By Michael Lavers

I.

Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire is, among other things, an elegy for Homer. We see the aged poet (played by Curt Bois) wandering through a divided Berlin, no longer the unifying voice of a community, the consolidator of disparate histories and legends, but, in his own words, “an old man with a broken voice . . . ignored and mocked.” He can’t climb a flight of stairs without pausing to catch his breath.

No longer the center that binds together what otherwise would remain scattered—the Earth and the stars, mortals and gods, time and eternity—his poem is studied in a library whose patrons cannot see its author passing by, burrowed as they are in their deaf and mute analyses.

Throughout the film, he interacts with no one. All we hear are his beleaguered thoughts: “Those who once listened to me over time became my readers instead. They no longer sit in a circle but apart, each oblivious to the other.” This isolation is made hideously visible in the city’s great graffitied wall, topped with razor wire, surrounded by once-glorious buildings left pockmarked by bullets and bombs.

II.

Unlike Homer’s gods, who take direct action in the lives of mortals, Wenders’ protagonists—a pair of angels named Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander)—are invisible to the people amongst whom they mingle. We pan through separate apartments whose inhabitants, despite their proximity, are mostly oblivious to each other. Only the viewer gets to hear their private laments: “I’ve had it; this can’t go on,” or “She doesn’t love you. Never did.” The angels look on, sad, curious, in love with people they are often powerless to help. When one young man jumps off a building, Cassiel can do nothing but scream, reminding us of Rilke’s famous cry: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’ / Orders? . . . For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror” (translated by Edward Snow). Of course beauty terrifies us: we have betrayed it. That is a truth which Wenders’ Homer knows.

Inspired by Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Wenders’ film has much to mourn: a city divided by a giant wall, a nation split into East and West, the brokenness of a tradition, of Homer’s voice, the brokenness of humanity itself. Two world wars and decades of a cold one have cast their gray penumbra on the world. There are attempts at beauty here, or something like it, but most mix any liveliness with the grotesque and sad: movie producers squabble about budgets; teens dance jaggedly in nightclubs; Nick Cave writhes like a coked-up rat. Even the film’s lovable acrobats, taken directly from Rilke’s fifth elegy, are not Homeric heroes, not angels incarnate flinging themselves into a radiant sky. They’re run out of town for not having the right permits. They dance for no audience in empty parking lots of mud.

III.

Much like the Trojan War, the war of modernity has been total. But we no longer have a unifying poem—or narrative or myth—around which we can heal, in which our sufferings are justified. Ours is an age of anxiety, of a deus absconditus, a world that’s too much with us, whose center is everywhere and therefore nowhere. In contrast to Achilles’ great shield—the circle whose center holds, the circle inside which the entire cosmos fits—the central symbols of our poetry are Yeats’s forlorn falcon and Eliot’s hermit crab gathering the fragments of a shipwreck. We have the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of Arnold’s faith, and Dickinson’s “Of Course—I prayed— / And did God Care?” We are not Odysseus, with a clear home to return to. If we do manage to find our Ithaca, the great hall is empty. Only Nietzsche remains to greet us with the news that God is dead. Like Wallace Stevens’ bantams in pine woods, our poets sing from the isolation of their own private experience: “I am the personal. / Your world is you. I am my world.” Or we flail like Baudelaire’s sad albatross: “The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky / [. . .] When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers, / His giant wings prevent him from walking” (translated by William Aggeler).

The creation of a poem like Homer’s requires, I imagine, a cultural and metaphysical foundation that gives the poet not just content for poetry but the spiritual sturdiness necessary to write at all. It’s hard enough to make poems, but for a while now poets have also had to build the ground on which their poems can stand; they’ve had to find the quarries, haul the granite, lay the spiritual foundations that culture—splintered, walled-off—has not laid for them.

It’s no wonder there is something exhausted about modern poets and something teetering or wrecked about their poems. Poets have been attacked since Plato, and any epoch will present us with examples of outcast bards. But from Virgil having the emperor’s ear, all the way up to Tennyson as Victorian hero, poets have typically been revered as truth-tellers and valued cultural authorities. In the twentieth century, the stereotype of poet as burnout or loser or martyr or drunk becomes central. The poet as “a broken voice . . . ignored and mocked.”

IV.

