The word Weltlust is a German word I first found reading Thomas Hardy. I’ve seen it in Tess of the D’urbervilles and in The Mayor of Casterbridge which are classic stories of love and heart break. The word seems to translate to something like “in pursuit of worldly pleasures or desires”. Like Hardy, I’ve always been interested in the intensity of the human experience. The highest ups and the lowest downs. Human life never seems to have a dull moment. We are always paying close attention to each other, watching and learning from one another. I can’t deny that humanity is my biggest source of inspiration, and in this series of monotypes I decided to lean into that more, and create a micro narrative with the objective of exploring a side of myself that required to be contended with.
There’s a scene in the movie El Topo by Alejandro Jodorowsky. In this scene the hero rescues a woman from being sexually assaulted. He rescues her and takes her away. In mythology it’s common to see a hero rescue a princess and marry her. People like Joseph Campbell see this pattern as the reward at the end of the long journey to enlightenment. The woman represents the goddess of wisdom. The great mother. The final piece of the puzzle, without which there’s no ending. The man cannot exist alone, and so the journey has the final piece of himself at the end: the woman. If you were to entertain this theory from myth, then that makes what happens next in the scene of the movie very interesting. The woman doesn’t just accept that the hero rescued her and took her for his own. She rejects him. She thinks that this prince charming isn’t charming enough. He’s not the man she wants. Her standards are high. So, she asks him to be better. To be worthy of her, if he ever wants a chance to win her. Her demands, however, are that he must go and kill all of the baddest gunmen in the land, and become the most dangerous man alive. And so, our hero embarks in a journey to win her princess again. This journey goes in a spiral, in a desert. With every man he kills, he realizes that he’s a loser, that he can’t win without cheating, that he’s weak, and that all of the men that he’s killing were better than him. This journey serves to show him how useless he is, and how the life that he thought was in order, was nothing but a falsehood. In the end, the princess leaves him even after he achieves his task, and becomes enamored with a female version of the protagonist, one that is more venomous and sadistic. The hero becomes a monk, and re-starts his journey, but this time without violence. A spiritual journey.
I’m very interested in the relationship between men and women. It’s clear to me that we are different creatures (psychologically speaking). In a relationship men and women have different expectations and goals, and different ways they go about co-existing with the opposite sex. The way we interact and approach each other, and the way relationships are created is nothing short of incredible. There’s a reason why there are reality shows and movies, and an endless source of incredible novels that focus on dramatic relationships between very complex men and women. It’s a highly relatable subject.
In the movie El Topo the hero is rejected and deemed not worthy. In real life, some men will decide to go on a journey of self-improvement once they understand that they are not fit enough to be in a healthy relationship with someone worth being with; however, some men will not go on this journey. They will instead lie to themselves. Like in the movie, they will go on a downward spiral of deceit, that will culminate in destruction and harm, resentment, and the eventual realization that not only are they not fit, but they wasted time lying to themselves. Rejection is a tough pill to swallow. We do the best we can with the lives that we have. Some of us just want to stop being alone and we want to do that in the easiest way possible. When we fall in love and get rejected, it turns our reality upside down. With men in particular, when we are self-conscious and not able to easily talk to women, rejection can be a brutal blow to our psychological stability, because we are not likely to have encouragement around us, and because we already see someone we are attracted to as the center of our desires. Men who are weak minded and rejected like this can become resentful and dangerous. Men who sexually assault women are a good example of the sort of individual I’m talking about.
I’m not trying to paint weak men as victims. They are not. I wish that instead of seeing themselves as so, they would use rejection as a fuel for change, and to learn to work on themselves and improve, like the hero in the movie does at the end. In the monotypes we see three characters. We see the man in the black hat (the hero) who is a loser. A rejected man. A weak man. A man who desires the love of a woman but is not desired back. I try to reflect this feeling of inner turmoil and desired release from dark thoughts. This man is painted as weak and repulsive. He’s not attractive or an example to follow. He’s the personification of what men should not be. The other man that appears in the work is a shirtless man. He’s arrogant. He’s confident. He’s naked. He has so much confidence, in fact, that he’s in love with himself. He doesn’t need the opposite sex, or the “goddess of wisdom” because he’s full of himself. He’s destined to also not be desired, because he doesn’t have a need to share his life; he doesn’t lack a piece to his puzzle. He’s also an example of what a man should not be like. Finally there’s the ghost of the woman. The specter of the goddess. The constant reminder that he’s being judged. The eye that sees all. The conscience. The inner feeling that something abut these two men is not good enough. She is the personification of a female force that may one day want them, but doesn’t. The two men are also the same person. Two extremes that live inside of every man. Two sides that we should never lean too far into. The reminder that we require a balance that prevents their existence.
Weltlust is a micro-narrative that explores rejection and states of being that are not for a healthy society. It’s not so much an inspiring set of prints as they are a warning. Ink on paper that stare back at us and remind us of how far we can go when desperate for love.
