Spurious

Weakness

There is more than one Stalker - Porcupine, who used to be called the Master, is mentioned almost straightaway. Porcupine who in some way watches over their passage through the Zone, Stalker and his two clients, known only as the Writer and the Scientist. Yes, he took his life - he hung himself after becoming immensely wealthy.

The Room in the Zone had granted him his wish - but it was not a wish he wanted to recognise. He thought he had wanted his brother brought back to life, but he received money. The Zone knows; the Zone knows what you do not want to want. And so Porcupine, who taught Stalker, hung himself.

What of the other Stalkers, who can read the signs Porcupine left - who know this nut, hanging from this threshold, is a terrible warning? We hear nothing of them. Stalker (this Stalker) stands in for all stalkers. This Stalker - but he is wretched. A poor man, a broken man. Hadn't he sworn never to return to the Zone? And yet he is returning to the Zone. This is his weakness, his susceptibility.

But this weakness is the call of the Zone; he has no choice. True, he has been there before, he knows the secret entrance, and knows of some of the traps which remake themselves around those who visit the Zone. But what does he know? Not a path - a way to reach the Room - so much as an immense caution. We must be careful - that's what he tells them, those whom he guides.

And he has an immense love for the Zone; he belongs to it and speaks for it. The Zone, he says to Writer, when he draws his gun, will not tolerate weapons. Look what happened to the tanks! And we remember their rusting bulk in the still greenery. But he is also hesitant, immensely so: he knows the Zone cannot be interpreted, that caution is their only protection, and even this may not be enough.

Caution - and a kind of sincerity. For those that attempt to make their way to the Room must be broken men. They must have come to the limit of their strength. Their weakness is their fellowship; it is what will allow Stalker, after, to call Writer and Scientist his friends. Weakness: but isn't it by this that you are called to the Zone? Isn't this the way it claims you?

Then to be a Stalker is to be unqualified to be what you are. To be a Stalker, or one who follows a Stalker, is to be unequal to one's own strength. You must have failed, and failed yourself. Sometimes Stalker is grotesquely weak. When he fights with Scientist, he is weakness itself, ineffectually thrashing about. How grotesque! But when he sinks down, and weeps, his weakness becomes a kind of strength, a command.

He speaks of the Room, and of the desperation that brings those he guides to the Zone. Now Scientist dismantles his bomb. Writer puts his arm around Stalker. They sit in the dark, at the Room's threshold. In weakness. In a kind of friendship, and by way of their weakness.

You will always be too weak to reach the Room. You will not reach it, and because of your weakness. Even as you drawn to it precisely by your weakness. How is it the Room opens only when you sink down, motionless, before its threshold? How is it that it is closed even as it opens, that you must have always failed the Room and failed yourself?

Then Stalker guides you only to the threshold of the Room. Guides you to where you cannot enter. He told you it was not for him, a Stalker, to enter. That would be impossible. Told you that he could only bring those in absolute need to this place, and that the Zone would know, as it always knows, what is in the hearts of those who come.

Then the Zone brings to itself only those who would fail. Or it destroys those who would make a success of failure, and thereby would have failed the test. What do you want? The Room is the test. You must want nothing, and not even yourself. To suffer yourself: this is what the Zone wants. To suffer and no longer to bear your suffering. For who is there? Who suffers?

Beyond Use

To put weapons beyond use. A curious phrase - not to destroy them, but to place them out of use, to render them functionless. But what do they become then, those weapons? They are not destroyed, they endure, but for what purpose? To commemorate a struggle? To signal the peaceable time the bomb lies beside rock?

Dream of the rebellion of matter, revolt of the earth upon whose hard surface everything will be broken. Isn't this the meaning of the Zone of Stalker? Notice the same items that are on the Stalker's nightstand are those over which the camera pans in the Zone. The same items - yes, but now they have the patina of age, now they exhibit what the Japanese call sabi, rust. That's when I saw it, the weapon in the water: it was a bomb, lain aside in the pool outside The Room. The camera rests its gaze on the bomb. It is beyond use. Water passes across the bomb.

