Introduction
While watching Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life in 2011, I was suddenly struck by seeing on screen what Andrey Bely's Kotik Letaev describes as the adult's memory of the child's memory of his emerging consciousness. The child is aware that he existed before the universe came to be and that his formation in his mother's womb recapitulated the emergence of the cosmos and of life on earth. Since that first viewing I have been persuaded that a comparison between Bely's autobiographical novel and Malick's film was warranted.
At the time there were serious discussions of the Christian symbolism and Catholic Christian theological subtext of the film, Geoffrey O'Brien, in his review essay in the New York Review of Books, prefers to see Malick as one “determined to turn narrative movies into vehicles for posing unanswerable metaphysical questions, not in words but in the quite distinct language of cinema.”Footnote 1 While O'Brien suggests that William James's Some Problems in Philosophy would be a suitable book out of which Malick could make a film, this essay will show that Malick, given his cinematographic conceit, development of specific themes and visual symbols, could just as well have made a film out of the works of the Russian symbolist poet, novelist, and anthroposophist Andrey Bely, especially his third novel Kotik Letaev.Footnote 2
What follows is an exercise in comparing two different works of art in two different media, literature and cinema. It is an experiment in interpretation, showing how two artists, with different backgrounds and concerns, have arrived at similar representations of the quest for human origins and the discovery of human destiny. My hope is that a deeper understanding of the film may also emerge from this inquiry.
Malick presents us with a philosopher's questions about human origins and destiny, about what lies at the boundary between life and death. As we will see below, there are elements of William Blake in his subtext.Footnote 3 Bely addresses the same fundamental questions from the point of view of a symbolist poet under the spell of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. Indeed, Blake's mysticism does seem to have points in common with Steiner's, particularly the need to “cleanse the doors of perception”. The protagonists of The Tree of Life and Kotik Letaev each seek answers to these questions through an exercise in remembering childhood. The memory of each man takes him to an experience of the soul's recapitulation of the creation of the cosmos, earth, and life on earth during the soul's descent into matter before birth (so Steiner). They both relate memory's findings of human origins to an acceptance of destiny finally understood in light of memory.
The Blakean motifs in The Tree of Life dovetail with the themes that I will identify as similar to Bely's. In the first scene, after Jack's whispered “Brother, Mother… it was they who led me to your door,” we hear a clear echo of Blake's “The Clod and the Pebble”. The mother is reflecting that
Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy… when all the world is shining around it… when love is smiling through all things.Footnote 4
Compare these words with Blake's.
So, does Blake's mysticism lie behind Malick's vision? The following from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell seems to express the sense of alienation from the Eternal that the questioners feel in The Tree of Life and in the 1998 film, The Thin Red Line.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern
(The Marriage of Heaven and Hell §§114‐116).Malick certainly takes Jack O'Brien on a journey that will end with a cleansing of the doors of perception and a vision of the infinite.
Despite some elements of Blake's thought in this film, what stands out are the uncannily striking similarities between The Tree of Life and Bely's Kotik Letaev.
Andrey Bely and Kotik Letaev
Because Bely will be unfamiliar to most readers, I need to present the aspects of his thought that are relevant to the discussion.Footnote 5 Andrey Bely was one of the leading Russian symbolists from the end of the 19th and early 20th century. His theory of poetic language reflects his wide‐ranging reading of philosophy and literature, including Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Russian mystic Vladimir Solovyov. He blurred the distinction between poetry and prose and attempted to re‐create the effects of music in his use of language. In 1912, after a period of flirting with the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky, he met and came under the influence of Rudolf Steiner and Steiner's refashioned Theosophy known as Anthroposophy. His second major novel, Petersburg (first version published in 1913), reflects Steiner's philosophy, while his third novel, Kotik Letaev, is an unabashedly semi‐autobiographical quest of a Steinerian adept for his pre‐existence to be found through memory.
