Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bell-Maker
Tine and Rubob took tentative steps back out into the world this afternoon, after several days without a walk. It was a dreary day, gray and misty after a wet weekend, and Tine was still weary after a long bout with the flu.
"It looks like the world after the great flood has receded," Rubob said, surveying the damp, cheerless scene around him.
Tine, feeling downcast, wasn't ready to look around and take in the sights of the neighborhood. She focused on more manageable portions of the world, such as a lichen-covered stone wall.
"What are you looking at?" Rubob asked. "You're not yourself yet, are you, poor little Tine?"
But Tine always enjoys stone walls, and this one boosted her spirits a little.
While she'd been ailing, the industrious citizens of the village had been busy.
Rubob, who's a capable fence-mender himself, lingered over the sight of the newly erected fence and pronounced it "perfectly straight and level."
"It can't have been easy digging those holes in the winter," he said.
"They would have had to penetrate the permafrost," Tine said, recalling a recent walk in Arctic regions. (Tine Travels to the North Pole. )
The two turned off Hatter's Lane and headed down a side street.
Tine continued to gaze at scenes close to the ground, including more evidence of citizens hard at work.
Rubob sought out broader vistas.
"I've just finished Primo Levi's memoirs of his time in Auschwitz," he said. "He survived because he was lucky enough to be assigned to work in the laboratory for the chemical factory, the 'Chemical Kommando.' Those who worked outside in the snow -- digging ditches, hauling wood -- had a much worse chance of surviving the winter. Something like seven in ten who labored outdoors died."
In the book, "Survival in Auschwitz," which Tine delved into later in the day, Levi wrote:
“The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature, but for us the question is simpler.
"Today in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring."
"And Levi was lucky again," Rubob said. "He wound up in the camp infirmary with scarlet fever when the Germans evacuated 20,000 prisoners in January 1945, near the end of the war. None of the prisoners returned from that march. But all those in the infirmary were left behind, including Levi. And with luck, once again, he managed to live through the month until the Russians arrived by finding an old cast-iron stove in the ruins of the camp and dragging it back to the infirmary. It became the only room in the camp with a stove, and the eleven patients in the infirmary survived on a diet of potatoes. "
"Better lucky than good," Tine said. "What film was that in -- that line? We just saw it."
"Was it 'Munich?'" Rubob ventured. "No, that wasn't it."
"'The Man in the White Suit'? No, that can't be it, because Alec Guinness was very unlucky in that," Tine said. "Now I remember -- the Woody Allen one."
"That's right, 'Match Point,' Rubob said.
"Where the ball hitting the net can fall one way or the other," Tine said. "In the case of the tennis pro, the murderer, it falls in his favor."
"Of the 650 people in the railroad convoy that took Primo Levi to Auschwitz, only a very few were lucky," Rubob said. "Just twenty returned home after the war."
"A train convoy from where Rubob?"
"Turin, Tine," Rubob said. "The Italian Fascists arrested Levi in 1943, and he was deported to Auschwitz. The journey took four days, and the prisoners had no food or water. Once they arrived, the men were immediately separated from the women and children, who they never saw again. And right from the start, people were picked out for the gas chambers.
"The system of selecting prisoners for the gas chambers was all very detached, methodical, done in a way so as not to alarm the inmates of the death camp," Rubob continued. A guard's hand gesture to the left or the right would indicate whether a prisoner would be spared or not."
Rubob stopped to look at a curious sign on a house they were passing.
"Built in 1969? I've never seen a sign like that before, Tine," he said.
"Maybe we're getting older," Tine thought. She thought of the '60s -- and the Beatles.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed-in for peace, 1969
From: http://www.beatles-discography.com/index.html?http://www.beatles-discography.com/1969.html
"Another time, Rubob -- history, " Tine said.
"Speaking of history, what happened to Rublev yesterday after I left?" Rubob asked.
They'd gone to see "The Passion According to Andrei: Andrei Rublev" on Sunday -- a long, brooding film about Russia's greatest painter of icons. Rubob had left halfway through because of commitments in the world at large. There were moments in the first half of the film where everyone in the audience, not just Tine and Rubob, must have been thinking: "Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the end of this film."
