Letting in the Light

Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia

 

The prophet foresees the fate of man and the world and, through contemplation of the spiritual, unriddles the events of the empirical world.

Nikolai Berdyaev, Truth and Revelation.

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I have heard it said, I forget where, that if all the men and women praying at any given time were to stop then the world would instantly and once and for all implode. How true this is, I do not know, but it gives us pause for thought regarding the value (or lack of value) we place on our everyday thoughts and actions. Which of these truly matter? Which only seem to matter? How do we puzzle out what is real and what is not? How do we differentiate, in our hearts and minds, between temporal and eternal truths? How do we map our personal insights and intuitions onto the wider world? Where is the bridge linking the individual to the community? How do we find it? What does it look like?

This is the exact terrain explored by Tarkovsky in this 1983 chef d'oeuvre, his penultimate film, and his first (of only two) made outside the Soviet Union.

The early eighties were a problematic, paradoxical time for the film-maker. He had emigrated to Italy to escape the stifling, overbearing hand of the Soviet film authorities. The artistic liberty he found there, however, came at an almost unimaginably heavy price - separation from his family and homeland, and a crushing sense of exile, estrangement and alienation.

Nostalghia is soaked (literally) in these themes. The central protagonist, Gorchakov, a Russian poet transplanted, like Tarkovsky, to Italy, finds the West a barren, chilly place. The mist-shrouded beauties of Tuscany and Umbria leave him cold. He is 'sickened' by the tourist trail of churches, statues and ruins, and - as if all that wasn't enough - feels unable to communicate this sense of disconnection to his interpreter, Eugenia, a character, like himself, in search of meaning, depth, communion and connection. It is only when Gorchakov encounters the 'village idiot', Domenico, that the dynamic starts to change and a new, unanticipated light begins, almost imperceptibly at first, to shine.

Domenico is a former Mathematics teacher. His home is a water-logged ruin. He kept his wife and children locked up in the house for seven years because the end of the world, he believed, was at hand. Domenico lives on his own now, the butt of jokes, in the small town of Bagno Vignoni, regarded by the townsfolk as a self-styled, utterly inept prophet. He speaks in riddles and appears reluctant at first to engage with his Russian visitor. Yet Gorchakov, unable to wind down and relax with anyone else, appears happy and perfectly at ease in his presence. To say he 'lightens up' might be putting too strong a spin on it, but he certainly seems more 'himself' in Domenico's house than any other location. A rapport begins to build. Sensing that Gorchakov's attentions lie elsewhere, Eugenia returns to Rome. Domenico and Gorchakov are left centre stage, physically apart yet spiritually together, their fates intertwined, one with the other, and also, in some unspecified yet undeniable way, with that of the 'whole wide world' itself.

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Nostalghia is a visually stunning film. Every frame, without exception, is a work of art. Evocative, evanescent images of rain, cloud, moss-covered columns and walls, horses, dogs and even, at one point, a bottle of spilt, spotlessly white milk, follow one after the other like Shakespeare's parade of kings in Macbeth.

For all this, it has to be said that the film can feel hard going at times. The pace, even by Tarkovsky's standards, is pedestrian at best, and the ambience of disconnection and estrangement described above can start to wear the viewer down after a while. The miracle, however, is that by the time the credits roll one does not feel down or despondent in any way. Quite the reverse. Somehow, Tarkovsky succeeds in taking the issues tormenting both Gorchakov and himself onto a higher, clearer level. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, both film-maker and protagonist are wounded, then blessed. Resolution is achieved. Our vision is cleansed; our hearts replenished with faith and hope. A transfiguration has occurred. How? Why? Where? In answering this question (or attempting to answer it) we approach the central mystery of Tarkovsky's art.

'Truth is a quality,' writes the Russian philosopher, Nicholai Berdyaev, in Truth and Revelation (1953). 'For that reason it is aristocratic, as all qualities are. Truth may be revealed to one single person and refuted by all the rest of the world. It may be prophetic, and the prophet is indeed one who always stands alone.'

Domenico is such a prophet. He journeys to Rome and sits on top of the statue of Marcus Aurelius, imploring the bored, listless citizenry to wake up, recognise and respond to the crisis hammering at the gates of the West. Like William Blake, he speaks against careerism, institutionalism, consumerism and one-dimensional, mechanistic explanations of life and the universe. He cries out for intuition, imagination, vision, creativity and openness to the Divine. He acts, for a short time, as a Pontifex - a ladder or bridge between heaven and earth - before backing up his words with a theatrical, spectacularly self-destructive act, which, to my eyes at least (and I may well be wrong) has always seemed more triumphant than tragic.