Thirty‐two‐year‐old Kotik, the narrator, is in Dornach, Switzerland (the site of Steiner's institute) during the First World War. The novel deals mostly with the coming to self‐awareness of the narrator, who looks back on his first five years of childhood in Moscow in the 1880s. His father is an eminent mathematician at the university and his mother is a woman of society. He is an only child, well taken care of. Through the “memory of a memory” (a recurring phrase in the novel) of the state prior to his birth, he traces his ego's journey from the Eternal into the phenomenal world. What he remembers from the time before birth will serve as Kotik's preparation to re‐ascend the summit both of time (his present moment) and the hill of the Cross, where he will be crucified with Christ on the Tree of Life.
Already before meeting Steiner Bely had treated the theme of the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. His Third Symphony: “The Return”Footnote 6 combines what he had received from Solovyov with Theosophy. It begins and ends with scenes in the dream world (or is it the Real World?) where the soul of the principal character Khandrikov pre‐existed as a child before being sent into the phenomenal world by an old man. Mythic images in the noumenal world are replicated in characteristics of people in the material world. Khandrikov's death by drowning becomes the means of rebirth into eternity, where, as the child once more, he is welcomed back by the old man who sent him forth. Bely implies that the eternal child has made the descent and return countless times.Footnote 7
Steiner's Anthroposophy fit well with Bely's earlier ideas. For Steiner the Spiritual essence of man, the ego, resides in an eternal world of the spirit between its successive incarnations. Once descended it loses contact with the spiritual world.Footnote 8 The soul must awaken in itself the ability to recall representations related to the spiritual world. Our task as human beings is to recover the memory of that existence as we experienced it before we lost the memory of our eternal origins. The adept trains adult powers of memory to probe the child's memory in himself to find the “memory of a memory” of the time before birth, the experience of the soul in the Eternal and its journey into the world of matter.
For Bely “True consciousness is recollection.”Footnote 9 The quest for memory from a time before birth is introduced by the novel's epigraph:
– “You know, I think”, Natasha said in a whisper… – “that when you remember in this way, you remember, remember everything, you remember all the way back so that you remember what had been, even before I was in the world….”Footnote 10
What Bely has taken from Steiner is that “The past in memory and the future in imagination are alike revealed…” so that one can transcend time and self in the “desire to embody all time in one moment.”Footnote 11 In Kotik Letaev he seeks to show that an individual in the phenomenal world can recover the memory of life in the Eternal.
On one level we are presented with the adult's memory of how he came to knowledge and understanding as a child. On another level Kotik remembers his earliest memory of his origins in Eternity when he was an infant beginning to come to terms with the phenomenal world.
The transfiguration by memory of what came before is, in fact, a reading of the universe which stands behind ours. The impression of childhood years – only flights into what never at any time has been; and – nevertheless exists; existences of the lives of others were now mixed in with events of my life; likenesses of what had been for me are vessels with which I ladle up the harmony of a cosmos beyond compare. Such is memory of a memory; it is rhythm; it is the music of the sphere, of the land – where I was before my birth. Memories surrounded me. A memory – music of a sphere; and this sphere – the universe; impressions – memories are mimicries of my life in the land of rhythms, where I was before my birth
(KL Chap. 3, §“An Impression”, p. 481).Footnote 12The adult Kotik uses language and the symbols created by language to reach back to primordial beginnings of the individual, the human race, and the cosmos itself, a return to the paradisal beginnings of humanity.Footnote 13 Labyrinthine corridors and networks of rooms in the childhood house duplicate the passage from Eternity into the world of matter.
Kotik's “memory of a memory” takes him back to the very formation of the cosmos. Every soul that comes from Eternity into time contains that cosmogony within itself. As the child becomes a self‐conscious individual, he becomes aware, from pictures in the parlor, of the images of the Tree of Life, which is both the tree encircled by the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the Tree upon which Christ was crucified. The child's memory conflates the two Trees. Kotik remembers that as a child he heard adult conversation around him suggesting that he, too, would be crucified.Footnote 14
Kotik begins his quest on a height looking down, a reification of time: he is looking from the “height” of the present moment “down” into the past. The mountains are both the real Alps of Dornach as well as the detritus deposited by his growth in the anthroposophic quest, metaphor becoming matter. Kotik addresses himself:
Under your feet is all that was once an unhealthy growth coming out of you and at the same time was you; that peeled away like dead stone and hardened like cliffs… Nature which is all around you – is you… (KL, Prologue, p. 430).
