Going Champing
At first, our conversation took an unsurprising route. We sitting in a graveyard on a long summer’s evening, about to spend a night in a church. We were at the age where death and the rituals that engulf it were as central to our navigation of the world as what to have for tea; perhaps more pertinently our recent engagement with them had been both emotionally heightened and compromised by the pandemic. So we chatted about the deaths of loved ones and the funerals we’d been to, we chatted about the process of dying, the intractability of grief. Indeed, it seemed for a while that this was the dialogue to which all champing must lead. Then we heard it.
By Charlie Hill.
Minute 9: Solaris
The engine powering this parade of off-kilter lookalikes is the planet Solaris itself. It shows a disconcerting penchant for reaching into people’s minds and fashioning physical manifestations of whatever it finds there. (Kris and company dub these apparitions “guests,” in part because they have no idea what the visitors really are, but also because anything more precise risks existential horror.) The arrivals are seldom comforting, but always revealing. Solaris sends Kris multiple copies of his young wife, Hari – who died of suicide ten years prior, and still bears the injection scars he recalls seeing on her body. Her recurrence is symptomatic of his unceasing guilt and grief. The supercilious biologist Sartorius is given miniature people whose short stature reflects his tendency to look down on others. The drunken, dishevelled cyberneticist Snaut receives feminine figures glimpsed in brief flashes in his bed; the sexual undercurrents of their brief appearances suggest a loneliness that has surrendered to fantasy.
By Alexander B. Joy.