Immunitarian politics and Todd Haynes's "Safe": Some observations

I.  Immunity, community, governmentality: Notes on the current situation

If the truth of surveillance is that there is “Nowhere to Hide” (the title of Glenn Greenwald’s book about Snowden’s revelations of American government spying on Americans and others), maybe the truth of viral pandemics is that you cannot come out of hiding. 

Although the real political and social problems involved in a political immunology are rather different in one sense (the causal agent involved and most of the measures needed to address it), it is doubtful whether this problem and the more quotidian of a “real” pandemic involving not a metaphorical agent of contagion but a real one, can be fully separated.     

There is an ethical problem, which is also a properly political one, about movements people feel the need or desire to make either towards others, or “community,” or away from them, in “immunity.”  (On this, my reflections here are loosely inspired by Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, particularly in his Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, 2012).

We are not beyond the horrors of the last century, which are still with us in the sense that they are the kinds of things that still can happen, albeit differently, both in how they are defined and who loses, which after all is the real question of “who,” not cui bono, or who benefits, a question that can appeal to losers who resent their losing.  One way of looking at the “dark times” then and now is that there is sometimes in political thinking a broad search for forms of being-with that are also “immune” in the sense of protected from others who could be figured in imagination as contagions, as dangerous.  Paranoia is an aspect of this, which starts from the felt need to defend or protect a subjectivity, individual or collective, from whatever threatens it.  All life is fragile and precarious; and one way of thinking the political is to ask what went wrong and what, that is, “who,” is the proper name of the cause of the damage.  As the Rolling Stones put it in “Sympathy for the Devil”: “What’s troubling you is the nature of my game.”  A different form of the paranoid strategy is to wonder which population group (for identities today all seem to come from Census-like categories, of how people can be counted, and who counts and in what way) to worry about, or perhaps, to affirm as savior.  Thus, gender and sexuality, which both are a little more than given and a little less than merely willed; race/ethnicity; or religion (in America historically everyone is supposed to either believe in God or have a “spirituality” proper to themselves).  Americans in public in our business society try to be maximally welcoming of backgrounds, and very insistent on the ideological correctness that in colonial days had been largely a matter of which Christian church you belonged to.  It may be that all other people are threats.  That idea is expressed today in liberal intolerance in the form of warnings like: “Don’t speak ill of my identity, for that will make me feel discomfort, which I treat as threat.”  The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a monarchist writing in the time of the English Revolution, argued that people are intrinsically threatening to the lives of others around them, and a state founded ultimately in terror as a police state is needed, in a kind of protection racket.  The government’s principal task is policing, and its purpose is to keep people from harm, from dying too soon and unnecessarily. 

National Socialism was heavily founded on ideas that persons of certain kinds pose an intrinsic threat to the body politic.  In a way, notions of purity and danger become politically horrible when something like a holiness code is constructed that may well derive from archaic and religious ideas of purity and danger, or with a norm of health, but with rather more violent and disturbing consequences than those involved in ancient religious sacrifices of animals, divisions between permitted and forbidden foods, or even the permitted and forbidden marital partners of kinship rules as studied by anthropologists.  It is known that the Nazis deliberately enacted perverse repetitions of some Biblical and other Jewish notions in the name of their exclusionary celebrations of hatred and violence, as if wanting to construct an anti-Torah whose only meanings were those of war and technique.  But maybe every horrible crime has a form and structure that it shares with much that is ordinary and banal, and so seemingly innocuous.  Therefore, we should be wary of political and governmental uses of notions of purity and danger.  Todd Haynes’s 1994 film “Safe” pursues such a thought as a line of inquiry.   

The paranoid mind is not so different from that of the detective in stories we all know well; his question is not the art interpreter’s question of what the work means, what sense we can make of it, but, in a world where we know already what everything means, and above all, what is right and wrong, and what has happened that is traumatic for us, “who” is the responsible party. 