On the Threshold

Last year I watched Bergman’s Winter Light after seeing Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Bresson’s Mouchette. Bergman’s film, so marvellous, so towering, seemed somehow fake. The acting was theatrical, which is to say, and I wish I could make myself clearer, somehow aware of itself . This is hard for me to write because I admire Bergman's films very deeply. But I write because of my shock of finding the performances of the great Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow hollow after watching Tarkovsky. They were only actors, whereas Alexander Kaidanovsky in the role of the Stalker is much more. The whole film revolves around his shaven head, his strange mixture of nobility and self-pity, of weakness and authority, of poverty and resplendence.

If Nostalghia looks towards the apocalypse, and The Sacrifice dramatises what happens at its brink Stalker is a film which occurs after the apocalypse has happened.

Somehow, the Zone has appeared. A place one has to cross a national border to enter. What is it? We know it is terrifying and wonderful. Stalkers, semi-criminals, earn a precarious living by leading people into the Zone. There are rumours that there is a miraculous golden ball which can grant wishes hidden in the Zone. We know Kaidanovsky’s character only by his nickname. We begin in his shabby house, where he sleeps with his wife and his paralysed child in a single bed (his wife blames the child’s paralysis on the Zone), and which shudders with the sound of the trains that pass nearby. The Stalker is going to take two people known, in order to protect their identities, by the nicknames Writer and Professor, into the Zone. His wife despairs. But he must go, and he goes. He leads the others into the Zone. He takes them to the threshold of the room with the golden ball. Then what? It is mysterious. We don’t know the outcome.

Tarkovsky, in Sculpting in Time:

People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what is symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by these questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, its life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through. Whether he comes through or not depends on his own self-respect, and his capacity to distinguish between what matters and what is merely passing.

Self-respect? Are we to understand the Zone as this world, our world, through which most of us learn to find our way, however hard it is for some, and however easy it is for others? Tarkovsky seems to suggest that we need to be led, to follow someone. And I wonder, when he writes, continuing his reflections in the paragraph I quoted, ‘My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him' – I wonder whether he understands his films as a way of guiding us through life. More: are they a way of giving us life?

Stalker finds his way through the meadows by hurling bandages full of nuts into the distance to test for danger. Stalker and his party pass abandoned and decaying technology, broken military equipment. They proceed through a deserted house, through a tunnel, through a room full of sand dunes. A bird seems to disappear into thing air. An Alsation dog joins them, then disappears.

STALKER (picking his words carefully and slowly): The Zone is a highly complex system … of traps, as it were, and all of them are deadly … But people have only to appear for the whole thing to be triggered into motion. Our moods, our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings can bring about change here. And we are in no condition to comprehend them. Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe places become impassable, and the route can be either plain or easy, or impossibly confusing. That’s how the Zone is. It may even seem capricious. But in fact, at any moment it is exactly as we devise it, in our consciousness …

At one point, Stalker remembers his teacher, the greatest Stalker, one of the first, whom he calls Master. The Master returned from the Zone one day to find himself amazingly rich. But his brother had died in the Zone. The Master had led him to his death. The suggestion is that he found the golden ball and had had his wish granted - a murdered brother, riches. The Master hung himself; thereafter, he was known as Porcupine (why that name?). But the Stalker will not fail. Above all, he has learnt from the episode with Porcupine that he can never give what he gives to himself:

STALKER (frenzied): […] Stalker’s aren’t allowed in the room! They aren’t allowed! […] I am a worm, I never did anything there, now will I ever be able to … I could never provide for my wide and daughter! … And I’ve got no friends there, not can I have. But don’t take away what little I’ve got! Everything I had, there, beyond the barbed wire, that’s all been taken away! Everything I have is here, understand, here in the Zone! My freedom, my happiness … it’s all here … Since I bring people here as unhappy as me, as tormented … it’s their last hope! But I can help them! I can help them! I weep with happiness at being able to help them! Nothing in this whole wide world can help, except for me, a worm! That’s my whole life. It’s all I want. And when the time comes for me to die, I will drag myself to this spot, to this room, and my last thought will be: happiness for all! And let nobody go away empty-handed.

