Stalker as Spiritual guide

Star’ets in Russian means spiritual guide (literally, “elder”). In Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker is the slang term for another kind of guide. In a future dystopia, possibly post-nuclear, there is an off-limits area called the Zone. Stalker is a play on star’ets. It is possible to interpret the film as a reference to mystical ascent, through the fallen world, under the guidance of a spiritual master.

An icon well known in Russia (not so well in the West) depicts this ascent as described by St. John Climacus (John of the ladder, 7^th C., Sinai). Figures climb the ladder propped against the wall. Many fall to their doom even from the top rungs. The spiritual path is dangerous. An experienced guide is indispensable. Even the most experienced can fall. Stalker, like any Russian star’ets, is an ascetic who cares nothing for the things of this world. Comfort, reputation and wealth do not interest him: only the Zone. The Zone is this world transfigured. (Filmed in vivid color as opposed to the depressing sepia/gray of the ordinary world.) Because of his contempt for ordinary life, Stalker appears to worldly people as a misfit or a freak. One of his clients, Writer, even calls him yurodiviy, referring to a specific kind of Russian saint: the “Fool for Christ” or “Holy Fool.” Little-known in the West since the Middle Ages, this particular kind of saint appears in Russia to this day. An apparent idiot (cf.: Dostoyevsky’s great novel), the yurodiviy has gifts of prophecy and clairvoyance, and a fearless willingness to rebuke the powerful. The great church on Red Square is named for such a one: Basil the Blessed, who alone was able to subdue the syphilitic rages of Ivan the Terrible.

The ordinary preoccupations of worldly people, represented by Stalker’s clients, Writer and Professor, are of no importance to Stalker. Or rather they are obstacles to be overcome. Both of these clients are intellectuals, and both skeptics but they are men of different spiritual temperaments. Professor is a scientist, a materialist for whom only the sensible is real. The triumph of scientific reasoning will bring universal peace and happiness. Professor is the best of the Soviet system, which erected an enormous sign across the river from St. Basil’s proclaiming “Literacy + Electrification = Communism.” Science and technology will cure human misery.

Writer scoffs at Professor’s materialism as a naïve illusion. Writer has thought everything through to the end. Having begun with compassion for humanity, he has lost all hope. He is a nihilist: comfortable, but bored to death. Writer is to Professor as Ivan Karamazov is to Dimitri. The man of letters versus the man of action, the mental versus the physical side of human nature. Stalker could be compared to Alyosha Karamazov, or to the latter's star’ets, Fr. Zossima.

Professor and Writer are passionate. That is, they suffer insatiable desire. This must be purged if they are to survive the spiritual journey — climbing the Ladder of mystical ascent, up through the Zone, to its central feature, a ruined building with the proportions (though not the domes) of a pre-Mongol, Russian church. It is the task of the spiritual guide to help them shed their dangerous delusions [prelest], and to lead them on the path that will strip them of their passions. Because, if their passions do not destroy them on the way (Writer’s liquor and his gun, Professor’s preoccupation with his knapsack), they will certainly annihilate them if they reach their destination with them. Stalker himself is utterly humble, without self-regard, but fierce in his insistence on the correct path. He has reached the level Orthodox mystics call apatheia, passionlessness. Like an actual star’ets, Stalker prays for his disciples with profound compassion. They have to be purified by water and fire. He addresses his prayers to the bottom of a well.

This feminine symbol, rooted in pre-Christian religion, persists in Russian Orthodoxy. Many churches and monasteries have holy wells, adorned with icons of the Mother of God overseeing the fountain of the Water of Life. The water of these wells is drunk and carried home by the faithful. The water into which Stalker speaks his prayers reflects his own face, and beneath the surface is an icon of the Savior. When the nihilistic Writer produces a pistol, the gentle Stalker violently wrestles it out of his hands and throws it into the well. Water is a key element in Tarkovsky’s cinematic vocabulary, especially indoor rain (cf.: Nostalghia, 1983), and water sometimes catches the light in such a way as to appear to be liquid gold. (Cf.: the final shot in Sacrifice, 1986, Tarkovsky’s last film) . In iconography, gold signifies divinity — the Uncreated Light. Golden rain might be interpreted as the water of Baptism, which the Orthodox call Illumination. Water suffused with Light, water joined with fire.

