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?
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