The German lyric poet Holderlin once asked: "What are poets for in a destitute time?" It is the same anguished question the Stalker asks at the end of the film. "The time is destitute," says the philosopher Martin Heidegger, "because it lacks the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death and love." Heidegger says that the poet is a person who refuses self-will - which turns objects and people into "merchandise", objects for commercial exchange - and instead ventures his being in the most human of qualities, language. There, paradoxically, he discovers his "destiny" by embracing his mortality: "what is presumed to be eternal merely conceals a suspended transiency, suspended in the void of a durationless now".

from Alison Croggon's theatre blog -- notes -- more soon