Paranoid politics is both individuals fearing and hating their governments, and governments (or persons identifying with them) fearing individuals.  In the latter case, they must identify the “who” who is carrier of the problem.  Paranoid individuals and paranoid governments fear each other. Certain demographical groups, whose effective identities are constituted by government practices of counting, may become convenient targets.  Usually a functional trait is also attributed to the target.  They will be identified with, or as, evil.  It is a question of some form of subversion, destruction, domination, or other danger or risk that they would bear.  This would be an evil that would be brought to the political social body by them, which therefore must be protected from them.  The Jews were a people ready-made to be fictioned as dangerous outsiders in this way, though the Nazis saw fit to also include several other groups, including homosexuals and the “mentally ill.” More liberal societies now welcome marginalized collectivities, but may be more skittish about the definitionally abnormal, who also appear as such as individuals. They will be subject to social control through means that are not supposed to include killing, though many persons are harmed or their lives destroyed by medical interventions that are almost all oriented above all to such control.  And medical metaphors are also serviceable for a politics aiming to legitimate, and formulate the reasons of, such exclusions. In 1973, when General Pinochet took power in a U.S.-backed coup in Chile that is perhaps remarkable now as the first true announcement of the new neoliberal policies that would sweep especially England and America, the new leader spoke of the “Marxist cancer,” which he would rid his nation of, partly by torturing and/or killing a fair number of people.  We still live in a world where large-scale and official paranoias of not dissimilar kinds are frighteningly very much with us. And the targets are usually people of some recognizable type: terrorists, Muslims, leftists and other dissidents, immigrants, poor people suspected of criminality…  

There are also liberal political fears of being the object of harassment because someone likes you who shouldn’t, or has an opinion that is a “micro-aggression” against you because it seems at least latently disdainful, in ways that an active imagination can easily attribute to histories of oppression or marginalization. And in this country, the truth is that being oppressed or having been and being susceptible to be is sort of par for the course.  Many of the original English and European settlers of what became the United States were refugees from some form of political oppression of their religious or ethnic group.  Coming here did not, at least for a long time, mean setting up a place of habitation where no one is an oppressed minority; it meant that you would not be that because your ethnic group or your church was established in some happy neighborhood with its own state of things.  Of course, if your ancestors came from a certain other continent, they were slaves, and distinguished by color, and so sort of permanently and absolutely oppressed; one could hardly be less free than the American slaves, whose ancient prototypes had little on them in this respect.  I think today most Americans recognize that life is difficult and the corporate and government entities they often must deal with are no picnic and it is easy for any of us to feel greatly or frequently slighted.  

When the right-wing white male extremist crazies take up a mode of discourse that they have heard from others, their use of it is certainly perverse, but not hard to understand.  This isn’t one of those countries where the people who exercise power over you will necessarily seem gentle and kind.  And it’s not one whose government normally seems to even want or claim to do much for anyone who needs anything.  On a bad day in this country, you could easily feel as if there is standing above you a Ministry of Fear.  Political demagogues will eagerly take advantage of this, and declare that someone is to blame.    

Right now, of course, the contagion is a real one and the cause an actual biological virus, borne unwittingly by people, and the very “spirituality” (from Latin spiritus, breath) of a neighbor who could endanger you just by talking to you from an insufficient distance.  The Gospel’s “Noli Mi Tangere” (“Don’t touch me!”), spoken in warning to Mary Magdalen by the resurrected Christ, could become a universal slogan, in a world where everyone may be a bearer of Satan and all spirits are unholy.  That would be nothing new, but it also reeks suspiciously of a secular Hobbesianism.  If you love me, stay away!  It almost is as if sociality as such were suspect.  The pandemic may appear as an opportunity for a further shift in the direction of the individualization and pscyhologization of the political, and of continued bio-political governmental focuses on the health of populations, figured as a crisis calling for emergency actions by decree, but also further in the direction of virtuality, with the immaterial senses of sight and sound, and the transmission of messages, artworks, and texts by their means, versus in particular the tangible.  Could we have proximity without contact?  If you and I talk on the phone or exchange letters, are we less in contact than sitting across a table from each other?  What does it mean to live in a society where touching and being touched are radically interdicted, if only in emergency situations?  How will this change not perhaps our thinking so much as our affects, and the ways it is tied up with them?  Plagues are situations where this becomes possible and necessary, at least temporarily.  What is it to touch or be touched?  This also engages the fraught question of “feeling,” a term that we use to indicate both physical sensation and emotion or affect. What is it to be affected and “touched” only by words and images?

