Stalker

Tarkovsky takes us to a toxic space. He assures us - against all common sense - that we will be saved. Do we believe him? Do we really want to…

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A man lies on the bed crying. He is inconsolable. For he has taken those great gurus, our high priests of the modern spirit - Writer and Scientist - into the sacred place and…they have defiled it. They have no faith, and so cannot embrace the mysteries of the unknown; the unseen wonders, the miracles of the mystic spirit, the religious centre of mankind, all are beyond them. Asked to leap into belief and…they hold back. Their souls weak, they prefer the mundane truths of the everyday to a life replete with meaning and wonder. They are lost souls, terrified of what they cannot see and touch. Impoverished by the banalities of wealth and fame. Materialists through and through.

Writer is too worldly. Those endless temptations, that constant variety, the pleasures at the end of a telephone, he thinks of them as a glittering crowd bustling his daemon out of his work, leaving nothing but their clamour. We think of a samovar in a living room. The guests knock at the door, enter, then walk to the table, where they take a cup… I wanted to change the world, he says, but the world has changed me. Each cup is a mouthful of precious spirit… Today the samovar is empty. There are grumbles. A few turn away. Some are not coming at all… Why is he suddenly so poor… He doesn't sparkle these days; so dull, very uninviting… Soon there will be no guests to murmur at his lack of hospitality; his predictable poverty. Writer knows this. He chides me for labouring the point. Then tells a beautiful story (this writer has talent) that perfectly expresses his predicament. Someone digs up a fragment of an ancient pot; which is put on display in a museum, to be visited by thousands; the experts marvelling at its antiquity, the aesthetes its beauty. This adoration goes on for a long time until one day the pot is revealed to be only a hundred years old. Immediately all interest is lost; the pot becomes worthless and plain. This story is blighting Writer. For the truth it contains - it is public opinion that decides value - is terrible. This public - superficial, assured and subject to rapid change - removing the meanings we thought intrinsic to objects, people and works of art. Everything is transient, including that holiest of Russian holies, literature. All is dependent upon the opinions of a crowd of characters - they are a force of nature - most of whom are either ignorant, foolish or blind. They bestow value, and then they move on, taking it with them. A writer’s eternity a myth that is always waiting to be exposed (lucky those who die before the inevitable). The moral is clear. This writer’s reputation is as fleeting as yesterday’s pop star’s, already lost to a paupers grave. We strive for importance. Convince ourselves we’ve attained it. Then others confirm that we have created something of permanent worth. At last we can sit back satisfied: one brick, at least, we have placed in the cathedral’s wall. It is but a tale we tell ourselves. There is no truth or beauty that will live forever; in a decade our work too will be forgotten. No churches are built in our name. The public gives. The public takes away; like a waiter removing the dirty dishes after the evening’s meal. It is an ugly debilitating thought. Writer looks at it day on day. The ceaseless flow of the (in)crowd scrubs out the very ideas of Truth, Beauty and the Good; always they are moving onto the next Big Thing; their intelligence, their confidence, that ability to define what is cool - it is they themselves, their youth, their sophistication - removing all that would deny their influence, and their need for perpetual variety, those tingling excitements of the comfortably new. Truth. Beauty. The Good. These are illusions. Or at best spots of sunlight on the kitchen sink, soon washed away by clouds. Writer - our seer of modern life - has looked beyond the old myths and discovered reality: nothing is permanent, not even literary value. Value! The pretty dresses the plain wear to pretend to prettiness. The very acclamation Writer receives is a sign he is ephemeral. Doomed by his own popularity. 

It is not so simple, of course. Writer retains the old belief that the artist can stand against the social flow. If only… It is a dying faith… How many are strong enough to stand alone? You place a statue in the middle of the river. Within a few years the river knocks it down. Again and again you fix that statue to its plinth; again and again the water pushing against it pushes it over until…one day, it is your own doubts that are carrying you away… You stumble, fall, and drift off downriver, a broken tree, the waterlogged branches, its sodden leaves…

Writer has hopes still. It’s why he’s here. The zone a last chance to believe in himself. But this writer is scared. What if… Shall I say it? What if…I am no better than the crowd… He should never have come to this place, for he has put himself into a terrible spot: he wants his work to live forever but, deep down, he knows it will die very quickly. He is in the zone, hoping for a miracle. This man who doesn’t believe in miracles.

