After spending more continuous time with family over the last month than I have in five years, I’ve been taking a breather for the last few days. It’s great being with family, and I’ll never forget how much I missed it when I was overseas, but it can be just as exhausting as work. More in some ways.
So, to ease up a bit, naturally, I watched a Swedish existentialist movie about death. The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet) is a 1957 Ingmar Bergman film starring Max von Sydow set in medieval Sweden during the Black Death.
I watched the film on the advice of a medievalist, who called it one of the most accurate depictions of the medieval mentality, which I find interesting due to its profound difference from modern attitudes and mores. Religious devotion and imagery permeate the film, and are often depicted in a macabre light, perhaps reflecting the prevailing mood during the Plague, which carried away at least a third of Europe’s population.
The main characters are Antonius Block, a knight returning from a crusade, and darkest Death himself, who has come for the knight. To put off his imminent demise, the knight challenges Death to a chess match, hoping that he can accomplish something meaningful before his time is up. Death agrees, and they begin to play, making a few moves during each encounter.
In between the encounters with Death over the chess board, the knight makes his way toward his castle, meeting up with a family of minstrels along the way. The husband and wife team have a little boy, and a companion named Skat who performs with them. The husband, a light-hearted, nimble fellow, also happens to be a clairvoyant, and has religious visions. However, his pretty wife is skeptical.
Other characters include the knight’s squire Jöns, who is a cynical warrior, a blacksmith cuckold named Plod, Plod’s lusty wife, a servant girl whose entire village was taken by the plague, and a villainous preacher named Raval.
On the journey back to the castle, they encounter a religious procession, a witch-burning and other ominous scenes. Antonius, knowing the end is near, desperately seeks knowledge of God and any sign that there is some purpose to life.
I’ll leave the story and plot for readers to discover on their own, but the existentialist theme that ties the ancient medieval lifestyle to ours with one common concern – the meaning of life – suggests that despite our advanced society and relative safety, we are living in times that are as dark as medieval Europe. Antonius finally does find his meaning, and accomplishes his one good deed before Death takes him. Despite his doubt about God and the afterlife, he finds purpose and value in the young minstrel family, and manages to spare them his fate. That family, symbolizing life and goodness, was enough for him to find some acceptance of the terror and darkness that characterized the world around him.
Today, one could make the argument that the systems we have created, and our human shortcomings, are as much a threat to what is good and meaningful in the world as the Plague was in those pestilent times. Politicians and activists uproot families, sow discord and profit from misery, consuming all that is beautiful and good like ravenous wolves. If death were to appear today, wouldn’t he be different only in wearing a black robe rather than a dark cowl? As the innocent fruit of love is mowed down by a grim scythe, we hardly even bother to justify it any longer; that lust and greed are temporarily sated is enough of an excuse.
And yet as we look around, we ask “what kind of life is this, where those things dear to the human heart are devoured around us?”
As I reflect on the film, I see little difference between Antonius and myself — and most men for that matter. In our lives we make a desperate bargain with fate, trying to stave off the inevitable to create a sanctuary for the little things we secretly cherish, so that the inevitable loss will not have been entirely in vain.
{ 30 comments… read them below or add one }
Indeed, don’t most men “Live quiet lives of desperation” these days?
Is it by chance the only Bergman you have seen? Some are even gloomier; Winter Light, for example – and slower. I saw Summer with Monica in the movie/theatre which is in the basement of the east wing of The National Art Gallery in D.C. I rather like The Magician.
At the heart of the matter is procreation. From the moment we’re born until the moment we die, we’re meant to prioritize it as necessary to our happiness and well-being, or it’s what everyone else is doing. I keep hearing politicans saying “we’re bankrupting our children and grandchildren’s future”. Well I have none of my own and I don’t care about your children or grandchildren’s future. If their style of living is diminished tomorrow because government is over-spending today, I really don’t give a rats ass. Most of them voted for my entitlements to keep coming, along with “free” college loans, healthcare and the legalization of pot.