Stalker's whole life is a life in service. What he wants is to serve, to open a path for others. He will lead only those who feel an absolute necessity to reach the golden ball. For himself, he will wait. And when he is about to die, he will seize the golden sphere and speak his wish. Outside the Zone, at the end of the film, he says to his wife of Professor and Writer: 'they are my friends' (his friends - I find this incredibly moving). Then he says he will not enter the Zone again. But we know he will return (he had promised his wife he would not return in the opening scene of the film) and that his friends, his only friends will be those who return with him.

Why does Tarkovsky feel the need to lead us through the Zone? Here is one clue:

Of great significance to me are those traditions in Russian culture which have their beginnings in the work of Dostoevsky. Their development in modern Russia is patently incomplete; in fact they tend to be looked down upon, or even ignored altogether. There are several reasons for this: first their total incompatibility with materialism, and then the fact that the spiritual crisis experienced by all Dostoevsky’s characters (which was the inspiration of his wok and that of his followers) is also viewed with misgiving. Why is this state of ‘spiritual crisis’ so feared in contemporary Russia?

One might remember The Brothers Karamazov, where it is Father Zosima’s dying brother who, in a state of madness, declares, ‘each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all’. He continues, ‘Dear mother, I am weeping from gladness, not from grief; I want to be guilty before them, only I cannot explain it to you, for I do not even know how to lover them. Let me be sinful before everyone, but so that everyone will forgive me, and that is paradise'. There is something sentimental and indulgent here. Dostoevsky’s work is always marked by hysteria and pathos. But later, when Zosima strikes his orderly Afanasy in baseless anger, he recalls his brother’s words, and undergoes conversion. Of course it is Aloysha Karamazov to whom this phrase is linked (Aloysha’s face reminds Father Zosima of his lost brother).

‘Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all’. How should one read this phrase? As self-indulgence - as masochism in the emphasis on the I who is always more responsible than others? But guilt, here is not a general law, but singularises each of us. This is the point I am guilty before you – you may be guilty before me, this is possible, but that is your affair. Here is what Levinas says in an interview when he remembers Dostoevsky’s phrase:

I am responsible for the Other without waiting for his reciprocity.... Reciprocity is his affair.... It is I who support all, [... as in] that sentence in Dostoevsky: " We are all guilty of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others ." This is not owing to such or such a guilt which is really mine, or to offenses that I would have committed; but because I am responsible for a total responsibility, which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility. I always have one responsibility more than the others.

I don’t want to follow the winding course of Levinas’s thought, which is more difficult and more demanding than it may seem. What is crucial is the asymmetry of the demand. I before the Other – the Other, according to Levinas, is higher than me. I am responsible before the Other who outstrips me. And the Other can be anyone at all, any of you, just as I could be Other for you. This is the opening of the ethical, for Levinas – but it also recalls the opening of the world. The Other is the very light and wondrousness of the world.

How should one understand Stalker's vocation? There is always an ambiguity in Tarkovsky's films - this is an element of their greatness. The films resonate in us. For my part, lost before the worlds of Dostoevsky or Levinas - or even Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time, I can only write of a threshold at which I remain that is similar to the one before the room of the golden ball, into which the characters of Tarkovsky's film do not seem to enter. I wish I had the strength to affirm, with Tarkovsky, the need for a spiritual crisis. I suppose I feel rather like Kierkegaard's heteronym Johannes de Silentio before Abraham in his Fear and Trembling: a sense of awe that such faith, such obedience, is even possible.

