Tears in Rain and the Hunter's Heart

Some ramblings on Roy Batty's death monologue from the movie Blade Runner

Protagonist, Rick Deckard, hangs from a beam high above the city streets, his grip slipping, his death imminent. The antagonist, Roy Batty, a human “replicant”, created as a slave with a life span of a mere four years, all of which are moments away from being used up, and whom up until this point was being hunted by Deckard who “retires” replicants for a living, stands above the dangling “Blade Runner”. A nail driven through his palm and cradling a white dove in his arms, Batty bemuses:

“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be slave.”

Deckard loses his grip and Batty makes the choice to reach out and grab his arm, pull him to safety and save his life. Sitting cross legged near the sprawled out and exhausted Deckard, Batty proceeds with the famous 42-word monologue that has since been titled “Tears in Rain”:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

With those words Batty gives up the ghost, as it were, the white dove he was holding taking flight into the night sky. Those wonderfully poetic 42 words are easily some of the most captivating in cinema history and they will serve now as inspiration for some reflections of mine concerning Romanticism, the Poetic Heart etc, and whatever else might be thrown into my sphere of intellectual awareness over the course of this short meditation. It also coincides with a piece of my own poetry entitled the Hunter’s Heart that will go up at the same time as this.

Most people are probably not aware that sometime in 1983, shortly after the release of Blade Runner in 1982 (itself an adaption of the Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”) the world ended. Of course, the world is always ending to a greater or lesser degree, that fact is itself the great revelation of the Romantic, but in 1983; a certain shift, the end of an epoch, crossing over a threshold. (Perhaps more could be said, if we take on some of Philip K. Dick’s view on the nature of reality) It is enough to say that 1983 marked both the birth of the modern internet and the first commercial cellular mobile phone call being made. And it’s safe to say, as most of us carry around our little internet scrying tool in our pocket, even attached most of the time to the end of our arm, in the guise of a phone, that both of those instances in time, especially merged together as they inevitably were, have since established a vision of life that increasingly few can remember or indeed fathom any other. (Not only has it established a vision of life but even more alarming it has potentially put in place measures such that no other vision will be allowed, given that it has removed man another step further from reality than the mere Cartesian mind/body split, now placing the screen as medium between the mind and body or external world.)

The 1980’s became an in-between time where the vision of the future was being established but had not yet been set. There was something still full of wonder and mystery in the visions of the future that came to us through music, movie and such. Or maybe it’s the nostalgia speaking? One thing is for sure when you take things like retrowave music and especially the Stranger Things phenomenon, which hearken back to this almost mythic 80’s era, they are rife with the sense of nostalgia and I think it impossible for something to have that nostalgic quality without there being the original foundation of wonder and mystery. To speak of wonder is to see the world in a manner that it overflows with Goodness, Truth and, perhaps most importantly for the Romantic (if there can indeed be any hierarchical categorization here) Beauty. To speak of mystery is to understand that for Goodness, Truth and Beauty to overflow it must break through the very constrictions that allowed its manifestation. Order exists not for its own sake but for the mystery of life to pour forth and then be smashed to pieces under the deluge. More could be said here but not yet, perhaps this is not the time for it.

Vision is the predominant theme of Batty’s monologue for it is the predominant theme of the Romantic. The Romantic insists that he can see in a manner that it would seem others cannot or even will not.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”

“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”

- Novalis

But that this Romantic vision is not simply a delusion of grandeur meant to comfort a mere sentimentalism, it is reality seen with utmost clarity. Novalis again:

“The world must be romanticized. In this way, its original meaning is rediscovered. Romanticizing is nothing other than qualitative potentiation. In this operation the lower self is identified with a better self. We ourselves are such a qualitative series of powers.”

It is to recognize the world and everything in it as completely and utterly overflowing with soul. The Romantic senses this ensouled reality but it is a cause of both joy and sadness, the bitter-sweetness of that which is right there, at the fingertips but cannot quite be grasped and held onto, and in fact to do so would be it’s true death. This is why a sense of longing or yearning seems to mark the soul of the Romantic and has to do with what Klages calls “the Eros of distance.”

“Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.”

-Martin Heidegger

Klages says that the Romantic period in particular, and therefore the Romantic himself, is marked by a sense:

“ … wandering and exploratory, … Strangeness, distance, the thrill of life and the threat of storm, rapture, emotional transport, yearning for the stars: many names for the self-same essence, which is the soul.”