(For me, this is one of the questions raised by the cinema of Tarantino, which places this problem in the world of cinema that is always like this for a spectator. The violence and how characters in his films handle it is always comic because of a radical disconnect between these two realms of touch vs. sight and sound, with the exclusion of the former always called into question by the excesses of violence. The separation of vision and touch in Tarantino works oppositely to Wim Wenders’s “Wings of Desire,” which contrasts angelic contemplation and fleshy world-involvement as two modes of the cinematic, one melancholy, totalizing, and literary, developed in an historical reflection that is always questioning itself, and one redemptive, individualizing, and erotic, realized itself in the romantic couple. This separation is bound up with the implicit bracketing of world as such in a fully postmodern aesthetic in which words and images draw most of their meaning from their intertextuality, so that we may be seeing not a film about a lived world, historical or imagined, so much as a film about a possible treatment in and by film of it. This aesthetic allows for careful delineations of character, though it tends to reduce dramatic scenes to interactions between more or less effective posers whose desire is partly just to look good for an imagined observer. The viewer’s distanced gaze is solicited with no allusions to a negating directorial commentary but a dense saturation of the image and soundtrack with comic allusions that reveal the image and speech as essentially composed because composite, and in this way we know we are looking at art, and art as mirror more than lamp, being asked to question possible ways of understanding (as in “Inglorious Basterds,” a film not about World War II but the mediated representation of it as a cinematic event) a past we all more or less know through repetitions of it that are all so many modes or styles of relating to it. )

In part, what is called for is nothing less than disconnecting the dichotomy love/hate from that of proximity/distance, or else redefining an ethics of proximity and distance, valuing both terms, but disconnecting them from love/hate.  This could have far-reaching consequences.  It’s not just that the lives of societies and persons suffer when attraction and repulsion between persons (or groups) are thought as opposites essentially separate from each other or ones that are usually inseparably intertwined.  This is the difference between ambivalence and ambiguity.  The psychoanalytic thought of Melanie Klein enshrined this opposition as one of health and maturity, the most characteristic norms of psychiatry if not psychoanalysis.  Ambivalence also takes the form of Manichaeanism, the division of the world between forces of good and those of evil, an idea that Christianity and Islam both never quite got free of and that still haunts our politics (often especially when precisely this framework is being, not questioned, but opposed, as we saw with our government’s rhetorical response to “radical” Islamism after 9/11).  Ethically, what we need most today may be an ethics of distance.  Yet, by itself that is too simple, because the problems we face today are actually not ones of psychology and ethics.  Take environmentalism: in the 70s it was popular among ecologists to try to implement personal codes of morally correct behavior.  Macro-social issues were activated in local cases so that everyone could feel involved, maybe even intensely.  And so many were the radical left or progressive activists who cared more about healthy foods and dangerous detergents than justice for the poor blacks they lived rather separated from as with many other genuine social issues.  In “Safe,” the aptly-named Carol White (her name evoking a “song of whiteness"?) essentially moves within a world of like followers of the Biblical Noah who would save themselves from a world that is toxic and dangerous, or risky and precarious.  Pandemics and plagues remind people that their lives are precarious.  And we live in a “risk society” where it’s generally understood that people should be expected to be able to deal personally and “psychologically” with anything that happens to them; trauma is the new normal.  And, in a society that still does not have a universal health care system, your trauma, honey, is your problem.  

For Roberto Esposito, the concept of “immunity” is the opposite of “community.”  Think of these as poles organized around an in-between-ness.   Immunity means not able to be “infected” by whatever could be transmitted, which could be a thought or “meme.”  Politically, community is a way of imagining a group identity and togetherness, while “immunity” is a movement away from that towards separation. Community is a sharing of a common world; immunity is its refusal.  The common may be desired or feared. “Communication” perhaps is neither, requiring only a message and a sender and receiver who understand it identically, which is why it easily is translated into propaganda, a possibility built into mass media.  There is also a sense in which cameras in making and recording images “see,” and mechanical reproduced art forms have been thought of as involving a “projection” that reverses the direction of informational transfer that starts with a receiving device.  Surely it must be said that today all forms of “being-with” others have been rendered problematic, and that is one reason why the very possibility of communication is experienced as problematic. Here I am reminded of Giuliana in Antonioni’s “Red Desert”: what she most desires and also fears is being surrounded by people or things who are objects of her concern or subjects of a solicitude. The film stages her character as witnessing explosions into spectacular re-visions of the things around her, while she complains about the disconnects.

