Tag: Andrey Tarkovsky

Mirrors

For Andrey Tarkovsky.

A common impulse: to return to the comforting womb, but you offer alternatives, where opposites swap places: the dream is waking; the old, young. After the before, a whisper: Watch the rain inside.

In your gaze, apocalypse becomes a monochrome street, disappearing into sky. You vanish the expected plot, the comfortable heroic character, show a living man instead, and the others we know well in secret: those mystics, depressives, and recluses that rarely join the table.

Everywhere these pools and puddles, reflecting. All this silence, its maker unrepentant. In this layered universe, no part of nature is ever fixed. Emerging from earth and water, leaning toward air and fire. 

There is no need to return, after all. There are no opposites here.

Visions

An artist elaborates.

The goal: to arrive at a truth endorsed by life.

For example, how war is often experienced not as explosion, but as tension, a concentration that feels like a rumbling in the ground. For example, the expressiveness of a death. For example, the fact of a vast cloth of undivided time between the living and the dead.

So many aspects of human life can only be faithfully represented through poetry, the inner power of the image, the fact of accounting for the participation of an audience, a listener, a viewer, as an essential aspect of any genuine effort to connect.

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This post is the result of notes made while reading the opening chapter of Andrey Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, which my love gifted to me in response to my newfound adoration of this artist’s work. I expect that several future posts will be inspired by this remarkable volume of the director’s own words (translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair).