from russia, with love

Showed Solaris to the students last night. Surprised that a number sat through it. Was asked to say something on it and very gingerly agreed...

What can one say? What should one say. I don't know much about the technical aspects of the film and I'm not sure whether the biographical ones are important. It's a poetic vision by a unique individual that requires a unique response. After all, Tarkovsky once said (of Andrei Rublev, the great painter of icons), Traditional truths remain truths only when they are vindicated by personal experience.

So his films are not about 'explaining'-and I couldn't explain them anyway-but only showing us what is somehow familiar-if it touches us, that is. And if it doesn't, then it doesn't. I think Mark Rothko, who was Russian in a way, would have understood how feelings open the way to what Milosz calls a 'second space'.

In Sculpting in Time Tarkovsky says:

The aim of art is to loosen the soul, to render the soul capable of turning to good. Showing, not telling.

So, I don't like this film because it's a so-called intellectual film or because I like the"ideas"-Tarkovsky was right here when he said: thought is brief, but the image leaves an impression-but because, to take a deeply Russian notion: the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Of course, this is a slow and complex film with lots of 'inter-textual' references (Rembrandt, Breughel, Bach, Don Quixote, and others) and a particular emphasis on time. Tarkovsky himself was wary of films that aimed to merely pass time, or kill it, or forget it. His view was quite the opposite since bereft of memory a person becomes the prisoner of an illusory existence. So, memory has a spiritual quality to it.

I'm reminded here of a true story that I read in the papers some years back about a man who would forget all he knew every seven minutes. He described his life as like an island in a vast ocean. Incidentally, the only thing he could remember was music.

Finally, I don't think this is a science-fiction in the traditional sense of the term. Why I love this film is because it is, at least to me, a profoundly religious film, a film about the mysterious and that is something which leaves explanation open, but not too open. Like a broken circle, perhaps? And that brokenness implies an understanding of the truth, as one of the characters in the film says, that you can only love that which you can lose.

the lightness of being

H: Do you know yourself?

K: As much as any human being does.

No, the human heart is unknowable. That's the point. Only what is lost can be found. One cannot lose what one has not possessed.

I can lose what I want. I want you.

second sense

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; ...for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment,..

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

---Walter Pater, cited in Iris M.

In order to be free..you have to have your own hypothesis about what you are called to do, and follow it, not giving in to circumstances or complying with them. But that sort of freedom demands powerful inner resources, a high degree of self-awareness, a consciousness of your responsibility to yourself and therefore to other people.
---Tarkovsky.

Only a very small part of the art of being happy is an exact science.
---Stendhal, cited in Avner Offer.

Second takes, second spaces (Milosz, must I name you?). Not just the immediate sensation, 'experience', but sustained attention, the soft, slow-burning blue flame as well, habitual reflection (Adam Smith), disciplined freedom (Sen), the simple ordinary things,the background work that quietly goes on behind the scenes: goodness as a movement to the absolute, the sigh you don't hear.

The capacity, the fundamental human capacity, of revision, of second thoughts; the ability to distance oneself from one's immediate or urgent perceptions, to evaluate one's likes and dislikes. Or else, we'd just be happiness machines, swayed one way or the other by our 'interests' or pleasures. And could we, then, talk of qualitatively higher pleasures or would we be constrained to talk in terms of quantities (and who, then, would be doing the talking, one wonders)? Is experience, happiness, just mental satisfaction or does it open us out to a love of the world and other people?

I cannot imagine my life being so free that I could do what I wanted; I have to do what seems most important and necessary at any given stage.
---Tarkovsky.

But let's not talk of love and chains, and things we can't untie.

Rialto

And once you have understood it, you remain for ever under the spell of its beauty and of your initial rapture.

The point is that each of the characters in Carpaccio's crowded compositions is a centre. If you concentrate on any one figure you begin to see with unmistakable clarity that everything else is mere context, background, built up like a kind of pedestal for this 'incidental' character. The circle closes...

The circle closes around each one of us, and opens up on to another. This lack of space,(how unlike Poussin's abstract openness!) holds, gathers the light to itself, a darkening star, a dying sun.

You want to say it as it is, to see it as it is. Nothing more. No need for metaphor or poetry. It is still thisness, lovingly inscribed in the details, like the fine interweaving of delicate patterns, the threads of time; the fire of the world, transmuting lead into gold,the betrothal of the blue to the red, does not mean a forgetting, the loss of self, but a deepening of subjectivity. A fidelity to yourself, to the reality of the absolute, to perfection and to the 'bridges' -stone or floating-that were placed before us.

stand forgotten

"The striving for perfection leads an artist to make spiritual discoveries, to exert the utmost moral effort. Aspiration towards the absolute is the moving force in the development of mankind...realism is a striving for the truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical"

The old pond was still
A frog jumped in the water
And a splash was heard.