I want to return to the materialism Tarkovsky repudiates. Is it not the case that in the stranded field telephones and plant encrusted tanks, in the ruined houses, and the patches of grass, but above all in the disparate items of Stalker's dream - the syringe and the icon, the coin and the packets - there is a depth or profoundity in things, a sabi, to use the word Tarkovsky borrows from Japanese aesthetics? The Zone is a place in which things affirm their revenge for being made to volatilise in circuits of exchange. And Stalker and his companions, picking their way through the Zone? They are friends of the unknown in things, being claimed by a question that seems to open in the depths of the world - a question that poses itself to us, to human beings, because we have emerged from the immanent domain of nature, a realm closed upon itself like water in water. This is what I see in the Anubian Alsatian who, for a while, attaches itself to Stalker, being near him as he lies hunched like a foetus. The dog is a living question because it seems to arrive from the depths of a nature from which we are exiled. And the bandages full of nuts Stalker throws into the distance to test for dangers are like a counter-question, from our side, from the side of human beings who, in the Zone, can become aware of what they always are: usurpers.

Time Pressure

I've seen your film four times in the last week. And I didn't simply go to see it, but in order to spend just a few hours living a real life with real artists and real people.... Everything that torments me, everything I don't have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me - it's all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror. For the first time ever a film has become something real for me, and that's why I go to see it, I want to get right inside it, so that I can really be alive.

Tarkovsky recalls the work that went into editing Mirror, in which the structure of the film was altered and the sequence of the episodes changed. It would seem the film would never find its form, that too much was missing. And yet, one day, he writes,

the material came to life; the parts started to function reciprocally, as if linked by a bloodstream; and as that last despairing attempt was projected onto the screen, the film was born before our very eyes.

Somehow, the two hundred shots of Mirror came together. Tarkovsky writes of a ‘time pressure’, in which the scenes have to come together to preserve a consistency of time, in the same manner one joins water pipes of a different diameter. The criterion that guides editing is life, according to Tarkovsky – life as it is ‘constantly moving and changing’, allowing each person to ‘interpret and feel each separate moment in his own way’.

What is essential is that the audience experience a time that is uncoerced by the director; yet, as Tarkovsky writes:

There is still an apparent dichotomy: for the directors sense of time always amounts to a kind of coercion of the audience, as does his imposition of his inner world. The person watching either falls into your rhythm (your world), and becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made. And so some people become your ‘own’ and others remain strangers; and I think this is not only perfectly natural, but, alas, inevitable.

I am intrigued about the notion of taste at issue here: the idea that, somehow, the director's experience of time would resonate with one's own, to the extent that one is possessed, or, perhaps, dispossessed by the work. Better still - there is the notion that this play of possession and dispossession is at issue in every moment of our lives, and particular when we give ourselves to drifting or to idleness, or when our attention is captured for a moment by something that is mundane and surprising.

What is essential is to cross the bridge from the opening to the work to life. This is not an opposition. Perhaps the bridge leads into the work itself. It is never a question of the representation of the world in the film. The film, sculpted from time, resonates with the rebirth of the world. 'In a word, the image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as a drop of water. Only in a drop of water!' A drop of water: an event, banal but world shaking, ordinary but extraordinary insofar, in a moment, it captures us and holds us still. A drop of water - the image is sufficient unto itself, but so too is the event. We live our lives at one time in terms of our desire to complete tasks, to finish projects, but at another - and in the same moment - in the fascination when we are unable, any longer, to be able, to assemble ourselves such that we are capable of anything at all.

'Everything that torments me, everything I don't have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me it's all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror.' - Everything is in the film. But this is because the film answers to the movement within things as they give themselves to be experienced and as we give ourselves over to them. Everything is there because it attests to a kind of 'push' or pressure that inhabits things, that is their movement in time, their constancy, their flowering or their withering which escapes determination. This is what resonates in me as I watch the film; I am claimed not by director's vision, or even his experience of time, as Tarkovsky suggests, but by time itself.

