The Sacrifice

All is Flux

Letters from Vienna #86

The Sacrifice

New Ideas

If we’re to have hope for the future: we need inspiring ideas. One is for workers to own their own factories (the exact opposite of Communism or Marxism where there’s no property at all to speak of, or more exactly: the state and the Deep State control everything), another is for local banks to take over the creation of money by means of local currency while a third is for farm co-operatives (rather than collectives where the individual is subordinated to the majority) to employ old-fashioned as well as modern (organic) farming techniques to prevent starvation. These have all been tried, tested and proven effective; there’s nothing remotely abstract, speculative or experimental about them.

Andrey Tarkovsky

Yet at the same time, in addition to such practical, useful, everyday ideas, we also need visions, prophetic ones, such as that embodied by Andrey Tarkovsky’s last film: “The Sacrifice”.

“The idea of “The Sacrifice”” Tarkovsky tells us “came to me long before I thought of “Nostalgia”. The first notes and sketches, the first frenzied lines, date back to the time when I still lived in the Soviet Union. The focal point was to be the story of how the hero, Alexander, was to be cured of a fatal disease as a result of a night spent in bed with a witch. Ever since those early days and all through the time I was working on the screenplay, I was constantly preoccupied with the idea of equilibrium, of sacrifice, of the sacrificial act, the yin and yang of love and personality. It became part of my very being, and all I have experienced since living in the West has only served to make that preoccupation the more intense. I have to say that my basic convictions have not changed since I arrived here: they have developed, deepened, become firmer; there have been changes of interval, or proportion. So, too, as the plan of my film gradually evolved, it kept changing shape, but I hope that its central idea remains intact.”

“What moved me was the theme of the harmony which is born only of sacrifice, the twofold dependence of love. It’s not a question of mutual love: what nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment, it is nothing.

I am interested above all in the character who is capable of sacrificing himself and his way of life—regardless of whether that sacrifice is made in the name of spiritual values, or for the sake of someone else, or of his own salvation, or of all these things together. Such behaviour precludes, by its very nature, all of those selfish interests that make up a “normal” rationale for action; it refutes the laws of a materialistic world view. It is often absurd and unpractical. And yet—or indeed for that very reason—the man who acts in that way brings about fundamental changes to people’s lives and to the course of history. The space he lives in becomes a rare, distinctive point of contrast to the empirical concepts of our experience, an area where reality is all the more strongly present.”

“Little by little that awareness led me to carry out my wish to make a feature film about a man whose dependence upon others brings him to independence, and for whom love is at once ultimate thrall and ultimate freedom. And the more clearly I discerned the stamp of materialism on the face of our planet (irrespective of whether I was observing the West or the East), the more I came up against unhappy people, saw the victims of psychoses symptomatic of an inability or unwillingness to see why life had lost all delight and all value, why it had become oppressive, the more committed I felt to this film as the most important thing in my life. It seems to me that the individual stands today at a crossroads, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the existence of a blind consumer, subject to the implacable march of new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or whether to seek out a way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, which ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large: in other words, to turn to God. He has to solve this dilemma for himself, for only he can discover his own sane spiritual life. Solving it may take him closer to the state in which he can be responsible for society. That is the step which becomes a sacrifice, in the Christian sense of self-sacrifice.”[1]

In the script of the film the hero, Alexander, tells his son:

“Man has defended himself, always

against other men, against Nature.

He has constantly violated Nature.

The result is a civilisation built

on force, power, fear, dependence.

All our “technical progress”

has only provide us

with comfort, a sort of standard.

And instruments of violence

to keep power. We are like savages!

We use the microscope like a cudgel!

No, that’s wrong.

Savages are more spiritual than us!

As soon as we make

A scientific breakthrough

we put it to use

in the service of evil.

And as for the standard,

some wise man once said

that sin

is that which is unnecessary.

If that is so,

then our entire civilisation

is built on sin,

from beginning to end.

We have acquired

a dreadful disharmony

an imbalance, if you will,

between our material

and our spiritual development.

Our culture is defective.

I mean, our civilisation.

Basically defective, my boy!”[2]

The fact that our civilisation is fundamentally “defective” has become crystal clear in the course of the current Scamdemic, the role of sin and evil all too evident as well as the limitations of technology; it’s time to strive for harmony once more.

Philosophically speaking, as Wittgenstein showed, it’s extremely difficult to talk in a meaningful way about God, and, as Wittgenstein famously put it: “Of that which one cannot speak one must stay silent.” Yet, although one has to be aware of this philosophical caveat it’s vitally important that we speak of spiritual, philosophical and theological matters as well as to listen to prophetic voices, such as that of Tarkovsky.

All is Flux

As Pepe Escobar put it in a recent interview: in order to deal with the coming crises, we must apply Taoism, Buddhism and Heraclitus in order to survive. In other words: all will be in flux and we must be prepared to relinquish our hold on everything.

Perhaps the one silver lining of the onrushing disasters of inflation, financial and economic collapse, war and mass starvation is that we’ll be forced to focus on our spiritual lives once more; we’ll have little else to hold on to.

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[1] pp.217-218 Sculpting in Time, Andrey Tarkovsky

[2] https://www.scripts.com/script.php?id=the_sacrifice_15113&p=8