In situations of risk or danger, people may set out on a voyage or movement to somewhere else.  In Western narratives, people often go somewhere else when they want to find themselves.  In the New Age so big in Southern California beginning in the aftermath of the 60s, finding yourself might mean looking for a God of health.  Health is like happiness except for the particular way it is dependent on its negation, sickness, as what it must try to either avoid or overcome.  Medical and therapeutic practices are normative and so normalizing, judging bodies and persons by a norm and conducting them to adapt to it, and so become more normal, for illness by definition is a breach in a norm.        

Narrative and dramatic texts in the West are traditionally structured around norm and exception, or order and its endangerment. When one finds that his or her world seems to have gotten out of joint, one may set out on a redemptive or therapeutic quest. Often these are interesting because of the way the character handles her or his own problem of narrative exceptionality and the resulting journey rather badly. The illness that “Safe” is about is not the one that Carol White (Julianne Moore) is fleeing from; it is the entire set of ways of thinking that her world is part of in both its suburban California and desert settings. For me, this is what makes the film truly great.

II. Driving to the end of the New Age: On the strange odyssey of Carol White in “Safe”

This film from 1994 takes place in 1987, during the AIDS crisis, which is mentioned more than once in the film, but mostly treated as the great unnameable object of a great mysterious silence.  Right away it is tempting to say that Susan Sontag was right to argue in Illness as Metaphor, simply that we should treat all illness, no matter what its cause or what is needed for its treatment or cure, as merely an object of medical science, and maybe appropriate public health measures, and not as some way of figuring crises of the soul and some particular, and palpably conspicuous, need for the salvation of a God or therapeutic spirituality or whatever. 

The film is precise in elaborating the ways that the heroine’s attempt to flee somehow her environment, imagined as mysteriously toxic due to unknown causes, and thereby as perfectly generalizable, and she flees basically into the arms of a therapeutic commune, or religious cult,  that actually in its discourse is a rather banal form of Protestant religiosity with the kind of therapeutic orientation that actually was and is uncannily common.  The preacher there, who himself has AIDS, does not talk about God or Christ, but he does talk of love, and tells everyone gathered in a little circle that they should basically get in touch with their feelings and be less angry or anxious and more loving.  This talk is empty and insipid, and I believe the film is both pretty disdainful of and also quite fair to this group, and its generalized Protestant therapeutic spirituality, which anyone who remembers Southern California in the seventies as I do, or even a bit later, as in this film, or has had contact with any of the broad narcissistic self-help spiritualities that became so popular in the wake of the sixties, will recognize.  I think that the place to which the heroine is finally moved by the story is in a way one that exists in spite of the therapy quest.  Or if you prefer, she picks up the only meme in it that matters.  It is a rather narcissistic quest, this pursuit of healing she goes on, and of course can afford because her husband has what must be a pretty good job, given the almost palatial suburban Fernando Valley home she leaves behind.  For me, this final epiphanic moment at least nearly redeems everything else.  Her quest for purification from the toxic environment is a vain and self-centered one-way ticket journey to hell.  Her tentative redemption occurs in the film’s sole and concluding epiphanic moment, when, with her sarcoma-marked face (we now suspect she really does have AIDS), she looks in the mirror in her igloo-shaped cabin designed for maximum isolation, and says “I love you” while pronouncing her absent husband’s name.  Word and image contradict here in the film’s sole authentically “Christian” moment (the pastor is sincere but his comforting ideology a fraud), treated with some irony and doubt.  Love is difficult. 

Especially when you’ve got to just save yourself like the Biblical Noah; that’s what everyone seems to know.  That might not be the best ethos for living in a crisis when people are dying from something other than a lack of kindness, whatever forms of it might save them, materially and not just in an ideological spirituality. Such a Good News might be insufficient if what people are threatened with is something as real as an actual disease, transmitted not, as self-righteous moralists were saying back then, by sin (an idea that is responsible for many deaths that could have been avoided, by governments like ours had they been less willing to exclude some of their citizens due to “abnormal” erotic practices), but by something that’s a lot closer to bad luck.    

Of course, she really is sick.  The film, by a queer director, is clear enough about the one mentioned possible disease that was happening to people then, and for which, for all we know, might be the cause of her trouble breathing, and the skin lesion she develops while in the happy house cure-from-society-and-self refugee camp, a voluntary concentration camp in the desert that people pay to go to for cures that are really psycho-spiritual from ailments that are said only to come from “the environment” is such.  Nature not only will kill you, but seems to want to; it’s motivated, if forces come from a will, for a viral pandemic is certainly a kind of hostile force. 