To a man his children represent his immortality (not sure how women feel). His DNA will live on to fight another day. His large nose and quirky personality traits his progeny will carry on are his legacy. I have no desire for my genes to procede, unless there’s something in it for me in Heaven, like 72 virgins or all my dead pet dogs to play with.
I think about my parents and grandparents sometimes. All the “liberated/empowered” women that divorced their husbands, my grandparents (on mother’s side) and parents, and brothers and cousins by the score. I don’t want to pass this tendency down. Not like it was a choice, it was just that I couldn’t see myself contending with more liberated/empowered women from other families like mine, until she became bored and disgusted with me and divorced…which based on every woman I dated and every girl friend I had I saw as inevitable. It didn’t take a crystal ball to see it coming, and they did little to hide it. She was the boss, I was the hapless worker/provider-man/child, because she read it in a magazine and saw it played out on TV and between her own parents.
Not gonna buy it. Not worth the hassle and heartache. Go Your Own Way young man. The insurrection is coming and you don’t want to be tied down to having to provide for and protect a woman and her children, who won’t appreciate you much once your gone anyway.
keyster wrote; “At the heart of the matter is procreation. From the moment we’re born until the moment we die, we’re meant to prioritize it as necessary to our happiness and well-being… I keep hearing politicans saying “we’re bankrupting our children and grandchildren’s future”. Well I have none of my own and I don’t care about your children or grandchildren’s future.”
I strongly agree with your first sentence, but in a counter-intuitive way. I have no children either (and won’t) and I think that raising children is a sure-fire way to banish these morbid thoughts simply because you are too busy attending to your kids’ needs to engage in a lot of philosophizing (that requires a lot more energy and time than you would think). The fact that I don’t have them, and by extension, the men who have children but don’t see them for large stretches of time, throws open the door to what I call the Existential Struggle. The glimpse of the Void on the other side of that door can be terrifying. At the very least it is sobering. But the only other alternative to grappling with it is indulging in the other distraction of hedonism (which would be right up the PUA’s alley), which I am not built for (being of stolid Germanic Lutheran stock).
Nonetheless, I do care about the future of today’s children. I hold that we are stewards during our tenure here, and my approach is that I would like to leave the place better than I found it – or at least cause it no further harm. That means maintaining my property, neighborhood, community and environment, not leaving debt for future generations, minimizing waste and exploitation of finite resources, and advocating, whenever I can, for a just society that has a shot at sustaining itself. That’s just good citizenship.
In our lives we make a desperate bargain with fate, trying to stave off the inevitable to create a sanctuary for the little things we secretly cherish, so that the inevitable loss will not have been entirely in vain.
My succesory quote of the day.
It is hard to argue with life or death; we always lose thinking we know better. Life is like failure interspersed with success, and death like imminent success clouded by singular failure.
Through the midst of it all; we learn value in life, and that our value is fleeting. Merely a token left behind on what we hope for; a greater journey (read existence) after this one truly fades.
It is true in life that like a universe sized scroll; it rolls itself up, and you either write yourself in the pages; or you don’t. Yet you will be swept away; your only choice being how you spend your days meeting it.
The young avoid being lived through vicariously by their elders. The elderly, wishing the young would live vicariously through their history.
Rinse (death), recycle (birth); long slow repeat.
There is a reason that a successful farmer without hardly a shred of IQ seems like a genius to the wise. These “facts” if you will are something he sees every year of his life.
So, to ease up a bit, naturally, I watched a Swedish existentialist movie about death.
U R 2 kewl 4 skewl!
This one is indeed a great classic and very much liked among European goths.
And, yes, parallels with today can be drawn, but there is one way that Antonius Block different from a typical modern man – his wife waits for him in the castle for a long time, hoping he will arrive from the crusades. She stays on even when the servants have fled the castle in fear of the plague.