Reeds cut for thatching
The stumps now stand forgotten
Sprinkled with soft snow.
---Basho.

To say the most, in the shortest time; the line that connects two spaces. Learning what not to say. To keep silent. Let things come to you. Know when to jump. Thoughtlessly.

Snow melts.
Reveals stones.
Sometimes green earth.

redire ad creatorem

I've seen your face before, my friend
but I don't know if you know who I am
Well, I remember, I remember, don't worry
how could I ever forget
It's the first time, and the last time we ever met.

The importance of exactness; the ability and desire to say the right thing, at the right time, in the right way; to pluck out the right word, image, from the stream of impressions. Hold your nerve, the memory of the absolute past was always there for you, lovingly left in your way for you to stumble upon, just under the surface, or like fish or deep shadows in the water.

The last time opened the door to the first time; just as the first moment held the memory of the last moment close to itself, memory and desire intertwining, falling, toppling into one another. When time ceases to be time there shall be no "first" or "last".

With the force of gravity removed, objects go flying off into space. But is that not what happens in love as well?

first meetings:

'And in the dark our nakedness was radiant
As slowly it inclined...
You slept, the lilac stretched out from the table
To touch your eyelids with a universe of blue,
And you received the touch upon your eyelids
and they were still, and still your hand was warm'

"If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met"

In itself, a passer-by whom you have seen at some time in your life means nothing new..but within the terms of the image, a moment of life, one and unique, her form is recorded, truly seen, perfect and simple.

Reaching down into the furthest depths of the recreation of life, to carve out time, until only the moment remains, and only the most perfect image stands, still, fresh, open, trembling, a rolling sky-blue, the sparkling of eyes, the flash of fire, the slow burning of the blue in the red, the thawing of ice by the spring breeze, the inky waters stirring, the stuttering of words on your lips. A new time entering the old, sliding into it in the dark, the shock of the return, unscripted and unbroken.

Queen of Spades

We die from a lack of imagination.
----Isak. D.

You see the world, live in it, amidst strange people, at a slight angle to the universe. Gently open the door for other people, even when it was closed on you. Because.Untimely departures. Are there any timely ones? Read the schedule. Play the game, show your hand.

Before your time. Someone called your name. With a true heart.

Dark with time, yet still a queen.But not,alas,of hearts. A life weaved around those "if's" and "but yet's". Ec-centric, off-key, out of sync. Look out, but also in. Look out, dear one!

I feel at ease and sad; there's a radiance in my sighs,
My sighs are all of you,
Of you, and you alone...My melancholy
Is untouched by torment or distraction,
And my heart is burning and loving once more.
---Pushkin?

Not a "search" for an image but a finding. Finders keepers. You grow into it. The key: into the most perfect image, mystery coming to light. What is superfluous, falls away. A simple line. A word. Quintessential. The image that is unfinished, and yet whole. Degrees of absoluteness.

I kept your soul in a blue bottle for safekeeping; you, my image close to your heart. Trapped in each other. The glass broke, and the child was a child no more.

double vision

Seeing two, when there is only one.

'An artistic discovery occurs each time as a new and unique image of the world, a hieroglyphic of absolute truth...'

'a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, the ideal...'

'I simply cannot believe that an artist can ever work for the sake of 'self-expression'. Self-expression is meaningless unless it meets with a response...'

'..for thought is brief, but the image is absolute...'

'You remain for ever under the spell of its beauty and of your initial rapture...'

A few words, out of context, fragments that glimmer, open a way. Simple words. "It's" beauty, and "your" rapture..the meeting of beauty with an idea, of beauty with the self. And: "initial" rapture, as if the stone thrown in the pond produces a dynamic equilibrium, broken circles, each circle an area of concentration, attentiveness, interpenetrating the other; the point, the centre of everything.

A frog jumps into a pond
Splash!
Silence again.

sufi andrey

a hope, today,
for a thinker's
word
to come,
in the heart.
---Paul Celan

[why write? Not for self-expression, or discovery or any other such nonsense. certainly your thoughts are drying up without any commenters. why is it only women who write to you? and women who stop writing you? press on. or off. you read: "i have a cold"; "i hate my mum"; isn't silence better than blogging?]

not a double life, but half a life. can't you think of any real numbers, b?

there is no mention of the word 'sufi' in the Qur'an. yes, but there is no mention of the word 'moron' and yet still you exist.

From 'Sculpting Time':

it's all too easy to be satisfied with glimmers of intuition, rather than sound, coherent reasoning.

It is considered that time per se, helps to make known the essence of things. The Japanese therefore see a particular charm in the evidence of old age. They are attracted to the darkened tone of an old tree, the ruggedness of a stone, or even the scruffy look of a picture whose edges have been handled by a great many people. To all these signs of age, they give the name sabi, which literally means 'rust'. Sabi, then, is a natural rustiness, the charm of olden days, the stamp of time. Sabi, as an element of beauty, embodies the link between art and nature.