What do I not need? Or reflections on subjective responsibility

     I drew my question — what do I not need? — from my reading of Andrey Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time (henceforth Sculpting). His book was completed shortly before he died of cancer in his late fifties. I am writing in my mid-sixties. At any age, we may consciously attend to and problematize the phenomena of aging and mortality. As we grow older, however, aging and mortality are often the very rhythm of our living, of our listening, writing, hearing-not-hearing, seeing, eliding. So it is with my reading and writing at this time.
    In Sculpting, Tarkovsky writes about his filmmaking, stretching the multidimensional fabric of his living-creativity through the palpability of practical time; through the moral or ethical intentions that come from his individual but always connected and collectively formed “soul“; and on to “love” and a kind of dipping into, and billowing out of, what is not known. His leaning into love, mysticism, and a search for a reality or a truth — which he would call the truth —  while acknowledging the inevitable condition of not knowing, and yet so confident of what he feels, thinks, and has to do, reminds me a lot of Simone Weil’s powerful and neurotic weaving of soul, intention, and world. Both Tarkovsky and Weil substantially draw their conceptions of love and sacrifice from the ethos and affect of Christianity. 
     Tarkovsky’s book was written over many years, his thinking and writing evolving as he made films, travelled, and fell ill. In the penultimate chapter of the book he offers a meta-narrative of his last film, The Sacrifice. He tells the story of a man, Alexander, who gives up everything, including his family, including burning down his home.  About filming the burning scene, Tarkovsky writes: “Perhaps other scenes — the dream sequences or the barren tree scenes — are more significant from a certain psychological point of view than the one in which Alexander burns down his house in grim fulfillment of his vow. But from the start I was determined to concentrate the feelings of the audience on the behavior, at first sight utterly senseless, of someone who considers worthless — and therefore actually sinful — everything that is not a necessity of life.” 
​     This question — what is (not) needed? — is often lived and described by men in relation to spouses and children, worldly goods, and status. A prime example is the life and story of Prince Gautam who came to be called Buddha. Female mystics, by contrast, often don’t have spouses or children; traditionally in many societies, especially Indo-European, whatever their inherited social status, as girls and women their personas were also more regulated, and ideally they embodied the absence of masculine assertion. Indeed, in Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice, the protagonist Alexander realizes the question of “what is not needed” by way of intimacy, sexual and otherwise, with Maria, a “modest, timid, perpetually uncertain of herself” maid in his household and also a “witch.” Here the word “witch” has a positive valence.
     For Tarkovsky, the 20th century world was increasingly mired in materialism and technology and desperately needed spiritual regeneration.
     From my experience of life, the world is always in crisis and always needs regeneration, but in the human-occupied world, too often the crap of crisis is heaped upon those who are socio-politically weaker or forced into weakness. This has always been the case. The difference in 2025 is the magnitude of everything: populations, industrial production, pollution, greed, waste, environmental degradation, destructiveness of weapons, technology-fueled fantasies. The difference in 2025 for people like me is that the crisis is in our backyard and we can’t easily turn away.
    In Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan tells a similar story to The Sacrifice. Keegan’s story is also about a sacrifice of sorts, also has a male protagonist with a family, but the rot and regeneration in her Irish story are lived in ordinary life. [SPOILER coming up] In Keegan’s novel, Bill Furlong has no known father, is himself the father of five girls, runs a coal business, and ends up rescuing a young outcast girl from a self-righteously predatory institution, meaning people-institution-people, in this case Catholic. The girl is also a mother. We are never told what happens to the girl’s child. There is no intimacy between Furlong and the girl, except as empathy or recognition. Furlong does not leave his family and does not burn down his house, at least not physically, but he does give up the safety of convention for himself and his family, and sacrifices peace of mind for himself and his family. We aren’t told how much he will lose. It is not a small sacrifice.
     Reading Small Things side by side with Sculpting, I struggled with the question of “sacrifice” and toggled back and forth between the notion of sacrifice and the question: what do I not need? Answering the question was easier than being abstract.
     I don’t need judgement, of self or other, except when I do. I don’t need to be right. I don’t need you to be wrong. I don’t need to sacrifice, except when I do. I don’t need to win, except when I do. When I do: when there is expanding dishonesty and unkindness of spirit and action; when there is malice and harm done; when there is promise of more meanness of spirit, more injury. When is “when,” and what is “more?” That is subjective responsibility. Alexander makes his decision, and Furlong makes his. 
     In this time of heightened strife, open cruelty, ripe lies, delusion of selves and others, strident calls for change, and bursting need for regeneration, both books have led me to reflect on subjective responsibility. 
    With a kind of steadfastness, Furlong lives in the middle ground between the shattering apocalypse-revelation of Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice and the grinding epochal change that is traced in history books. He lives in the middle ground of the everyday, as I do, as we all do, whatever the piping or trumpeting grandness of our vision or voice, however our actions contribute to revelation or change. In that middle ground, while Tarkovsky, Weil, and many others write about love, or soul entanglement with the world, as an immanence or a calling, Keegan’s Furlong lives it as a mundane practice: working to feed, clothe, and shelter his family; noticing others’ need and giving a little without reducing care for himself and his family; until one day giving a little isn’t an option. He can either turn away, or has to give (up) a lot.
     Living my Furlong life, I don’t have an obvious person to rescue, as he didn’t, until he did. Nor do I feel a shattering revelation. What does stretch and spill out of the boundaries of my thought is an eerily repeated world. So much is present, so much repeated, all alive.
     Thankfully, so many others are also thinking, feeling, deciding, acting, and giving up their peace of mind, again and again. For those of us who are still fortunate, wellbeing and peace slip back with late summer flowers, or music, or laughter, until, again, we are faced with caring, or not. In our world, caring risks peace of mind at the minimum. 
    To close on a sweeter note: while I was finishing the two books, the Jewish High Holy Days began. 
    On Rosh Hashanah, Zohran Mamdani, the NYC Mayoral candidate whom I support, posted a greeting to Jewish New Yorkers that is worth listening to, even if you fear it’s just political theater. Mamdani’s greeting ends with : “Yom Kippur will soon follow. On this holiest of days, Jewish New Yorkers will pause to reflect, to atone, and to do the hard work of looking inwards. It is a tradition we would all do well to emulate, to build a city that feels sweet, and learns from what did not work in the past. Where we are not afraid to admit to our failings and grow accordingly. And where, above all, every New Yorker is cherished by this city they love.” Political theater or not, the words express an aspiration that I/we could hold for reflection on the past, action in the present, and intention for the future. Definitely for NYC, beloved city I share with Jewish New Yorkers and Zohran Mamdani, but also for our world.

What do I not need?
What comfort of mind do I sacrifice?
What is my aliveness in this world?