Mirror is not the film in which one recognises oneself, or recognises one's childhood. I cannot contemplate Mirror - I am not the spectator; the work does not lay itself before me. Above all, it does not let me see myself. Alexei, the child of the film is fascinating because I am seized by the fascination that seizes him as he gazes into the mirror. It is then that he allows us, too, to gaze at the film as into the mirror in which we can no longer see ourselves. At that moment, we are no longer capable of seeing, of assuming a distance from what we see. We see the film with the blindspot which permits our sight - with the incapacity from which everything we are capable issues and to which it must return. Websites as rich and as beautiful as Nostalghia mean that none of us, now, need be alone in our fascination with this film. But we share nothing but our blindness.

The Empty Room

Tarkovsky is totally averse to symbolical or allegorical interepretations of his work. But there is a marvellous interview at Nostalghia.com where he speaks very candidly of Stalker.

Should I recall the plot of this extraordinary film? I tried to do so here. But to recall: Stalker leads two men he nicknames Writer and Professor through the Zone to reach the Room in which there is a golden ball which is said to grant the wishes of all who enter there. ‘Stalker’, we are to understand, is also a nickname: there was another Stalker, who was said to have been the greatest Stalker of them all, who was said to have entered the Room. He was the teacher of the present Stalker. One day, he returned from the Zone and found himself amazingly rich. Yet his brother had died in the Zone; the Master (as Stalker calls him) had led him to his death. The suggestion is that he found the golden ball and had had his wish granted: the death of his brother and countless riches. But then the Master hung himself; thereafter, he was known as Porcupine.

Who is Writer? A talented man who is burnt out. A popular writer who wants to enter the Room in order to recover his abilities, to find relief from the burden he is carrying. Later he worries that if he becomes a genius, he will stop writing, as everything he’ll write will be perfect. Writer then thinks about the story of the Master. Perhaps, he speculates, the Room grants you more than just the wishes you consciously select. Tarkovsky paraphrases Writer’s musings:

Perhaps they are true wishes pertaining to the inner world. If, let's say, I wish to become rich then I'll probably obtain not the riches but something more compatible with my nature, depth, the truth of my soul — for example poverty — which is closer to what my soul needs in fact.

What about Professor? He carries a bomb to blow up the Room since it is a place which will draw those who would wish for unlimited power and might endanger human life. Yet he gives up this plan – after all, those who set out for the Room desire only primitive things: money, fame, love. But he also comes to understand that the room offers something important: hope, longing, the ideal.

And what of Stalker? What is he looking for? Does he believe in the marvellous powers of the Room? Of the golden ball therein which will grant the wishes of the Writer and the Professor he has brought with him through the Zone? Tarkovsky:

Stalker does not enter the Room, that wouldn't be proper, that is not his role. It would be against his principles. Also, if all this is indeed a fruit of his imagination then he does not enter because he knows no wishes are going to be granted there. For him it is important that the other two believe in the Room's power and that they go inside. Stalker has a need to find people who believe in something in the world in which no one believes in anything.

Stalker is a man of faith, but faith in what? Perhaps he only has faith in faith – a faith that would retrieve faith from its disappearance from the world. Tarkovsky, speaking of Stalker:

He has a highly developed sense of his own worthlessness but at the same time he says to himself: why enter if nothing special happens there and most likely no wishes are granted? On the one hand he understands that wishes cannot be fulfilled and that they won't be fulfilled. And on the other, above all, he is afraid to enter. His approach is full of superstitions and contradictions. That's why Stalker is so depressed — nobody really believes in the Room's existence.

But it’s not the Room’s existence which concerns him as a wish-fulfilling device. Tarkovsky:

The Zone is in some sense a result of Stalker's imagination. Our line of reasoning was as follows: it is he who invented that place to bring people there and convince them about the truth of his creation [...] I completely agree with the suggestion that it was Stalker who had created the Zone's world in order to invent some sort of faith, a faith in that world's existence. It was a working hypothesis which we tried to preserve during creation of that world. We even planned an ending variant in which the viewer would find out Stalker had invented it all and now he is heartbroken because people do not believe him.

I have said that Stalker is a nickname – that there are other Stalkers. This is certainly the case in the novel on which the film is based. But Tarkovsky transformed that novel when he filmed it. Now, we are to be unsure whether the Room itself is not just Stalker’s invention.

