Enowning has it's first guest blogger! Orenda writes about Terrence Malick's The New World:

The title -- "The New World" -- is not inconsequential. This fragment of a poem by Friedrich Hoelderlin ("The Ister," "Germania," and a great influence on Heidegger) may well have been in the back of Malick's mind. (Malick translated an early work from Heidegger while a graduate student at MIT.)

Friedrich Hoelderlin
from "The Death of Empedocles" (1800-1801)

"New world


    and a brazen vault

Heaven hangs over us, a curse
freezes the limbs of mortals, and the strengthening,
joy-giving presents of Earth are like chaff, the
Mother mocks us with her gifts
and all is mere semblance --
O when, when

    will it break at last,
    the flood over the parched land."


The new world is the world of enframing nature, setting her off over and against men, who in their drive toward exploration come no longer to see earth as Hoelderlinian Mother but as chaff for exploitation, consumption, and profit. Captain Newport's (Christopher Plummer) address to the citizens of Jamestown on the beach midway through the film -- "we will be the new gods" -- tells of the self-possession behind this impulse. What gives life -- sky, sun, earth -- becomes mere semblance to the West, while metaphysical apparitions and abstractions now take priority as the "real."

The new world, then, mandates the death of the old -- or at least, its shackling, re-education, and conversion -- and the replacement of old gods with more tellurian ones -- namely, us. And we do "not intend to leave," as chief Powhatan concludes.

Malick's understanding of cinema seems to be influenced by Heidegger's contention that it is a cardinal symptom of modernity (which he claims has its deepest roots in Greek thinking) to apprehend reality as something to be differentiated from how it appears to a subjective consciousness, and that the reality is understood at the most fundamental level as something to be mastered.*

In their first attempt at communication, Pocahontas asks Smith to translate "sky," "sun," "water," "lips," "eyes," and "ears" from Algonquian into English. Yet it is her physical gesturing, along with her words, which suggests the musicality and harmony of these elements (in the case of sky, sun, and water) with human beings, who are gifted to speak, see, and hear of them. This is no mere labelling of natural things with words -- an inconsequential pasting of sounds onto objects we come across -- but instead, a gesturing toward a more primordial rhythm of these forces with the human spirit.



Language, the human voice, and the body are not originally at odds with nature, but instead, reveal it to us, as Pocahontas's prayerful gesturing -- the opening of her hands from her face and body -- throughout the film indicates. A true openness to being brings the world to life -- not as a place from which we escape through death, but which is, in fact, our only home. "There is only this," Captain Smith (Colin Farrell) says in a moment of clarity while his sight ranges over the waters: "All else is unreal." The technological distance introduced by the West between humans and nature -- by this new dominion and mastery -- severs us from our only true dwelling. We are the creators of our own imprisoning and brazen vault, what Wallace Stevens in "Sunday Morning" called "...this dividing and indifferent blue."

The enclosed forts of Jamestown intimate that at the heart of the mortal West is a sealing off against our originary poetic dwelling with the earth, sky, and gods. Our spirits are headed in another direction, toward other creations. The wooden towers constructed within the fort climb futilely toward a heaven from which we were not always divided.

Heidegger's saying in der Spiegel in 1966 that "...only a god can save us" takes on a new meaning when considered in this vein; such a waiting awaits, perhaps, a "coming word in the heart," and a flood over this new, parched land.  ¶ 4:23 PM