don't they know

About the sun that goes on shining and the birds that go on singing and the sea that continues its rush towards the shore, Julie London is quizzical. She wonders, like Kirsten Dunst’s Justine in Lars von Trier's Melancholia, lolling about in her stupefied Sight: why has seemingly nothing changed, how don't they know...it is so clear that the world is over, and the reason the world is over, well...

it ended when I lost your love. 

Like von Trier's film, London's The End of the World (released 1963) is but one entry in the sizable annals of heartbreak art and the eschatology of love—a bit much to contend with for a single Sunday evening. Nevertheless, a couple of fly-by notes, after listening this morning to London's lucent, mesmeric singing...

Melancholia (2011), a world-ending movie, contours the loss of life through that which orbits and constrains love—marriage and family and sacrifice. These are values quick to fade or self-immolate in the face of irrevocable conclusion, so that what is left to accompany an ending—to handhold in cessation—is sight: a seeing of doom-to-come that is mediated through love. London, by contrast, is losing not life but love, a loss she sees through a world-ending that has not yet happened, that will not happen, even as it should.

For both London and Justine, what hurts most is to look on all that has not yet fallen away once a fall has been decreed, it hurts to feel a total ending well before you will stop breathing.

Does London want to stop breathing? Yes, and no; she is more so surprised by the fact she still is, that her body has not yet caught up to her emotional decimation. She does not ask big questions, like whether sense and soma are indeed separate, or what bearing subjectivity has on other people; instead, she makes big assumptions. Her whys take responsibility for an unseen destruction...conjecturing that if, in the semantic fluidity of cosmic knowledge, "world" equals "love", a rejection of love is a rejection of world-being...so that a single goodbye must have the power to dissolve life itself. 

But what kind of life, and whose world? Human, animal? Is love necessary to the existence of either—as London discovers, seemingly not. Both nature and body persist (with impunity!) in their resilience, ignorant of or else simply indifferent to her loss.

So we beat on...

My father likes to say, love the world and it will love you back. Easy, simple Noahide love creates an ark in time, but cataclysms dent and compress time, calling for, as Bracha Ettinger has termed it, trust after the end of trust. This trust is synthetically generated by Justine in her family’s final hours and London is practicing a version of it, too. The endurance she encounters in her surroundings and in herself serve to further her trust, as evidence of an autopilot continuity that at once painfully contradicts her innate truth—her experience of ending—and offers a way out of its world-shaped wound. 

Re-romancing a world she regards as loveless, London's observations of nature are remnant survivors that she polishes with song. If she seeks in them assurance of the ability to imperviously carry on, these external variables—sun, sea, birds—are also where she diffuses her half of lost love.  One of the guiding tenets of the creative is that tragic rupture is exalted by reconstructive transmutation. Violation renders the personal project of love universally potent. So that there, in art or nature, love isn’t really over, is it?

Von Trier knew to retain his organic background elements til the film’s coda—that the humming CGI birds and the swaying CGI branches should be the very last to go, because they, and whatever whispers through them, are the harbingers of all love, as channels for making and remaking—for real and life-preserving communion. They soar and circle overhead as Justine and her family brace themselves for death, holding hands at this ending of ends. The birds and branches tell us:

Love is everywhere, it is already gone.