Monday, March 25, 2013

Precious knowledge

"There was much that he wanted to learn, but he could not believe that he would learn it as other people learned what they learned. He believed in something called precious knowledge. As a child, he had hoped to find some of that knowledge in some discarded or forgotten book. Later, he came to understand that such knowledge as he was looking for was not readily passed from one person to another." Gerald Murnane, Emerald Blue, p.84

The image above is a still from Tarkovsky's The Mirror - you can tell that it is the boy leafing through the book (the boy in the 'contemporary' time frame of the film) because of the clumsy way in which the pages are turned and the tissue paper over the plates is creased. Later in the film we are led to suspect that this is the book was stolen by his father when he was a boy. The dialogue below is the sister threatening to tell ... "I'll tell them you stole the book."
It's a subtle film, at times difficult with the different time periods and the same actors playing people in different generations, but it is marvellous ... and the ending of the film with that most sublime chorus "Herr, unser Herrscher, dessen Ruhm in allen Landen herrlich ist" from the opening of Bach's great Johannes Passion BWV 245 makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. After just having watched a scene where the central character (the boy from early days who becomes the father in the contemporary time) presumably dies, we see the young mother seemingly watching herself now aged leading her two small children (the boy and his sister) through a field. The different time periods coincide, the decades collapse, which is after all what happens in the mind, and presumably also what happens in the frame of reference of a photon, and maybe even at the moment of death. All time is one.