Fear

Tuesday 1 April 2025

The Remainder

article

FEAR was once the name for an event. It is the 27th of June, 1974 and there is a room in Moscow turning a gentle yellow, cigarette sunrise. It is the hour of mobility and blind coordination, of children scoot-swerving parents, teachers zebra-crossing streams of exhaust rush. Andrei is writing and smoking and men are swearing sweet nothings into their dashboards. It has been two weeks since the letter from the State Councillor of Justice – M. Samayev – on the matter of filmmaker Sergey Paradzhanov. Andrei’s letter, co-signed with Viktor Shklovsky, had been sent on the 21st of April, closing with the lines: “Artistically, there are few people in the entire world who could replace Paradzhanov. He is guilty—guilty in his solitude. We are guilty of not thinking of him daily and of failing to discover the significance of a master.” The Kiev State Councillor had replied: “There are no grounds for appeal.” All this was two weeks ago. Five years’ loss of freedom.

Andrei is up and scribbling 27 June, Moscow. Beads of ink and sweat bleed lengthways on the page and he thinks of the things that heat brings out in men. There is swearing and skipping and smoke-rising outside. He listens and writes: “Last night I dreamt that I had died. But I could see, or rather feel, what was going on around me.” Larisa – Lara – is still soaked in sleep, Andriosha – little Andrei – in the cot beside her; moon faces glistening a primeval concern. A question? “When you feel compassion for yourself in that way, it is as if your pain were someone else's, and you are looking at it from outside, weighing it up, and you are beyond the bounds of what used to be your life. It was as if my past life was a child's life, without experience, unprotected. Time ceases to exist, and fear. An awareness of immortality.”

There are no bells in Moscow, and if there were you could not hear them anyway. There are sirens and engines and comrades shaking hands, greeting the sun, sweeping grit and soot and softly speaking to one another the names of American movie stars. “And then I came back to life, and no one was surprised. They all went off to the public baths, and I wasn't allowed in because I didn't have a ticket. I pretended I was the bath attendant, but I couldn't produce any proof of identity.” Andrei is writing and thinking быт (byt) – the deep time of everyday life – in the afterglow of Lara and the white-blinding sound of the street, in the afterburn of a dream in which fear has decentred the subject. Anything but Kiev and Paradzhanov and the five years ahead. Anything but Brezhnev’s Nine Year Plan.

“But all that was just a dream, and I knew it was a dream. It's the second time I have had a dream about death. And each time I have felt an extraordinary sense of freedom, of not needing any kind of protection. What can it mean?” Andriosha coos from his cot and maybe that is a bell he can hear after all, not in the room but elsewhere. A golden yellow thrum which threads the morning heat, the beaded sweat. And Andrei writes: “The interview with Bergman where he says I am the best contemporary director is in Playboy.”1

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Andrei Tarkovsky released his final film – The Sacrifice – in 1986 and died in December of that year. The narrative follows Alexander, a former actor and intellectual who, upon learning of an imminent nuclear exchange, promises God he will sacrifice everything – his home and his speech – if the catastrophe is averted. When he wakes to find the world seemingly restored, he methodically fulfills his vow by setting fire to his house, and is taken away to an asylum. The film ends with this scene and the dedication: “to my son Andriosha – with hope and confidence.”

In Old English fær was the word for a sudden and terrible event; a peril. In Beowulf one reads of the fær-gryrum (sudden horror) of the enemy:

“...hwæt swiðferhðum selest wære / wið færgryrum to gefremmanne.” “Plotting how best the bold defenders / Might resist and beat off sudden attacks”

This is a word like so many others which has turned inwards over time, a word propped up like a house of cards. By the Middle English of the C12th, according to the OED, it had taken on the sense with which we use it today – the uneasiness caused by a feeling of impending danger, something akin to dread.

