Richard Burton's semi-forgotten directorial debut (and swan song), DOCTOR FAUSTUS came out in swingin' 1967 and it's too bad it didn't know there was a whole summer of love going on around it, because, thanks to all its Satanic, illuminati, 'interiority-hallucination' and horror film iconography, it's plenty psychedelic. An adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Elizabethan play, made by Burton to raise funds for his alma mater, the Oxford Dramatic Society (and cast with pretty boys from thar), it's got issues with trying to be respectful Art in its retelling of the classic devil's bargain myth, but like a bunch of twitchy-legged hippy undergrads waiting for class to end, it's got a sensationalist, existential, trippy drug fantasia waiting for it down at the pub. Oh but the trepidation of taking one's first big lysergic weekend step into the Summer of Love. Mods and rockers giving way to Carnaby dandies, Blow-Out winning hearts and minds. Shit was in the wind, troop! And like Roger Corman in the US, Burton the director was realizing how how easily the props from Gothic horror films could carry over as hallucinational markers through the cornfields of the mind.
Though shot in Italy and England using creative crews from both, bringing deep colored gel flavors of Mario Bava and slinky psychedelic and horror scores of the giallo (thanks to Mario Nascimbene), it nonetheless as a very strong AIP Corman Poe flavor, and would make a great double feature with Corman's very California The Trip (from the same year, 1967 - above) and Corman's earlier, yet still highly-psychedelic horror films Masque of the Red Death (1964) and X-The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963). Which since I've written about all three as part of the justly-celebrated Acid's Greatest series, you know that means Doctor Faustus has things to say about the steep price paid for following the 'poison path' to enlightenment, disregarding the warning label on Medusa's chintzy veil. Be it the black arts or forbidden scientific experimentation in the form of eye drops or pills, the result in the Corman canon--and so here with Burton's Faustus--are approximately the same -power, kaleidoscopic images of painted women writhing in delight, lenses smeared on all sides by vaseline for trippy distortions, time lapse dissolves, crypts, dungeons, caves, cobwebbed skulls, sudden strange juxtapositional overlap dissolves, and copious occult symbolism.
In all the tales of those who'd ignore caution to sound the depth of that they would profess, comes the terrible price of enlightenment, one way or another. Even in the case of The Trip there are the disclaimer in the beginning and 'cracked glass' ending, both forced on the film by the nervous producers who wanted to make sure the psychedelic experience was portrayed, ultimately, as causing calamitous long-term brain damage lest the film be seen as green light to a curious nation. In Faustus, however it's more bleak and final - the voyage to Hell being one of eternal DTs, represented by an evil Liz Taylor in green body paint, her hair a bed of snakes, laughing evilly.
It's ironic that--as the star/director and the director's wife/muse and the muse of Faustus in the film, Burton and Taylor--then married and still tabloid gold-are the weakest parts of the film. Like many towering drunk titans of the stage and screen, each could rely on a bag of tricks to mask their various hangover and bloated periods. Burton, especially, as he'd later prove in nearly every role he took, uses tortured booming depth of voice and harrowed stare of beady eye into the ether just past the camera to masking his doleful hangover and likely existential longing for four PM cocktail hour (1).
By contrast, consider how how both Welles in his self-directed Macbeth and Olivier in his self-directed Hamlet (both 1948) give you the impression they love every minute of their character's tortured guilt and suffering. No matter what dour calamity their character wallows in, the actor himself is reveling in the poetry and mythic undertones in small perfect little gestures. Burto is not reveling even in Faustus' moments of revelry. One can't help but wonder if the demands of directing and marriage and paparazzi-ducking--and staying sober long enough to do most of each before the day's shooting stopped-- tanked his energy, and so he let his brown-nosing reverence for 'the classics' undo his natural crazy Wagnerian oomph. The sort of 'mustn't spook the dean of letters' kind of respectfulness takes over. Confident, vibrant auteurs would heedlessly go for a more reckless 'give the dean a heart attack' approach that paradoxically would be more faithful to the material at hand. If you're going to have a respectful staid depiction of a prankster thumbing his nose at staid respectful depictions, then you become the very thing you're against, and that kind of feedback is so exhausting it may takes years of painless deconstructive art history to recover.
As a result, the play's dense intertextually-lined language unpacks rather flatly, especially since there is --essentially-- so little at stake. This is after all the tale of a very old, seemingly rich unemployed college kid doing tons of drugs up in his study / man cave and getting periodic visits only from his drug dealer or students looking to get high, and getting lost in phantom anima dream imagery when he takes too much, or suffering insane tortures when he takes too little. We never understand why he's so keen to worship Lucifer and denounce god, or sympathize with his bratty deal welshing and second guess antipathy. If you've 'been there' you can relate when his occasional visitors find him on the floor, staring at some unseen phantom, or writhing in the grip of some frothy madness, clothes and brain in a state of disarray, barely aware his friends are here. But as Bill Lee says to his visiting buddies in similar circumstances (Naked Lunch) "the Zone takes care of its own."
Luckily, if Burton the actor is suffering from boozy stress but there's no doubt Burton the director is using that same boozy stress as a subtext for a richly familiar and welcome streak of Gothic horror and illuminati in-jokes, showing he learned some important things from his buddy Tennessee Williams. The popping rich tapestry of colors--lots of dusky deep ochres, blues, purples, cherry reds- glow as if Mario Bava himself were doing the gel lighting, giving many scenes, such as the graveyard a highly evocative atmospheric quality reminiscent of Black Sabbath, or what one might see on an Aurora monster model box or 60s pulp magazine cover. The use of available anachronistic/period sets and costumes evokes various surrealistic historical tableaux (the Garden of Earthly Delights, the Vatican, a king's reception hall, a crypt) as well as the various movies and genres they evoke, creating a sense of stripping away of time's linearity, allowing a stage-like but very psychedelic scene changing (there's similar bits of Gothic horror call-back in Head, and Psych-Out as well as The Trip). Copious occult magic (nice use of made of a haunted mirror), cobwebs, skeletons, candles, alchemical test tubes and conjuring crucibles, volumes of forgotten lore, and astral charts-bedecked torture chamber-cum-Illuminati arcane alchemist sanctuary becomes the home base for Faustus' solitary drug experiments - boldly if callowly going where one might hallucinate yearning naked women inside the flames of a candle or the eye of a skull, the kaleidoscope effects and blurred edges, time laps flowers and occult symbolism, and to see the effects of time and age upon desire's ripe fruit.
