Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seascapes, 1980-93 (via fieldmouse)
- Caribbean Sea, Jamaica
- Sea of Japan, Hokkaido
- Tasman Sea, Ngarupupu
- Black Sea, Ozuluce
- Red Sea, Safaga
- Tyrrhenain Sea, Scilla
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You will never actually get to know someone as they exist as self. The closest an other can come to that is only outward appearances as perceptions to them.
There are some people who have this ideal version of a self that they must somehow strive to be. I think they miss the point that it is the striving to be that should be the focus. You can strive to be without a goal or even an inkling of a end result. Striving to be is the result and it is the point of life if we were to give life a point.
There is always that ever crushing feeling of loneliness that is always imminent every time you realize that you can never really have access to things in themselves. This includes flowers and people.
Have you ever considered the fact that your entire system of reality is resting on faulty and objectionable premises? I have.
We are all faced with despair. Whether you arrange your life to becoming a professional dancer and at the next big break, you are faced with a terrible injury that renders you a paraplegic. The same despair, to some degree, can be found in the person who becomes a sort of jack of all trades and has multiple contingency plans to fall on if one fails. It doesn’t matter, everything can crumble and everything can fail, as long as we continue to live our lives through human means and human understanding we will always be surrounded by some degree of despair. It is utterly inescapable. Despair is always apart of us. And it is only through the acceptance of despair that we can truly live and give ourselves essence.
The acceptance of despair, in a fantastic way, is shown in Melancholia from two polar opposites. Justine and Claire both show two ways to accepting despair, and it is only through Justine that we see that despair can be overcome and recognized. Both of these characters acknowledge their perpetual despair consistently. Claire is what I want to call the typical. The typical is the person we find that denies the acceptance of despair, and lacks essence. This is the person who lives in bad faith, who strives for meaning and definition in lost causes, in dead ends. It is the person who is entirely filled with delusion and can only parade themselves around through a complete self-delusion and it is the kind of self-delusion that is the most harmful. In Melancholia, Claire is the typical and she manifests this perfectly.
Claire is filled with a existential weight that holds her down. This weight consists of taking care of Justine in multiple ways, from part one with her wedding and in part two with Justine’s crippling depression. Claire is always faced with the absence of herself being defined and the absence of essence is shown. Claire has a husband, a child, a family, and a gorgeous living arrangement. These things do nothing for her in the face of the ultimate and marvelous despair that Melancholia presents to the resident’s of Earth. Claire is ultimately unable to accept the despair and she is filled with insurmountable angst and terror in the face of realization. A realization that she is lacking essence and she is lacking definition. We, the viewers, see this in it’s entirety in her panic and anxiety in the last part of part two. It is the crumbling of the delusion that she lives. She is the person who becomes a reconnaissance man who fears the one way path to fulfillment and tries their hand at multiple paths of fulfillment and thus, in their mind, increased chance of fulfillment, all of it of course is only despair. It is a way the typical try to escape the acceptance of despair and angst, it is a way to delusion themselves to live in bad-faith.
Justine is the Queen of Despair. She is the one who we can look towards and see the full acceptance of despair and the growth of self-subscribed essence in the very face of despair and dread. In part one we see the tearing down of the walls of self-delusion and ignorance of despair. Justine, through her depression, has a realization of looking from the outside in. She realizes her own delusion she is living, she looks around, sees everyone as they are, only people living in bad faith and under self-delusion. She acknowledges the very despair she was trying to escape and ignore. She rips away her fresh marriage and her job. She throws off her armor and she collapses and lets despair weigh and push her down. And push down on her it does! It gives her a whole new existence. It is through this glorious realization of impending doom that she realizes she can fully and wholly accept this inevitable despair. This despair wraps itself around Justine and Justine embraces her new armor. Through the acceptance of despair she provides for herself essence, meaning, and definition. She defines herself in the face of despair, angst, and dread.
As she sits in the stick teepee with her sister and her nephew, her lip trembles and her face tells all. The rogue planet is seconds away from hitting and decimating the Earth and all life. I can only see bliss and authenticity in her face. I see acceptance of the despair. In contrast with her sister, Claire, we see a difference as wide as Melancholia itself. Justine is filled with optimism. She is purely human and defined in the very last seconds of her life. It is beautiful.
-Jake Ross