Writer completely questions [the Room’s existence]. He says: "It probably doesn't exist" and he asks Professor: "Who told you this Room even existed?" The scientist points to Stalker. So he appears to be the sole witness. He is the only person who can testify to the existence of a Room with the power to grant wishes. He is the only one who believes. All the stories about the Room come from him — one could imagine he has invented it all.

I would like to reiterate something I said before. When he returns from the Zone, Stalker says to his wife of Professor and Writer: 'they are my friends'. Friends, it would seem, because they entertained a kind of hope with him. That they joined him, for a while in a kind of hope for hope: this was their friendship. And is it in the hope of a kind of friendship that Tarkovsky made this film? Where does he lead us, Tarkovsky the Stalker? To the brink of a Room we know is empty. Who is there? God? Nothing? But we remain with Tarkovsky at the brink - there where, just beyond, hopes and ideals once burned.

I like Stalker the most. The is the best part of myself and at the same time the least real one. Writer — who is very close to me — is a man who has lost his way. But I think he will be able to resolve his situation in the spiritual sense.

Assurance

I love those moments when an artist, sure of his or her genius, feels able to speak and to speak on all matters, like a master. Imagine the million conversations Tarkovsky had in private before, at a relatively early age, he made the masterpiece Andrei Rublev and gave this interview. What I love here is not necessarily what he says, although he is always interesting, but his assurance. How dazzled he must have been at the work which made itself from his hands!

Apocalyptic Piety

Ritual, liturgy: do they not offer the chance of warding off chaos and change for a moment, to plunge back again into the waters of eternity? To honour the gods and one's ancestors; to receive their directives, their gifts anew - does this protect us from flux and decay? Catastrophes come and go, but quietly, alongside them, there are small acts of ritual and prayer: sacrifices in which you relinquish your place up as a particular person and take your place in the rite. You are one celebrant among others; others before you have celebrated, and others after you will celebrate once more. True, ritual is itself vulnerable; there is the chance that it degenerates, becoming a matter of stereotypical gestures, of hollow ceremony. Will is required. Intensity. Then the ritual can be alive and maintain a community in closeness to eternity. There is also the danger of zealousness, whereby those who fail to perform the ritual properly are expelled from the community. Violence is always close, too close.

To watch Tarkovsky's Mirror for the umpteenth time - is this not, itself a ritual? And the admirers of The Sacrifice who go to the cinema for see it again, on a crisp new print - are they not gathered by the artwork into a a kind of community? Notice the way Tarkovsky makes us wait. He asks for patience when we watch Gorchakov cross the drained pool and when the protagonist of The Sacrifice strikes a match in order to set fire to everything he possesses. Remember, too, the long scene in Solaris which follows the car as it drives through a futuristic city. And the scene where Stalker and the others sit outside the Room. Perhaps these long scenes are linked to a sense of eternity, to what is repeated over and again in the ritual.

I read about the Russian notion of the artist as the cosmogonist who brings the world into being once again. Is this the eternity to which Tarkovsky attests, and towards which which his films draw us, as with a ritual? Think of the argument you find in Descartes that God sustains the being of the universe in each moment - that the creation is perpetually re-enacted. But isn't there also the sense that ritual (think of the worshippers in the church in the mist in Nostalghia) has become impossible for us. But then I remember Abraham's sacrifice, in which the ritual piety is itself placed at stake, sacrificed, according to the demands of a God who opens a future beyond ritual repetition. Isn't an apocalyptic piety born at this moment (I am following Philip Goodchild's Capitalism and Religion)? The chance of a future that opens beyond the repetition of the past? A future that demands the sacrifice that shatters endless repetition of the ritual?

Martyrology

The final movement of Beethoven's 9th is the background to Domenico's self-immolation in the square in Rome in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. Remember it is as though scratched or stuck. No glorious celebration of freedom and joy ... the music stutters. What do I hear in this stuttering? A hesitancy within the artwork itself - within a beautiful artwork. A glitch in the beautiful which as it were divides it from its beauty. And it is thus with Domenico's suicide: it is not beautiful. He falls and crawls along the ground, crying out. He dies - it is a martyr's death. Martyrdom? But in the interval between the immolation and his death, he is just a man who has set himself alight.

