Ritual nostalgia

the emblemic deity - the ghot 
by Subhrangshu Chatterjee

This time of the year is drenched in nostalgia. Always.

Learning to breathe - part 2: Are transformations wishing wells?

So who's your Chris Powell?

The habit of watching real people living through ups and down die hard. The viewer-writer is always looking for more and more stories to inspire, to tell, to refashion into a poem or a non-fiction piece. Sometimes the lives of these real people whom she watches only from a great distance in time and/or place finds a seat in the corridor of characters she assembles for her novel that she will write someday. Either way, she can’t stop being a voyeur to life.

A character in a medical drama on a television channel once said that people watch reality shows in order to escape from them. That is but only one side of the coin. There are couch potatoes and then there are potatoes who want to be French fries. Okay, that was a really bad metaphor, but do you not agree that life is like a coin with two sides and the connecting joint that has no name?

Most of us flip that coin around all the while, unable to hold onto any particular face of it. Most of our lives are like the edge of the coin- connecting the heads and the tails and existing without an identity. What happens when we actually, I mean, really, really, truly recognize this fallacy of our lives? Either, we choose to live on in this in-between-ness with a sense of never even wanting to achieve either the heads or the tails of it. Or.

Or, we choose to push ourselves across the boundaries of this in-between-ness and into the domains of the extremes of either head or tails which in turn calls for an intense overturning of what we know of our existence. Ah! That sounds like the material of fictional protagonists!

The difference between the fictional protagonists that we usually encounter in films and novels and short stories, and us plebians, is that, they usually achieve a successful transformation, and the story ends there. We, on the sadder hand, always remain tangled; or rather, mostly remain confused and tangled in the matrix that is the process of transformation. So, what should plebians do? Here's a shortlist of choices:

1. Never venture into the extremes that create confusion and tanglement.
2. Forever venture into the extremes that create confusion and tanglement.
3. Think for ever and ever about what to do and hence remain indecisive forever.
4. Live a thriving life filled with ecstasy and injuries, choosing the opportunities of purposeful living over the ever-present fact of life being a wipe-out show of sorts. (another show I sometimes indulge myself with)

Chris Powell in the reality television show "Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition" urges his clients to choose option 'd'. They appear on the show with unbelievable amount of excess weight. During the course of 365 days, the client is shown to achieve a goal to lose whopping amount of fat from the body. Now, these are usually people who instead of dealing with some kind of personal issue, had chosen to not care about themselves and participate in binge eating. And then, this guy who introduces himself as the one specialising in transformations, appears. 

This guy, Chris Powell, takes them on a journey of realising and facing some of their well-hidden emotions. Does this show have a fairy tale ending? It does and it does not. Some of these people do fail to keep up the motivation and falls back to old habits of binge eating and/or not caring about themselves when things get out of hand. You know old habits die hard. While some keep trying. They slip off their mark. They get up and they keep trying.

What does one do when one has a bad bugging old habit that die hard? What does one do when in spite of that habit one desires to lead a purposeful life, acknowledging the bruises that come along with the joys of life? Think of a rose, and, breathe. Sit up straight wherever you are. Feel your spine stretching down your back. Roll back the shoulder blades. Look up straight from your computer screen and breathe. Inhale 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Exhale 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Repeat till you feel profound as a wishing well. 

And then, maybe, write a response to this post? 

After-thought: A., my husband, sounds like Chris Powell when giving me a pep-talk . Hmmm. 

(To be continued) 

When memory ... 2nd part

Emotion is, one assumes, non-existent in times of war. Killing and dying, being lucky enough to survive, and other such primal instincts that humans have carried forward, from the lower ranks of the Darwinian ladder, seem to be the sole truth. Truth of a war is, however like truth of memory - nothing is either this or that. Absolutes don't exist in the memory of devastation. Neither is there one dimension that defines completely what devastation is like. Neither is there one emotion that exists during a time of death and devastation. Neither is there a massive shift in emotions from fear and hatred to love and compassion once the war is officially over. What takes a fraction of a second to destroy needs a lifetime to rebuild. And no, the destruction referred to is not structural destruction. It is the intimate, personal, covered up hopes, ambitions, desires that are more fragile than the concrete structures and life.  

While watching the War Trilogy of Roberto Rossellini - Rome, Open City (Roma, città aperta) , Paisà and Germany Year Zero the above articulated thoughts occurred. 

It is difficult to express responses to images and incidents that seem to nullify all meaning in existence. The long silence since the last post When memory... was because of that difficulty in thinking about things that the 'cultured' mind assumes to be gross. But then, it is interesting  how the eyes see the things that it assumes it doesn't want to see; how the mind locates the things that it assumes it doesn't want to know about. This post is an interlude about how the need to remember brought this second part of "When memory..." to life.

Memory is synaesthetic, meaning that one sensory perception automatically stimulates another sensory perception. The memory of a gashed wound that you hear about is translated into a visual image by the power of words used to express it. Such is the case. A link to an article on a social networking site led to an editor's blog. A particular link in that blog led to the article The Falling Man. Before the article begins, the image of a man, who had jumped from one of the towers hit by the terrorist-driven aircrafts in the USA on 9/11, stares back.

The truth about why or how this particular man appeared to be calm and at a perfect perpendicular position during his fall in this particular photograph, unlike the photographs of the other 'jumpers' that surfaced since the tragedy, remains unclear. And that is not what the article was about. The article addressed the issue of silence. Of forgetting deliberately. Of selective amnesia for something that the 'cultivated' mind identifies as gross and inhuman. As if the end of the 'jumpers' was any different from the people in those aircrafts. As Tom Junod writes in the article : "But now the Falling Man is falling through more than the blank blue sky. He is falling through the vast spaces of memory and picking up speed." ("the falling man" refers to the man in the photograph) 

Accepting the brutal truth of the inconceivable ways in which death can happen is difficult. Silence seems to be a better option. As if forgetting is a way to heal the wound. The most quoted proverb - "Time is the best healer" is possibly not a restorative idea at all. It encourages 'falling' through memory, from memory into those spaces that gradually become too dark to see. It is anything but healing. It is an attempt to bury the moment, the emotion, the incident. As some languages are being lost in this globalised world of ours, so will some memories be lost. Choosing to remember seems a mammoth task, an impractical thing to do some would say. But then, what has this slipping through the cracks of time done for us till now? We read about historical incidents; no understanding emerges from them it seems. Such is perhaps the folly of forgetting. So what happens when we choose to remember, to acknowledge and to heal?

To be contd.