We don’t know if it’s AIDS; it might be.  We do know that when the AIDS crisis occurred, many people died who might have lived if governments like our own cared more than politicians like Ronald Reagan or Trump’s Vice-President Mike Pence, then Governor of Indiana.  Pence refused, until pressured by activists, treatment for drug users who might have gotten AIDS from contaminated needles; the victims then were understood to be mostly gay men and drug addicts, two conveniently identifiable groups of supposed sinners.  

AIDS scared a lot of people shitless, and it ravaged the world of artists generally as well as gay men.  Today’s crisis is also spread by a virus, but it is more like the Black Plague of 1348 that killed one-third of Europe at least in being a very democratic killer thing.  “Thing” is a good term: a virus, a meme, a disease: it is impersonal and persons transmit it but cannot be said to be its agents.  So the basis of imputations of sin, which is the idea of a will, presumably free, so that people are responsible for what happens, let’s say when they breathe on you, this is in a way absent and in another way placed at a distance along with all properly behaving persons.   

There were “Christians” then who could only offer anyone God’s holy love and sympathy, but had no interest in calling the disease by its name and blaming it on chance and not the individuals who were sick from it, generally suspected of having brought it on themselves through unsafe amatory practices engaged in because they had chosen as love objects forbidden partners to a form of the “Christian” religion that mostly values normality, propriety, and obedience to authority, along with the typically patriarchal familialism that they called “family values” (which also legitimates in their minds opposition to reproductive freedom for women).  One lesson from that time is that what we needed then is something other than government to police our behavior and religion to back that up while offering nothing but false smiling succor along with a tacit moralizing judgment. Such is the way of the nice pastor in “Safe,” whose main concern is to get everyone to forgive whoever they are angry at and join the eternal life of happy attitudes and good feelings. 

(Parenthetically, I would note that ideas of God and divine providence are entirely political.  Consider: Can it be that you don’t necessarily deserve what happens to you?  Traditionally religious people who imagine a God as ruler and master of the world tend to explain and so justify what happens to people as either a result of their own bad will that they therefore deserve (this of course includes New Age believers in “karma”), or the good will of God, who makes bad things good by virtue of a knowledge he denies us, or by virtue of a happy ending, no matter how painful it was to get there.  From this I draw certain conclusions:
First, the justification of why bad things happened is always subject to a contradictory over-determination: On the one hand, they should not have happened, and so it’s your fault if they do.  But on the other hand, like everything else, they happened necessarily and so justly, because God operates a cosmic metaphysical machinery that transforms the bad into good by way of assumptions of totality (each thing is justified by a divine will that sees and controls everything) and time as a rewriting tomorrow of what happens today or today of what happened yesterday in a way that redeems it by cancelling it.  Time as traditionally thought is itself a logic of justification, and in fact is sacrificial (and economic: it is thought as investment), always denying the full value of the present in order to make its painfulness or boredom pay off at the end (at the moment that you die, or when the story is over; clearly, this shares with sacrifice its substitutional and as-if identification, from the point of view of a spectator who sees but does not touch, and, like the actor, is touched by the event in an experience that is make-believe). It is easy to see that while this may not vitiate all ideas of God, let alone of some atheist “spirituality,” it does vitiate the idea of his power and providence, and so of the kind of faith that trusts that the world is in good hands, and holds that therefore you should just try to save yourself with the right attitude.  No doubt, if there is a God, as we can infer from the chance combinations of genes in the reproduction of life, he, she, or it plays dice.  This may be the lesson of Machiavelli: Where will rules it only rules in part; luck is real, and is utterly secular.) 

