jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Philip Gröning lived in a monk’s cell in the French Alps for six months to make this — you guessed it — very quiet documentary about the hermits’ lives. According to the press notes, the Carthusians are among the world’s most ascetic orders. (They also make the sticky herb liqueur Chartreuse). But you wouldn’t know this from the movie, which barely contains a spoken word at all. There is chanting, there is praying, there are the monks’ daily chores, the chopping of wood, the mending of shoes, the preparation of food. The seasons pass: snow falls, ice melts, spring comes, and the fog lifts off the monastery that lies nestled between stunning peaks. The patient observation lasts for nearly three hours; Gröning’s aim is not to explain and analyze the monks, but to approximate their heightened awareness through contemplative filmmaking.

I’m of two minds about this. Into Great Silence is an exquisitely boring, poetic film that uses the carefully observed day-to-day textures of the monk’s austere existence to lull its audience into a meditative state. But there is something of the imitative fallacy to Gröning’s approach. The outward signs of the monk’s lives are just that — they don’t just wander the hallways and kneel: they read, write, think, and pray. Even if they never open their mouths, their heads are filled with words, words we are not privy to. No matter how long he holds his shots, Gröning can only ever show us the surface, never the insides, of what the monks are living for. The film aims to find some sort of vague “spirituality” in moments of mindfulness, but the Carthusian’s very specific religiosity eludes it.

More soon in a full-length review for About.com. Into Great Silence opens next week at Film Forum. Here’s the trailer and the official site.

Die Große Stille. Philip Gröning, 2005. ***

I’ve been remiss in blogging the strange books I’ve been reading lately, so here’s a quick roundup.

This one’s a fascinating treatise by Rudolf Steiner, founder of Antroposophy.

Brilliant. If anybody can map a way forward out of the exhaustion of postmodernism, it’s Ken Wilber. This book, written as socratic dialogue, is a boiled-down version of his Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and I’ll be damned if I can boil it down any further–the title isn’t as hyperbolic as it might seem.

My favorite idea here–and there are tons–is the concept of Transcend and Include, which according to Wilber is how evolution moves forward, how transformation happens. It is part of his integrative vision, which does a fantastic job at ferreting out useful insights from all disciplines of human thought. He places everything in a four-quadrant system (internal/external, individual/communal), and the beauty here is that suddenly everything from psychoanalysis to abstract painting, transcendental meditation, communism, and nanophysics suddenly fits together in a very baggy and appealling system.

As I read over this, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t make any sense at all. Here’s what Amazon has to say:

“This account of men and women’s place in a universe of sex and gender, self and society, spirit and soul is written in question-and-answer format, making it both readable and accessible. Wilber offers a series of original views on many topics of current controversy, including the gender wars, multiculturalism, modern liberation movements, and the conflict between various approaches to spirituality.”

Yeah, I guess that’s better. Either way, this is full of fresh ideas.

One Taste, a kind of journal, was probably a strange way to approach the work of Ken Wilber, prolific integral philosopher. Instead of one of his door-stop size dissections of religion, culture, spirituality, and science, One Taste offers a scattershot sampling of Wilber’s ideas (or the ideas of Wilber-4, the fourth phase of his development, which has recently been subsumed by Wilber-5, from what I understand.)

There are more fresh insights here per page than I remember seeing in a good long while. Wilber’s approach is very methodical. Everything comes in lists, numbered quadrants, levels, lines, waves, and he likes to capitalize his Concepts–such as One Taste, the awareness of non-dual spiritual reality he posits behind the Gross Realm of the physical. His project, as far as I can tell, is to integrate most of the world’s knowledge into one functioning system. “Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time,” and therefore every discipline has something to contribute: transpersonal psychology, quantum physics, Gaia theory, Buddhism, magic, sociology, and so forth. By stepping back far enough from each of these disciplines, he abstracts an essence, which is heavily influenced by what Huxley calls “the Perennial Philosophy,” the theory of the Great Nest of Being in which ascending levels of realization and awareness enclose each other, from the Physical to the Rational and beyond.

The aesthetic and political implications of his work are as interesting as the spiritual self-realization. From what he posits as the “pre/trans fallacy” (a confusion of pre-rational impulses with post-rational growth), he mounts a strong attack on extreme Postmodernism and the way in which Liberalism undermines itself by “embracing diversity” without fostering the growth of a world-centric view. He also has very little love for garden-variety New Age philosophy, which he considers merely regressive.

I’m probably not doing a good job of explaining or even summarizing any of this; it’s a complex system that’s doing a fine job of teasing out some of the more dumbfounding contradictions of the usual dualities we’ve come to live with (liberal-conservative, religion-science, body-mind, etc.), and in One Taste, it’s revealed in little glimpses, interspersed with private bits about the weather in Boulder, conferences he’s invited to, and his love affair with a grad student. It’s highly recommended reading, although there might be better places to start. I’m looking into The Eye of Spirit and A Brief History of Everything next, and save Sex, Ecology, Spirituality for some other time.

Wilber at Wikipedia
Wilber links on del.icio.us
Wilber on the Iraq War