Like its contemporaries in the Elizabethan dream theater era, Faustus gambols freely amidst the arcane iconography of spirits and demons that would previous (or concurrently in Spain) be charge enough for heresy. As it is, thanks to the rise of sane Protestantism, even making fun of the pope is not frowned upon, so long as the knave who dares winds up trapped in the arms of burning hell by drama's close. Thus Burton's Faustus makes fart noises behind the rows of bishops, and pelts the pope with a fancy cake, finally flogging a bunch of empty robes in a moment that seems straight out of Jodorowsky, while the psychedelic college kid experimentation aspect continues with the slow downward slide from seeking truths past the known to just getting lit, and staying drunk enough that you forget the terror that awaits you at the end of this decade-spanning spree - the terror of the cold turkey addict tied to a bed table in a hospital, screaming his guts out like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood.
In the beginning of Faustus we find Burton as an aging scholar in round owlish glasses and long gray hair -freshly graduated (at his age? Not a strong studier?) advised by one of his druggie friends to "sound the depths of that they would profess."- In other words, don't just say no to drugs, try them first - condemnation prior to experimentation is not wisdom.
Later, alone in his study, not quite sure which field to expend his academic energies next, Faustus is soon restless, buffeted by ego and curiosity up against the fences of the known. "To live and die in Aristotle," seems wise and--to him--oddly sexy, or to study medicine but--as he notes, "the end of physic our body's health." From what new field shall his alchemist's brain next turn? Why to the occult, with his friends Valdez and Cornelius, as sketchy a pair of Satanic drug dealers as one is likely to find, but alas--his closest things to contemporaries. They regale him with tales of all that my be grante a man who summons demons, via footage reflected from mirrors and soon the three trundle off with their summoning gear to the graveyard to raise hanged sinners and summon devils.
But to explore the black arts is blasphemy, Faustus! Turn to the church and repent. This finding parallel in the case of The Trip with all the disclaimers forced on the film by the nervous producers who wanted to make sure the psychedelic experience was portrayed, ultimately, as causing calamitous long-term brain damage. In all the tales of those who'd ignore caution to sound the depth of that they would profess, comes the terrible price of enlightenment, one way or another. (And as anyone 'called' to try these things, even your hardcore hippy friends may warn you off, 'you'll damage your chromosomes, Faustus!") In Faustus, however it's more bleak and final - while in bad trip country it only 'feels' that way and one--if they're smart--knows eventually after timeless aeons of distress, everything will wear off. On some level as many a scholar has noted, the only difference between a schizophrenic and an LSD user is that the latter knows he's just 'visiting' the mystical realms beyond space/time via medication and he's actually safely rooted in linear reality, while the schizophrenic knows he is just 'visiting' reality via medication and is actually in the void, like a phantom signal forever caught between neighboring TV channels.
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But it all starts innocent enough when Faustus's friends Valdez (Ram Chopra) and Cornelius (Robert Carawadine) show up at his dorm and the three head to the graveyard like a trio of errant hippie sophomore knaves shrooming behind Sadler in Syracuse University, circa 1986, finding all sorts of universal truths and froth-at-the-mouth delights there (big rolling graveyards being the perfect place in which to trip, both emblematic of the experience you're on as far as death/rebirth awareness, and the way egoic fear keeps the lightweights away). These pleasures, indeed, are the first reward of daring, to buffet manly against the current and enjoy the rarefied air above the superstitious public's boorish din.
No sooner has Faustus found his spot for conjuring though, then he bids his friends depart him so he may work alone. They're never seen again and indeed one wonders about his social skills, for here is a man not cut off from the society around him the way, say, Prospero is in The Tempest, and yet he prefers only the company of his own unconscious projections, vis-a-vis the devil, and his anima, here played by Elizabeth Taylor. Would, in hindsight, those two return, for he played well against their relish in demonic control and would have perhaps ably benefitted from their energy (like the bulk of the cast, they're students and teachers from the Dramatic Society and Burton often flickers to life in their company- too often to turn dour again when sidelined through dark rant that we know in but a second he will deny having said. For he chides Mephistpholis' sadness over his failing soul, urging him to take a lesson from his resolute bravery and "scorn those joys thou never shalt possess." While a dissolve later he's letting a statue of St. Sebastian urge him turn to God, then to let a skull on the desk encourage him back to Lucifer. All he needs is a hard push one way or the other and he not just hesitates but thoroughly changes his mind.
Instead, it's hard to get involved in the plight of a man so wishy-washy and so unmotivated in his flight to Lucifer. He's a dude burning out his brain for pure onanistic thrill-seeking"Magic" and only realizing it's not some dumb heavy metal pastime when it's too late to back down. He assures Valdez and Cornelius he won't back out, he says, "magic enravishes me!" but we're never really sure what his end game is beyond pleasure and sport, to revel in the folly of others. The presence of these two ennablers might have made it clearer (peer pressure) but without them, it's hard to fathom why he sticks to it. Whatever he once thought to know, being known, he'd rather forget fast, so turns to drink - which makes days flow faster especially with a devilish enabler servant at your side to make sure you never wake up without a stiff drink at your bedside.
Drunk writers and artists who sequester themselves for long periods of micro-tripping in service of their art can--with blocking--drift into just the drinking part, as Faustus does here. But as he's not a writer or artist why we should care? Beyond the realization that all pleasure is fleeting and he shouldn't have signed the contract, there's not much he learns. Reveling by proxy too proves a challenge. Whether flatly chanting along with the bell, book-and-candle monks who try to exorcise his spirit or belligerently chanting "he wants his money!" to an aggrieved bartender, we're not amused or thrilled (like we were in Woolf or Shrew) but rather embarrassed by this base schadenfreude and tone deaf infantile prankishness. Here is a man who freely takes more than would befit a man, then tries to weasel out of paying - drinking vainly against the passing of time (his ever-present hourglass) ticking down to his Hell journey. He's a 'bad' drunk!