Tine noticed a tree that looked just like some of the endless scenes in the black-and-white film:
The movie follows Rublev on his wanderings through war-ravaged, medieval Russia. The director, Andrei Tarkovsky, presents scene after scene of arid Russian landscapes, interspersed with what one critic said were "achingly long, slow pans across Slavic faces." To make matters worse for Tine and Rubob, they were sitting in the last row in the back of the theater, right next to a leak in the ceiling. Every second, a drop of water landed with a loud plop behind them, with the slow, steady drip of water torture.
Rubob, who appeared to be enjoying a nap during much of the first half, was much relieved to leave just as the second half was starting. But as it happened, the action picked up, and Tine was glad she stayed.
"How much of it did you see before you dropped off in the first half, Rubob?" Tine asked.
"Well, a group of icon painters left a monastery to go paint a church in the city," Rubob said. "At the church, Rublev couldn't bring himself to paint 'The Last Judgment' -- or anything else."
"Yes, why was that?" Tine asked.
"I don't know," Rubob said. "Anyway, the other monks sat around doing nothing, waiting for word from Rublev. Then the scene changes and the Tartars arrive. They raid the city, and things start to pick up a little. That's when I left."
"I thought you were sleeping, Rubob"
"Now and then, Tine," Rubob said. "I tried to keep one eye open."
"Well, you got most of the first half. It did get better after you fled from the Tartars," Tine said. "Like your friend Primo Levi, Rublev was lucky, and he managed to avoid injury and death despite every imaginable catastrophe befalling those around him. He survived the bloody sacking of the city by the Tartars. And then -- do you remember the Russian prince who overthrew his brother with the help of the Tartars?"
"Vaguely," Rubob said.
"Well, the prince commissioned a bell for the church, and a new episode in the movie begins," Tine said. "There's no one to cast the bell because all the bell-makers have been felled by war, disease or famine. The son of one of the great bell-makers --Boriska, who's not much more than 12 or so -- says he'll do it. His father, he claims, left him the secret of bell-making.
"Everyone's skeptical, but Boriska is persuasive and he takes charge of things. He starts to dig an enormous hole in the ground for the casting, telling the workers that one of the secrets is that bell-makers must dig the hole themselves. It's going to be a huge bell, bigger than that black SUV in that driveway.
"Rublev, who's been wandering around the countryside in various states of torment over his life and art, happens upon the strange scene with the young bell-maker working in his hole, and he watches from a distance. The out-of-work icon painter becomes increasingly fascinated by the sight of the precocious young craftsman leading hundreds of workers in the casting of the bell.
"Like Rublev, Boriska insists that everything has to be perfect. He delays the project for weeks while he searches for the perfect clay, which he finds while falling down a hillside in a storm. Unlike Rublev, Boriska gets things done, though. He doesn't sit around brooding, but he pushes his army of laborers endlessly, even ordering them whipped when they won't do what he wants. He's a determined artist, this bell-maker, Rubob, and Rublev recognizes it as he watches everything.
"And yet all the other workers continue to doubt that Boriska will be able to make his bell. It'll crack after it's been cast, they say. It's taking far too long and it'll snow before it can be cast. But the bell is cast, and it comes out perfectly, like that fence you liked, Rubob.
Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev),
From http://www.ramr.org/vine/journal_view.php?journalid=160444
"It's solid, strong and beautiful, and the boy, lying beside it in the muddy hole, caresses it. The silver bell looks like something that's dropped from the sky, something miraculous sent by God to the ravaged country.
"Then the day of the great ceremony arrives, when the completed bell will be hauled out of its hole by lines of laborers with ropes that stretch out over the hillsides, seemingly for miles. The prince and his court are there, along with all the church leaders. The naysayers are all there, too, and they seem to chant in unison: It won't ring. It can't ring.
"The bell's hoisted up on its massive wooden frame, and a man jumps down into the hole to swing the rope beneath the giant mallet. It takes forever for the mallet, which sways soundlessly back and forth in a slowly widening arc, to reach the lip of the bell. The town waits anxiously. The audience in the theater is breathless, Rubob. You missed the climactic moment, you see."
"I'm sorry I missed it, Tine," Rubob said.
"The exigencies of a busy life," Tine said. "Perfectly understandable. You had your own bells to cast."
