#ingmar bergman
From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) dir. Ingmar Bergman
From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) dir. Ingmar Bergman
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Aries: “There’s always a tension in me between my urge to destroy and my will to live… Every morning I wake up with a new wrath, a new suspiciousness, a new desire to live.”
Taurus: ”The temperature of love can only be measured by the loneliness that precedes it.”
Gemini:”In every soul there is thousands of souls trapped, in every world thousands of worlds hidden.”
Cancer: “Reality is perhaps not at all what I imagine. Perhaps it doesn’t exist, in fact. Perhaps it only exists as a longing.”
Leo:“Don’t you think I understand? The hopeless dream of being. Not to seem, but to be.”
Virgo: “Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.”
Libra: “To feel. To trust the feeling. I long for that.”
Scorpio: “Perhaps we are the same person. Perhaps we have no limits; perhaps we flow into each other, stream through each other, boundlessly and magnificently. You bear terrible thoughts; it is almost painful to be near you. At the same time it is enticing. Do you know why?”
Sagittarius:”I make all my decisions on intuition. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.”
Capricorn:“I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful.”
Aquarius: “I think I am a better ghost than I am a human being.”
Pisces:“I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.”
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
[…] [DFW, Infinite Jest, 14b]
‘I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I’m not one of the self-hating ones. The type of like “I’m shit and the world’d be better off without poor me” type that says that but also imagines what everybody’ll say at their funeral. I’ve met types like that on wards. Poor-me-I-hate-me-punish-me-come-to-my-funeral. Then they show you a 20 X 25 glossy of their dead cat. It’s all self-pity bullshit. It’s bullshit. I didn’t have any special grudges. I didn’t fail an exam or get dumped by anybody. All these types. Hurt themselves.’ Still that intriguing, unsettling combination of blank facial masking and conventionally animated vocal tone. The doctor’s small nods were designed to appear not as responses but as invitations to continue, what Dretske called Momentumizers.
'I didn’t want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don’t hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn’t want to play anymore is all.’
'Play,’ nodding in confirmation, making small quick notes.
'I wanted to just stop being conscious. I’m a whole different type. I wanted to stop feeling this way. If I could have just put myself in a really long coma I would have done that. Or given myself shock I would have done that. Instead.’
The doctor was writing with great industry.
'The last thing more I’d want is hurt. I just didn’t want to feel this way anymore. I don’t… I didn’t believe this feeling would ever go away. I don’t. I still don’t. I’d rather feel nothing than this.’
The doctor’s eyes appeared keenly interested in an abstract way. They looked severely magnified behind his attractive but thick glasses, the frames of which were steel. Patients on other floors during other rotations had sometimes complained that they sometimes felt like something in a jar he was studying intently through all that thick glass. He was saying 'This feeling of wanting to stop feeling by dying, then, is —’
The way she suddenly shook her head was vehement, exasperated. 'The feeling is why I want to. The feeling is thereason I want to die. I’m here because I want to die. That’s why I’m in a room without windows and with cages over the lightbulbs and no lock on the toilet door. Why they took my shoelaces and my belt. But I notice they don’t take away the feeling do they.’
'Is the feeling you’re explaining something you’ve experienced in your other depressions, then, Katherine?’
The patient didn’t respond right away. She slid her foot out of her shoes and touched one bare foot with the toes of the other foot. Her eyes tracked this activity. The conversation seemed to have helped her focus. Like most clinically depressed patients, she appeared to function better in focused activity than in stasis. Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients’ own minds to chew them apart. But it was always a titanic struggle to get them to do anything to help them focus. Most residents found the fifth floor a depressing place to do a rotation.
'What I’m trying to ask, I think, is whether this feeling you’re communicating is the feeling you associate with your depression.’
Her gaze moved off. 'That’s what you guys want to call it, I guess.’
The doctor clicked his pen slowly a few times and explained that he’s more interested here in what shewould choose to call the feeling, since it was her feeling.
The resumed study of the movement of her feet. 'When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depressionsounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.’ She seemed to the doctor decidedly more animated now, even as she seemed unable to meet his eyes. Her respiration had sped back up. The doctor recalled classic hyperventilatory episodes being characterized by carpopedal spasms, and reminded himself to monitor the patient’s hands and feet carefully during the interview for any signs of tetanic contraction, in which case the prescribed therapy would be I.V. calcium in a saline percentage he would need quickly to look up.
'Wellthis’ — she gestured at herself— 'isn’t a state. This is a feeling. I feel it all over. In my arms and legs.’
'That would include your carp—your hands and feet?’
'All over. My head, throat, butt. In my stomach. It’s all over everywhere. I don’t know what I could call it. It’s like I can’t get enough outside it to call it anything. It’s like horror more than sadness. It’s more like horror. It’s like something horrible is about to
happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine — no, worse than you can imagine because there’s the feeling that there’s something you have to do right away to stop it but you don’t know what it is you have to do, and then it’s happening, too, the whole horrible time, it’s about to happen and also it’s happening, all at the same time.’
'So you’d say anxiety is a big part of your depressions.’
It was now not clear whether she was responding to the doctor or not. 'Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Luridis the word. Doctor Carton said lurid, one time. That’s the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh-sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It’s like what’s the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower.’
The doctor looked intrigued rather than concerned for a moment as he wrote all this down. He preferred handwritten notes to a laptop because he felt M.D.s who typed into their laps during clinical interviews gave a cold impression.
Kate Gompert’s face writhed for a moment while the doctor was writing. 'I fear this feeling more than I fear anything, man. More than pain, or my mom dying, or environmental toxicity. Anything.’
'Fear is a major part of anxiety,’ the doctor confirmed.
[…] [DFW, Infinite Jest, 14c]
