Emile got into Melbourne with a present for me, the flier for Jan Fabre’s new Troubelyn production, History of Tears.
In his book Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Roland Barthes raises the rhetorical question of who will write the History of Tears, ‘Dans quelles sociétés, dans quels temps a-t-on pleuré?’ Jan Fabre’s History of Tears is a possible answer. The play is not just an allegorical story of the loss of bodily fluid and the censoring of our natural body, but also sketches an image of the age. The fluid-filled body of the knight of despair is an anachronism in our era. Our era is threatened by drought, by bodies that deny their nature, by the dominance of rationality and control. We are once again living in the Renaissance, under the all-seeing eye of the knowledge that wants to fathom and analyse everything. We are observed and defined by the detached eye that reduces the tears, sweat and urine to chemical substances. Vesalius’ anatomy of the body has been increasingly perfected and technologised until every substance that makes up the body has been charted and can be simulated. The flows of our body drift further and further away. We are becoming increasingly alienated from our fluid nature. The desert steadily advances.
HISTOIRY OF TEARS
Luk Van den Dries
History of Tears is Jan Fabre’s latest play concerning our old body. This body, which has endured millennia of evolution, which has always adapted, which has been patched up, dies off and is born again. Over and over again.
The body in this play is above all a bag of water, that liquid essential to life. Water keeps the body fluid so it does not become crusty and dry out. In the body, water is transformed into all manner of bubbling juices. The moisture in our body links us to the rain from the sky and the water of the seas. Our body follows the tidal movement of ebb and flow, hope and despair.
The watery body cast onto the dry earth. This is how the play begins. Skin that yearns for the warmth of a womb. That is not there. Not enough. Not always. And so it bursts out crying. History of Tears starts with this very first beginning, the distress resulting from dryness. Small human animals floundering on dry land. That helpless clawing in search of security. That is briefly comforted by larger specimens, but as soon as they are laid back alone on the cold ground they renew their heartbreaking cries. The great sorrow of mankind can be heard in this crying. These babies cry the tears of previous lives, choke on the sorrow of all those other people, of the past, of pain, of all those desert wanderings mankind has been through, of hardship. It is an overwhelming, deafening lament. An unendurable concert of tears. Man is born and uses his first breath to cry. I am therefore I cry.
I am therefore I pass water. History of Tears is about the water in our bodies. That wants to get out but cannot. That has to get out but must not. All three come from deep down. They form channels between our most intimate folds of skin and the world outside. They sprinkle the earth. They moisten matter. They form the secretions of the body. Sweat, tears and urine are poured out, driven out, pressed out. But secretions are also secrets. The secret of the language of bodily water. The secret code of the smell of sweat. The invisible boundaries with which a trail or urine marks off territory. The waterfall of emotions set off by tears. The instincts of the body triumph in these fluids. Urine as a hot shower. Sweat that stimulates. Tears that soften. These streams of urine, these droplets of sweat, this bath of tears, let us know that this body has an inside that is moist. A body full of caverns of snot and mucus. Without these sacral bodily oils in its clefts, between discs, in cavities, the body would stiffen and fossilise.
The knight of despair, the main character in History of Tears celebrates this moist body. He is proud of his tears, his sweat, his urine. He knows the power and beneficial effect of these secretions. He dances for the rain gods in his body. But at the same time his yellow urine in the snow writes a cry of distress. He is alone. He steams and swelters and stinks and sweats and he is alone. His moist body is inappropriate. His tears are not understood. His urine arouses shame. His sweat makes people avoid him. In the dry world he is the leak that has to be stopped. His struggle is hopeless. The superior power is great. Yet he never gives up. In his eyes is a piercing ideal. He cherishes the memory of a fertile age. This is why this Don Quixote of the free flow indefatigably pricks open the scabs and blisters so that the water can keep on flowing. He takes up the fight against the lock-keepers of this world. Against those authorities that want to contain the water management, against the terror of odourlessness, against the shame that holds the body in its grip, against the Catholic church, which has for centuries wrung out the body until there was not a drop left.
It is a lonely struggle. But the knight of despair is immortal. There is always someone ready to take his place. The knight of despair is an army on his own. He is constantly regenerating. His belly sloshes with water. Don Quixote comes back to life in him, the knight who overcomes because he dares make himself immortally ridiculous. And also Rabelais’ creatures, Pantagruel and Gargantua, with their all too thirsty and emptying bodies. And even Francis of Assisi joins in, the saint who gave free rein to his tears, overwhelmed by all the beauty that strikes him at random. Each one is an eccentric character, outsiders who sing the praises of folly. The knight of despair recognises something of his struggle in these wandering knights and mystical hermits. A struggle that costs him urine, sweat and tears.
Apart from the knight of despair, two other characters play a part in History of Tears: the rock and the dog. In the dog we recognise the Greek philosopher Diogenes, well-known for his quest for a human, using a lantern in full daylight. He looks for a human but does not find one. He does find enough poor excuses for humans, creatures who deny their own nature, who live by all sorts of laws and convention. His cynical teaching tries to reconcile mankind once again with his essence and to break free from all the constraints of society. Like the knight of despair, he is a loner. The only thing he has is a barrel. And he is happy when inside it. And Diogenes cheerfully pisses wherever he likes. In the natural surroundings or against the legs of those in power. He accepts the secretions of his body.
Diogenes is the unwelcome visitor here. He upsets the order of things. He is the permanent outcast. He lives according to his nature but this is precisely what is intolerable in this, our stagnated world. Rather than endure the sand between his teeth any longer, he prefers to hold his breath. And to die.
