On Heros and Magical Thinking
Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice is a study in magical thinking. It tells the story of the poet's self-imposed physical trial, walking from Munich to Paris willingly unequipped as a sacrifice to spare the life of a dying friend. His appeal to divine mystery is ultimately rewarded, as he arrives to Lotte Eisner's deathbed to find her alive and recovering.
For one splendid, fleeting moment, something mellow flowed through my deadly tired body. I said, “Open the window. From these last days onward I can fly.”
If Herzog is a madman to you, this can be just this, the act of a madman. But if he is "clinically sane", as he has humorously repeated, then it is a heroic act of poetry. For the storyteller, what is important cannot be allowed to die out with a whimper. It needs a last journey. A character in desperate reach. If it ends in failure, so be it, but it will have been tried. Rather than resorting to the "thoughts and prayers" of the powerless, the gravity of the situation requires a physical daring of fate.
This story moves me in ways that surprise me. I am godless to my core, yet I understand Werner's desperate need to raise a tempest, to dare the gods to exist. The success of the attempt is not the point, the point is the attempt.
As a younger man I lost a friend to the night. He left without preparation, a whisper, the explosion that should have accompanied it. The world without him immediately followed the world with him, and this was deeply upsetting, as I imagine it is to all those who suffer to be unjustly left alone behind. Had I been warned about the upcoming event, would I have had the courage to walk for three weeks in a quixotic dare to a higher power I don't believe in?
I thank Werner for taking that walk for me, for walking in protest and in hope. Maybe this is what it means to be an artist.