THOU ART FULL OF HOLLOWNESS:
In his groovy man cave, doth Faustus have the alchemical tools to astral travel the world over and have his heart's desire granted time and again, the only caveat being it brings him no real joy, since there's no strife or earning of the goal, there's none but the shadow of gratification. And as anyone who suffers from depression knows, getting all you want in life might make you more miserable than just wanting, which at least gives you the hope you will be happy once said desire is attained. To attain it and still be unhappy is to be faced with the reality of a no-escape misery, a room without an exit. The gorgeous women you coveted as a geek in high school clamor all over you now that you're in a band, but their affection creeps you out, as it's so counter to what you expected in a girlfriend, this skeevy slutty availability compiling upon you, and the terror of sexual merging with someone who you barely know. For Faustus, his wish for 'a wife' is ridiculed by the devil with an open flower of beautiful women who turn into men or aged crones on contact. This is the Sidpa bardo in Buddhism at play (ala the woman in room 237). Women never stay lovely, and so outside of space/time, beyond the illusion of permanence, sexual allure beckons like a sticky web of flame that evaporates on contact but leaves you just as stuck. Beauty and youth fade faster than the speed of light, leaving us only with withered crones where once were massive babes.
It's in this aspect, the terrors of the DTs, where Burton brings his alcoholic and priapic issues into the subtext: the realization that, when given a chance to be endlessly indulged, the ego flattery resultant from sexual magnetism--being irresistible to women--is an addiction as destructive as alcohol or cocaine and brings with it no joy. And the desire to possess beauty is one of foolish vanity --that not even the most gorgeous of souls possess beauty for long - it's power is in its ephemeral nature. You can argue that movie stars are the exception - Marilyn still looks alluring in Niagara, but imagine you wished you could share a bed with her, and then wake up trapped in her coffin with her rotting corpse for all eternity!
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That's what the DTs are like, vs. watching the movie over and over in a state of benumbed boozy grace. You don't get to actually sleep with Marilyn, but isn't watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for a hundred straight times (even with Elliot Reid in it) better than even a single night with the actual Marilyn in her actual current underground boudoir? Movies and distractions then are to the ego what the ego is to the soul, the distraction from the terror of eternity. The lungs, understanding at last their slavery to the body, the awful duty they have, almost collapse from the weary shock. Luckily, the quickly forget again. If they stayed aware, they wouldn't last a single week. No drunk can imagine never drinking again, it's too awful to contemplate. But one day at a time, we can not drink just for
today. Sure, it's a trick to make the abstinence endurable, but is booze's trick any less devious?
Supposedly immortal in itself, a soul is paradoxically threatened when the ephemeral nature of all things is revealed. The space-time order allows the comfort of the ephemeral, allows us to dwell under the protective illusion of permanence. That all things die, that life is rounded with a sleep, wounds heal, flowers wither, traumas are buried in the repressed unconscious, seasons change, nights and days alternate ---these are comforts that deliver us from the terror of continuity. Hell, then, as realized by Marlowe's Faustus, is the waking up from this illusion of impermanence so that the terrifying eternity of existence is revealed and is inescapable. This is trial of the cave crypt hallucination in The Trip, ("I don't want to die, man"), the 'bad trip' every tripper sooner or later must endure, the wave that suck us under for an eternal night, the giant eye at the center of the universe gazing pitilessly through our X-Ray Eyes. This is Hell as inescapable awareness of, as Mephistophilis puts it, "all that isn't heaven", the great flaming void that is left "when all else dissolves."
As Faustus will soon learn, the double-edged gift of heaven is the gift of illusion and forgetfulness. It's a mechanism easily frozen into place when we avoid danger for too long. Our way our brain is hard-wired to veil the ever-looming specter of our inevitable death, but to function in its correct aperture (as a veil rather than a window), this veil needs death near enough to cover successfully. If we death moves too far away from our vision, the veil covers everything and anything it can. Soon we can't appreciate life due to this veil creating a thin filmy wall between us and the world. As writers and artists this results in a block and we need to regularly descend to the limits of sanity and traverse beyond, just to feel the appreciation for life's impermanence, for the veil to find something its actually supposed to cover, freeing us to see around its corners at last.
The further paradox is that Hell is a level beyond, the eternity of just the veil, the terror of eternity that makes us long for the illusion of impermanence. When faced with extinction, life at last becomes unbearably precious -- so that each miserable second is clung to like one clutches a piece of floating bed frame in the midst of a tidal flood current. Yet, as he clings, Faust has no love of the life he's led, only fear for what is to come. Not knowing that his fear of eternity is already hell, he indulges full force. These are the types of lightweights you need to avoid when culling a 'set and setting' for your 'voyages' - as they're invariably the ones who can't shake their ego's sticky grip, and foolishly believe all the fear mongering it spreads to keep itself in power. Knowing how to ignore ego's panicky horse-in-the-stall bucking is one of they key skills for successful inter-astral navigation. When God is your co-pilot, you don't need yourself even in the plane.
LAST STASH LOST
Early in their meeting, Faustus asks Mephistophilis where hell is and why he's not there. "Why, this is hell," notes Mephistophilis. "Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joys of heaven am not tormented with ten thousand hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?" If you're living as--or have ever lived--as a drug addict or alcoholic, and still think back to your old highs as this magic plateau, knowing you can never return to it, then you might--as I do--resonate with that line and have a special love for Burton's Faustus or if not love, at least unnerved understanding. For to be in the throes of a serious addiction is to know the joys of hell and heaven are as a coin ever flipping, and one may become the other just through the other's absence, and so sooner or later heaven always flips back to hell. Hell is the constant. It's a question of numbers, of days, of time. For every day the horrible shakes/convulsions/DTs of detox are staved off, the worse they will be when they can no longer be staved off.
To wit, compare Mephisto's version of hell ("everywhere that isn't heaven") with the advanced stage alcoholic or addict, whose heaven is absence of Hell (withdrawal), just not being in the agony of hell is heaven. By contrast what delight then, to up the ante, for heaven may become euphoric than just not-hell, with the one caveat that any new plateau of ecstasy may become the new baseline, so that anything less than that same euphoria becomes hell.
The irony of Faustus's deal with the devil--which holds true to for any addict's postponement of withdrawal--is that the decades of decadence he gets back (24 years, as in hours of the day) are all elapsed by the end of the film, they flit by. If there is any enjoying to be had, we don't really get the impression Burton's Faustus has done so, for heaven is in this case not Hell, yet. That's the terrible bargain, the sacrifice of memory: most of a drunk's happy time is either not remembered due to black-outs or slept through. A drunk can tell if he had fun the night or week before only by how messed up his apartment is the next time he wakes up. It could take hours for him to figure out how long he's been asleep, what day it is, or what AM or PM on the clock means. Time is 'missing' in the good parts and slows to eternity in the bad. Sandwiched between black-outs, benders, waking up in strange positions on strange floors, and suffering all the tortures of being departed from on-highness. For a would-be escapee into booze's warm clutches, how unappealing that life suddenly looks from the outside. Burton spares us nothing of the scene's wild guffawing ugliness -yet it's strangely beautiful too, as in the way the walls are painted to resemble both cracks, dirt and trees. Isn't that what it's all about, man, finding the trees in the bar wall filth rather than the other way around?