"But to get back to the story," she said, "the bell finally rings out over the landscape, with a great, rich sound, welling up from the depths of the earth, in some ways like the deep, resonant chant of Orthodox monks. It's the sound of creation, Rubob.
"The boy -- our Boriska -- flees the scene and collapses in a ditch with relief. Sobbing, he confesses to Rublev that his father never gave him the secret of bell-making. Rublev consoles him and tells him they'll go to Moscow together. 'You'll cast bells and I'll paint icons. That will give the people something to celebrate.'
"I wonder, come to think, whether Boriska was lucky or good, Rubob -- I don't really know. I think maybe the two work together, hand in hand. Maybe that was the case with Primo Levi, too.
"Anyway, the scenes of the black-and-white film dissolve at this point, and the film ends in color, with the camera moving slowly over Rublev's frescoes and icons. The most beautiful may be his icon of the Trinity, which shows three angels seated at a table beneath the tree of life.
Rublev's "The Trinity," from:
http://www.stjohnscamberwell.org.au/Sermons/ExplanationofTheTrinityIcon.htm
"So you see, it's the story about the making of an artist, Rubob. Not so bad, but very long."
"It sounds very interesting, Tine," Rubob said.
"Well, it was the icons that were the most stunning. In the Russian Orthodox Church, they believe that divinity is really present through icons. Icons are 'meeting places with the divine,' as an old church canon once told me. I wonder whether it's still true in a movie. I suppose it must be."
Tine and Rubob turned up their street, and a neighbor was putting out her trash.
"It's easier to put it out this week than last," Rubob said, referring to all the snow last week.
"It certainly is," the neighbor said.
"It's a lot warmer today, too," Rubob said.
"They say it was 9 degrees warmer than usual this month," the neighbor said. "But the temperature has been up and down, with extremes of cold and warmth. It's more healthful to have it consistent, I think. Even if it's cold, we can at least turn the heat up."
Tine thought that the cold would probably return to the village soon. We haven't made it through the gray winter yet, she thought.
Her eyes were still downcast as she walked up her driveway, but she thought of Boriska's bell deep in the muddy earth. It was the story of how Andrei Rublev recovered his passion for his art, his passion for life.
"All in all, a very pleasant walk," Tine thought.
"It looks like the world after the great flood has receded," Rubob said, surveying the damp, cheerless scene around him.
Tine, feeling downcast, wasn't ready to look around and take in the sights of the neighborhood. She focused on more manageable portions of the world, such as a lichen-covered stone wall.
"What are you looking at?" Rubob asked. "You're not yourself yet, are you, poor little Tine?"
But Tine always enjoys stone walls, and this one boosted her spirits a little.
While she'd been ailing, the industrious citizens of the village had been busy.
Rubob, who's a capable fence-mender himself, lingered over the sight of the newly erected fence and pronounced it "perfectly straight and level."
"It can't have been easy digging those holes in the winter," he said.
"They would have had to penetrate the permafrost," Tine said, recalling a recent walk in Arctic regions. (Tine Travels to the North Pole. )
The two turned off Hatter's Lane and headed down a side street.
Tine continued to gaze at scenes close to the ground, including more evidence of citizens hard at work.
Rubob sought out broader vistas.
"I've just finished Primo Levi's memoirs of his time in Auschwitz," he said. "He survived because he was lucky enough to be assigned to work in the laboratory for the chemical factory, the 'Chemical Kommando.' Those who worked outside in the snow -- digging ditches, hauling wood -- had a much worse chance of surviving the winter. Something like seven in ten who labored outdoors died."
In the book, "Survival in Auschwitz," which Tine delved into later in the day, Levi wrote:
“The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature, but for us the question is simpler.
"Today in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring."
"And Levi was lucky again," Rubob said. "He wound up in the camp infirmary with scarlet fever when the Germans evacuated 20,000 prisoners in January 1945, near the end of the war. None of the prisoners returned from that march. But all those in the infirmary were left behind, including Levi. And with luck, once again, he managed to live through the month until the Russians arrived by finding an old cast-iron stove in the ruins of the camp and dragging it back to the infirmary. It became the only room in the camp with a stove, and the eleven patients in the infirmary survived on a diet of potatoes. "
"Better lucky than good," Tine said. "What film was that in -- that line? We just saw it."