Before his departure for Rome, Domenico charges Gorchakov with a task - to walk the length of the drained pool at the Bagno Vignoni baths with a lighted candle, protecting it from the winds and keeping it alight until he reaches the further side. The result, in purely cinematic terms, is a lengthy take of hypnotic, mesmeric quality, arguably the most memorable of many such takes in Tarkovsky's canon.

The stakes could not have been higher here. In the director's mind, his whole artistic vision hinged on this one shot. In slightly dramatic style he described it to the actor playing Gorchakov, Oleg Ianowsky, as 'displaying an entire human lifetime in one shot, without any editing, from beginning to end, from birth to the very moment of death. It could be the true meaning of my life and will certainly be the finest shot I ever make - if you can do it, if you can endure to the end.'

Gorchakov does endure. To the end. He fulfils his mission. At a price. But the memory of the flickering, glimmering candle on the far side of the pool burns on and on in our minds, years after walking out of the cinema and stepping forth into the city and the night.

It is strange, how such a pointless, random act, with no quantifiable yardstick to measure its success by, can have such a profound effect. Objectively, It means nothing. It has no disecernable impact on the world. Yet, on a subjective, symbolic level, it means absolutely everything.

It is an act of truth, a statement of intent and a rallying cry, a call to the imaginative and spiritual arms needed to transmute, transfigure and transform the base metal of contemporary Western society. It points beyond, bridging the gap between the secular and sacred, and bringing that extra, unquantifiable, unpredictable element to the table which the world so sorely needs if we are to have any chance of finding creative, sustainable solutions to the ideological and environmental problems currently assailing us.

This is what Truth looks like - truth with a capital 'T' - existential, not (necessarily) dogmatic - a living thing, a live coal, lying within, like the Kingdom of God, and spreading out around us like the lilies of the field. Humankind, however, seems constitutionally incapable of recognising it. That, it seems, is why prophets are sent. To wake us up to this Truth, which, says Berdyaev, 'is not an objective datum but a conquest won by the creative act. It is a creative discovery rather than the reflected knowledge of an object or of being. Truth is not a reality in the sphere of things which falls into man's lap. Truth is the letting in of light into the world, and this light that comes from truth ought to be spread abroad.

'All men should have, more and more, the idea of truth as the letting in of light, for their interpretation of it is always exposed to the danger of becoming hardened in rigidity, ossified and benumbed. This is not the light of abstract reason. This is the light of the Spirit.'

Our world, here and now in 2014, calls out for nothing less. When are we going to start letting in the light?



And the Light Shineth in Darkness ...

The Battle for Kobane in the light of Rosemary Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers.

 And this is the writing that was written, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.

 This is the interpretation of the thing: Mene; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.

 Tekel; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

 Peres; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.

Daniel, 5:25-28

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At the time of writing - 1330 BST on Wednesday October 8th - Kobane has not yet fallen. Maybe it will never fall. The skill, determination and commitment of its Syrian Kurdish defenders can be in no doubt. They are, however, significantly outnumbered and outgunned, left to fend for themselves (US air strikes nothwithsatnding) due to 'Great Power' political chicanery and - with regards to Turkey - a continued reluctance and inability to recognise the depth of existential threat posed by ISIS.

It is strange, sometimes, what works of art such last-ditch stands against darkness call to mind. I could, I suppose, feel tempted to quote from the linguistic heights of Shakespeare or the spiritual depths of Dostoyevsky, yet the text which jumps, shouts and demands attention when I meditate on Kobane is actually a children's book, published in England in 1956: The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff.

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Rosemary Sutcliff (1920 - 1992) is perhaps best known today for the first of her 'Roman' stories, The Eagle of the Ninth (1954). Sutcliff's novels - along with her creative retellings of Gaelic, Greek and Arthurian myth - have had a profound influence on both children and adults (including myself) throughout the second half of the twentieth-century and the first decades of the twenty-first.

Her novels were written, in the main, in the post-Second World War era. As with a number of British children's writers (Alan Garner and Susuan Cooper, for example) whose formative years co-incided with the struggle against Hitler, Sutcliff's work contains clear distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, civilised conduct and savagery. There is no post-modern ambiguity, equivocating or hedging of bets here. We also find a firm commitment to the value of law and custom (inherited from the Pax Romana) and an overarching belief in the significance and intrinsic worth of Judeao-Christian civilisation.