Just such a martyr is the eponymous character of Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. We watch as he guides two pilgrims to a mysterious room in the middle of a forbidden “Zone,” a room where their deepest spiritual yearnings will be realized. But they are not realized: having arrived at the mysterious room, the pilgrims simply stand at the threshold, staring in at the only holy place left to them, seemingly interested in stepping through.

It is hard work guiding others through a landscape of toxins and traps toward ultimate meaning, especially if he is unsure of the way himself, especially if it is all for naught. And so Stalker is understandably demolished by this labor. As played by Alexander Kaidanovsky, Stalker spends most of the film looking tormented, wincing and twitching, lying down in the mud. Late in the film, Stalker’s wife (Alisa Freindlich) remembers that her own mother had called him “one of God’s holy fools.” He has dedicated his life to the pursuit of truth and beauty in a world determined to destroy those very ideals, destroy them either with bombs or indifference.

Tarkovsky is named as one of Wings of Desire’s dedicatees. Both films portray a bombed-out world where goodness, beauty, and truth remain as the faint aroma of some evaporated glory. In both we get fragments shored against the ruins of a former whole: in Tarkovsky’s a fish swims over submerged hypodermic needles, as well as a shard of the Ghent Altarpiece. This fiftienth-century series of paintings is housed in St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, and depicts, in large luminous panels, Christ’s redemption of humankind. Maybe the shard is from a reproduction, or maybe the original. We aren’t told how, in the fictional universe of this film, the cathedral or its masterwork got destroyed, but the rusty machine-gun lying submerged next to it gives us a clue. Stalker, the film’s quasi-redeemer, possesses mostly only fragments, quoting snippets of the Tao Te Ching, the Book of Revelation, the Gospels.

Stalker does recite one unbroken poem, called “Now Summer is Gone,” in which the line “there has to be more” recurs as the refrain: “Life gathered me up / Safe under its wing, / My luck always held, / But there has to be more.” This is the primal longing, the longing for something else, something transcendent, something we’ve lost. And how is such spiritual longing repaid? After he recites this poem, Stalker says that the poet who wrote it perished in one of the traps of the Zone, a trap called “the meat-grinder.”

V.

The poet who wrote it is, in fact, the filmmaker’s father, Arseny, whose career as a poet was forced through the meat-grinder of the Soviet regime. Most of his poems had to be written “for the desk drawer” as the saying goes, read only by a small coterie of friends. But the desk drawer slowly filled, and out of those hundreds of poems his son included seven in his films. More importantly, his father’s poetic sensibility tinges every film Tarkovsky made. “When I speak of poetry,” the filmmaker writes, “I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality . . . The proper viewing of film requires the spectator to organize the disparate elements of film by intuiting the poetic linkages of its construction.”

Intuiting. Not the brute, dogmatic cause-and-effect linkages of prose, but the subtle associations of color and shape, instinctive analogies of light and shadow, motion and stillness, music and speech. The cuts of some films, like the line breaks in a poem, act not as fractures but joints. They connect as well as separate. The work they do is religious in the etymological sense, something that “binds again.” The filmmaker’s choices—and the viewer’s enjoyment of them—depend on making connections that cannot be reduced to prosaic schemas or recipes, but rely instead on a semi-mysterious artistic faculty perhaps best described by Paul Klee as “exactitude winged by intuition.”

VI.

Damiel the angel grows tired of eternity and opts instead to experience a human life. Once mortal, he wounds his head and sees on his blood-stained hand a color, something he’s never experienced before. He tastes the blood and says, smiling, “I’m beginning to understand.” What does he understand, and how? Pain? Color? Tastes? All those, but something more. We could say “life” but that is so inadequate. It’s not an understanding of the mind, but of the tongue, of something, as Wordsworth would say, “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.” It is a poetic, and therefore a-rational understanding. In an interview with Oswald Stack, Pier Paolo Pasolini, both a prolific poet and filmmaker, stated: “In my view cinema is naturally and substantially poetic . . . because it is dreamlike . . . because it is an apparition, because it is full of meaning, because it is full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning.”

He also wrote: “The motivation that unites all of my films is to give back to reality its original sacred significance.”

VII.

Writing about Cezanne’s runty apples and dirty bottles, Rilke says: “Like Van Gogh he makes these things into his ‘saints,’ and forces them, forces them, to be beautiful, to draw into them the meaning of the whole world and all its bliss and glory.” These films are elegies, but they are also more. They point, they imply, they invite us to remake an order, a wholeness sensed if not fully realized, co-created by us if not already present in the film.