"Was it 'Munich?'" Rubob ventured. "No, that wasn't it."
"'The Man in the White Suit'? No, that can't be it, because Alec Guinness was very unlucky in that," Tine said. "Now I remember -- the Woody Allen one."
"That's right, 'Match Point,' Rubob said.
"Where the ball hitting the net can fall one way or the other," Tine said. "In the case of the tennis pro, the murderer, it falls in his favor."
"Of the 650 people in the railroad convoy that took Primo Levi to Auschwitz, only a very few were lucky," Rubob said. "Just twenty returned home after the war."
"A train convoy from where Rubob?"
"Turin, Tine," Rubob said. "The Italian Fascists arrested Levi in 1943, and he was deported to Auschwitz. The journey took four days, and the prisoners had no food or water. Once they arrived, the men were immediately separated from the women and children, who they never saw again. And right from the start, people were picked out for the gas chambers.
"The system of selecting prisoners for the gas chambers was all very detached, methodical, done in a way so as not to alarm the inmates of the death camp," Rubob continued. A guard's hand gesture to the left or the right would indicate whether a prisoner would be spared or not."
Rubob stopped to look at a curious sign on a house they were passing.
"Built in 1969? I've never seen a sign like that before, Tine," he said.
"Maybe we're getting older," Tine thought. She thought of the '60s -- and the Beatles.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed-in for peace, 1969
From: http://www.beatles-discography.com/index.html?http://www.beatles-discography.com/1969.html
"Another time, Rubob -- history, " Tine said.
"Speaking of history, what happened to Rublev yesterday after I left?" Rubob asked.
They'd gone to see "The Passion According to Andrei: Andrei Rublev" on Sunday -- a long, brooding film about Russia's greatest painter of icons. Rubob had left halfway through because of commitments in the world at large. There were moments in the first half of the film where everyone in the audience, not just Tine and Rubob, must have been thinking: "Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the end of this film."
Tine noticed a tree that looked just like some of the endless scenes in the black-and-white film:
The movie follows Rublev on his wanderings through war-ravaged, medieval Russia. The director, Andrei Tarkovsky, presents scene after scene of arid Russian landscapes, interspersed with what one critic said were "achingly long, slow pans across Slavic faces." To make matters worse for Tine and Rubob, they were sitting in the last row in the back of the theater, right next to a leak in the ceiling. Every second, a drop of water landed with a loud plop behind them, with the slow, steady drip of water torture.
Rubob, who appeared to be enjoying a nap during much of the first half, was much relieved to leave just as the second half was starting. But as it happened, the action picked up, and Tine was glad she stayed.
"How much of it did you see before you dropped off in the first half, Rubob?" Tine asked.
"Well, a group of icon painters left a monastery to go paint a church in the city," Rubob said. "At the church, Rublev couldn't bring himself to paint 'The Last Judgment' -- or anything else."
"Yes, why was that?" Tine asked.
"I don't know," Rubob said. "Anyway, the other monks sat around doing nothing, waiting for word from Rublev. Then the scene changes and the Tartars arrive. They raid the city, and things start to pick up a little. That's when I left."
"I thought you were sleeping, Rubob"
"Now and then, Tine," Rubob said. "I tried to keep one eye open."
"Well, you got most of the first half. It did get better after you fled from the Tartars," Tine said. "Like your friend Primo Levi, Rublev was lucky, and he managed to avoid injury and death despite every imaginable catastrophe befalling those around him. He survived the bloody sacking of the city by the Tartars. And then -- do you remember the Russian prince who overthrew his brother with the help of the Tartars?"
"Vaguely," Rubob said.
"Well, the prince commissioned a bell for the church, and a new episode in the movie begins," Tine said. "There's no one to cast the bell because all the bell-makers have been felled by war, disease or famine. The son of one of the great bell-makers --Boriska, who's not much more than 12 or so -- says he'll do it. His father, he claims, left him the secret of bell-making.
"Everyone's skeptical, but Boriska is persuasive and he takes charge of things. He starts to dig an enormous hole in the ground for the casting, telling the workers that one of the secrets is that bell-makers must dig the hole themselves. It's going to be a huge bell, bigger than that black SUV in that driveway.