Stalker’s clients must complete purification in this Water of Light before they can reach their goal, inside the House. There, a golden rain falls across the threshold of a Room, in which those who enter realize their innermost wish (cf.: Solyaris). The trouble is that one may not be aware of one’s own innermost wishes. Stalker’s own guide, whose name was “Teacher” and who Stalker says “opened my eyes”, entered the room wishing for world peace. When he returned to the sepia world, however, all he got was money, and — like the one Russians remember as the lover of money, Judas — he hanged himself. After this incident, no stalker had ever entered the Room, and Teacher was remembered as “Porcupine.”

In order to enter the Room of realization, one must pass through a rain of gold, which separates the Room from the rest of the House. Professor and Writer wonder why Stalker will not go. “I am fine as I am,” he answers. Perhaps he has no desires to realize, so there is no point in entering the Room; or maybe he remembers Porcupine and fears his own subconscious. Writer and Professor turn out to be afraid to enter the Room, too, because they have begun to sense  that they are not free of passion, and they might realize something they might not like. (A similar theme is found in Tarkovsky’s earlier film, Solyaris, 1972).

Professor’s knapsack turns out to contain a nuclear device with which to blow up the Room, and thereby to free humanity from the dangers of its innermost wishes – along with access to unseen Reality. [The materialist would destroy the numinous.] But something about the journey has changed him. Although he fends off Stalker's repeated attempts to wrestle the bomb away from him, in the end, Professor dismantles it and throws it into the golden water.

Writer, too, cynical as ever, has to admit that there is something he does not know, namely his own innermost desire. Stalker's guidance has taught him at least enough humility to make him afraid to enter the Room. He announces that he will go back to his villa and drink himself to death.

Stalker himself returns to his own miserable house, where his wife comforts him as he lies on the floor, commenting on his own exhaustion. In the last scene, his daughter sits at a table. The sepia-world regards her as defective in some way, mental or physical. The film closes as she moves a glass of wine across the table without touching it. Her superior consciousness, regarded by the world as an infirmity, actually dominates the “reality”  of material appearance. 

Meanwhile, supernatural Reality, blazes away, unseen, in the transfigured Zone. The numinous is not entirely absent from the world.  It is Forbidden, however, and the authorities of dystopian, sepia-world do everything they can to hide it and to keep people away from it. 

PARTICIPATION

I saw a headline last week alerting me to “ World cup fever” What can account for it? Why do Brazilian adults still weep over a single goal made decades  ago? Maybe it has to do with our innate human need to identify with something bigger. We must be part of a greater whole. We want to participate. This word, part has opposite meanings. It can mean something separate and cut-off – something apart, till death us do part – or it can mean something that is not alone and cut off, but part of whole, as our various body parts are part of the body. [We also call these different parts members – hold on to that for later]. So a part is something small and cut- off, but it is also something that participates in that of which it is a part. Maybe that’s why people get world-cup fever or go to concerts in the same sports arenas. Or go to Church.

Participation, likewise, has a couple of senses. It can mean taking part in some activity – as a player participates in a performance, playing her part, or a soldier participates in a battle. But it can also mean something deeper, more abstract: something having to do with who or what the participant is.  The world-cup fans participate not merely in that they attend or listen to the games, but in that they identify themselves as fans of particular teams. That’s who they are. The notion of participation as shared being is ancient and important and very much with us. If we participate in a community of any kind, we identify ourselves as members of it. In some way, we share in the being of the community.

In Church, we call this Communion, and it means participation, in the sense of being part of the Body of Christ. Members of His Body. I think it instructive that in some languages, the word for receiving Holy Communion is participation. Indeed, Holy Communion is all about participation. In both senses: we participate by action of eating and drinking, and thereby we become participants in the Divine Life. Our separate life is incorporated into the shared Life of the Most Holy Trinity. The consecrated elements of Bread and Wine make it so. Let us consider them.

We make bread from flour and water and yeast. The flour is lots of grains of wheat, which we grind up and mix with water and yeast and then bake. The finished loaf participates in the species of wheat, water, and yeast.  But the countless grains of wheat that make up a loaf also participate in the plants that produced them, and these plants participate in the nutrients they drew from the soil, and in the seed that sprouted them in the first place. But that wasn’t really the first place, because those seeds were grains from other wheat plants and so on back to pre-history, as wheat gradually evolved – under human cultivation. Wheat doesn’t occur in the wild. In a sense, wheat and humanity evolved together. Wheat participates in human civilization. So, more obviously, do bread and wine.