The converse, for the angel who has known the face of god and lost sight of it, mere absence of heaven is hell - which is far worse. This is more an ecstasy equation. Common among ecstasy users, myself included back in the 90s-- is to have an early peak experience the first or second time - with everything perfect and a sense of oneness, love and belonging so complete that it lasts for a whole weekend and when it leaves, the following Tuesday at work, suddenly, inescapably, suicidally depressed, maybe for weeks. The only thing that keeps us going is the idea that the following weekend, we'll just repeat all the same steps with the same friends, and get that magic back. Vainly, inevitably, we struggle to recapture it by doing more ecstasy, behaving sluttier, dancing harder, but that just makes the absence of that 'first night' bliss all the worse. For this branch of the psychedelic damned, the Hell of heaven's absence takes years to recover from, not weeks or days. No amount of rehab or reformation will do it. One must, simply, forget, and stay away from the music that you listened to at the time, lest it remind you, and send you crashing yet again for memory of what heaven is, when it's real.
"Sweet pleasure conquers deep despair," counsels the demonic voices that guide Faustus towards his decades on a spree. Ah but the fine print, Faustus: the longer thy just measure of despair stays conquered by sweet pleasure, the deeper the accrual of its depth, the compounding interest on the loan against future joy, and the weaker the sweetness.
Finally, the sweetness has grown too stale to conquer anything, the despair's is now so deep that water line has risen to the ceiling. Thou art thus asphyxiated by woe, swallowed up into Hell eternal, all for postponing your deep despair, whose fair judgement and scathing portion - felt in full at the time of payment, might have done more for your artistic vision than all the demonic libations in all of 1967 Berkley.
The Adulation of Future Masses:
Sooner or later if we keep drinking, we die; sooner or later if we keep writing we live forever. The caveat: we're not there to enjoy whatever benefits that immortality may bring. We make a deal with the fates -we get to keep our souls by agreeing to labor in obscurity now, for the promise that 20 years after our death we'll be revered as geniuses. We won't feel the lionizing because we'll be dead, but the idea it's coming is enough to keep us working. Lost in the process of creation, our whole life flits by in a painless brush.
Drinking on the other hand, brings us the adulation of the future masses in advance - hence it's a kind of reverse direction time line of reward from writing, tapping into an ego gratification time machine. Whatever Akashic record crystal teraflop transfiguring time/space device they're accessing to read your work in the future and send payment of their love back through the past, it's as tactile and sweet in our third eye's ear as god's own indulgent applause.
One thinks too of this time travel authorship with writer Jack Torrance saying "I'd sell my soul for a drink," and thus summoning Lloyd. And while he lives forever via his life's work, it's not that repetitive work about being a dull boy, but the real life murder of a black cook and an epic fail of the mission to kill his wife and child - so there you go.
The devil's bargain - Jack would sell his soul for a drink, as if that wasn't the price to begin with, it's like going to the cashier of the liquor store with a $20 bottle of bourbon and announcing "I'd pay twenty dollars for this!"
And beyond all that is the feeling of control that only surrendering control can bring. To have the ability to postpone the anguish of hell and prolong the joy of heaven available to you is surely worth any price even if that price is that sooner or later, you use up your heaven and can no longer avoid hell's ever-increasing tab. It is due.
"Hell hath no limits"
A special high point is saved for that final act: Faustus' time running out and being swallowed up by Hell is done very very well - with the trap door opening and hands pulling him below to the depths; the whole production, set backdrops, actors and all, kind of wheel backwards and outwards, as if hell was there the whole time, flames flickering at the clapboard walls, the whole decadent spree of Burton's just an elaborate stage show, now the real erupting from reality's cracks the way the void does on intense DMT or Salvia highs. Burton's Faustus--surrounded by red/orange glowing embers and a fully green demonic Taylor--is sort of twirled in a bad ballet slow mo spin deep inside a kinky Rube Goldberg-meets-Brueghel on the Corman Poe set Hell. Faustus yelling and pleading, demonic figures writing in overlapping images, reds and oranges contrast and finally, Liz Taylor as Medusa, in greed demonic body paint, comes alive - her mouth frozen in a Norma Desmond grimace -- at last her stoic silent treatment and obedient kissing and many guises makes sense. She finally roars to life with a macabre flaring of the eyes that's thrilling for all its absence hithero. Here is the green absinthe fairy showing her true size and shape. The beguiling voice that--for example, lured me last year around this time into buying a 15 pack of 'All Day IPA' at the grocery store (how it would whisper to me on my walk home from work, "what a great thing it would be to have that around, have one or two once in awhile") and the way that same voice laughed and sneered a month later when I was shaking and convulsing on the floor from alcohol withdrawal.
In her fathomless patience and malevolence, that demonic anima gets us all, sooner or later. And Taylor who seemed so frozen in this burlesque of statuesque refinement in her earlier Helenic incarnations now, finally, really lets loose. Look at her eyes in the above hell shot! Now that's amore! In her eyes I see shades of Madeline Usher or Morella, or those other ghostly/mad women in Corman's Poe films, who go out, laughing and throttling her husband while flames consume them.
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In the end, it's Burton the actor perhaps who must hamstrings Burton the director for here, for I can't help but wonder how much more energetic this would all be with a less wearily portentous Faustus, someone who could inject some camp vitality, like Vincent Price, as Burton the director has welcomely camp macabre eye, with an admirable sense of pacing and with his ability to tap into the then-burgeoning psychedelic drug 1967 culture in a way that's mythic more than flashy. If Burton the director/star couldn't quite make something on the level of Welles or Olivier, that doesn't detract from the rich Halloween horror festival vibe; on a poetic dream theater level he almost captures the same fairy tale energy of another actor's one-off sojourn, Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter. And if their acting isn't all there this time around, we'll always have Liz and Dick in Padua and "New Carthage" and sometimes we'll even watch them in Big Sur and Heathrow - and if we're also the same persons who love Bava's Black Sabbath and Kill Baby Kill and AIP psychedelic 1967 freak scenes like The Trip, and Maqsue of the Red Death then anything that six-degrees them, problematic and stilted or not, is going to get us right in the Jeffrey Cordovas.
