people understand writing as a function of the conscious mind. You have an intention, you sit down and express it best you can.
However, the actual writing process is usually more convoluted than that, and there are many off-label uses for the lesser understood parts of consciousness, where writing is involved. Nowhere is this more true than with the long-form creative process, which is more like a marathon than a sprint, and more like a surrealist “drift” than even a marathon.
Indeed, many of these byways, alleys and side-paths lead us through a meandering labyrinth, and we may even care to engage the physical process of one foot before the other.
Ambiguity is the labyrinth’s central nature. It is always unstable, changing its personality and ours as we change perspective. … Like a psychic nuclear reactor, the labyrinth generates creative emotional and psychic processes in whatever guise it appears. It is continually breeding new versions of itself that demand we revisit our categories and redefine what the symbol means to us in our time. … the experience of the labyrinth is not only ancient, it is hardwired into the brain structure of the earliest humans, biologically indistinguishable from us, who first recognized its ineffable potency.
In pre-literate antiquity, the labyrinth design and its cousins, the spiral and the meander, were symbols that occurred worldwide in rock art and weaving patterns, on pottery, and was scrawled as ancient graffiti on a wall in Pompeii. From the Near East to New Grange in Ireland, and from the American Southwest to Siberia, the labyrinth pattern is one of the oldest symbols in the history of mankind and one of the most universal.
— Dancing at the Edge of Death, Jodi Lorimer.
Much that has been written about “drifting” might be equally applied to writing, and vice versa.
One of psychogeography’s principle means was the dérive. Long a favorite practice of the dadaists, who organized a variety of expeditions, and the surrealists, for whom the geographical form of automatism was an instructive pleasure, the dérive, or drift, was defined by the situationists as the ‘technique of locomotion without a goal’, in which ‘one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there’. The dérive acted as something of a model for the ‘playful creation’ of all human relationships.
Unlike surrealist automatism, the dérive was not a matter of surrendering to the dictates of an unconscious mind or irrational force. Indeed, the situationists’ criticisms of surrealism concluded that ‘the unconscious imagination is poor, that automatic writing is monotonous, that the whole genre of ostentatious surrealist “weirdness” has ceased to be very surprising’. Nor was everything subordinated to the sovereignty of choice: to dérive was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed. It was very much a matter of using an environment for one’s own ends, seeking not only the marvelous beloved by surrealism but bringing an inverted perspective to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world.— The Situationist International in a postmodern age by Sadie Plant
I’ve found this to be nowhere so true as in a city such as Boston, where the streets themselves seem to serve as a spatial metaphor for the creative process — not a circle cut into 4 quadrants, as in the classical plan, but rather an organic structure built from original Indian walking paths, grown, cut-down, re-structured and -purposes over the years.
Get lost in the city, letting your mind get lost as well, and you just might find the solution to that scene you’ve been struggling with for a week. But maybe even this will not do. Some problems will not dissolve by way of drifting, and the only means I’ve found left at that point is to drift toward sleep, without falling asleep.
I’ve often joked that the best parts of my novels are written when I’m half asleep. Like many jokes, this isn’t entirely untrue. How often do you suddenly happen upon inspiration, or unexpected connections, as you drift off? If you manage to wake yourself, you might scribble notes that can later take a form, or merely serve to perplex you.
The common wisdom that inspiration has been born from dreams is, if my experience is any indicator, a misunderstanding. It is not the dream state that is so fertile, as the threshold of sleep, those liminal lands that offer up many connections and solutions, if we can only drag their glamour from those depths and connect them with more substantial matter.
Of course, not all such fragments are captured. And fewer still take to the soil they’re given. “The slashes on her hands, the angel’s trumpets, a flower,” the crumpled and nearly illegible note reads. Thanks, past-me.
There is probably a hidden architecture behind most texts, of what never made it to the page. Like an actor holding a prop none of us can see on screen, I’d like to believe these invisible structures still inform the corpus.
I have developed a number of fairly simple practices to help capture more of this gossamer stuff, and I’ll share what I can with you, though as is often said, “your mileage may vary.”
The Liminal Spaces
As in “Flatliners,” there is indeed a price to be paid for subterranean knowledge.
For any would-be artist, musician, or author, you need to learn to dredge up material from these in-between spaces, because the matter in your conscious mind is not particularly useful, certainly not for the first decade or so of your work. Eventually you can train your conscious mind to be a valuable creative tool as well, especially once you manage to find shortcuts to get yourself to flow. But before that point you need experimental routes, and if you depend entirely only on drugs, you’re liable to destroy yourself before you get anywhere. Me? I mostly used liminal techniques. (Also drugs). The question is how deep do you want to go? Your work will change depending on how deep into dreams you delve.
I find that some projects demand a different “depth” than others, but in general, you don’t need to necessarily go as deep as you might think. Just being able to learn to have controlled daydreaming sessions may be enough. Others demand more, and if you are a surrealist, you will need to learn to fish as deep as recollection can fathom. It is to the surrealists that the passage above may be a familiar experience, after a few years of experimentation. The brain does not take well to blending waking and sleeping with such willful abandon.
What you will be practicing is exploring that transitional, ‘turning about’ point, between the various states of waking that lie and believe they are tethered by some sort of rationality. (There are bardo states within waking as well, and levels of brain-state “depth” here as well, and rationality is, aside from those of us using the scientific method of math for a specific task, a post hoc… well, rationalization. An excuse. Pay it no heed. Emotional commitment, ideology and everything else subconscious steers our ship, not the conscious mind.) We must explore all transitions of brain state, which at first may seem like a simple band from white “waking” to pitch black “dreamless sleep.” However, as you experiment, you will discover that there is in fact a whole spectrum of color, and there are multiple vectors here. This is consciousness, and as an artist, consciousness is your palette. Medium is actually irrelevant, save what you have time to train yourself in.
One first stage in the process of exploring these Bardos are the points where “I” becomes nebulous, as you slip ever so slightly toward sleep, and you begin to see connections spanning out around you, almost as if we have dived under water with a group of friends and can no longer tell whose limbs are whose. This is the liminal space, which holds the first essential key for all who wish to be mythic artists.
And beyond that? Just between you and me, and the rest of the Internet: artists need to share experience and skills like we are a clan tasked with teaching humankind to remember and speak to their dreams. We’ve all been had with the glamor and $$$ game, used as competition pieces, tricked into thinking that we need to kill the others and emerge victorious. But that’s not why we care about stories.
I’ve expolored many of these ideas further in fictional form in Tales From When I Had A Face — a modern fairytale about generational knowledge, death and recollection…
