Fire through Water through Fire

This image can be linked to at http://staticfix.blogspot.com/ however I feel that there must be a better version of this image that I must find and expand greatly, and to an even more profound depth, only because it is perhaps ultimately beautiful


Tarkowski's images are always seen for a conjunction of fire through water through fire. Most notably Tarkowsky sets fire on the water, held aloft from trembling warm youthful bodies: the May festival. The "summer vacation" in Andrei Rubliev is contrasted to the fires in the end of Solaris, on the island in the midst of the living and waking water of Solaris. Finally compare water through fire: the image of the barn burnt in Mirror/Zierkala.

Please note the image that Oppermann and I have chosen is an image of a woman. This nesting of web-logs, well this is all we got, so far, in cities distant from one another, and yet cherishing a dream of this something.

Was it a woman in a frame which was about a woman in a frame?

It is not Pink Floyd's legendary cover:

It is something else, no it is not these two men staring back at us, not this Oppermann and Ayres... it is not staring back at us. It is staring at her: the Langer Abschied: as she stares out at some incomprehensible beauty.

Note that our friends in Floyd also have a background of absolute beauty that you could go out and look at. You might look at that or you may get caught up looking into one of these cats. However Pink Floyd is irrelevant after a while when you want to stare directly into the scenery, and when you want her, when you want her so deeply not to look into you but into the very depth and the very essence of the scenery, and for that scenery to open up, beautifully, impossibly, crushingly.


I have tried to intimate that the greater image was the Abschied of the feminine: her taking leave of us and looking out at this almost overwhelming beauty. Elsewhere I have spoken of the undifferentiated ocean: that it dissolves almost everything that tries to step into it. And yet it is amazing to step foot at the edge of it there: Tarkovsky's Solaris presents a formula: animal love on an island of animation upon an endless ocean of unfathomable unconscious material. Is she staring into this? The thing that is touching is that she sits on that rickety threshold, and eventually some man comes along in the movie and breaks the fence, and laughs (and inwardly cries and laughs about it all again) on how beautiful it is to break a fence with a woman. This is not the last we will see of her. And toward the end of the film she will grow older. This is also a sense in Tarkowsky itself: if you pull away from the sphere enough in sublimatio: you will see the curvature of the earth: it's finiteness.

Here is the thing: The sin of Adrian Leverkuhn is ... "Interest," that is to say in Mann's words: "Love without the animal warmth." The sin is the sin of sublimatio: where it is more interesting to be a far-shooter, an Apollonian god and so forth. Ah well, objectivity. This means finally devoid of the institutional will to power, we become once again space men in their fucking helmets. Tarkowsky points to the fact that we have to cling to this animal warmth, it is all we have, and even though Oppermann and I write web logs from fabulous distances, we still cling, each, to our animal warmth, because it IS all we have.

The essence is subtracted from the medium. And the medium is cooled so that the "product" congeals out of it. And in Tarkovsky we are the essence, the camera has to sail out ever further, till it reaches toward the curvature of the sphere, a glimpse of its finiteness: where the horizon itself is dissolved into the void of emptiness, and the ground somehow shivers into a faint disk and then becomes nothing at all. Welcome to the void of Tarkovsky. In point of fact we do not get to the point where we can see the curvature of the sphere: we never get to a place where genuine complete sublimation takes place.

The essence escapes from the work of art before it is fully congealed, otherwise death will capture everything, and we have already stated that death and forgetfulness and dust will come. And that the web log is just an effort of this heaving city at some form of self rememberance, but it is pitiful and terrible at the same time. Here we are, these little monkeys clinging to web-logs for some vestage of pathetic warmth... at least the semblance of warmth. But was there ever really that warmth? Was that warmth somehow some other thing? More primitive, yes, as if to say you could not have it there being nothing more than a little greasy worm clinging to your mother's belly.