Nonetheless, I do care about the future of today’s children. I hold that we are stewards during our tenure here, and my approach is that I would like to leave the place better than I found it – or at least cause it no further harm.
A noble aspiration.
Me?
I simply don’t care about shit like that anymore.
Am I gonna go out and purposefully ruin the planet?
No. I recycle and pick up my dog’s poop, and sometimes other dog’s poop.
Am I gonna purposefully ruin the economy?
I tried to convince as many people as I could that Obama would ruin this nation with a liberal tax and spend philosophy, and he’s in the midst of it right now. My liberal female friends voted against the “war on women”. My liberal male friends voted against Bain Capital and all of Romney’s rich friends. Not that Romney would have been some magic savior. Paul Ryan’s plan was ridiculous considering the scope of the problem, but at least he had a plan – a smidge of hope.
It was the tipping point. I tried to save my friend’s children and grandchildren from a future with a lower standard of living, but they wouldn’t listen. Now when I see their children and grandchildren I thank them for my “life of leisure” on their future dime. They roll their eyes with a smirk of bemusement at the crazy old bachelor.
Ahhh, sweet freedom!
Do you know what interest on $20,000,000,000,000 will be, assuming rates stay them same? It will be over $500,000,000,000 a year. We take in $2,500,000,000,000 in revenue….oops sorry we now take in $2,560, 000,000,000 since rates went up on the “rich”. We need $3, 500,000,000,000 per year to balance our budget. Now we could cut spending, but that’s “off the table”. Yeah, so some really bad shit is gonna happen.
I see your point about not wanting your own probably screwed up genes reproduced. If my family, meaning parents and siblings, were an individual, it would be in a strait jacket in a padded cell. I did reproduce my genes, but if I had not done so, the world would not have been a worse place.
What we have is a bad cocktail.. A plot of land that is inhabited by multiple races is problematic by itself, extremely problematic, but we’ve more than greatly compounded that problem by attempting to share authority with women, we’ve made it an impossibility. It’s like trying to safely juggle a water-balloon, a running chainsaw and a plugged in toaster. Good luck.
Some time back in the early 90′s I took a stab at a number of Bergman films. Rented on VHS, of course. I recall the Seventh Seal was the one I had the most difficulty with. In retrospect, it was a movie that just wouldn’t have appealed to me very much in my mid-20′s.
Other Bergman films I tried: Summer Interlude, Wild Strawberries, Through a Glass Darkly, Persona… and that pretty much exhausted the offerings at the local video stores of the time. No Netflix in those days! Summer Interlude was the one that I liked the most.
But this is because she is noble. The common wench who is the blacksmith’s wife wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to her husband.
“I did reproduce my genes, but if I had not done so, the world would not have been a worse place.”
Holy cow. I struggle with double negatives, but the triple is a whole new ball game.
I’m intuiting that your children haven’t materially affected the world’s fate, one way or the other. Amirite?
To hell with nobility, and honor to thy Queen. I’ve always liked the pirate movies.
@Opus
No, I’ve seen a couple others. Virgin Spring was the last one before this. Thanks for the tips on the above.
What I see when I read the post seem normal to me.
As you get older it is normal to have these thought about life and some time feel down and depressed. As you get older and see you body losing strength and energy it is normal that you ask what life is. Life is hard, always been hard and will always be hard. The easy and coward solution is to go for prescription drug. Only they strong can deal with what life is really about.
The mainstream media are selling a false view of what life is. According to them life is something easy, where there is no physical and emotional pain, where all your desires have to be meet right away and so on. What life is hard, always been hard and will always be hard. We have to start teaching the young that life is not what see on television and build some resilience into them.
As life will get tougher and tougher it is wise to start preparing mentally for it by reflecting upon it and making sense of it.
