A Faustian Joust

The story of Faust resonates deeply for me, for my imagination is at its deepest and clearest essence Faustian; it is the organum of the inward eye which sees all it desires, espying every sacred glade, reveling in every profane text, divining every sacred secret, diving with the sperm whale to every hoary depth the abysm.

Why do we revel so to follow Faust through the acts of his rise and fall, cheering his every audacity, jeering at his damnation? What is it that so trills the imagining sense when we hear the scholar make his infernal pact, declaring (in Marlowe’s version) to Mephistopheles, that greasy courier of Hell,

Go, bear these tidings to great Lucifer:
Seeing Faustus hath incurred eternal death
By desperate thoughts against Jove’s deity,
Say he surrenders up to him his soul
So he will spare him four and twenty years,
Letting him live in all voluptuousness,
Having thee ever attend on me:
To give me whatsoever I ask,
To tell me whatsoever I demand,
To slay mine enemies and aid my friends,
And always be obedient to my will. (III 95-105)

What balls! -- Or, to be more gender neutral, What audacity! Imagine the English rabble assembled to hear those words, high and low, all united in a pornographic glee, stepping joyfully out of the tyrannies of the day if only in the imagination to roger and rut and rout and rule with Faust, if only for an hour! It was pure whiskey for the mind, 100 proof cupidity, a miraculous island of revolt against the Christian state superego. Something of the carnival here, the Twelfth Night saturnalia inverting the dayside order into its sprightly sprung nigredo, a yeasty foment of forbidden delight. Yee-hah.

Of course the parabola winds high through forbidden delights then down to everlasting damnation; the crowd which cheered Faust’s crown of magic is the same one crowing his demise, jeering as he is ushered off by imps at midnight on the eve of his contract’s end. The dramatic sheath allows us to enter and revel with the hero and safely retreat and mock his foolishness and criminality. He pays the piper, and we go whistling home. The imagination provides through its faux-incantations of “what-if” and “let’s pretend” a Faustian romp of criminal license that we never have to pay for; we get to sit in the theater at the grisly end repeating, “it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie,” and live to walk out into the brilliant day alive and well and safe from all we so evilly dreamed.

Well, almost. Literalists of the imagination still abound. Unfettered imagination may be deep in our nature, but so are the wardens of it. The certainly are everywhere in this country. I would venture that there are few places in the world accorded such free access to whatever one fancies; nor is there any place where such Puritanism damns such license.

We are told there are good reasons for such shackles. How many children have become schoolyard snipers after spending too many hours shooting monsters and villains inside the virtual killing-grounds of video games? What unbridled, techno-sugared fancy has spawned our sexual preditors? What abrogations of our nature are fanned by fantasies of necrophilia and gang-rape, of coprophilia and golden showers, of double-anal penetration and fisting and the snuff epic? How far do we let it go? How far can it go? Whatever legislation or judgment or regulation our culture tries to put out there, the flood isn’t tamping down much; the channels of Faustian delight are more sophisticated and powerful than ever (witness that the twenty most-visited websites are all pornographic; the revenue from sales of pornographic DVDs is around 7 billion dollars a year, which far exceeds the revenues of Hollywood).

Faust has become the Mephisto of our imagination, the gravitas of a world too empowered by our arts. His desire drowns out so much else in the milky white noise of endless glut and surfeit; he is what makes so much of our culture noxious and fallen, a consumer paradise gone rabid into suburban hell. We can dial up heaven if we choose, but the fingers err too readily to the darker frequencies: I mean to Google “divine aura” but instead I type in “big nipples” and press my face to the monitor, dreaming not of transcendence but immersion in the actual paps of danger, aw hell, why not doom.

The problem, IMO, isn’t centered in the imagination -- I can just as easily imagine Heaven as Hell -- but in that agency which wardens and ordains it. Faust is a Christian creation, the personification of errancy from God’s will; like a black puppet in an early morality play, Faust was set out for us to unlearn evil by drubbing our noses in it. To taste the whisky of sin and then experience all of its consequences.

But those early Christian re-creators of the drama missed a crucial theatrical point. By allowing us entry into the savage garden of Faust’s mind, we are freed to raven in it, if only for a time, and no threat of damnation is strong enough to lure the imagination once sprung. We identify not with the angels who escort Faust to doom but with the fallen hero, because he is us.

What is odd about the present is that despite the abundant aids to the imagination we have today (proliferating at a technological warp speed), its products are so two-dimensional -- howlingly banal planes of repeated sex and violence. There’s no inside to the narratives, they’re rote and flat and predictable. Given the chance to glut our fancy, we go for the same old same old same old same, conjuringg up the half-dozen .mgs of ecstasy we don’t get enough in the real, gunning the usual suspects as we quest through the stone labyrinth of the prince of Doom. The nuance is missing, the heft and flavor of depths, the wilderness spectra: all of the insides of delight which are always outside the safe and the known.

These regions of the imagination can’t be accessed, IMO, without disciplines. License keeps us in imagination’s kindergarten, playing the same schoolyard games; schooling is necessary, plus practice and sacrifice. What Faust renounces is exactly that; he gives up on his years of patient ordained study for his walk on the wild side; he gets what every starving student ogles in his cups, but none of what that yearning represents beyond literal consumption.

Mephisto is the intermediary between Faust and the Devil; he offers the pen with which Faust signs his bloody pact; he becomes like Ariel to Prospero, the wings of every wish. Too bad Faust’s desires are so predictable. Faust and Mephisto -- his black imagination -- are shadows of Mercurius, the sacred magician, the inside angel every alchemical cooking-pot, brewing not gold but golden realms of psyche. Our culture is stuck in the old parental Christian tale -- verbs of amplitude at war with stony verbotens.

We have a lot of growing up to do. There’s plenty of room for sex and drugs and rock n roll in alchemy -- innumerable pairings, transgressions of gender, role-playing, romps and thefts, cocksure struttings and screaming forays, indulging in all crimes of nature against our nature -- all of those fumes arise from the vat of imagination. The trick is to keep the container solidly between real walls, in a wholly imagined place. There is no payoff in any worldly term to this: no queen of the Green Knight to proffer her charms, no actual inventory of the treasure-rooms of Hell, no actual top-floor job bestowed by Donald Trump/Mephisto for this Apprenticeship -- No: Those walls must be firm in order for all of the magic to brew forth. Our imagination doesn’t make us better people or more successful. It won’t beat Death. Those certainties are difficult to accept, but once that work is done, the really fun stuff can begin.