The past that Kotik confronts will also be the way to the future and his own crucifixion on the Cross of Christ.
I know that there will be a time – (when it will be, I do not know) – when I will be split internally, with my body nailed down and torn apart by my soul, – my long glance fixed on the ruptures of my sufferings … the hardened scab will crack in two …
Then my self‐consciousness will be a man, my self‐consciousness, still in infancy: I will be born a second time; the ice of ideas, of words, of meanings is breaking up: it is sprouting with new meanings.
These meanings are now nothing to me, and all previous meanings are something inarticulate which rustles and flutters about the dry wood of the Cross; I am hanging in myself on myself. …
In Christ we die in order to rise in the Spirit
(KL, Epilogue, p. 578).The “memory of a memory” combines with the narrator's present moment to move him towards a future ascent of CalvaryFootnote 15. However, Bely's use of Christian imagery goes beyond traditional Christian symbolism.
Malick's The Tree of Life
The role of memory also dominates the film, although the film's narrative is different from Bely's. Like Bely Terrence Malick uses Christian language and imagery but not in any orthodox Christian way. There are a few important church scenes, but there is not much in the film that is overtly Christian. As noted in the introduction the outlook of the film is closer to Blake's mysticism.
The film is set chiefly in the protagonist's childhood in Waco, Texas of the 1950's, a far remove in time and space from Bely's Moscow of the late 19th century. The adult Jack O'Brien is an architect in Houston. He is the eldest of three brothers. His father is an unsuccessful inventor, who admits he should have followed a career in music,Footnote 16 and his mother embodies the nurturing qualities of the Earth goddess. The very beginning of the film provides a prelude to the protagonist's quest. We see two verses from JobFootnote 17 flashed on the screen against a black backdrop against which appears shifting light imagery (credited as Opus 161 “Untitled” [1966] by Thomas Wilfred) suggesting a star in the process of becoming. That light is Jack's origin, with which he also seeks reunion. The movie closes with the same image without the divine question. The flickering light motif recurs in various forms throughout the film as a symbol of Eternity breaking into mundane life. The first words we hear in the film are Jack's whispered statement “Brother, Mother… it was they who led me to your door.” Jack's quest is to cleanse the “doors of perception.”
In The Tree of Life Malick shows us dizzying heights, not as mountains but as Houston high rises. From the top floor the protagonist looks down, and from below he looks up at the buildings, just as Kotik looks at the mountains. Where the mountains that surround Kotik at Dornach are also the product of his spiritual past, there is no direct implication that these buildings represent Jack's spiritual development, but they are still an objective product of his life, even if he did not design them all. He is an architect, a builder, and is now embarking on a search for the God that he has been in dialogue with his whole life.Footnote 18 The death of his brother R.L. (we know the name only from the end credits) at nineteen, a death never explained in the film, sets him on his quest for understanding of and entrance into God's world.
Time is reified in various ways. Looking down and looking up become symbols for seeking the past and trying to discern the future. The Brazos River is the river of time, appearing once in the prehistoric sequence and repeatedly throughout the film, the very last scene showing the adult Jack looking up at the bridge spanning the river. It unites all the characters and events.
Like Kotik Jack is haunted by the “memory of a memory.” In an early scene, while the mother is reading from Kipling's Jungle Book, one of the boys asks her to “tell us a story from before we can remember.” (Compare Natasha's assertion about memory in the epigraph to Kotik Letaev.) Jack, like Kotik, embarks on a quest through memory to an internal encounter with time from before birth. Kotik's memoir breaks off at the age of five, the age at which the young human being is supposed to forget completely the experience of Eternity from which he or she has descended into matter.Footnote 19 By contrast Jack's memories continue to the threshold of adolescence. And unlike Kotik, Jack is not preparing for union with God by sharing in Christ's Cross, although his memories prepare him to cross the threshold between our world and Eternity. Instead, it is the death of his brother that becomes redemptive.