"Rublev, who's been wandering around the countryside in various states of torment over his life and art, happens upon the strange scene with the young bell-maker working in his hole, and he watches from a distance. The out-of-work icon painter becomes increasingly fascinated by the sight of the precocious young craftsman leading hundreds of workers in the casting of the bell.
"Like Rublev, Boriska insists that everything has to be perfect. He delays the project for weeks while he searches for the perfect clay, which he finds while falling down a hillside in a storm. Unlike Rublev, Boriska gets things done, though. He doesn't sit around brooding, but he pushes his army of laborers endlessly, even ordering them whipped when they won't do what he wants. He's a determined artist, this bell-maker, Rubob, and Rublev recognizes it as he watches everything.
"And yet all the other workers continue to doubt that Boriska will be able to make his bell. It'll crack after it's been cast, they say. It's taking far too long and it'll snow before it can be cast. But the bell is cast, and it comes out perfectly, like that fence you liked, Rubob.
Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev),
From http://www.ramr.org/vine/journal_view.php?journalid=160444
"It's solid, strong and beautiful, and the boy, lying beside it in the muddy hole, caresses it. The silver bell looks like something that's dropped from the sky, something miraculous sent by God to the ravaged country.
"Then the day of the great ceremony arrives, when the completed bell will be hauled out of its hole by lines of laborers with ropes that stretch out over the hillsides, seemingly for miles. The prince and his court are there, along with all the church leaders. The naysayers are all there, too, and they seem to chant in unison: It won't ring. It can't ring.
"The bell's hoisted up on its massive wooden frame, and a man jumps down into the hole to swing the rope beneath the giant mallet. It takes forever for the mallet, which sways soundlessly back and forth in a slowly widening arc, to reach the lip of the bell. The town waits anxiously. The audience in the theater is breathless, Rubob. You missed the climactic moment, you see."
"I'm sorry I missed it, Tine," Rubob said.
"The exigencies of a busy life," Tine said. "Perfectly understandable. You had your own bells to cast."
"But to get back to the story," she said, "the bell finally rings out over the landscape, with a great, rich sound, welling up from the depths of the earth, in some ways like the deep, resonant chant of Orthodox monks. It's the sound of creation, Rubob.
"The boy -- our Boriska -- flees the scene and collapses in a ditch with relief. Sobbing, he confesses to Rublev that his father never gave him the secret of bell-making. Rublev consoles him and tells him they'll go to Moscow together. 'You'll cast bells and I'll paint icons. That will give the people something to celebrate.'
"I wonder, come to think, whether Boriska was lucky or good, Rubob -- I don't really know. I think maybe the two work together, hand in hand. Maybe that was the case with Primo Levi, too.
"Anyway, the scenes of the black-and-white film dissolve at this point, and the film ends in color, with the camera moving slowly over Rublev's frescoes and icons. The most beautiful may be his icon of the Trinity, which shows three angels seated at a table beneath the tree of life.
Rublev's "The Trinity," from:
http://www.stjohnscamberwell.org.au/Sermons/ExplanationofTheTrinityIcon.htm
"So you see, it's the story about the making of an artist, Rubob. Not so bad, but very long."
"It sounds very interesting, Tine," Rubob said.
"Well, it was the icons that were the most stunning. In the Russian Orthodox Church, they believe that divinity is really present through icons. Icons are 'meeting places with the divine,' as an old church canon once told me. I wonder whether it's still true in a movie. I suppose it must be."
Tine and Rubob turned up their street, and a neighbor was putting out her trash.
"It's easier to put it out this week than last," Rubob said, referring to all the snow last week.
"It certainly is," the neighbor said.
"It's a lot warmer today, too," Rubob said.
"They say it was 9 degrees warmer than usual this month," the neighbor said. "But the temperature has been up and down, with extremes of cold and warmth. It's more healthful to have it consistent, I think. Even if it's cold, we can at least turn the heat up."
Tine thought that the cold would probably return to the village soon. We haven't made it through the gray winter yet, she thought.
Her eyes were still downcast as she walked up her driveway, but she thought of Boriska's bell deep in the muddy earth. It was the story of how Andrei Rublev recovered his passion for his art, his passion for life.
"All in all, a very pleasant walk," Tine thought.
posted by Tine at 2:36 PM
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