I once saw a brewmaster wearing a T-shirt that said fermentation is a sign of civilization. And that is true. Nomads and hunter-gatherers don’t have bread and wine. They are the product of cities, the fruit of complex systems of human co-operation. Bread and wine are human artifacts. They are not found in nature. But they are more than signs. They not only signify civilization, in the sense that they are evidence of it, but they are part of it, in the sense of belonging to it. Bread and wine belong to civilization. Signs they are, but they are more, because bread and wine participate in the life of the City.

It is easy to see that the ingredients of bread represent the three kingdoms: animal, vegetable, and mineral. Wheat represents the vegetable kingdom, water the mineral kingdom, and yeast the animal kingdom. They are not, however, only representatives, but participants in their respective kingdoms in the sense of shared being. The water we add to the flour comes out of the ground or river, having fallen as rain somewhere else, maybe thousands of years ago. The microbes of yeast have their own chain of evolution, sharing in millions of years of life. Human art puts them together to make something new, something not found in creation, the product of the City.

But not only the City: bread and wine are the products of agriculture, the prerequisite for civilization, and they also participate in the evolutionary chain of plant life going back before the appearance of humankind. Bread and wine participate in that too. As do we. A human being participates in the life of her parents and also in the lives of her children – speaking now in the biological sense, and not only in the social. In that sense we all participate in the life of our original ancestors and in the earlier life-forms from which they emerged. And so we also participate in the biological lives of all other human beings – indeed of all life on the planet. This is not merely symbolic; it is the reality the ancients called participation.

So the bread and wine that Jesus took as supper was ending are representatives and signs of the whole created order and of human civilization – but more than signs, more than representatives, they are participants: they are the natural creation as molded by human civilization. The Divine Word that called them into being in the beginning now speaks again, calling them His Body and Blood. In so doing, the Godman does not merely apply a new label, but He changes them in the essence of their being. The Bread and Wine now participate in His own Body and Blood. They participate in His Life. And since His Life is divine as well as human, the Bread and Wine are too. This is more than symbolism: it is sacramental Reality, because sacraments participate in the Reality they symbolize.  By His Word, God re-created the cosmos – by virtue of participation, He incorporated all that is into His own Divine Life. This happened before He gave His Body and Blood to the Apostles to eat and drink.

Our personal participation in the Sacrament  –  our Communion – is something additional. We call it the pledge of our redemption. In this sense, perhaps, it is a sign. Our eating and drinking of His Body and Blood signifies to us the stupendous and incomprehensible Reality of the Redemption of the world, and of ourselves as part of the world. He gave His Body and Blood to us with the commandment to “Do this in remembrance of Me.” As Dom Gregory Dix observed, never has any commandment been so widely obeyed – to the extent now that there is probably not a moment in any Day – with the possible exception of Good Friday and Holy Saturday – in which it is not fulfilled on earth. God’s kingdom come on earth as in heaven.

When we eat His Body and Drink His Blood, He lives in us and we in Him – we participate in Him and in one another consciously. To some extent, we are also conscious of this incomprehensible new Reality. And that, perhaps, is what our personal participation adds to the objective Redemption of the New Creation. All creation and all people participate in the New Creation by His pronouncement that Bread is His Body and Wine His Blood. We who eat and drink, however,  enter eternal life here and now in the sense that we are conscious of it.

This may be what He meant by saying Do this in remembrance of Me. Remembrance, anamnesis, amnesia negated, unforgetting – these all have to do with consciousness. We may not be able to comprehend what we are doing when we consume his Flesh and Blood, but we can be conscious of it. In any case, the commandment of anamnesis  - to unforget Him - is not a commission to form a historical society. This memorial is vaster, a kind of mystical consciousness that has to do with participation, conscious participation. 

It is tempting to pun on the English word remembrance, which sounds like it might have something to do with members­ or parts of the Body, but it doesn’t.  Too bad, since that is what memorial means in the context of the Holy Eucharist – it means calling to mind the fact that we are participants in the life of Christ. We also participate in creation and in civilization. Through us, all that is participates in that Divine Life. We eat His Body and drink His Blood so that , as He said, we “will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”