Here is the mad attempt to negate the world, to draw the whole world into the fire of sacrifice and bring it shuddering back into birth. And this mad action is met with incomprehension that voids it of all beauty. We - the viewers - are not spared the hideousness of his agony. Far away, Gorchakov has heard of Domenico's death. He takes the stub of a candle and begins to walk across the drained pool. It is madness, all of this. But a madness which is bound to the world's plight.

We have seen people die violent deaths (swollen bodies, scattered limbs) and know death is not beautiful. But does the abjection of the martydoms which, in depriving death of its beauty, bear witness to the desparation and horror of suffering (think of the monks who set themselves on fire in protest at the Vietnam war)? Yes, witness is the word I would insist upon (isn't it linked etymologically to the word martyr?)

But then remember Mishima's ritual suicide: he would have cut open his own stomach - terrible pain - and his 'second' beheaded him. As I recall, the 'second' (was his name Morita?) did not slice Mishima's head from his body in a clean stroke. It took several attempts (and wasn't it someone else who delivered the final blow?) In Mishima's aesthetics, was death not also a moment of beauty (it is more complex than that)? - A beauty that, we know, was linked by Mishima to the glory of the old Japanese order, to the emperor? This is not a martyrdom, for it bears witness only to the limitations of a reactionary aesthetic which requires Mishima step from the world of the writer (he wrote at night) into the daylight of the world. Reactionary? Yes, because as Tarkovsky understands, the work of art already bears witness to the world's plight. There is no need to step into the light.

The Zone

Deleuze: The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events that happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film.

I daydream about a rebellion of matter. Of a writing, say, which no longer hears the demand of the bureaucracy, that develops lawlessly, which breaks the connection between sender and addressee. A rebellion of matter against form, a revolution of words themselves, as they come to resound with what shatters them. Resonance: the rebellion of matter as it resists reduction to the sign.

The world seems to have solidified as a series of signs. Strategic plans, quality assurance certificates, audits and appraisals – what is important is not so much performance but the appearance of performance; efficiency does not matter so much as the simulacrum of efficiency. Who am I, in this system? The functionary, the role, the stamp of bureaucracy’s power. Which is to say, hardly anyone (who I am does not matter). How else to evaluate the world? How to receive the world in another sense?

Think of ordinary words, placed one after another in the work of fiction. Think of Kafka’s cool prose; think of the pleasant lucidity of early Duras. Ordinary words – but by the fact of being so placed, the fact that they lie down alongside other words causes a trembling to pass through them. They become a conduit; a rumbling traverses them, a great trembling which is also a trembling of the world. Suddenly, reading, you know the system of signs is dislocated; know that proliferation and disorder have escaped the universal signifying power. A book, a little book, rests as though atop a volcano.

Resonance: books call to one another through their readers. Think, too, of the songs which sing to one another. Think of the films which touch one another. Watching Tarkovsky's Stalker, I know the disparate objects in the pools of water (paintings, a syringe, money …) have undergone the alteration that prevents them disappearing into circuits of exchange. And isn’t this the miracle of the Zone? It is a place which refuses value, which has no value. The earth recovered; the becoming of the world reaffirming itself.

One day there will be a great rebellion of the earth. No: one day, we will notice this rebellion, which happens today and everyday (the future is happening). The pantheist speaks of Gaia, but that word does not reach to matter’s depth. In the end, it is not even a question of the rebellion of this or that thing – of the syringe, the banknote, the painting, but of all things. The refusal of matter, of the world, of the earth: in a sense, we are already outside it, walking across it as strangers. It refuses us; the entire order of nature refuses us. What is the source of this resistance? Bataille calls it immanence, naming by this word the depths of nature as it roils in itself as water does in water. Water in water: the lion, king of the beasts, is a wave higher than the others, but it is still a wave. Remember the example from Hegel: I say the word, lion, and I lose the lion in its lived immediacy; the word lifts the world off its hinges. This loss has been redoubled. Bureaucracy, administration: the world disappeared …

