There is a moment in the film Stalker when the Writer, after a terrifying journey down a long tunnel known as The Meat Grinder, discovers a round metallic cylinder or container, a little over a metre in diameter, into which he peers, picks up a rock, and lets it fall. According to Zona, Geoff Dyer’s brilliant study of the film (and much more besides), ‘the stone . . . makes no sound when it lands, because there is no splash or clang at all, and then, after ten or twelve seconds, there is an echoey, clanging splash suggesting that the drop is about the height of the Empire State Building at least . . . Given the depth, it’s quite ballsy of Writer to perch on the rim of this drum – a drum that is in fact a mile-deep shaft – as if on the edge of a paddling pool made from Meccano.’

And here’s the thing:  I was thinking about the film today just before I had a meeting with a visual artist, who in the course of our conversation – she was talking about Gilles Deleuze, actually – said that what Deleuze didn’t understand, what he couldn’t grasp, was that for the artist the abyss is vital, and the entire life project of the artist might be to perch on the precipice, on the rim above the abyss – I can’t remember precisely what she said, but it was something like that – and this image of the Writer flashed past me, perched as though oblivious (the adjective is apt) on the edge of that cylindrical precipice, that terrifyingly deep pit or abyss.  And I was so grateful for that insight, and because that sequence in the film has stuck with me, I knew exactly how to visualise it. It was one of those synchronicities that imbue the passing of the days with what I like to think of as a form of Sympathetic Magic.

And then, shortly after, is the moment in the film when the eponymous Stalker, Writer and Professor have just abandoned their quest, the room in which they were to accomplish the fulfilment of their innermost wishes left unvisited, nothing achieved, no one satisfied or appeased, just life or what remains of it continuing as before, but the participants more exhausted, more shattered, shredded by an inexorable sense of finality – in spite of everything having been said, and nothing said, and none of it mattering – this is the moment when the rain comes down, and with it, if this is possible, descends both a consummate despair and a terrible cleansing, as though the almost unbearable build up of tension (some might say the unbearable nature of the whole cinematic experience) is washed away in the downpour, the rain that falls and falls without mercy or relief on the souls of the living, and what has been left behind , and what is to come, and which holds only that tiny flicker of hope carried by a child, nothing more . . .

And this is the scene in the bar, afterwards. The dark colours could be out of Rembrandt. Thank God for the dog, just visible to the left of the screen. How strange that the presence of an animal is the element that most imbues the scene with humanity.