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live now.”16 In his best-known essays Emerson imbued his prose with invitations and provocations to his readers to fulfill their untapped potential, to follow their genius wherever it may lead. What matters most is being oneself and seeing the world as only you might, institutions or traditions be damned. “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?” Emerson asks in “Self-Reliance”. He goes on, “My friend suggested, – ‘But these impulses may be from below, not from above.’ I replied, ‘They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”17 History is affirmed not in hindsight, but in the ways it is embodied in humanity’s potential today. P. Adams Sitney identifies American avant-garde filmmaking with Emerson- ianism in the ways it employs cinema as an instrument of self-discovery.18 This connects with Wees’s concept of cinematic exemplarity mentioned earlier. American filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, and Su Friedrich, Sitney shows, work in interrelated modes of camera movement, su- perimposition, associative editing, and the disjunctions of language and image to link the exhilarations of their cinematic inventions to the eccentricities of their personality and experience. Like Augustine in his Confessions, the most visionary American avant-garde filmmakers center their art on their personal lives and the project to elucidate the unconscious. Yet unlike Augustine – and this is what allies these filmmakers with Emerson, to Sitney’s mind – visionary avant-garde filmmakers consider the measure of a work of art not its capacity to emplot narrative, but the degree to which it can surprise and thereby exhila- rate its maker. “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire”, Emerson writes at the conclusion of his essay “Circles”, “is to forget ourselves, to be sur- prised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do some- thing without knowing how or why.”19 In the address Emerson delivered in 1837 to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School, he identified this capacity for transformative experience and self-possession as the very means of incarnating God in the world. In this way, the creative exhilaration inhering in avant-garde film possesses Emerson’s call to enflesh divinity in the here and now. PERFECT EXHILARATION AS POLITICAL VISION What makes Malick’s The Tree of Life interesting as far as its politics are con- cerned is that it draws from both the Emersonian and Augustinian traditions in order to address questions like: What is the appropriate relationship between 16 Emerson 1912, 255. 17 Emerson 1983, 262. 18 Sitney 2008. 19 Emerson 1983, 414. Narrative and Experiment, Religion and Politics in The Tree of Life | 175www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185