Have I gone off the deep end with my alcoholism metaphor and Trip comparisons again, Hannah? Sure I have. But so what? I'm no more repetitive, belligerent and self-indulgent in my fancy than Marlowe here and in a way I relate to Burton's pained hangover more than most- and I appreciate the way he and tried to alchemically transubstantiate it into the context of the central myth. I've given him a hard time tonight for his energy levels but I'm probably projecting. His eyes may betray insoluble weariness but he still has that beguiling mellifluent booming voice, Marlowe's velvet language rolls trippingly off his tongue, and the lighting and spooky accoutrements alone are worth the price of admission. We may not feel much pity for his 'last second desperation' as hell's gorgon arms drag him down into the flames, because hey, we've been there, and found out eternity is only as long as you think. Faust'll get out, if he just lets go. The great rule of eternity is that only nothing is forever. Except thirst. So drinks, now... let each vicious circle be a signature on our natural habitat's cocktail napkin contract. Whatever the cost, it's already worth it. Valdez and Cornelius, man, they'll hook you up.
NOTES:
1. That last part seems quite sexist today, presuming a kind of condoned satyriasis is packed kit and caboodle over the hump of spiritual awakening - not no more!
1. I'm guessing, based on my own experience doing the same thing - I may be projecting but, on the other hand, as they say in AA, you can't shit a shitter - not one of AA's best phrases, I'll grant you.
5. Technically the Hell might not 'be' eternal in the space-time sense, but in Hell, space/time ceases to exist. One comes out the other side of a cold turkey detox--which may seem to have taken less than a weekend to those around you and to the calendar--as if one had been away for centuries of endless torment. Yet you barely remember it, for the brain which records such things was so badly burned. All you remember is that it was an eternity, and eternity is over.
Though shot in Italy and England using creative crews from both, bringing deep colored gel flavors of Mario Bava and slinky psychedelic and horror scores of the giallo (thanks to Mario Nascimbene), it nonetheless as a very strong AIP Corman Poe flavor, and would make a great double feature with Corman's very California The Trip (from the same year, 1967 - above) and Corman's earlier, yet still highly-psychedelic horror films Masque of the Red Death (1964) and X-The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963). Which since I've written about all three as part of the justly-celebrated Acid's Greatest series, you know that means Doctor Faustus has things to say about the steep price paid for following the 'poison path' to enlightenment, disregarding the warning label on Medusa's chintzy veil. Be it the black arts or forbidden scientific experimentation in the form of eye drops or pills, the result in the Corman canon--and so here with Burton's Faustus--are approximately the same -power, kaleidoscopic images of painted women writhing in delight, lenses smeared on all sides by vaseline for trippy distortions, time lapse dissolves, crypts, dungeons, caves, cobwebbed skulls, sudden strange juxtapositional overlap dissolves, and copious occult symbolism.
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| The Trip |
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| "Heyyy, Swamp! Hey Swampyyy!" |
Burton was coming off his two best films with Taylor, both of which endure today as classics of battle-of-the-sexes fury--Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Taming of the Shrew--it's clear what the problem is. Burton's Scorpio mischief needs an opposite of equal clout - he needs to plays off Liz's energy, making full use of their Pisces-Scorpio dynamic. BUT, as her character in Doctor Faustus never speaks, or appears as anything but a Ligeia/Rebecca-style anima (with an initially haunting but eventually tiresome female vocalizing leitmotif following her around like a herald), she is simply not right for the part. Her larger-than-life stature oveflows the boundaries of a mute object role/phantom role. It's like casting Jimmy Stewart as Edward Cullen in Twilight or Meryl Streep as Syl in Species. When Faustus beholds her beauty and asks "is this the face that launched a thousand ships?" you feel like he can't help but know the answer. The ships are launched long ago. No face stays the same. If you loved the brawling Liz in Shrew and Woolf, you too might be inevitably weirded out to see that same brawler posited as the ultimate silent object-d'art beauty against an array of models all bravely clad in nothing but the glow from hellfire. Is she poised and glamorous and stunning? yes, but not the girl of any straight man's libidinal fantasy the way, say, this tableaux is (below). Every hetero male in the world knows this scene - the odalisques lounging at the intersection of fantasy and nightmare. They're always there, judging all we see and do with scathing insolence - their silence speaks volumes to our frenzied bloodstream, while Liz's silence speaks only to our vague 'put Tracy Lords on a pedestal' post-Roman madonna worship.
One particular problem then becomes the mythic-reference-choked language of the text, recited by Burton with great oratory declarations unto heaven that in the end resonate far less cosmically than, for example smaller gestures made in Shrew and Woof. Director Nichols and Zeffirelli, know that true mythic grandeur comes from small gestures not big ones. When Burton shouts or pleads to the heavens in Faustus we're left bored, not enthralled. It's one of the great ironies of poetry and theater - when he's playing a drunken middle aged history professor verbally sparring with his bullying wife, Burton is as large as the cosmos, but when he's playing someone who's supposed to be large as the cosmos, Burton is as small and dusty as a middle-aged history professor. When he kisses her as Helen and talks about her kiss sending his soul flying around the room, it's hard not to roll your eyes and think of that old adage of acting class, "you're telling us instead of showing; you need to make us believe it." He should have used method, and pretended he was saying that to a bottle of Scotch and an ice bucket. We'd be able to feel that passion in our toe tips! At least I know I would.
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| "the fruits of lunacy" |
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| Any similarity to packing a massive gravity vape is presumably unintentional |
Luckily, if Burton the actor is suffering from boozy stress but there's no doubt Burton the director is using that same boozy stress as a subtext for a richly familiar and welcome streak of Gothic horror and illuminati in-jokes, showing he learned some important things from his buddy Tennessee Williams. The popping rich tapestry of colors--lots of dusky deep ochres, blues, purples, cherry reds- glow as if Mario Bava himself were doing the gel lighting, giving many scenes, such as the graveyard a highly evocative atmospheric quality reminiscent of Black Sabbath, or what one might see on an Aurora monster model box or 60s pulp magazine cover. The use of available anachronistic/period sets and costumes evokes various surrealistic historical tableaux (the Garden of Earthly Delights, the Vatican, a king's reception hall, a crypt) as well as the various movies and genres they evoke, creating a sense of stripping away of time's linearity, allowing a stage-like but very psychedelic scene changing (there's similar bits of Gothic horror call-back in Head, and Psych-Out as well as The Trip). Copious occult magic (nice use of made of a haunted mirror), cobwebs, skeletons, candles, alchemical test tubes and conjuring crucibles, volumes of forgotten lore, and astral charts-bedecked torture chamber-cum-Illuminati arcane alchemist sanctuary becomes the home base for Faustus' solitary drug experiments - boldly if callowly going where one might hallucinate yearning naked women inside the flames of a candle or the eye of a skull, the kaleidoscope effects and blurred edges, time laps flowers and occult symbolism, and to see the effects of time and age upon desire's ripe fruit.