The rock is a lachrymose figure. She cries unceasingly. She cries saltless tears which she knows will not help her. She cries out of devotion, she cries in sympathy, she cries for what has become of her, she drowns in her own tears. She was once Niobe, the most fertile of all women, but her fertile hubris was a thorn in the side of the gods and she was punished by the death of all her children, while she herself was turned into the most insensitive of all substances: a rock. She had once been Mary, the mother of faith, and she too was robbed of her child. The rock incarnates all those crying mothers who want to offer comfort but themselves drown in endless torments. They form a landscape of solidified sorrow. A desert of rocks. The waste land.
In his book Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Roland Barthes raises the rhetorical question of who will write the History of Tears, ‘Dans quelles sociétés, dans quels temps a-t-on pleuré?’ Jan Fabre’s History of Tears is a possible answer. The play is not just an allegorical story of the loss of bodily fluid and the censoring of our natural body, but also sketches an image of the age. The fluid-filled body of the knight of despair is an anachronism in our era. Our era is threatened by drought, by bodies that deny their nature, by the dominance of rationality and control. We are once again living in the Renaissance, under the all-seeing eye of the knowledge that wants to fathom and analyse everything. We are observed and defined by the detached eye that reduces the tears, sweat and urine to chemical substances. Vesalius’ anatomy of the body has been increasingly perfected and technologised until every substance that makes up the body has been charted and can be simulated. The flows of our body drift further and further away. We are becoming increasingly alienated from our fluid nature. The desert steadily advances.
Na Je suis sang, een Middeleeuws sprookje, heeft Fabre de hergeboorte van de mens in beeld gebracht. Maar deze zogenaamde Renaissance brengt absoluut geen verlossing. Integendeel. After Je suis sang, a mediaeval fairytale, Fabre has now visualised the rebirth of man. But this so-called Renaissance brings no salvation at all. On the contrary. Man has been given more space. But to do what? He can no longer hide behind destiny. Heaven has moved higher. And man wants to explore these heights. Like Da Vinci, he dreams of machines that allow him to take off. That give him the freedom of birds. Which, like Jacob’s Dream in the Bible, admit him to heaven. But the more man becomes acquainted with these heights, the more he discovers the void too. And the higher he climbs the deeper he can fall. This is the image of the Renaissance that Fabre wants to show us in this epic study of the sources of human civilisation. A time of dehydration. Of alienation from one’s own urges. Of over-rationalisation. Man even thinks up a mechanism to cry.
The dominant images in this piece show the world as a desert and life as a long journey in a dry country. They symbolise the litany of despair that resounds continuously throughout the play. The primary material used is glass, hard and unfeeling. As in many fairytales, the tears are here transformed into coagulated matter. They are traces of sadness carried around as in a funeral procession. Fabre shows life as a pilgrimage of tears. Man is born and he cries. He is baptised and he cries. With his first breath he blows out tears. And he will clothe himself in these tears. As in a fairytale, the tears always take a different shape and each time illustrate a different stage of the long journey towards death. At the heart of this lies despair. In a key scene we see figures metamorphose into pearls of sorrow. They form an impressive scene into which all the suffering in history (and art history) is compressed.
But Fabre would not be Fabre if no counter-force was released. The knight of despair refuses to resign himself to the dryness. He summons us to ‘save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance’. To temper the omnipotence of the eye and to again give the ear all the space it needs, the organ that is connected like a funnel to the innermost parts of our body. He carries on a struggle to let the body’s secretions flow freely. To combat sterility by means of moist lusts and passions. He wants to return to the body of the Middle Ages. The body of mercy that is able to participate directly in the mystery of the cycle of life and death. The fluid body that constantly transforms into other shapes and thereby avoids the fossilising eye. The comical body that is not afraid of its own ridiculous state.
He calls up his army of Sancho Panzas to wage war on dryness. The prisoners of dryness protest with loud tapping against the dehydration of life. With their very last tears they write an appeal for help, Save our souls, clearly visible so that heaven can read it too. They dance for rain. But the gods do not listen. They stamp on the ground in the hope that water will fall from the heavens. Still no rain. They beg the gods. They threaten the gods. They curse this heaven without water. But it stays dry.
“Let our weeping bodies
be an alternative to aggression
Let our weeping bodies
be a counterweight to hypocrisy
Let our weeping bodies
complain against the disappearance
of conscience
Let our bodies weep
to be a fiery igniter
of changes
Let our bodies weep
to prevent a catastrophe”
In History of Tears the gods laugh at the human species. They roar with laughter. Their laughter thunders across the heavens. They laugh so hard the humans wet themselves with fear. So there is water after all. But Don Quixote is not afraid. He laughs back at them. His cosmic laughter challenges the gods. The knight of despair never gives up.
The Renaissance produced many people who tickled the dryness out of the age. Don Quixote is one of them. But there were the idiots too, whom the great humanist Erasmus from Rotterdam used in his notorious parody on his contemporaries, In Praise of Folly. The praise of idiocy is sung in Fabre’s production too. The idiot is someone who is unadjusted to his era. Someone who laughs at all seriousness. Who celebrates the carnival of irrationality. Who drives the prevailing order up the wall with his idiotic behaviour. But In Praise of Folly is not an ode to pure madness, complete psychosis, as the only escape route from an over-rational age. It is rather a plea for the constant watering of life. This watering is done by laughter. The ‘waste land’ of this age can only be irrigated by admitting the comical. That is why there are so many idiots running around in History of Tears. They are crying with laughter. They build enclaves in seriousness. They storm heaven with ladders. They laugh louder than the gods.
‘Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine laughter, and because he is not a pessimist, because he believes in immortality, he must keep on fighting. He fights against the modern, scientific, inquisitorial orthodoxy to bring a new and impossible Middle Ages into being, that is dualistic, contradictory and passionate.’ (Miguel De Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life).