I just noticed an aspect of Solaris that I hadn't before. There is this idea - quite common in English pop music, for instance in EMF's Unbelievable: in thought I love you more - that you should not love the idea of a person, but the person itself.

The idea is alien to me, because there is no me itself, only an idea of me - or more precisely, me itself is what chooses the idea - but it kind of strikes me as left wing. Now, Solaris is after all a Soviet film, and my intuition is that Marx would come down on the acceptance side of the debate.

So, Kris sends Hari off, and another Hari enters, Hari number 2, both materialisations of Kris' conceptualisation of her. That is, the person is the idea. And yet Kris thinks he treated her wrong and it meaningful to do penance by treating Hari number 2 better.

To no avail, because Hari is suicidal and his gentleness only causes her more pain in the knowledge that she is just the idea of Hari and not the person herself.

There's a point there, isn't there?, that when you're the materialisation of an idea of a person, you'll be just as bound by the nature of that person as the person itself - providing the idea is correct.

In any case, Kris thinks at that point that contributing in a nurturative way to the evolution of his concept has a deeper meaning and Hari agrees by praising Kris' love for her.

Arguably his opinion changes, since he understands that making contact with the ocean is the higher goal, but even so he chooses to rectify his relationship with the idea of his father, when he could not do so with his father himself.

Apart from the possible allusion to but as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God there's a definite insistance that learning how to cope with one's ideas of people is what matters and that the people themselves are, if anything, stumbling blocks on this path, by failing to grasp the meaningfulness of the ideas they pursue and which inform the ideas that other people have of them, that is that we find ourselves and within ourselves the relations to the rest of us finding ourselves, but, alas, the children are always late.

There is not much understanding for that on EMF's side - and neither on Cock Robin's. But their, again, Catholic! understanding of loving the sinner - actually, I once met a Catholic who professed his hatred of the man who chooses his idea to my face - is not as peculiar as Patrick Stewart's obsession with treating Data as a real person evidenced by the Picard series. This seems to be a typically English idea that, because you can't tell the difference, you should make no difference, or, differently put, that any ideas you may have must be derived from observation.

Now, if my ideas were derived from observation, I would be a moron and only an imbecile can dream this to be different for anybody! It is a particularly English type of not seeing your own nose - or more precisely, denying that you have eyes, because you can't see them.

Well, I guess all of these drink the world, so to speak. I am drinking life, time, creation, whatever you want to call it - and so did Tarkovsky. This is a weird time. Our public figures celebrate a cult of extreme mindlessness. In their mind they are the be-all, end-all, but not their mind, but their silhouettes. Yes, Plato talked about the cave before, but they only bother with their own shadows. The mind, of course, shields itself from the one, but is still one.