Like its contemporaries in the Elizabethan dream theater era, Faustus gambols freely amidst the arcane iconography of spirits and demons that would previous (or concurrently in Spain) be charge enough for heresy. As it is, thanks to the rise of sane Protestantism, even making fun of the pope is not frowned upon, so long as the knave who dares winds up trapped in the arms of burning hell by drama's close. Thus Burton's Faustus makes fart noises behind the rows of bishops, and pelts the pope with a fancy cake, finally flogging a bunch of empty robes in a moment that seems straight out of Jodorowsky, while the psychedelic college kid experimentation aspect continues with the slow downward slide from seeking truths past the known to just getting lit, and staying drunk enough that you forget the terror that awaits you at the end of this decade-spanning spree - the terror of the cold turkey addict tied to a bed table in a hospital, screaming his guts out like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood.
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| Top: Hopper schools in TRIP; FAUSTUS |
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| Faustus, Valdez Cornelius freakin' over a full decanter of the good shit - shhhh - don't tell Neil |
But to explore the black arts is blasphemy, Faustus! Turn to the church and repent. This finding parallel in the case of The Trip with all the disclaimers forced on the film by the nervous producers who wanted to make sure the psychedelic experience was portrayed, ultimately, as causing calamitous long-term brain damage. In all the tales of those who'd ignore caution to sound the depth of that they would profess, comes the terrible price of enlightenment, one way or another. (And as anyone 'called' to try these things, even your hardcore hippy friends may warn you off, 'you'll damage your chromosomes, Faustus!") In Faustus, however it's more bleak and final - while in bad trip country it only 'feels' that way and one--if they're smart--knows eventually after timeless aeons of distress, everything will wear off. On some level as many a scholar has noted, the only difference between a schizophrenic and an LSD user is that the latter knows he's just 'visiting' the mystical realms beyond space/time via medication and he's actually safely rooted in linear reality, while the schizophrenic knows he is just 'visiting' reality via medication and is actually in the void, like a phantom signal forever caught between neighboring TV channels.
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But it all starts innocent enough when Faustus's friends Valdez (Ram Chopra) and Cornelius (Robert Carawadine) show up at his dorm and the three head to the graveyard like a trio of errant hippie sophomore knaves shrooming behind Sadler in Syracuse University, circa 1986, finding all sorts of universal truths and froth-at-the-mouth delights there (big rolling graveyards being the perfect place in which to trip, both emblematic of the experience you're on as far as death/rebirth awareness, and the way egoic fear keeps the lightweights away). These pleasures, indeed, are the first reward of daring, to buffet manly against the current and enjoy the rarefied air above the superstitious public's boorish din.
Instead, it's hard to get involved in the plight of a man so wishy-washy and so unmotivated in his flight to Lucifer. He's a dude burning out his brain for pure onanistic thrill-seeking"Magic" and only realizing it's not some dumb heavy metal pastime when it's too late to back down. He assures Valdez and Cornelius he won't back out, he says, "magic enravishes me!" but we're never really sure what his end game is beyond pleasure and sport, to revel in the folly of others. The presence of these two ennablers might have made it clearer (peer pressure) but without them, it's hard to fathom why he sticks to it. Whatever he once thought to know, being known, he'd rather forget fast, so turns to drink - which makes days flow faster especially with a devilish enabler servant at your side to make sure you never wake up without a stiff drink at your bedside.
Drunk writers and artists who sequester themselves for long periods of micro-tripping in service of their art can--with blocking--drift into just the drinking part, as Faustus does here. But as he's not a writer or artist why we should care? Beyond the realization that all pleasure is fleeting and he shouldn't have signed the contract, there's not much he learns. Reveling by proxy too proves a challenge. Whether flatly chanting along with the bell, book-and-candle monks who try to exorcise his spirit or belligerently chanting "he wants his money!" to an aggrieved bartender, we're not amused or thrilled (like we were in Woolf or Shrew) but rather embarrassed by this base schadenfreude and tone deaf infantile prankishness. Here is a man who freely takes more than would befit a man, then tries to weasel out of paying - drinking vainly against the passing of time (his ever-present hourglass) ticking down to his Hell journey. He's a 'bad' drunk!
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| "Glad tidings from great Lucifer" |
In his groovy man cave, doth Faustus have the alchemical tools to astral travel the world over and have his heart's desire granted time and again, the only caveat being it brings him no real joy, since there's no strife or earning of the goal, there's none but the shadow of gratification. And as anyone who suffers from depression knows, getting all you want in life might make you more miserable than just wanting, which at least gives you the hope you will be happy once said desire is attained. To attain it and still be unhappy is to be faced with the reality of a no-escape misery, a room without an exit. The gorgeous women you coveted as a geek in high school clamor all over you now that you're in a band, but their affection creeps you out, as it's so counter to what you expected in a girlfriend, this skeevy slutty availability compiling upon you, and the terror of sexual merging with someone who you barely know. For Faustus, his wish for 'a wife' is ridiculed by the devil with an open flower of beautiful women who turn into men or aged crones on contact. This is the Sidpa bardo in Buddhism at play (ala the woman in room 237). Women never stay lovely, and so outside of space/time, beyond the illusion of permanence, sexual allure beckons like a sticky web of flame that evaporates on contact but leaves you just as stuck. Beauty and youth fade faster than the speed of light, leaving us only with withered crones where once were massive babes.
It's in this aspect, the terrors of the DTs, where Burton brings his alcoholic and priapic issues into the subtext: the realization that, when given a chance to be endlessly indulged, the ego flattery resultant from sexual magnetism--being irresistible to women--is an addiction as destructive as alcohol or cocaine and brings with it no joy. And the desire to possess beauty is one of foolish vanity --that not even the most gorgeous of souls possess beauty for long - it's power is in its ephemeral nature. You can argue that movie stars are the exception - Marilyn still looks alluring in Niagara, but imagine you wished you could share a bed with her, and then wake up trapped in her coffin with her rotting corpse for all eternity!
