1/8/07

1/8/07

The English countryside in summer: green trees and hedgerows, yellow (or ochre) fields, pale blue sky. A strict division of zoning of colour fields, each seemingly allocated to denote a different function: a manufactured and regulated landscape, subject to distinct divisions of space. But hardly country in the real sense (at least, not along the line between Cambridge and London), but more land as yet residual to urban sprawl: a determinant of the city, an unintended leftover of it. Perhaps the most visible sign of this is how the structures being built in it are uncompromisingly urban: they take no heed of the fact they are surrounded by ‘nature’, and nature, by virtue of this, appears ‘degraded’ in the light of this dissonance. (Notice how sensitive you were to this degraded state of nature when you were a kid; wasn’t it one reason why you disliked the country so intensely?)The approach to London is now so heavily built up that one is no longer conscious of entering the limits of the city: the distinction has ceased to exist. The category of ‘country’ needs to be rethought, at least in southern England – or abandoned.
Most striking of all though is how all your antipathies and ‘weaknesses’ were revived the moment you came back here. You are more conscious than ever of how much England bores you – though ‘boredom’ hardly covers the sense of helpless despair you find yourself feeling (or perhaps: indulging yourself in) when you are here. It may be that having remained in this country has been one of the biggest mistakes of your life, and that you should have paid attention to, and acted upon, your early desires to go abroad: to Germany, to the United States, to Russia. You cannot at the moment say, and it is pointless trying to determine which. No amount of looking back will resolve these questions definitively, because the ultimate meaning of those events can only be determined retrospectively, by what you do now. Needless to say, it is not England in itself that is intensely boring, but the life that you have made for yourself here. (but what of the lives you might make for yourself?)

Tarkovsky as Slavophile: how much of the ideology of his films might be found in, say, the work of Glazunov? Could he merely be offering a more ‘sophisticated’ version of Glazunov’s ‘narrative’? And if so, does Mirror give the more exhaustive exposition of this narrative (consider, for example, the shots of soldiers marching across Lake Lagoda to relieve Leningrad as a modern, Slavophile version of Benjamin’s victors’ triumph, only instead of cultural artefacts they bear in their arms both the cause of their suffering and the means of their liberation, namely weapons). Could a painting, however large, ever hope to comment upon this film; can a non-narrative art offer commentary upon a narrative one? And what would be the point if it did? Would it not have to incorporate the ‘scene’ into its own symbolic narrative (a la Glazunov), only in a way that is formally more innovative and interesting? Imageine the artist: a young, clever careerist, who has accepted a commission to decorate the lobby, and perhaps also the stairs, of the Chechen parliament with a mural – whose subject is either the history of the Chechen people or of Chechen-Russian friendship. For this he uses Tarkovsky, though works by Tolstoy and Lermontov also feature, as do certain Chechen writers (who?). Title is History of the Vainakh. It is decided that it should encompass the recent Chechen war, whose causes in the picture are fudged, so to speak, and whose monstrous suffering is sentimentalised. He needs to create allegorical figures to represent each people. Its theme should be the gradual acceptance, through a series of horrific defeats, of the reality of Russian hegemony. The most heroic act is this acceptance. The picture will be self-consciously in the tradition of Russian imperialist romanticisation of the Caucasus. His struggle is to stop his real loathing of the Chechens seeping into his work. His solution is to make his own loathing of Chechens an attribute of the Chechens in his picture, whose implacable resentment of imperialist rule is thereby made palpable. In his spare time he is making his own work about the country: a long poem entitled Impressions of Chechnya.