Andrei Tarkovsky’s painterly, moody films capture something that is hard to describe, a sense of searching and bleakness at the same time. There are deep, fundamental  questions at the centre of his films: it is as though the structures of the world are recognisable but translucent, as though something exists but has lost its essential meaning, its essential form.  In his book, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky describes: 

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The purpose of art is to prepare a person for death, to plow and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good”.

I live in strange times, not as beautiful as the interior of a Tarkovsky film, but strange and emptied of something essentially human. Rapacious political ideologies dominate the public discourse, delivered in a soulless drudge of ones and zeros, spinning to some sinister, insentient algorithm that everybody treats as human. But it is not human, it is not even close to human. Hollowed out institutions, collapsing inwards still retain vestiges of their original functions but cannot find a way to connect to the world outside of themselves.  Words used to communicate a shared human experience or understanding become litmus paper  for purity testing.  No one will ever pass these purity tests. Swarms of humans cluster online, waiting for the instruction to hunt other online human beings and everybody treats the prey as though they are not human. But they are human. It is strange to live in times that objectify people and personalise things. 

There is a novel by Herman Hesse’ titled Steppenwolf in which the protagonist, Harry Haller, ends up one evening in a Magic Theatre with random doors and mirrors, confronting multiple versions of himself that may never have existed. Suicidal and isolated, Haller feels himself to be unable to belong to the times he lives in, an internal tussle between his higher self and his animalic self dragging him towards a dark ending. He finds his way to the Magic Theatre where he experiences multiple versions of himself and projects his suicidal impulses onto a woman whom he had fallen in love with. The novel, in typical Hesse fashion, offers a paradoxical ending: the dead body of his paramour becomes a tiny chess piece in someone else’s pocket and Harry avoids his own suicide by embarking on a new quest to understand the game of life. Steppenwolf, published in 1927 became a counter culture book in the 1970s, inspiring a generation to identify with the wildish steppenwolf battling the civilised Haller for control. 

Hesse lived through the first world war and saw, in his native Germany, the rise of nazism and the eventual splitting of the country into east and west.  Almost 22 million died in the first world war and Europe’s traditional empires crumbled away, plunging the continent into the deep uncertainty that led to World War II only three decades later. He had volunteered to join the German Imperial Army in 1914 where he was assigned to care for prisoners of war. The experience haunted him for years. Hesse himself battled the same suicidal impulses that Haller suffered, his own life beset by loss, heartache and isolation. Tarkovsky, in his diaries, mentioned Hesse frequently, citing his struggle with remaining human in dehumanising times, his love for tiny moments of utter beauty in the bleakness of a crumbling world. He thought of making a film based on Steppenwolf. He wrote often of Hesse’s crystalline prose and enduring search for the rich depth of human experience.  He made films about trying to bring together worlds whose internal coherence has been lost. 

Maybe that is all we ever know: that somehow we have to repair the loss, re-enchant the emptiness with our so very human essence. During the cold war, when Germany was divided into democratic west and communist east, families were split apart, friends separated without ever knowing if they would find each other again.  A tiny, medium wave radio station, RIAS Berlin, began broadcasting family news and personal messages from West Germany into the airwaves, never knowing if anyone on the other side of the Berlin Wall could hear them. The broadcast included news of weddings, births and deaths, birthday wishes, and personal updates that divided families hoped relatives and friends would hear in East Germany. The BBC began a service called Letters Without  Signatures, so that letters smuggled out of East Germany could be read out into the airwaves without the Stasi knowing where they came from. 

I think of this often, of the loves that didn’t die, of the friendships that never ended, of the hopeful imagination of engineers and broadcasters building the radio station with no guarantees that the sounds would reach the other side of the concrete wall. It is easy to imagine a family huddled around a forbidden radio, delirious with joy to hear the name of someone they know or to find out a baby has been born. It is easy to imagine young military officers, listening to other people’s clandestine messages, hoping to one day hear of their own distant families, and turning away without reporting them to Stasi headquarters. It is easy to imagine a whole city, under constant surveillance, forming a guard of shadows and silence to protect a soft ember. Hesse knew such things were possible. He wrote 

“That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony. “