The Romantic is constantly seeking soul; their own through communion with the other.

In the movie Batty does indeed have a unique vantage in life compared with the “you people”, the regular human, that he is addressing. “Replicants” are created with only a four-year life span, and it is with this visceral awareness of his own mortality haunting him that Batty clearly sees the beautiful tragedy of life. It is a mistake however to think that it is simply longer life or even immortality that is the desire of the Romantic. In fact the Romantic will often have a strange attraction to their own death such as it is that his whole life is being irresistibly drawn to it in a manner a kin to the desires of the heart which are experienced as a magnetism that speaks more of fate, destiny, rhythm etc. more so than something of the will and the intellect.

Well ends death life’s need,
Yet life shudders before death.
So shudders a heart before love,
As if threatened by death.
For where love awakens, dies
The self, the dark despot.

-Rumi

The simple prolongation of existence does not cure the yearning of the heart for more life. It is a qualitative thing, as Novalis has said, not a quantitative thing. Earlier in the film Batty confronts his maker, Eldon Tyrell, who asks him, “What seems to be the problem?” to which Batty replies “Death.” And then stepping forward into the light he clarifies “I want more life, Father.” Now, perhaps at the moment of his meeting his maker Batty thinks the cure to death is, in fact, the perpetual continuation of his own existence. An understanding of “more life” as merely a quantitative thing as opposed to a qualitative one. Something that, “if only I had just a bit more time I could work this whole life thing out. Understand it. Square it away with the rational mind.” There is something very Klagesian (I have been reading a lot of Klages if the reader hadn’t guessed) happening here, especially in Batty addressing his maker as “Father” as opposed to themes in the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049 where the importance lay in the one who is “woman born”. There is even a deleted scene that takes place after Batty’s meeting with Tyrell where, upon hearing the automated female voice of the elevator he is riding in, he responds with a whimpering cry of “Mum?”. For Klages, “Father” is equivalent to Spirit or Geist, also rational mind or nous, which is the opponent of Soul and Body, seeking to wedge its way in between the natural union of the two. Of course Ludwig Klages is decidedly anti-Christian in many of his opinions and whilst it is my contention that much of his work is invaluable for the contemplative mind following the light of the Christic Revelation, eventually, perhaps one has to concede trying to fit a round peg into a square hole (let us leave alone, for now, the fact that it is Christ who did indeed, as the Hermetics put it, square the circle!)

By the time of his moment of compassion in saving Deckard’s life and his “tears in rain” monologue Batty understands that more life comes through death not despite it. The cruel irony is that it is the impermanence of one’s individual life that is often the catalyst for the vision required to truly experience life and life to the full.

“I have come that you might have life and life to the full.”

Jesus is not speaking here of the perpetual extension of biological life, but life that pours out itself fully in every moment.

Here is Klages on what might be described as “fullness of life” or Lebensgefühls (the elementary feeling of life that is the undercurrent of any additional rationalizing, analysis, documentation, concepts etc. ) that we all have experienced at some point to more or less degree:

Life is not perceived, but it is felt [gefühlt] with a strength that obscures everything. And we need only reflect on this feeling to become aware, with a certainty beyond which there can be none more certain, of the reality of being alive [Lebendigseins]. Whether we judge, think, will or wish, dream, phantasize, all of these are sustained and shot through by one and the same torrent of an elementary feeling of life [Lebensgefühls], which can be compared to nothing, traced back to nothing, that cannot be thought through and analysed, and also of course never ‘understood. And because we feel ourselves as being alive, what is vital meets us in the image of the world. Expressed in a short formula: we experience our own life and, in it, we also experience the other life [das fremde Leben]. From this it follows that we can know about life exactly only insofar as we, ourselves alive, submerge sufficiently deeply into it in order to preserve and secure a recollection [Erinnerung] of it for waking consciousness.

Though Klages says that life is not perceived but felt (and allowing for translation nuances from the original German) we are happy to equate his “felt life” with the Silver Branch Perception of John Moriarty of whom we have written a previous article regarding the Romantic vision, fullness of life, Verdant Heart etc.