But there is art, there is the matter of art. The matter foregrounded in the work, that approaches us there. And the artist through whom the work might be born? Like Stalker himself, going into the Zone, he is marked by friendship – by friendship with those he takes towards the work (I wrote about this at In Writing ). With Stalker, there is a friendship with the Writer and Professor whom he guides across the Zone. Friendship because he was their guide and because of the Zone, and the rebellion of matter as it affirms itself there. And the artist? Friendship with those who are undone as the work reaches them, touches them as he or she (the artist) is also touched. (Links to something like a minor theory of art here.)

Still, this argument is incomplete. Matter does not refer simply to the expanse of nature. I am haunted by Blanchot’s words: only man is unknown. Unknown – which is to say Stalker’s journey with Writer and Professor, his relationship with them, passes by way of matter. The Zone, then, is not nature, but a way of experiencing the strangeness of the other person, of welcoming the other person as the unknown.

(I am indebted here to Philip Goodchild's Capitalism and Religion.)

Resignation

Tarkovsky’s Mirror. The scenes with the narrator and his wife are barely alive in the screenplay, but in the film! The character of the wife, Natalia was added into the film as it was being made. Margarita Terekhova is astonishing. The narrator is guilty. The screenplay tempts us to identify him with Tarkovsky; and we see a poster for Andrei Rublev in the narrator’s flat. But he is someone else (who does the narrator allow Tarkovsky, allow us, to be?). – The narrator is irresponsible, he neglects his son, taunts his wife. He is remiss. We sense his father was similar – at least, his return is greeted as a sudden surprising benediction by his children. Perhaps the reasons for his behaviour do not matter. He seems dislocated – the world is not real enough for him. He is like a ghost.

I think of a book I read many years ago: Peace, by Gene Wolfe. You can find it in the science fiction section of the bookshop. The protagonist is a dead man. You have to work it out; it isn’t easy. Took me three reads to see not only that he is a ghost, but that he had been a murderer, too, and he remembers the murders he committed (though this is not clear to the reader). The same scene in Peace as in Mirror: the protagonist is told he has a limited time to live. It’s all coming to an end. And the same fantastic quality to that scene: it is not real, as it were, and it is not meant to be.

What does it matter? I am thinking of Mirror's narrator. Thinking of a sense of unreality I experienced today as I walked home from work. And a sense of responsibilities that will open before me one day that I could – could, not would – shirk. My excuse? I imagine it would be similar to the narrator of the film: I’m after something else, I want something else. How indulgent and melodramatic!

I read a screenplay many years ago by Bergman – The Touch – I’ve never seen it. I remember the male protagonist breaking up a marriage – why? Resentment? The desire to tear a hole open in the world, to break something open? It is more than resentment. A kind of frustration with the unreality of things, of the absence of affect. Where does it lead? Petulant rage … sabotage … self-indulgence. Smashing up lives.

I remembered the same character when I saw the film Liv Ullman made with Bergman’s script: Faithless. And felt a kind of anger at the philanderers who would smash up their lives to escape – to escape what? When I read The Touch, I did so as one who was outside, far outside the world of work. When I saw Faithless, I was on the verge of getting a job, but still outside (it was a short term contract …) Today, remembering both I thought: now I am the bourgeois with the job and the mortgage, I am one who will be able to shirk responsibility. I know I won’t. But what a strange feeling to be part of the world – if I experience the unreality of that world, I do so from a secure place within it (although my current contract runs out in 6 months …)

Natalia. Think of the way she looks at the narrator. They have had a life together, a child. They a share a history, yet what do they share? Now the narrator has turned from her. He gently satirises her account of her new lover, a writer. He is like a ghost, removed from everything. And his son? He is burning things in the yard, poking at them with a stick. Another ghost, a ghost in the making, just like me.