Stalker talks about the plasticity of nature; the soft, the quick, the flexible are the young and living things; it is the old and the dead who are stiff, hard, impenetrable. Isn’t this just what Writer is attacking? No. The zone reverses all values. Stalker is describing not the impermanence of society, a purely material flux and flow, but the evanescence of the spirit, a quite different kind of force; its infinite subtleties benign and alive with life if we are awake enough to grasp them. But we have to keep an eye on that spirit: it can easily turn against us. It is why the zone is so dangerous; shifting, changing, metamorphosing; the zone is unfathomable to all but the most experienced; such as stalkers, saints, shamans, madmen, those with the special gift. The zone is supernaturally sensitive, quick to intuit feelings and thoughts, it is preternaturally attuned to an individual’s atmosphere; a Stalker’s sensibility has be acute and delicate, able to react to every shift and change. Only a great artist could survive in the zone, for only genius could capture, as it insists you must, its intangible presences: it is a climate rather than a place. The zone is unforgiving to those whose souls are coarse or utilitarian. And it demands your sacrifice to receive its riches. There is innocence too: the mind has to be pure. At the centre of the zone is the Room; it is where one makes our deepest wish; that most difficult dangerous moment in a person’s life.

All along Scientist has been cagey. No wonder. There’s a bomb in his rucksack! He wants to blow up the zone because its promise of perfect happiness is, he believes, a danger to society; it could not survive, he says, a mass emigration to paradise. He doesn't understand. We suspect other motives too. The zone operates outside the laws of science. It is therefore a threat to his understanding of the universe, which in turns undercuts his identity, the idea of himself fused with his concepts and theories. What an expert knows is who they are. No longer grounded on the central nervous system the personality grows out of their knowledge and ideas; not quite a person they are wholly Physicist, Doctor, Literary Critic. But Scientist has made a mistake; he has entered the zone, which is shaking this belief until it cracks, is splitting open… Will he risk a total collapse… No. Better to destroy the thing than junk an epistemology that defines his character. In fact, Scientist hasn’t understood the zone at all. This is no Arcadia. We take a tab of ecstasy and rave in an open field… Hell no, this Room can kill you. Freedom is dangerous. It is a deadly substance. 

Thank you: Stalker has returned to help me. He tells a story; it about a friend who after leaving the zone became exceedingly rich. Then one week later he was dead. His soul suffocated inside a money bag. Only an intellectual could believe the zone is both real and safe. Thinking with ideas, which he uses to construct his world, pay the rent, give himself status, attract those nubile disciples, Scientist believes ideas are, essentially, benign. Scientist only wants to blow this one up because it is so marvellous. Poor chap. He hasn't got it. Whilst the zone is a site of the spiritual - a mind can live here - it is not a collection of concepts, which we file away at the end of office hours. What exists here is the spirit that creates and suffuses ideas, theories, works of art. Not what the mind thinks - its outcome and product - but the quality of the mind as it thinks… This is so hard. To enter the zone is to test one’s spiritual talents. Each thought a step on the tightrope… So easy to fall off… And there is no safety net to catch coarseness, self-interest or the inauthentic. To survive the zone one’s thinking has to be top-notch; and there must be that innocence. The dangers are immense! The zone a tyrant to those who are not true and noble. This is the risk. It is an enormous one! Can we make it across that high wire… Stalker changes the metaphor: the Room is a mirror where we see ourselves naked. It is where we confront a mind stripped of all its illusions. The locals keep away from the zone; their native superstitions protecting them from the real dangers that lurk here. Stalker knows the risks. He lives with them as an intimate friend. In the Room we discover our deepest wishes, which are either pathetic or sublime, the latter requiring a Sisyphean slog - forever climbing towards a mountain top we will never see let alone conquer. Failure and success. Both are devastating to the comforts of ordinary life, and its simple fantasies. There is no easy pleasures in the zone. Our greatest wish is the very thing that could destroy us. Stalker agrees: this is so. The Room offers a revelation that changes a life completely. Exiled from the self, we will grow distant from others. The consolations of community will vanish. We will be alone. After this last trip Stalker’s wife, despairing over his obsession with the zone - it makes him an outsider and a target for the authorities - asks to be taken to the Room. Stalker reacts badly. He is afraid that she won’t have faith… Always this risk of a tremendous loneliness. How many are strong enough to confront that?