Batty gives us two examples of the things he’s seen; things ordinary humans wouldn’t believe. These are two particular moments through which he comes to know and understand life having clearly “submerged sufficiently deeply” into these moments and experienced the raw and elemental “feeling of life”. A moment of divine rapture or ekstasis that is the death in that moment of the rational mind and the unfettered experience of the soul in communion with what might be called “Daemonic reality”. Let us also take poetic license here with these moments recollected by Batty, the license to see what others may not, and speculate on other levels. He recalls:

“Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”

Orion is not at all an insignificant constellation in the religions and cultures of the world. We will highlight firstly the ancient Egyptian association of Orion with the god Asar or Osiris. Osiris is the preeminent resurrecting god in the ancient Egyptian tradition, and the yearly cycle of Orion would mirror the flooding and receding cycle of the Nile River. Death and birth. The bitter and sweet. The Beautiful tragedy of life.

In the Greek, from where the name for the constellation comes from, Orion is the Hunter, of which we take as the foremost image of the Romantic, the Poet, the Man of Silver Branch Perception. There is much to be said of this image. We will merely dot-point the basics. The paradox of the Hunter’s love of nature, his intimate relationship with the sights and sounds and smells, the rhythms, liturgical in nature, with the violence he does to it that he might himself have life. He makes of his violence liturgical garments and food as communion with the cosmos, but that is not all. He searches for the final hunt in every hunt but none will grant ultimate satisfaction, and they are not meant to. Each morning he rises and hunts, for the purpose of the hunt, it’s telos, is not simply in the acquisition of raw material for food and clothing or to sell as goods, the whole of the hunt is life to the hunter. Like the god Eros himself he wields his weapon. He fires the projectile that is the symbol of his desire at his prey and is himself also wounded by the reality of the death that his desire brings despite its necessity for sustenance of his own life. The poet also must experience life and death in every moment, his meaning is not found in the mere completion of a spoken or written piece of poetry.

“Poetry is an ecstatic vital force. The life of the poet is an inner poetry. Poetic experience is the magical experience of language.” - Ludwig Klages

That is, the magical experience of communication between souls.

Klages again:

“ … one can be a poet without ever having made a poem, and that no poet ought to call himself such until reality has become one continuous song.”

Reality is one continuous song for the poet as the hunt is for the hunter.

Understanding also that the subject of his hearts desire cannot be contained, the proverbial “caged bird”, but that it is in fact its freedom to be what or who it is that pulls the heart of the poet to begin with. The poet does not desire to hunt the caged animal.

And when the Poet or the Romantic does engage in art, writing, poetry, music, etc. as his heart is want to do he seeks to open up the Romantic vision in others. His heart becomes a portal to other worlds. This will ring more true in a moment, but first more Klages:

“Let there be no mistake: either the most powerful art and poetry of all times is sheer invention - no, a smoke screen - or it is a magic means of opening up to us real worlds, to which we would on our own no longer find a way out of our dungeon of believing facts.”

That Batty speaks of “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion” is to speak of the bright shoulder star in the Orion constellation called Betelgeuse. It is the star of the right-side shoulder, technically speaking, but to view the heavens as a mirror we would then find it as the left shoulder of the man who looks into that mirror. The shoulder over the Hunter’s heart. Which is to say that these attack ships are on the verge of that heart. Whether the attack ships are of that heart or aim to attack that heart is neither here nor there for as we have said the desire, the longing, the yearning of the Hunter is both joy and a sadness to him. A desire is both boon and a wound. That these attack ships are on fire is a clear allusion to the burning of desire. If we take Betelgeuse here to be the heart itself, we find it fitting, for it is a red star that varies in brightness over periods of time such that it could be said to pulse. It also is very close to going “supernova” and exploding which is an apt description of the poet’s heart. (Coincidentally enough, one potential meaning of the name Roy Batty, of whom we have concerned ourselves, is “Red Son”)

Moving on to the second of Batty’s visions we see a zeroing in on the heart motif:

“I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.”

If Orion the Hunter is the image of the poet, we find now reference to the Poet himself. Tannhäuser was a medieval German poet, particularly a minnesinger, those poets who dealt exclusively with courtly love, and who became a figure of legend.

Enticed to the court of Venus, Tannhäuser lives a life of earthly pleasure, but soon, torn by remorse, he makes a pilgrimage to Rome to seek remission of his sins. The pope tells him that, as his pilgrim’s staff will never put on leaf again, so his sins can never be forgiven. In despair Tannhäuser returns to the court of Venus. Shortly afterward his discarded staff begins to put forth green leaves. The pope sends messengers to search for Tannhäuser, but he is never seen again.