Esther Vilar in her book The manipulated men, by the way this book has a really positive description of men, was fascinated by these deep emotional thought than men are capable of. She says that the way man see the world and describe it is beautiful and a really nice quality. She like men compassion and other quality that we have.
She thought that women are shallow and empty creature. She even mentioned that men have really beautifully body and aged nicely. She thought that women are ugly and age badly.
I wish I had a better English so I could expressed my thought better.
My personally I think there is nothing in live for either men and women. I am for a gracefully shutting down of the human race. Sterilized everybody, allow euthanasia and let the human race varnish into the past memory.
Before going, there are many some blogs around, are we really helping people by commenting. I fell sometime that blogging is a waist of time and does not make a difference.
And death said ” you sank my Battleship , Bill and ted s bogus Journey . They beat death, Save the princesses and win the battle of the Bands . While holding there infant Children in There Manginia Back packs .
Still the same theme To hell and Back for the family .
I wonder what the Modern Artist would do with Bergmans classic Today .
Two LBGT men fight death with a Dance off while Challenging the court to the rights to Raise a small dumpster baby found years ago But, The Mom emerges and want custody . The Court grants the Crack Mom custody and She sells the Baby back to the gay Couple for Cash .
They win the dance off and move to Toscani and start a winery .
All this while the real Dad laments his death and writes on a Blog .
40 years earlier ,1972 I spin back in time .
Little joeb wakes from a bad dream .
His dad at his side . Dad Dad I had a really bad dream .
I killed a man in a war , A patriarchal system of feminists High Jacked the court systems sized my family during what seemed to be a gay parade . I’m forced to work in a steel mill witch is owned by a evil man that has a contract with the Judge that gave my family to the system . I was layed off and they put me In jail I jumped of a bridge and then I awoke .
Dad it was horrible .
Don’t worry Son we live in the greatest country in the world ,That’s just crazy talk it was just a dream .That could never Happen
Mom shakes her head and says ” Ya crazy talk Ha .
Y’all need to lighten up. There are two purposes (not meanings) available to a man in the time he is allotted:
- pass on your genes
- contribute to human civilization
Most of what we do in life is a contribution towards the unconscious and conscious struggle to pass on our genes. Some of it has a profit margin paid out to human civilization. Some of what we do contributes to human civilization first and foremost, but some of that in turn can benefit your mating strategy
. If you procreate, you pass on your genes, but that is only half of it. As a proper K-strategist you better raise your kids too, in order to set them on a vector towards successful promotion of their genes. So Fire and Forget isn’t the way to fulfilling your destiny. It also prevents your offspring from being sufficiently inspired by your example to remember you and make their offspring remember them.
If you choose to desist from the mating race, well you better have something to contribute to future history, else you may live a happy life now, but it will ultimately have been purposeless, and that is not my opinion but the experience of all those uncounted souls who, lying on their deathbeds, confessed to its truthfulness.
A bit offtopic, Stratfor just released an article “The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power”
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/crisis-middle-class-and-american-power
Family issues are briefly mentioned, but they talk mostly about other causes.
I suggest to send as much possible feedback and mention the issues discussed here.
If Stratfor makes an article on feminism, that would be something…
BTW, I’ve been reading this site for a while, now I kinda introduce myself
If your life means nothing, and the only meaning is your children, then their individual lives wont mean anthing either, but only their children. And so on. In philosophy, this is called a regression. It’s a completely false approach. Meaning is found in the present, or not at all. If you life has meaning, then if you have children, you can give them this gift – the love of life which you have found. And they can give it to their children and so on.
Of course, Sociobiology isn’t all wrong – creatures often do sacrafice themselves for their offspring. And humans often do as well. But Meaning? That’s something more. And it’s not to be found in the genes, instinct, and Nature.
keyster
same here
I don’t give a rat’s ass anymore.