Malick's “tree of life” is more than the Cross. Malick represents life reaching out for heaven with frequent views of trees, especially the large tree in the O'Brien front garden, an image of Yggdrasil, the world axis uniting earth and heaven. In this way the tree in the movie becomes the representation of the totality of being of Jack, his brother R.L., his parents and all that makes up his past, from the emergence of the cosmos from chaos, and leading to the final consummation.Footnote 20 Where Kotik looks to his own participation in Christ's crucifixion, Malick comes back again and again to views of trees. The tree of the Cross is implied, when the camera pauses briefly on a stained‐glass image of the Ecce Homo in the church where the priest is preaching on the misfortunes of Job. R.L.'s death is joined to Christ's: his mother in the role of Mary gives her son back to God. From Bely's point of view we would say that the mother fulfills the role of the eternal feminine, Divine Wisdom, who joins the seeker to the Logos dwelling with the Eternal.Footnote 21 Jack and all that are touched by his life will take part in this apotheosis: R.L.'s death brings about the reconciliation between Jack and his father.
Kotik Letaev and The Tree of Life Compared
Kotik's memoir breaks off at the age of five. According to Steiner this is the age at which the human being loses all memory of pre‐existence in the Eternal. The adult Kotik, now a Steinerian adept, looks down from a height in the Swiss Alps and sees the past – not just the chronological past of his own life, but probes back to before he was born. From this vantage point he can see the backward reach of memory and can look forward as well, seeing both the heights of the mountains before him and the hill of Calvary that he must ascend to be united with Christ on the Cross. We learn nothing of his adolescence, of his school days, or even of how he finds himself in Dornach. Without the biography of the author to guide us we would be presented with an almost impenetrable closed system, however fascinating the details are.
Malick's work is not so hermetic, but it is open to multiple interpretations. Of course there are differences between him and Bely, simply because Malick is not a Steinerian Russian symbolist. Nevertheless, the similarities to Bely are in many places quite striking.
Both Bely and Malick seem to say that the formation of everything from the beginning of the universe is recapitulated within the human being's formation and contained in the Unconscious, if only we could learn to gain access to it through thought and memory. In both the novel and the movie we are shown the protagonist's origins as part of the history of the universe. Roiling chaos predominates. The cosmic process causes matter to form around discrete centers – galaxies, stars, planets.
In the novel consciousness emerges in the same way: the child in the womb is in touch with earlier embodiments of the ego and becomes aware of the matter that is now encasing the “I” that has descended from the Eternal. At the end of chapter one he says, “My life began in imagelessness and continues in images.” These images show his eternal self participating in the formation of the world as he is formed in the womb.
The world and thought are only scums: of stormy cosmic images; the blood throbs with their flight; thoughts are set ablaze by their fires; and these images are myths. … Myths are existence of long ago: like continents, like the seas myths at one time rose up to me; the child wandered among them; he was delirious in them, as everyone is: all people wandered in them at first; and when they were exposed, they began to be delirious with them … for the first time, from the beginning – in them they lived.
Now the ancient myths have fallen away from under my feet; like delirious oceans they rage and lick our terra firma: made of lands and consciousnesses; what could be seen arose in them; “I” and “Not‐I” arose in them; separate identities arose… But the seas overflowed: a fatal heritage, the cosmos, burst into reality; in vain they hid in its shreds; without protection everything melted; it just kept spreading out; lands fell into the seas; consciousness burst forth in myths of the terrible Progenitrix; and the floods boiled
(KL, Chap. 1, §“Formation of Consciousness”, p. 433).The child Kotik, looking at a book of dinosaurs called Extinct Monsters, thinks it is odd that “they say that they have died out; but still I encountered them: in the first moments of consciousness.” (KL, Chap. 1, §“He is Burning up with Fever”, p. 437).
