The Heavenly Council, Part III

Tarkovsky

Whew! Thank you, Federico; that was a colossal bit of pasta. I feel the need to make a Russian contribution to this discussion, and I’m not referring to borscht. [Audience laughter] You drew on your most famous film for inspiration; let me draw on mine, Solaris, and see what we can come up with.

Solaris also talks about the limits of rationalism, but the theme is not one of failure suddenly transforming itself into success. At least, I don’t think it is. Critics have hailed the film as being innovative, but in fact the central theme is one that appears in the work of numerous Russian writers: Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Bely, and Bulgakov, to name just a few. The theme is that reality is labile; that dramatic alternatives to our present “reality”—I use that word in quotes—are always present at the edge of that reality, even a hair’s breadth away. A man wakes up with his nose suddenly missing. A kind of “siren” drives a group of lawyers crazy by describing the sensual properties of food. A man loses a fortune in a card game when an ace inexplicably turns into the queen of spades. And so on. Gogol put it this way: “Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all.” There is enormous profundity in that statement, when you think about it.

In Solaris, which was made during the oppressive rigidity of the Soviet era, there is a planet called Solaris that is actually a sentient being. Strange, paranormal things have been happening there, and so a psychologist, Kris Kelvin, is sent to investigate the situation. One member of the crew has committed suicide; two others have gone sumashedshi—nuts. A duplicate of Kelvin’s dead wife, Hari, suddenly shows up as a hologram, and he discovers that he still loves her. At this point, Kelvin has lost any sense of what is real. Upon seeing the film, Ingmar Bergman was led to comment that it “captures life as a dream.”

Where did I get this idea, that reality is slippery, that it can be more than just one thing? Partly from the authors I cited a moment ago, but also from an event that occurred in my early twenties. I was having lunch with my mother and grandmother, who was only a few months away from dying. She turned to my mother and said to her, “It’s all a dream.” I dismissed it at the time, with a kind of pseudo-sophistication that I’m now ashamed of. I said to my mother, gesturing to my grandmother, “Oh, a philosopher.” My grandmother reddened a bit. What had she lived through? Marriage; four children; the Revolution of 1917; the Bolshevik takeover; the Stalinist purges, during which she lost a number of friends; and finally, the dullness of Cold War life. Looking back, it did seem to her like it was all a dream, a fog that had swept through her life without rhyme or reason. All of these events had possible alternatives; she just wound up with one particular set.

With Solaris, I wanted to capture the arbitrary nature of reality, of our lives. Perhaps it was this, or perhaps the Soviet censors saw it as a religious film, but whatever the reasons, they did their best to prevent my films from being made or known, which is why I left the country in the early eighties. I died in Paris a few years later.

(At this point Tarkovsky choked up, unable to continue. Tolstoy went over to him, held him in his arms. “Drug moy, brat moy,” he said to him. Everyone in the room stood up, and gave Tarkovsky a standing ovation. When he recovered his composure, he continued.)

So I guess what I am saying is that we can’t control the world, but we can be open to alternatives, and we can teach that openness to others. That’s the only “formula” I have to offer.

(Tolstoy suggested they all take a break, and go for lunch. When they returned, it was Auden’s turn to speak.)

Auden

Andrei, let me first say that you are one of my heroes, and if it is not too presumptuous on my part, I join Leo in saying that I too regard you as a brother, and a friend.

The poem I’m best known for is my longest, The Age of Anxiety, for which I was awarded the Nobel Prize. It contains the much-quoted line, “We would rather be ruined than changed,” and that, I believe, is the crux of the human dilemma. In that regard, let me express my gratitude to Wally and Antonio, who are struggling with the question of societal change, not just individual change—which is hard enough. In my early days it was the latter that preoccupied me; as time went on, I began to write about the importance of the community at large. I’m thinking of poems such as “The Unknown Citizen,” “Under Which Lyre,” and “The Managers.” In 1966, Life magazine offered me ten grand for an essay on the fall of Rome. I wrote the essay, which ended with the following sentence:

“I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don’t mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilization, whether officially labeled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to.”

It will come as no surprise to anyone here that Life refused to print it, and that I didn’t get a dime for my efforts. Which is exactly what I was talking about when I wrote that we would rather die than think differently. And where are we now, my friends? Nearly sixty years later, we are indeed going smash, as we transition out of modernity to Something As Yet Unknown. Some have called it a tectonic shift, analogous to when the plates in the Earth’s crust begin to move. But I think Federico might be right: it is out of failure that a new possibility might arise. The phoenix out of the ashes, the nervous breakdown that becomes a nervous breakthrough. It might be that with our ruination, real change will occur. Neither individuals, nor societies, opt for change voluntarily. Historically speaking, substantive change is always a matter of force.