These themes come especially to the fore in The Lantern Bearers. Aquila, a young Romano-British soldier, deserts his regiment when the last of the legions are recalled to the continent. In what seems at the time like a somewhat 'showy', pointlessly theatrical gesture, he lights the beacon tower at Rutupiae (modern day Thanet in Kent) as the ship sets sail for Italy without him:

"On a sudden wild impulse he flung open the bronze-sheathed chest in which the fire-lighting gear was kept, and pulled out flint and steel and tinderbox, and teasing his fingers on the steel in his frantic haste, as though he were fighting against time, he struck out fire and kindled the waiting tinder, and set about waking the beacon. Rutupiae Light should burn for this one more night. Maybe Felix or his old optio would know who had kindled it, but that was not what mattered...

"He flung water from the tank in the corner onto the blackened bull's-hide fire-shield, and crouched holding it before him by the brazier, feeding the blaze to its greatest strength. The heart of it was glowing now, a blasting, blinding core of heat and brightness under the flames: even from the shores of Gaul they would see the blaze, and say, 'Ah, there is Rutupiae's Light.' It was his farewell to so many things: to the whole world that he had been bred to. But it was something more; a defiance against the dark."

 

Aquila chooses to return to his family, to protect them as best he can from the marauding Saxons and Jutes, running rampant in the civilisational vacuum left by the departing Romans. During one raid (which has rang in my mind again and again this year as ISIS rampage through Iraq and Syria) Aquila's father is killed, his sister taken into captivity and Aquila himself stripped naked and tied to a tree, literally left to the wolves. In the event, however, a Jutish raiding party seize him as a prisoner of their own and transport him back to Jutland. The rest of the book recounts Aquila's long and winding journey home, and the leading role he goes on to play in the Romano-British Resistance, led by Ambrosius Aurelianus from his 'Fortress of the High Powers' in the muntains of North Wales.

One interesting and very relevant vignette from Aquila's captivity phase is the slaughter of the British King, Vortigern, by the Saxons, Hengest and Horsa. Vortigern, in a manner that will sound familiar to followers of the Kobane crisis, sought to play one enemy off against the other by inviting a party of Saxons to settle in the country to hold at bay the Pictish threat in the North. Votigern's death and continued Saxon conquest were the only results of this misguided slice of Realpolitik, a lesson today's great powers would do well to heed, otherwise - vis-a-vis ISIS - lest they (and we) end up like the aristocratic German ruling classes who thought they could tame Hitler and use him for their own ends by playing Nazis off against Communists. The lesson is there to be learned - the writing on the wall, no less - writ large in screaming, blazing neon script. 'Let those who have ears, etc.'

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The Lantern Bearers has, at times, a distinctly valedictory feel, almost as if Sutcliff herself was waving goodbye to what she recognised as civilisation. But the impressions remaining with the reader are poles away from bitter negativity: kindness, fortitude, a sense of the Divine at work in the lives of both individuals and communities, and a compassion and understanding (though never a backsliding tolerance) of the enemy and his bleak material and spiritual situation.

Above all, there is the title, The Lantern Bearers. My contention is that Rosemary Sutcliff herself was a literary lantern bearer, giving dramatic form and content to the value and perilous nature of civilisation. There can no doubt in anyone's mind, suely, that the Kurdish men, women and children of Kobane are lantern bearers one and all, here and now in October 2014, out there on the front line - a democratic, person-centred, values-orientated commune - taking a stand, stepping up against the darkness when other, far more powerful actors, choose to sit on their hands and play political games.

But there is no time left for games. The enemy is literally at the gates. We stand therefore with the YPG. Their fight is our fight. We will never forget them, whatever happens. Heroes and heroines all:

  "'It is wonderful what one victory in the hands of the right man will do,' Eugenus said musingly beside him. 'With a Britain bonded together at last, we may yet thrust the barbarians into the sea, and even hold them there - for a while.'

    Aquila's hand was already on the pin of the door behind him, though he was still watching the thinning, lantern-touched crowd in the coutyard. 'For a while? You sound not over-hopeful.'

    'Oh, I am. In my own way I am the most hopeful man alive. I believe we shall hold the barbarians off for a while, and maybe for a long while, though not for ever ... It was once told me that the great beacon light of Rutupiae was seen blazing on the night after the last of the Eagles flew from Britain. I have always felt that this was' - he hesitated over the word - 'not an omen: a symbol.'

    Aquila glanced at him, but said nothing. Odd, to have started a legend

    'I sometimes think that we stand at sunset,' Eugenus said after a pause. 'It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows again out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.'"