Early in The Tree of Life, following the mother's questions “Where were you?” and “Who are we to you?” Malick gives what could serve as a visual representation of Kotik's remembered experience from before he was conceived. We see the flickering light image from the beginning of the film followed by Hubble images of galaxies and stars, implying the formation of the cosmos, then the appearance of life on earth, and the encounter of a predator dinosaur with a wounded herbivore. Instead of killing and devouring the helpless animal, the first dinosaur touches and then pushes the wounded animal's head down with his leg, first roughly then a second time gently before moving on. Here Malick goes beyond Bely, who simply states that Kotik encountered dinosaurs in an earlier embodiment of his “I”. Malick suggests that the moral foundation of the human being is one with the formation of the universe and life within it. The predator's gesture of compassion will be taken up in the second half of the film as an act of reconciliation and forgiveness between various people. Jack touches the shoulder of a boy burned earlier in a fire. Jack betrayed R.L.'s trust and love by getting him to cover the aperture of a BB gun with his finger and then firing the gun. Later, after repeated rejected attempts to gain R.L.'s forgiveness for the nasty trick with the BB gun, the healing finally begins when R.L. places his hand on Jack's shoulder.Footnote 22 In the final scene before the epilogue Jack and his father each place a hand on the other's shoulder. Compassion and love go back to before human existence, to before Jack was born. Memory will prepare for final reconciliation.
Death and (Re‐)birth
Death is necessary for our encounter with Christ. For Bely, drawing on Steiner, Christ made it possible for us to be individually aware of our origins in the Eternal and opened up the way for our return. In the concluding sentences of his 1916 essay “On the Meaning of Cognition” Bely affirms that the divine within the individual is where we meet Christ, who is born in us, who is our “I” and whose death makes possible the birth of the new.Footnote 23
At one point in Malick's film The Thin Red Line the internal monologue of two of the characters is very close to this idea. Private Witt wonders, “Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of, all faces are the same man.” And Private Train's final thoughts are, “Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with? The brother. The friend. Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind?”
For both Bely and Malick death by drowning is an entrance into new birth, the sustaining water of the mother's womb becoming also the source of life for the drowned. Bely's theme of the eternal return is best seen in his Third Symphony: The Return, published about fifteen years before Kotik Letaev. In that short work, already mentioned above, the “child” is sent from the realm of the eternal to become incarnate as the chemistry student Khandrikov. He goes mad and, through the urging of Docent Tsenkh, drowns himself, thereby finding his way back to the realm that he had left.
Malick had used the themes of drowning and rebirth in his earlier film, The Thin Red Line. Towards the end, at the moment that Private Witt is shot, Malick shifts to an underwater scene of Witt swimming in the sea with some children. Witt, who has been probing the boundaries between life and death throughout the film, experiences death as rebirth. In The Tree of Life Malick joins birth with death by drowning in a different way. The last part of the creation sequence shows Jack being formed in the womb. His birth is depicted as a new‐born baby rising to the surface of a pool. Later he remembers the drowning death of a child in a public swimming pool. The child's death is linked to R.L.'s death in a striking way. The opening bars of Mahler's First Symphony are played both during Mrs. O'Brien's grief over the death of R.L. and at the death of the unnamed child. The mystery of the return becomes clear as the film progresses, the drowned child foreshadowing the redemptive death of the teenage R.L.
Structuring the World
The infant Kotik remembers birth as an entrance into a “labyrinth of corridors: “After the first moment of consciousness there appear corridors and rooms – nothing but rooms, rooms, rooms!” (KL, Chap. 1, §“A Labyrinth of Black Rooms”, p. 442). He encounters strange forces in the world. His house is full of cave‐like rooms and corridors that recapitulate previous lives and experiences. Both physical space and people are seen as mythic images that provide the constant thread from one life to the next. His Uncle Vasya appears to the young child first as a snake with a mustache, then is cut up, a part of which appears on the cover of his dinosaur book Extinct Monsters. The snake reappears later around the Tree of Life in a picture of the Garden of Eden in the family's parlor.