BTW it’s my observation most people who cry, “oh it’s for the children!” are full of bull. If they were truly sincere about the next generation’s future they would start by keeping their own financial house in order today. These are the same people who maxed out their credit cards and defaulted on their loans so they’re not in a position to open their mouth. They may desire to “help” the children of tomorrow, but not more than they want to maintain their lifestyle today.
Bergman+the manosphere=major win. love it!!
As for films set in medieval times, ask your friend if he has seen Valley Of The Bees or Market Lazarova. They are much darker than Bergman’s films but kind of similar too.
When there was such a thing as community children would stay close to in-turn have their children. Now, not only are children not marrying, but rather “hooking up” – – if they have children at all it’s a daughter out of wedlock, with typically a father somewhere else, or their is divorce. And because we’re a “mobile society” moving where we need to for work, such as urban centers, parents have little contact with their children and rarely see their grandchildren. This is the typical dynamic…the “Nu Family” spread so far and wide; alienated from each other through geographic distance…trying to get home for the holidays once or twice a year.
What’s the point in pro-creating only to imagine your progeny from afar? The joy of raising children, watching them grow and learn? And again, this is not necessarily a conscious effort of young men. Remember “There Are No Wives, only competitors.”
@ Keyster
Don’t think that my growing up within striking distance of:
1) my guido paternal grandfather and mick paternal grandmother;
2) all three biologically-related aunts on my father’s side of the family (and the respective uncles and former uncles married to them);
3)on my mother’s side of the family, both biologically-related uncles (and their respective wives and former wife); and
4) one biologically-related aunt (out of three biologically-related aunts) and the uncle married to her
is anything to treasure. If I could go back in time, keep the same DOB, and be born to a family where the nuclear family components were scattered across the country (or even into foreign countries), I would make that trade effortlessly.
I’m exceptionally ashamed of my guido heritage, and to a lesser extent my mick heritage because of the fact that a non-guido or non-mick needs a chainsaw to separate the members of a guido or mick family.
Keyster That’s deep .
Remember “There Are No Wives, only competitors.”
And vary true , I never thought of it like that . The Joy in life would come from something really Manly eliminating the competition and willfully gaining Joy throw the benefits of victory .
Like Playing Basketball with a Girlfriend although you could let her win Fuck it Just slam it home . Competition Over .
Thanks Man I have a new way of thinking .
Remember “There Are No Wives, only competitors.”
And vary true , I never thought of it like that . The Joy in life would come from something really Manly eliminating the competition and willfully gaining Joy throw the benefits of victory .
I paraphrased both Welmer and Uncle Elmer into one sound bite.
Men only competed with each other until the sexual revolution; the pill and legalized abortion. Child birth essentially limited women from competing with men (and still does), which is why female control of pro-creation is the Raison d’être of feminism. Now that meritocracy is all but extinct, workers being evaluated based on how others “feel” about them, combined with Affirmative Action/Diversity Chic – women are competing, but on a tilted playing field that they seem to be unaware of, or don’t care about because advantaging women over men is “social justice” for men being so dominant throughout history.
When you combine the increased value of the “gestational carrier”, with State enforced social and economic egalitarianism to the less valuable “non-gestational carrier” – – you have a cocktail for societal decline and collapse. This is happening right now.
I submit to you:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/03/paedophilia-bringing-dark-desires-light
Yes, actually proposing the normalization of sex with children. The next frontier of the moral relativists after homosexuality.
Two Swedish movies that I would recommend are “Under the Sun” (under solen” and “My Life as a Dog”. Under the Sun is particularly philosophical if that is your shtick. It isn’t about death though, it is quite uplifting.
Michael
“There are two purposes (not meanings) available to a man in the time he is allotted:
- pass on your genes
- contribute to human civilization”
This is my opinion also.
Fighting feminism is a contribution to human civilization. It is taking a stand against a totalitarian ideology same as fighting Nazism or Communism.
Thanks, The Spearhead and Co. … you have been to me like the father I was denied growing up… You have taught me so much…