Click on title for footage from the video...
Bill Viola takes the title for his video piece from a verse in the Rig Veda. It is worth quoting subsequent lines in the verse: “But when the evolutes of natural truth, i.e. intelligence and understanding of awareness come to me, and when the revelations of this Divine Word of truth bless me, then I realize my share of knowledge of the reality of existence that it is.” (Verse 37, Mandal – 1, Sukta – 164, italics added). The Divine word of Truth is at issue here is “Prakriti”, usually translated as “nature”, which represents the intelligence that animates all matter. This verse contemplates the correspondence between individual intelligence and the universal intelligence of Prakriti.
Viola takes this idea of the natural order of things versus the individual as his point of departure for an extended meditation on the nature of consciousness, being and becoming through an intricate sequence of images that combine documentary-style and staged video footage. The first chapter, “Il Corpo Scuro” (“Dark Body”), largely revolves around shots of bison in their natural habitat. A visual epigraph, as it were, to the chapter shows a cave where Viola is reflected in a drop of water hanging from a stalactite. This reflection motif recurs throughout the video in different aspects, and poses a fundamental ontological riddle: “Where does the individual leave off and the rest of the world begin?” Each chapter comes at this question from very different angles.
The image of geologic time in the cave segues into the image the grazing bison, majestic creatures emblematic of nature apart from human civilization. The bison’s cycles of living and dying, eating and eliminating, and their relationships with other creatures in the environment, are on full display. Then Viola moves in to focus on the eyes of the bison. These creatures are more than eating machines-they are sentient beings.
In the second chapter, “The Language of the Birds”, Viola extends this conceit to include fish and birds, focusing on the eyes of these creatures, culminating in the video’s iconic sequence of a slow zoom shot on the eye of a Great Horned Owl, which ends with Viola’s image clearly reflected in the owl’s pupil. Here the issue of what constitutes consciousness is posed more forcefully. Yes Viola is videotaping the owl, but the owl clearly has Viola within its field of awareness. The sense here is of a true reciprocity between Viola and this creature whose consciousness we have no way of fathoming. Humans, Viola seems to be saying even more emphatically than in the previous chapter, are but one of many creatures, all of whom participate in awareness.
The third chapter “The Night of Sense” is the most involved of all the chapters and appears to be building an argument about Western forms of knowledge. We see Viola reading a book on anatomy while working on editing some video. It is no accident that he is working at night. We see things only dimly, Viola seems to be saying, a point which he emphasizes when an elephant appears from behind a set in what we first thought was just somebody’s room, a reference no doubt to the parable about the blind men and the elephant. The sequences with the surprise appearance of the snail in the still life and the hatching chick both point toward cycles of becoming, one apparently referencing art and culture, and the other life and death. What is certain is the sensuality of both sequences. This chapter takes on the ponderous, centuries-long process of building understanding through art and science, while questioning the degree to which the very tools that use to build knowledge, our limited perceptual range, can answer with certitude the fundamental questions of what it is to be alive.
The fourth chapter, “The Beat of the Drum”, features, to the beat of a metronome, a parade of strobe-lit images that get progressively more threatening, culminating in flashes of attack dogs jumping out at us. There are images of contemporary culture, including television. Viola here makes the point that the media cycle that we move with in lockstep fashion actually increases fear and confusion-an argument that I find hard to disagree with. Clearly this realm of knowledge, if one can call it that, has downright alienating effects in the individual’s relation to the outside world, which here appears hostile.
The fifth chapter, “The Living Flame”, consists of multiple takes of a Hindu community in Fiji performing a fire-walking ceremony. The activities here are frankly repulsive by Western standards. The men in the community begin by performing austerities such as piercing their faces and limbs with small skewers. The climax comes when the men egg each other on to walk across a bed of hot coals. The aim evidently is to purify the community by offering up these acts of mortification, literally self-sacrifices, to their gods. It would be very easy to dismiss these activities as superstition, but Viola asks us to consider which community is healthier. Secular Western culture, which as the previous chapter implies, is ruled by a mind-numbing procession of alienating images of the world, or this community which comes together to celebrate a vision of a reality which transcends the personal limitations of fear and self-preservation at all costs?
The coda to this very complicated video has the bizarre sequence of a fish flying through the air over a beautiful mountain lake, finally landing on the lake’s shore to slowly decompose before us. Viola appears to be referring to the cycles of living and dying, fusing birds and fish into one creature-nature rolled into one. His parting image underlines the truth that no living creature escapes these cycles. In fact, it is precisely in embracing in an experiential way these cycles, which are the intelligence of nature, rather than seeing solely through the prism of art or science, much less popular culture, that the individual comes to a better understanding of his relationship to the world. Again, as quoted from the Rig Veda in the first paragraph: “But when the evolutes of natural truth, i.e. intelligence and understanding of awareness come to me, and when the revelations of this Divine Word of truth bless me, then I realize my share of knowledge of the reality of existence that it is.”
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