Kotik sees the Minotaur in the labyrinth. For Steiner and for Bely this would be one of the “guardians of the threshold”, who warn and advise the initiate of what he or she is about to embark upon. Later on in the novel the theologian and poet Vladimir Solovyov also appears in this role. The child Kotik hears people speaking of Solovyov as a “very dangerous man.” He imagines Solovyov lurking in the corridors of a house, ready to leap out and snatch the unwary and make them fellow travelers striding towards far off goals (KL, Chap. 6, §“Vladimir Solovyov, pp. 562–563).
We see a similar theme in The Tree of Life. The very young Jack explores his house and in the attic also encounters a silent figure, who appears either to be watching over him or guarding the path that Jack is to follow. We also see images of grotesque figures, taken from the Parco dei Mostri di Bomarzo in Viterbo. These, too, would be reiterations of mythic figures that Jack would have encountered in earlier existences. Jack meets the guardian again when the family is playing at night with sparklers, which evoke the light of Eternity seen at the film's beginning: an old man leans forward and says enigmatically, “Good night; we'll see you in five years.” He will meet the guardians a final time in the film's climactic scene, when he crosses the threshold, passing through the free‐standing door frame in the desert.
As he acquires language the infant Kotik learns to structure the world around himself. Language orders chaos. Language is the means by which we tame a hostile, meaningless world. The process begins with the young child learning language. At first the child experiences sounds whose meanings flow in and out of one another. As Kotik brings order out of the chaos of sounds, he joins together the experience of developing cognition with the origins of the cosmos.
Language does not play the same structuring role in Malick's film as it does in Bely's novel. However, Malick's sequence of the birth of stars, the earth, and the emergence of life on earth represents the innate sense of structure and order from chaos in his protagonist.
Structuring the Self
Bely's artist, as personified in Kotik, becomes his own creation, engendering himself in the creative process. The same can be said for Jack the architect. Both the adult Kotik and adult Jack sense alienation from the Eternal. The mythic images that they encounter are a part of their developing sense of self‐awareness.Footnote 24 As the mythic images lose their force, each of the young boys loses the knowledge of his original identity in the Eternal and seeks to structure a new sense of self out of the world around him.
Both Jack O'Brien and Kotik need to overcome the fundamental dualism of formlessness and order or intuition and intellect, represented for both by mother and father. Kotik's mother is a force of imagination and the unstructured life, which teems and moves along without shape. The mathematician father wants to teach the child to view the universe in an objective and structured way.Footnote 25 Malick's Mrs. O'Brien is a more positive figure than Kotik's mother, but both represent a free‐spirited approach to the world. Like Kotik's father, Mr. O'Brien objects to the influence the mother has over their sons, accusing her of undermining his authority. Over this chaos each man's father fights against the disorder that the mother brings into the ordered world that he wants to control. Jack becomes an architect, a builder of structures and Kotik is a philosopher, a builder of intellectual structures. Each man learns to shape the world around him, and in so doing finds restorative power in the recovery of memory.
Structuring the World through Music
For Bely music is the ultimate language and it is through music that we experience that timeless other existence before our birth. Memory is our entrance into that world. “Music gives direct expression to absolute reality and has a relation to the unindividuated common core of experience.”Footnote 26 Phenomena can remind men of the noumena that they have forgotten.Footnote 27 Through the association with past experience music makes recollection possible.Footnote 28 For Kotik the search within produces the realization that he had lived before he was born (KL, Chap. 5, §“Impressions”, p. 522). Before his conception and birth Kotik lived with the music of the spheres. Music taught him to “grow” stories (KL, Chap. 5, §“Myth”, p. 530).
Malick achieves a fusion of image and music that Bely is unable to with poetic language alone. He uses music not just to supplement the visual representation of his narrative but to add a dimension that enlarges the whole. Mr. O'Brien is a failed musician, the implication being that by having given up a career in music he has abandoned true unifying language for the sterile language of mechanical structures.Footnote 29 In an early sequence the boys and the family seem drawn together in various scenes of play and playfulness to the accompaniment of Smetana's Moldau. That river in turn becomes a musical statement of the Brazos River, the river of time. Similarly the Lacrimosa and Dona eis requiem from the Requiem Mass provide a framework for the movement from death to life, from the announcement of R.L.'s death at the beginning to the acceptance of death and entrance into eternity at the end.