Since these angels have no experience of life’s pleasure or pain, all they can do is look on, astounded. Things we take for granted are to them sources of the profoundest joy. In one scene, two angels compare notes on what they observed that day:

   Cassiel:  And an old man read to a child from The Odyssey, and the young litener stopped blinking              completely. And what do you have to report?

   Damiel:  A woman in the rain who folded up her umbrella and let herself get drenched . . . A schoolboy          describing to his teacher how a fern grew out of the earth, and the astonished teacher. A blind          woman who sensed my presence and groped at her watch.

It’s like watching two children peer through the window of a candy shop. Their deprivation has resulted in a kind of attention that we often lack, a felt intuition that the everyday can be, deserves to be, raised to the level of the mythic, of the sacred. This “poetic way of seeing,” as Tarkovsky might call it, is also taken directly from Rilke:

   What if we’re only here to say: house, 
   bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window,—
   at most: column, tower . . . but for saying, understand,
   oh for such saying as the things themselves
   never dreamt so intensely to be . . .
   Praise the world to the Angel . . .
   Tell him of things.

In a sense, all things are hidden. Only a well-chosen word, spoken with love, can bring them forth into the light.

VIII.

“They no longer sit in a circle but apart, each oblivious to the other.” True also that the center doesn’t any longer hold. All we have of the old certainties are embers, too frail to warm us in this long chaotic night. But there are still things, and things are beautiful: that woman with her umbrella in the rain. Ferns growing out of the earth. The color of graffiti and the smell of coffee and the taste of blood.

Achilles’ shield depicts things aplenty—chariots, spears, sheaves of wheat, lions and dogs, judges and criminals, armies and acrobats—but it also depicts their fittedness, their place inside a cosmically connected whole. Without a center, what is there to unify the scattered satellites, what is the backdrop tableau against which all the various “things” can stand out and assert their rightful meaning or value? Are “things” enough?

Somehow, we sense, they are. Somehow we intuit that Tarkovsky’s submerged shards still pulse with the urgent beauty of the world. After all, the Zone’s sacred room is there. And for all of Stalker’s pained contortions, his head is regularly lit with a kind of nimbus, the tinge of something we recognize as grandeur or grace. It is Stalker’s quixotic quest, futile as it may be, that makes everything a bit more holy and everyone a bit more noble. And though Damiel cannot expect his beloved Marion (Solveig Donmartin) to occupy the place of the dead gods—to become the metaphysical foundation of an entire mortal life—her love is no small compensation for what he has lost. I think of Van Gogh, another of Baudelaire’s sad albatrosses: “In my opinion, I am rich, because I have found in my work something to which I can devote myself heart and soul, and which gives inspiration and significance to life.”

IX.

My favorite scene in Wings of Desire has Peter Falk, playing himself, talking to Damiel next to a coffee stand. Damiel is surprised when Falk can sense his presence and quietly listens as Falk says to him: “I can’t see you, but I know you are here. I feel it . . . I wish I could see your face, just look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here.” (Or, in Rilke’s phrase from the seventh elegy: “Hiersein ist herrlich.”) Falk continues:

   Just to touch something. See, that’s cold. It feels good. Or, here, to smoke, have coffee, and if you do it    together it’s fantastic. Or to draw. You know, you take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a    light line. And together it’s a good line. Or when your hands are cold. You rub them together. See, that’s    good. It feels good. There’s so many good things.

Such things might seem like mere trinkets, the glib assertions of a soul desperate for scraps. Is it reasonable for the angel to give up his immortality for the feeling of rubbing his hands together, for the experience of drawing a line? Is it reasonable that Tarkovsky Sr. had to bury his poems in his desk drawer? My sense of exactitude tells me these things aren’t reasonable at all. But my intuition says that reason isn’t everything. Not even close.

True, our voices are broken, our center is in flux. We no longer sit in a circle but apart, each oblivious to the other. But there are, there still are, so many good things. Poems and films, fruit trees and windows, the kiss of a beloved, and the deer that this week have been wandering up and down my street, leaving their tracks in snow. These things are what we have. They are what let us feel, even in their finitude, some sense of an abiding whole.

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Michael Lavers is the author of two poetry collections, After Earth and The Inextinguishable, both published by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Southwest Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He teaches poetry at BYU.