Viewing others’ meaning-drained objects lets us see our own urgencies as an alien would

Evidence

‘Here you see old sunlight from other times and other lives’, Foxx observes in his evocative sleevenotes for Tiny Colour Movies. To leaf through other people’s family photos, to see moments that were of intense emotional significance for them but which mean nothing to you, is, necessarily, to reflect on the times of high drama in your own life, and to achieve a kind of distance that is at once dispassionate and powerfully affecting. That is why the – beautifully, painfully – dilated moment in Tarkovsky’s Stalker where the camera lingers over talismanic objects that were once saturated with meaning, but are now saturated only with water is for me the most moving scene in cinema. It is as if we are seeing the urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an Alien–God. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 362

Categorization

• XREF: The phrase ‘seeing the urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an Alien-God’ reconnects to ch6’s ‘identifying with the alien’ and to the book’s whole lost-futures theme. — connects to: Decontextualized photographs charge us through the gap between others’ importance and our indifference; The situation is constituted from Others’ meanings rather than from being itself — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 444; Another person’s perception of objects disintegrates the spatial relations I establish between things — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 718
• BMF: The objects ‘saturated only with water’ in Tarkovsky’s Stalker evoke the final flooded, emptied rooms holding only significance that outlives its meaning — a close tonal cousin to the shrunken everyday hauntings of Burial and the spectral spaces tracked through this book, though no specific novel from the library matches directly.

Broader Connections

• The situation is constituted from Others’ meanings rather than from being itself #expands (0.78) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 444
• Another person’s perception of objects disintegrates the spatial relations I establish between things #corroborates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 718