Malick is able to integrate music into his film to bring out the relationship between different scenes. Of course, the aforementioned sections of the Requiem Mass emphasize death and the hope of resurrection, but the opening of Mahler's First Symphony provides the most effective use of music uniting death and birth. As the mother mourns the death of her middle son R.L., we hear the opening bars of Mahler's First Symphony, which are repeated later on at the death by drowning of a young boy in a swimming pool. To understand the effect of the Mahler selection we need to remember that it is part of a long nineteenth‐century fascination with the opening of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: initially there is no discernible tonal base, but gradually musical chaos resolves into order (imitated by Wagner in his overture to Der fliegende Holländer). Mahler, too, creates the same effect with the opening bars of his First Symphony, starting with a drone, then various motifs introduced as bird calls before resolving into a tonal theme. Malick's use of Mahler has effectively provided us both with an example of Bely's theory of the creative role of music and a musical expression of Bely's attempt to re‐present a chaos of sounds resolving into order.
Conclusion
Through memory Bely and Malick's respective protagonists explore the limits of human existence. Memory's quest brings Kotik and Jack into contact with the Eternity from which they have sprung and to which they must return. For each, memory opens up similar associations, reaching back to the time before Kotik or Jack was born and leading them to an understanding of how they have arrived at the present moment of their reflection. For both Jack and Kotik memory reveals the formation of the moral self as one with the formation of the cosmos, including life on earth. Mythic images allow each artist to explore the formation of consciousness, starting with the clever use of a house's confined space which each child investigates.
These two remarkable works complement each other. Bely's novel opens up our understanding of Jack's formation and of his life's journey. Malick illustrates for us what Bely can only describe.
If we compare the two media within which each artist works, we see that Malick represents visually what Bely expresses with words; Malick expresses with music what Bely attempts through the musicality of language. Bely's verbal leitmotifs create images to shape the inner world of the narrator and to reshape his outer world. He makes the leitmotifs out of musical poetry, integrating word and image to link Kotik's pre‐existence with his present and his destiny. Malick shows us the images that Bely's words create. While Kotik can tell us that he heard the music of the spheres, Malick lets us hear the music that integrates the cosmic images of tree and river, light, and darkness, which mark the path of Jack's quest. Malick's film is a good audio‐visual illustration of Bely's belief that music is the superior language. In the end both Bely and Malick transcend their respective media.
Memory performs the same function in both works, to bring the quester in touch with his cosmic origins and cosmic destiny. Death is necessary for entrance into life, as each comes full circle, the one through musical play with language and the other through a fusion of music and visual image.
The higher mountains that Kotik sees before him in the Prologue become symbols of Calvary in the Epilogue. He knows that he must climb those mountains to achieve his final union with the Eternal.
Malick uses a different image for time and for the anticipated consummation of the quest. The final long scene before the brief epilogue begins with Jack finding a free‐standing door frame. This brings us back to the whispered first words of the film (“Brother, mother … it was they who led me to your door”). Instead of mounting Calvary Jack passes through the doorway and enters upon a vast wasteland into which his parents, the young R.L. and all the people who have touched his life gather. Some of these (e.g., the unidentified women in white) have mythic qualities. R.L. achieves Kotik's goal, but Jack is still left to ponder the future, even as he finally understands the answer to his repeated questions to God, which play on the words of God to Job. He says at last “What was it you showed me? I didn't know how to think, but it was you. Always you were calling me.”Footnote 30 He may achieve it. Just as Kotik looks up to the hill he must climb, in the last earthly image of the film Jack stands looking up at the bridge over the river that we repeatedly are drawn to. The shifting light imagery against a black background reappears, bringing us back to the film's beginning. It is the Eternity from which both Jack and Kotik have descended into the material world and which is the goal of their return. While Kotik will return to the Eternal by ascending Calvary to join Christ on the cross – the Tree of Life – Jack's brother R.L. performs the role of sacrificial self‐giving in Malick's film. At the same time his death is Jack's own entrance into life with God and also the preparation for all connected with him to enter Eternity.