In a beautiful scene, one of the most beautiful in cinematic history, Writer, Scientist and Stalker sit outside the Room looking at across a large puddle of shifting light and exploding rain. Stalkers cannot enter the Room. The others, not trusting themselves, are scared of it. There is no faith in transcendence. Does Writer really desire immortality? Is he prepared to sacrifice his acclaim and wealth to become a second Tolstoy? Or is that stunning young woman - she has film star looks - who left him on the outskirts of the zone, driving off with his hat on the car's roof, a more sure and greater attraction? The hard and lonely work of art, its dedication to the spirit adrift on the uncertainties of fate - it can take centuries to decide a masterpiece - is a fantastic risk - what sane person makes such leaps of faith? - better, surely, to play safe, and stay with that beautiful model, who each night guarantees a filmset’s Elysium. The easy triumphs of fame, its rewards of money and approbation, is the rational and sensible choice. Only fools risk their loss. You have to be a saint to be a genius. And you need faith: you have to believe in your immortality. Only time measures the eternal. Time. It is suffused with a spirit that touches the anointed and their acolytes. But who are they? Only the spirit decides. Yet the spirit has no voice; it issues no certificates. It is nothing but an air… We put our noses into the sky and sniff like dogs… Stalker is not happy with this metaphor: it is a bone without any meat, he says. Ok, let’s choose another: testing for genius is water-divining. Genius gives out signals that only the few can pick up (it is the senses of the mind, its feel and touch, not the mind itself, that ultimately decides who belongs to the gods). Stalker is one of these. A madman and a criminal. His wife, a respectable bourgeois, was advised not to marry him: he is a mystic, she was told, and therefore unreliable, weird, a surefire failure. They were right. The truly civilised should always avoid a Stalker. Stay clear of the zone you good people, it deranges all right thinking. And this is the consequence: you end up outside ordinary society; wandering in a desert of your own making, where one must find one's own oasis; with only that fugacious spirit to guide you. Always you must be testing the atmosphere. Those dogs again: you think of invisible threats pulling those noses up into the sky…Pull: sniff sniff. Pull: sniff sniff. Stalker again: very good, but there are no metaphors here. Or similes. Concepts have long ago disappeared. It’s just you, and a mind alive with its emptiness. These (mental) feelings so fragile and evanescent that even I cannot know if it they are real. Risk one’s life for something so nebulous? Only the truly heroic, or the insane, could be so foolish.

Writer is weak: he knows himself too well. When he asks the question - am I one of the immortals or fashion of a few weeks? - he already knows the answer; too many compromises have been made for his work to live long. Faith! He has no basis for it. Only a child believes in glitter and tinsel. There will be no transcendence here. This writer says goodbye to the Room.

Scientist is a technician. His dreams of great discoveries are the grandiose fantasies of an intellectual bureaucrat whose strongest impulses are to status and prestige; an odd telephone call with a superior revealing his character. Save society! Only small minds believe in this fairy tale. Let’s be blunt. Scientist, resenting his own mediocrity, disses what is beyond his reach. This is no genius. He is a second-order intellectual who works with the ideas of others. He is a sort of cipher. No wonder that he feels oppressed by those of infinitely greater talent. He stares into the night and, in trying to look beyond the stars, hurts his eyes… This is a man suffering from the anxieties of the second-rate. No spaceman this, only an intellectual worker, a lab rat. Of course he stews with resentment. And typical of many - they are common amongst the clerkly class - he wants to destroy what he himself cannot understand and create. Bye bye original thought… Go into the Room! Who can truly face their pettiness? Scientist doesn't even have the courage of his envy. There will no big boom! in this film.

The Room survives, as it must. A work of art to always hang on some wall.

We leave the zone and return to modern life. Everyone is depressed. Writer and Scientist, failing in their quest, have confirmed the poverty of their souls; while Stalker has had an especially bad time. The cynicism of Writer and Scientist’s destructive bent have poisoned his being: it will take a long time to recover from this trip. For Stalker, like all mystics, is a would-be saviour, but as with all saviours he is destined to be disillusioned by those he wants to save. They are different kinds of person from himself, almost a separate species. His wife puts him to bed, and hopes that sleep will revive him. Alone, she muses upon both herself and her husband; his deep strangeness, the difficulties of living with an outcast, the hard times, and…yes!, she concludes with a joyful affirmation, the happiness. No other life would she have chosen. The spirit enriches far more than the social and physical impoverishes.

In the next room their daughter is reading a book. When we enter she puts the book aside and crouches down to look across the table’s top; she stares at the glasses standing there. We know. We understand. In that book it speaks of faith moving obstacles… She wills the glasses to move. They do! The spirit lives on! Stalker is going to be a woman.










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