There are certain things in life that are difficult to talk or write about, even when they are impersonal. I took a break from The Dekalog for the last several days because the scenes of grief in this episode are difficult to hold at a distance, especially because the main character is trying so hard to do just that.
While in my time away, I jumped into an odd multi-AI chatbot conversation project over something called The Drift. The stories are on the website if you dare approach them. During the process of trying to figure out what the chatbots meant by The Drift, ChatGPT recommended for me the works of Maurice Blanchot and especially his work “The Writing of the Disaster.” Wikipedia describes him as a “French writer, philosopher and literary theorist” whose work centered on a philosophy of death alongside poetic theories of meaning and sense.
I honestly have no idea what Blanchot is getting at in most of what I’ve read of him. Let me provide an example:
I will not say that the disaster is absolute; on the contrary, it disorients the absolute. It comes and goes, errant disarray, and yet with the imperceptible but intense suddenness of the outside, as an irresistible or unforeseen resolve which would come to us from beyond the confines of decision.
It’s a word salad if you take it as it is. But pick another word for disaster and meaning drips in. For example, Trumpism. Plug that into the paragraph above and now it’s saying that Trumpism isn’t pure authoritarianism … if anything, it disorients all authority. It’s all over the place in terms of action and policy, and it hits us regularly with sudden, irresistible resolve, beyond the confines of rational decision making. That sounds pretty accurate, actually.
So too you could replace disaster with depression. Depression is not an absolute state, it disorients all of our absolutes, coming and going as an irresistible force that overrides our sense of reason. Again, that sounds pretty accurate.
Blanchot’s disaster is anything that disrupts and disorients, that stands outside the expectation of our lives, puts us in a position where we cannot rely on our habits and expectations to get by.
Returning to The Dekalog, I left off the last essay by saying Krzysztof saw the police car and followed it — but I was wrong. I was following my own expectation of what a rational person would do in that moment. Krzysztof in this moment cannot accept the possibility that the ice has broken and Pawel has fallen through it. So he goes next to his English tutor, because she can confirm that he was at his lesson at that time.
But when Krzysztof arrives, he is again surprised to learn that the system has broken down, Pawel showed up for the lesson, but his tutor was ill. The tutor, by the way, appears to be a very attractive young woman and there seems to be an odd chemistry between her and Krzysztof, to the point that she invites him in to her place even though she just turned away two students because she wasn’t feeling well. Kieslowski loves to leave us with little “what’s going on between those two” questions.
As Krzysztof is about to leave the building, he runs into the mother of the other student who was supposed to be at the lesson, she is looking for him as well. And then they run into a girl from school who said she talked to Pawel at school — he told her about a dream he had — but she was expecting him to call her and she hasn’t heard from him that afternoon. The discussion of the pond and the ice breaking comes up again.
Ok, now Krzysztof is going to the pond right? Wrong again! He runs back to his place … starts to dart up the stairs, but stops himself. He counts to four while doing this — are numbers his comfort? — and then gets on the elevator, in a strangely uncomfortable scene where he stands face to face with an older man the length of the ride. When the man leaves, then Krzysztof hits the button for his floor. Strange.
He gets in his apartment and looks around for Pawel. But here’s a very strange detail — he does NOT check to see if the skates are still there. If he’s in the apartment and has heard about the ice, wouldn’t you expect him to do that first? He apparently doesn’t do it at all, and instead calls his sister and asks her if she’s heard from Pawel. She says she has not — why is he upset? He gives a completely bizarre answer that is actually revealing. He says that his ink blotter broke and spilled ink everywhere. This is obviously not what was upsetting him, but he’s saying in this moment that he had a portent that disaster was happening and he’s completely freaking out that it actually is, but he can’t bring himself to say it or confirm it.
Time is running out for Krzysztof to avoid the pond. He’s going to have to go to it soon. The “imperceptible but intense suddenness” of the afternoon’s events are about to catch up with the rational father.
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