So the story goes. The legend deserves it own commentary but we shall allow it to speak for itself for the time being. Tannhäuser Gate we take, then, to be an allusion to the heart of the poet that is the gateway to the court of Venus. What C-beams are exactly is open to speculation, but we shall take them, in all their sci-fi context, as laser or light beams of some description focused by a C-shaped lens. This fits nicely with the Tannhäuser Gate being a wormhole or portal and C-beams as that which focuses what shall pass through. The C-shaped lens or convex lens is something we are familiar with in the anatomy of the eye which focuses the light that passes through. The fittingness of all these is further amplified by the contemplative tradition of the “eye of the heart” which is the spiritual faculty by which we perceive true reality. Moreover, that there is said to be a glittering, which etymologically means “to shine” or “gold” is to allude to the alchemist-poet’s treasure that is his focus, his desire; the light in the dark, the gold hidden in the lead, the treasure buried in the earth, the maiden veiled.

And so, we find ourselves again at “vision”. Again, not mere vision, but a manner of perceiving, or better, as Klages puts it, a life felt fully, coursing through you, in that moment. Feeling the fullness of the moment, despite the fact that “all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” In fact, as we have mentioned, not despite but because. The uniqueness of the moment, it’s quality, its ability to move us, to make the heart shudder, is possible only if the physical phenomenon that allows it to rise up, like the white-crested waves upon a shoreline, is also to be torn apart by it, come crashing down, to die so as to give birth to the next moment. For the moments of truly rapturous, ecstatic life cannot be “caged birds.” Batty performs the monologue with a wonderful sense of bitter-sweetness that so defines the Romantic vision, no doubt understanding himself to be the rising of a moment in time, then lost to time. That despite his being a “Replicant” who he is will never happen again.

And to transform all that is created
Lest it be fixed in hostile rigidity
Eternal, living action is at work
And what was not, now wills to become
Pure Suns, colorful Earths;
In no case may it rest.
It must stir, act creatively,
First take form, then transform,
Only in appearance does it stand still for a moment.
The eternal keeps stirring in all things,
for all must dissolve into nothingness,
Would it persevere in being.

-Goethe

“Time to die.” Roy finishes, and the pure white dove takes flight as if life itself, that Batty will not hold onto, will not keep caged to his chest. He dies and allows it to fly in all its virgin potency, pregnant with *some novel bloom.

Hummingbirds

These days, I try not to clutch
the good things too tightly.

They are here, and then, they
are gone, and then they are

here again, I am always listening
for the thrum of little wings.

- Alex Dawson

“Tears in Rain.” It could not be more fitting. For tears and rain can be both of joy or sadness. Though their seems to be much more sadness in Batty’s lamenting the moments lost to time, perhaps those tears are not lost but taken into and join with the very tears (rain) of the enraptured soul of the cosmos in sympathy with his own.

“Symbol of the highest rapture: the tear that bursts forth uncontrollably, the tear that ‘overflows’ the eye.” - Even more Klages

Much of this is to speak of what is termed “Eternal Flux”, the “Fire of Heraclitus” or Holy Impermanence, and to reconcile such with the Revelation of Christ is a much vaster subject to discuss, far beyond the short musings of a movie monologue. Even more so to bring Ludwig Klages into the discussion who critiques Heraclitus for having his notion of Eternal Flux fall back on Logos, a rational ordering principle, that as Christians we can more easily take as being The Logos, Christ. As I said though, another time perhaps.

I will take me leave with a piece of poetry by Ludwig Klages that couples with Roy Batty’s monologue rather nicely.

And if it really was a dream,
Why should one suffer so?
As storm - winds roared,
The welkin raged
From sea to sea to sea;
And all the while
The evening sun shed
Wretched rags of light.
We die, and are forgotten,
Even by the grandsons
Strolling on our graves.

And if it really was a dream,
Why should one suffer so?
The storms are roaring,
And above the lands
The gloomy clouds sail on.
Whole nations die, and are forgotten,
And above the wreckage
Time prepares the entry
Of the coming generation.

And if it really was a dream,
Why should one suffer so?
The storm - wind screams,
The welkin shrieks;
The very stars will die
And be forgotten.
Still, there’ll always be
*Some novel bloom, which,
Nourished by the dust of the deceased,
Will one day wander far
On bright, celestial paths.