Tarkovsky’s cinematic oeuvre as a whole – and The Sacrifice in particular – is heavily influenced by the work of Ingmar Bergman, director of The Seventh Seal (1957), Persona (1966) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973). In The Seventh Seal, set during the Black Death of 1346, the mediaeval protagonist – a disillusioned knight Antonius Block – meditates on the concept of fear, in a discussion with Death:

“We make an idol of our fear and that idol we call God”2

In his writing on the Lives of Saints in the late C10th, Benedictine monk Ælfric (Abbot of Eynsham) discusses the father of the Virgin Mary, Joachim. In Old English he writes:

“Se wæs heorda his sceapa and he wæs godfyrht man on bylewitnysse and on fremsumnysse, and he næfde nænige ōðre gymene buton his eowde. Of þam eowde he fedde ealle þa ðe him drihten ondredon…” “He was a shepherd of his sheep and he was a God-fearing man in innocence and in kindness, and he had no other concern except his flock. From that flock he fed all those who feared the Lord…”

The ‘godfyrht man’ – the god-fearing – belongs to a kind of club, a flock. The flock fears and farms and is fed on that basis. One makes an idol of their fear and calls that idol God. In Bergman’s autobiography, The Magic Lantern (1987), the director writes that as a child, a favourite ‘quote’ of his was that “fear would create what is feared.” That, as a child, he “had a talent for being frightened and acquiring a guilty conscience”. He writes:

“My parents lived in an exhausting, permanent state of crisis with neither beginning nor end. They fulfilled their duties, they made huge efforts, appealing to God for mercy, their beliefs, values and traditions of no help to them. Nothing helped. Our drama was acted out before everyone's eyes on the brightly lit stage of the parsonage. Fear created what was feared.”

What Bergman calls the “the mechanics of fear”, Paul Virilio might describe as its administration. For Virilio – writing in The Administration of Fear (2012) – fear is today synchronised through media, through films, through the internet, through ‘the bomb’. The ‘ecological bomb’, the ‘information bomb’ and, of course, the ‘nuclear bomb’. But perhaps this idea of ‘the event’ and its aftermath, its afterglow or afterimage, its collapse, has always been integral to the concept’s construction? The God Bomb. The Love Bomb. Bergman writes:

“There are moving pictures with sound and light which never leave the projector of the soul but run in loops throughout life with unchanging sharpness, unchanging objective clarity. Only one's own insight inexorably and relentlessly moves inwards towards the truth.”3

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“Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can’t bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive in the universe. This is the natural language of the species.” 4

You used to be distracted in particulars, inequalities, news stories, events, things which had happened in your life and the lives of others and how they stitched themselves into a bigger picture, into a way of knowing the world. Concerns that could be counted, that felt productive and scary in a way that spoke of an outside. Now you find yourself distracted in general – by a slowing of your thoughts, by an inward turn of the processes which make up a day-to-day difference.

You don’t dream so much these days, and when you do it is of the bomb. This is a throwback fear, this is a fear learned from movies and test footage, from video games and books, media in which you have played both willing and unwilling participant. This is the kind of fear with a name – a fear with a capital F – which can be catalogued and indexed and maybe even medicated. Nucleomitophobia, the fear of bombs. Theophobia, the fear of gods. Chronophobia, the fear of time.

It’s time for bed or maybe it’s morning. The bomb is the kind of big dream which obviously means something else. It’s morning in an abstract way, morning for others, for those who work shifts in the dark meat of the night, all buckets and mops and pistols and knives. It’s the big dream in which nothing else has changed, just the edge of the bed, the moon through the curtain, and a secret you’d like to reveal to yourself.

The important thing about dreams is that they always mean something else, isn’t it? Don’t they?

You think of the drills you never did, of the times you never lived through, and the children scared shitless beneath their tiny wooden desks. The bomb dream is big and important, it’s a rehearsal. It must be. The bomb dream is the standing and the moon-flash, the nose-itch crunch of a light which comes from within. It’s a kind of wishful X-Ray where you get to see the bone, where you get to see inside yourself and know – just for one second – what it meant all along.

This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

Footnotes

  1. The quoted sections are taken from Tarkovsky’s Time Within Time, The Diaries, 1970-1986 (1989), p.95–96 ↩

  2. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4dxaf4 ↩

  3. Ingmar Bergman. The Magic Lantern (1987) ↩

  4. Don DeLilo, White Noise (1985), p.289 ↩