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That's what the DTs are like, vs. watching the movie over and over in a state of benumbed boozy grace. You don't get to actually sleep with Marilyn, but isn't watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for a hundred straight times (even with Elliot Reid in it) better than even a single night with the actual Marilyn in her actual current underground boudoir? Movies and distractions then are to the ego what the ego is to the soul, the distraction from the terror of eternity. The lungs, understanding at last their slavery to the body, the awful duty they have, almost collapse from the weary shock. Luckily, the quickly forget again. If they stayed aware, they wouldn't last a single week. No drunk can imagine never drinking again, it's too awful to contemplate. But one day at a time, we can not drink just for
today. Sure, it's a trick to make the abstinence endurable, but is booze's trick any less devious?
Supposedly immortal in itself, a soul is paradoxically threatened when the ephemeral nature of all things is revealed. The space-time order allows the comfort of the ephemeral, allows us to dwell under the protective illusion of permanence. That all things die, that life is rounded with a sleep, wounds heal, flowers wither, traumas are buried in the repressed unconscious, seasons change, nights and days alternate ---these are comforts that deliver us from the terror of continuity. Hell, then, as realized by Marlowe's Faustus, is the waking up from this illusion of impermanence so that the terrifying eternity of existence is revealed and is inescapable. This is trial of the cave crypt hallucination in The Trip, ("I don't want to die, man"), the 'bad trip' every tripper sooner or later must endure, the wave that suck us under for an eternal night, the giant eye at the center of the universe gazing pitilessly through our X-Ray Eyes. This is Hell as inescapable awareness of, as Mephistophilis puts it, "all that isn't heaven", the great flaming void that is left "when all else dissolves."
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| "The depths of all that thy would profess" i.e. all therein that may be explored |
The further paradox is that Hell is a level beyond, the eternity of just the veil, the terror of eternity that makes us long for the illusion of impermanence. When faced with extinction, life at last becomes unbearably precious -- so that each miserable second is clung to like one clutches a piece of floating bed frame in the midst of a tidal flood current. Yet, as he clings, Faust has no love of the life he's led, only fear for what is to come. Not knowing that his fear of eternity is already hell, he indulges full force. These are the types of lightweights you need to avoid when culling a 'set and setting' for your 'voyages' - as they're invariably the ones who can't shake their ego's sticky grip, and foolishly believe all the fear mongering it spreads to keep itself in power. Knowing how to ignore ego's panicky horse-in-the-stall bucking is one of they key skills for successful inter-astral navigation. When God is your co-pilot, you don't need yourself even in the plane.
LAST STASH LOST
Early in their meeting, Faustus asks Mephistophilis where hell is and why he's not there. "Why, this is hell," notes Mephistophilis. "Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joys of heaven am not tormented with ten thousand hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?" If you're living as--or have ever lived--as a drug addict or alcoholic, and still think back to your old highs as this magic plateau, knowing you can never return to it, then you might--as I do--resonate with that line and have a special love for Burton's Faustus or if not love, at least unnerved understanding. For to be in the throes of a serious addiction is to know the joys of hell and heaven are as a coin ever flipping, and one may become the other just through the other's absence, and so sooner or later heaven always flips back to hell. Hell is the constant. It's a question of numbers, of days, of time. For every day the horrible shakes/convulsions/DTs of detox are staved off, the worse they will be when they can no longer be staved off.
To wit, compare Mephisto's version of hell ("everywhere that isn't heaven") with the advanced stage alcoholic or addict, whose heaven is absence of Hell (withdrawal), just not being in the agony of hell is heaven. By contrast what delight then, to up the ante, for heaven may become euphoric than just not-hell, with the one caveat that any new plateau of ecstasy may become the new baseline, so that anything less than that same euphoria becomes hell.
The irony of Faustus's deal with the devil--which holds true to for any addict's postponement of withdrawal--is that the decades of decadence he gets back (24 years, as in hours of the day) are all elapsed by the end of the film, they flit by. If there is any enjoying to be had, we don't really get the impression Burton's Faustus has done so, for heaven is in this case not Hell, yet. That's the terrible bargain, the sacrifice of memory: most of a drunk's happy time is either not remembered due to black-outs or slept through. A drunk can tell if he had fun the night or week before only by how messed up his apartment is the next time he wakes up. It could take hours for him to figure out how long he's been asleep, what day it is, or what AM or PM on the clock means. Time is 'missing' in the good parts and slows to eternity in the bad. Sandwiched between black-outs, benders, waking up in strange positions on strange floors, and suffering all the tortures of being departed from on-highness. For a would-be escapee into booze's warm clutches, how unappealing that life suddenly looks from the outside. Burton spares us nothing of the scene's wild guffawing ugliness -yet it's strangely beautiful too, as in the way the walls are painted to resemble both cracks, dirt and trees. Isn't that what it's all about, man, finding the trees in the bar wall filth rather than the other way around?
The converse, for the angel who has known the face of god and lost sight of it, mere absence of heaven is hell - which is far worse. This is more an ecstasy equation. Common among ecstasy users, myself included back in the 90s-- is to have an early peak experience the first or second time - with everything perfect and a sense of oneness, love and belonging so complete that it lasts for a whole weekend and when it leaves, the following Tuesday at work, suddenly, inescapably, suicidally depressed, maybe for weeks. The only thing that keeps us going is the idea that the following weekend, we'll just repeat all the same steps with the same friends, and get that magic back. Vainly, inevitably, we struggle to recapture it by doing more ecstasy, behaving sluttier, dancing harder, but that just makes the absence of that 'first night' bliss all the worse. For this branch of the psychedelic damned, the Hell of heaven's absence takes years to recover from, not weeks or days. No amount of rehab or reformation will do it. One must, simply, forget, and stay away from the music that you listened to at the time, lest it remind you, and send you crashing yet again for memory of what heaven is, when it's real.
"Sweet pleasure conquers deep despair," counsels the demonic voices that guide Faustus towards his decades on a spree. Ah but the fine print, Faustus: the longer thy just measure of despair stays conquered by sweet pleasure, the deeper the accrual of its depth, the compounding interest on the loan against future joy, and the weaker the sweetness.