In fact, the film is not fundamentally about AIDS or anything like it; the story is allegorical in the broad sense that refers to nothing in particular in order to focus on something more general.  It is narratively strung on a scaffolding borrowed from many novelistic tragedies.  The woman is a housewife who gets frustrated about pieces of furniture being delivered and installed in the wrong color by the delivery men entrusted to bring the goods that are wanted (Mrs. White doesn’t like the black couch! A symbolic danger that suggests superstition?).  Strangely overvaluing this item perhaps (or is she just a bit of an obsessional housewife?), she makes what we may consider ominous remarks about something in the room that needs to “come out.”  Just as race (in a world with few black people) meets the anodyne differences of abstract visual elements that might at most be its symbols, so the queer’s closet meets interior design!  This is after a short scene of excruciatingly bad sex, as her husband, looking apparently at the bed his face is buried in, pummels away at her with his presumptively amatory thrusts as he moves inexorably towards his own satisfaction, while she looks up, at us, and tries to comfort him with gentle touches on his shoulders and upper back, in what look like almost pointless caresses.  Soon after the furniture incident, and some scenes in a local woman’s dance exercise studio and its locker room, where the ladies babble in ominous and well-scripted ways about matters of health and medicine, she starts to get mysteriously sick, and goes to a doctor but is left wondering, as nothing works and no illness is found, until she sees a sign form some organization asking, “Is the twentieth century making you sick?”  This is not fundamentally the story of an illness; it is the story of a latter-day Emma Bovary, a bored housewife in what may be a loveless marriage (and is the husband in a real closet?  We can only wonder; certainly Haynes’s later film “Far From Heaven” repeats, with a husband who is guiltily gay, an in some ways similar marital relationship), who has everything except her own happiness.  When we see the early scenes, we know, from seeing other films and reading novels, that something must be wrong with this picture, or arrangement of things, the mise-en-scène of the living room with the sofa that seems to her as out of place in her home as she is in her life.  With this narrative engine turned on, something must go wrong with her world, to show her and us that it is amiss, and she must then go through a journey to find herself, first and mostly finding cures that are no cures. 

In fact, the final epiphanic scene is reminiscent of some films of Antonioni (like L’Avventura) which end with ambiguous moments of tragicomic moral recognition.  At the end of that film, Claudia puts her hand on Sandro’s shoulder, much as Carol does in this film in the awful sex scene at the beginning, in a gesture of consolation and forgiveness, for a man whose betrayal of her just then is actually only a further index of his defining self-betrayal as a man who renounced his own creative ambition as architect designing spaces to just make money as a property developer’s lackey instead.  There are many kinds of self-betrayal or even self-deception, and Haynes is astute enough to leave enigmatic “what it is about” and not identify as “the cause” either the possibility of the husband's gayness or the dread disease that she may or may not have, and that the film displaces onto a general paranoia about “the environment.”  And this also links up nicely with the whole Southern California New Age culture addicted to health and spiritual practices that in the end may be just a sad and desperate attempt to stave off and deny mortality, and so take on the thanatological and immunological quality that such a project can have.  In L’Avventura, is Claudia forgiving Sandro’s transgression to annul it or to ambiguously welcome him in spite of it, as the little that they have together?  Other epiphanic moments in Italian cinema of the time, like that at the end of the (then) more Catholic Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, fill us with joy, while this one fills us with as much foreboding as gratification.  When Carol pronounces her love to her husband, she is alone in her cabin, which looks like a combination of igloo and spaceship, absent him, and absent the preacher’s group and the people in it.  She seems to have come to this more out of desperation than anything.   

All the film’s specific references, beginning with Carol’s name, “White,” are contingent and imprecise indicators of something larger than themselves.  Far from the film’s making AIDS a metaphor, it makes how Carol and the people around her deal with that crisis an allegory of what many people will do with crises like it.  Among other things:   

The New Age was a secular Protestantism seeking a banal salvation that was blatantly constructed and proposed as something like a new religion in lieu of a possible politics.  That project has rarely been more fully anatomized—and autopsied, as it has rarely looked more sad and lonely.  

Of course, today no one is journeying to escape the plague, and almost no one can. The change we need might be neither redemptive nor liberatory, because redemptive and liberatory projects suppose temporal articulations of space that could not in this case sound very promising. Mrs. White, curious traveller and follower of Christ and Noah, voyages to a place of healing in a desert location, with dubious sympathetic salvationists, and there comes to the end of the line, and so then turns to the mirror, invoking her husband but looking, perhaps hard, at herself, as if finding self in the displacement of exile, and there pronounces the ambiguous mantra that, at a time when people are literally dying from unlucky ways of loving while the unaffected silent majority would rather they just go away, names that legendarily wondrous solution to all of life’s ills, the desire, perhaps the will, to love.