Finally, the sweetness has grown too stale to conquer anything, the despair's is now so deep that water line has risen to the ceiling. Thou art thus asphyxiated by woe, swallowed up into Hell eternal, all for postponing your deep despair, whose fair judgement and scathing portion - felt in full at the time of payment, might have done more for your artistic vision than all the demonic libations in all of 1967 Berkley.
The Adulation of Future Masses:
Sooner or later if we keep drinking, we die; sooner or later if we keep writing we live forever. The caveat: we're not there to enjoy whatever benefits that immortality may bring. We make a deal with the fates -we get to keep our souls by agreeing to labor in obscurity now, for the promise that 20 years after our death we'll be revered as geniuses. We won't feel the lionizing because we'll be dead, but the idea it's coming is enough to keep us working. Lost in the process of creation, our whole life flits by in a painless brush.
Drinking on the other hand, brings us the adulation of the future masses in advance - hence it's a kind of reverse direction time line of reward from writing, tapping into an ego gratification time machine. Whatever Akashic record crystal teraflop transfiguring time/space device they're accessing to read your work in the future and send payment of their love back through the past, it's as tactile and sweet in our third eye's ear as god's own indulgent applause.
One thinks too of this time travel authorship with writer Jack Torrance saying "I'd sell my soul for a drink," and thus summoning Lloyd. And while he lives forever via his life's work, it's not that repetitive work about being a dull boy, but the real life murder of a black cook and an epic fail of the mission to kill his wife and child - so there you go.
And beyond all that is the feeling of control that only surrendering control can bring. To have the ability to postpone the anguish of hell and prolong the joy of heaven available to you is surely worth any price even if that price is that sooner or later, you use up your heaven and can no longer avoid hell's ever-increasing tab. It is due.
"Hell hath no limits"
A special high point is saved for that final act: Faustus' time running out and being swallowed up by Hell is done very very well - with the trap door opening and hands pulling him below to the depths; the whole production, set backdrops, actors and all, kind of wheel backwards and outwards, as if hell was there the whole time, flames flickering at the clapboard walls, the whole decadent spree of Burton's just an elaborate stage show, now the real erupting from reality's cracks the way the void does on intense DMT or Salvia highs. Burton's Faustus--surrounded by red/orange glowing embers and a fully green demonic Taylor--is sort of twirled in a bad ballet slow mo spin deep inside a kinky Rube Goldberg-meets-Brueghel on the Corman Poe set Hell. Faustus yelling and pleading, demonic figures writing in overlapping images, reds and oranges contrast and finally, Liz Taylor as Medusa, in greed demonic body paint, comes alive - her mouth frozen in a Norma Desmond grimace -- at last her stoic silent treatment and obedient kissing and many guises makes sense. She finally roars to life with a macabre flaring of the eyes that's thrilling for all its absence hithero. Here is the green absinthe fairy showing her true size and shape. The beguiling voice that--for example, lured me last year around this time into buying a 15 pack of 'All Day IPA' at the grocery store (how it would whisper to me on my walk home from work, "what a great thing it would be to have that around, have one or two once in awhile") and the way that same voice laughed and sneered a month later when I was shaking and convulsing on the floor from alcohol withdrawal.
In her fathomless patience and malevolence, that demonic anima gets us all, sooner or later. And Taylor who seemed so frozen in this burlesque of statuesque refinement in her earlier Helenic incarnations now, finally, really lets loose. Look at her eyes in the above hell shot! Now that's amore! In her eyes I see shades of Madeline Usher or Morella, or those other ghostly/mad women in Corman's Poe films, who go out, laughing and throttling her husband while flames consume them.
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In the end, it's Burton the actor perhaps who must hamstrings Burton the director for here, for I can't help but wonder how much more energetic this would all be with a less wearily portentous Faustus, someone who could inject some camp vitality, like Vincent Price, as Burton the director has welcomely camp macabre eye, with an admirable sense of pacing and with his ability to tap into the then-burgeoning psychedelic drug 1967 culture in a way that's mythic more than flashy. If Burton the director/star couldn't quite make something on the level of Welles or Olivier, that doesn't detract from the rich Halloween horror festival vibe; on a poetic dream theater level he almost captures the same fairy tale energy of another actor's one-off sojourn, Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter. And if their acting isn't all there this time around, we'll always have Liz and Dick in Padua and "New Carthage" and sometimes we'll even watch them in Big Sur and Heathrow - and if we're also the same persons who love Bava's Black Sabbath and Kill Baby Kill and AIP psychedelic 1967 freak scenes like The Trip, and Maqsue of the Red Death then anything that six-degrees them, problematic and stilted or not, is going to get us right in the Jeffrey Cordovas.Have I gone off the deep end with my alcoholism metaphor and Trip comparisons again, Hannah? Sure I have. But so what? I'm no more repetitive, belligerent and self-indulgent in my fancy than Marlowe here and in a way I relate to Burton's pained hangover more than most- and I appreciate the way he and tried to alchemically transubstantiate it into the context of the central myth. I've given him a hard time tonight for his energy levels but I'm probably projecting. His eyes may betray insoluble weariness but he still has that beguiling mellifluent booming voice, Marlowe's velvet language rolls trippingly off his tongue, and the lighting and spooky accoutrements alone are worth the price of admission. We may not feel much pity for his 'last second desperation' as hell's gorgon arms drag him down into the flames, because hey, we've been there, and found out eternity is only as long as you think. Faust'll get out, if he just lets go. The great rule of eternity is that only nothing is forever. Except thirst. So drinks, now... let each vicious circle be a signature on our natural habitat's cocktail napkin contract. Whatever the cost, it's already worth it. Valdez and Cornelius, man, they'll hook you up.
NOTES:
1. That last part seems quite sexist today, presuming a kind of condoned satyriasis is packed kit and caboodle over the hump of spiritual awakening - not no more!
1. I'm guessing, based on my own experience doing the same thing - I may be projecting but, on the other hand, as they say in AA, you can't shit a shitter - not one of AA's best phrases, I'll grant you.
5. Technically the Hell might not 'be' eternal in the space-time sense, but in Hell, space/time ceases to exist. One comes out the other side of a cold turkey detox--which may seem to have taken less than a weekend to those around you and to the calendar--as if one had been away for centuries of endless torment. Yet you barely remember it, for the brain which records such things was so badly burned. All you remember is that it was an eternity, and eternity is over.