Hiroshima

Watched Hiroshima Mon Amour (Hiroshima, My Love) for the first time; it broke my heart.

Without form, technique; content cannot be adequately conveyed in art. Without content of course, it all becomes an exercise in style; pretty and glossy but hollow. Without form (and this does not mean only style), content becomes a high minded bore, tedious even if worthy.

Resnais' film with its exceptional framing, exquisite sincerity, commitment to justice; and the marriage of an extremely unique dialogue/literary process together with the possibilities of cinema blew convention apart. Even though we are nearly 50 years, or 60 years after this film premiered; its form seems shocking even now. Perhaps especially now when cinema seems to have stagnated.

Thematically, the film explored obliquely (and therefore all the more powerfully), the desire to destruct, the equally powerful thread of sexuality intertwined with that destruction, the impossibility of comprehending what is essentially unimaginable even to those to whom it has happened, and the audacity in comparing another's tragedy with one's own minute tragedy. Not making it equal in the process, but understanding that in its most absolute essence, true suffering is shattering wherever it is.

And finally, grief and memory and memory and grief; locked in an interminable cycle. Stunning. 

Poetry

Poetry

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind. 

Pablo Neruda

Ships in the night

Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing; Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.

Tales of a Wayside Inn. Part iii. The Theologian’s Tale: Elizabeth. iv; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Adrienne Rich

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.

Allegory of the Cave

Today I saw a dance performance that for me, reinvigorated contemporary dance. Criticisms of modern or contemporary dance have often been that it lacks rigour, and achieves only theatrics, instead of emotion through controlled movements. But today's performance, seemed to blow away all previous tired dance performances I have seen, seemed to make laughable every other dance company's effort to be original and most importantly, the dancers themselves, whose hearts flew on their sleeves, transcended the form to achieve something truly and profoundly moving.

Plato's cave allegory is a parable that shows clearly how truth and the perception of truth are vastly different, and that as we move away from the shadows and into the light; along with enlightenment comes sadness, wisdom and ultimately knowledge. This 'theory of the forms' is repeated in many myths and religions; from the Egyptian Book of Knowledge/Book of the Dead, to Eve and the Apple etc. The ideas encountered are the cost of knowledge, the fall of humanity, the loss of innocence, the concept of ignorance as imprisonment and the tragedy of experience that cannot now be unknown.

To see all these ideas expressed through dance, which felt new, original and visceral was astounding. Light, sound, movement, expression and passion coursed through the performance which was both controlled, but was so expertly controlled that it seemed genuinely spontaneous and free.

I felt my heart sing. 

a pale horse

I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat upon him was Death; and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

Revelations, Chapter 6, verse 8

"In a democracy, we get the government we deserve", Alexis de Tocqueville.

"The devil came here, and it smells of sulfur still" - Chavez, at the United Nations General Assembly, 2006

Hardly

While I

Saw morning harden upon the wall

Unmoved, unknowing

That your great going

Had place that moment and altered all

Excerpt from The Going by Thomas Hardy

shame

No movie in recent memory ripped out my insides and handed it to me on a platter, as did Shame. I will not say more about its visceral impact; there are enough reviews that gush, and enough reviews that dismiss it both. I was struck only by one thing; it received a great critical reception outside of America, but within America it received decidedly mixed reviews; with most film critics out of New York remarking on its failed ambition.

How does the gaze of an outsider inform 'insider' views? Sometimes when a mirror is held too close by an outsider, the 'insiders' cannot see their reality; cannot see their face; can only see a blurred indistinctness. I think this is what happened to Shame. The consumeristic, hyper-sexualized world which is more distinct in America than anywhere else I have ever been, at least to me, is unrecognizable to Americans.

I am sorry that the movie has not sparked the debate about sexualized mores that the director has stated he would have liked it to. I think it was way ahead of its time. Certainly there were a plethora of great movies last year; but this movie felt like it was bloodsport and utterly remarkable.

What can a photo do?

"Even though individuals are born, work, laugh and die everywhere in the same way, they cannot be denied the determining weight of history, of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices and conflicts",

and elsewhere

"the camera interrogates"

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Revolution

When one begins to know oneself more and more, it seems as though there is no option but to become more and more alone. I have discovered more from art, from the process of understanding it, and attempting to create it, and in turn, understood more about my life; than anything else. Experience alone is not understandable. Reason alone can never be enough to comprehend what has happened and what may happen, and the choices in between or the lack of choices in between. In this, I have learnt that imagination is more important than knowledge. And that love and truth are the only things that can set you free, and that without either of those, there is nothing called art. I like this quote by Gauguin "Art is either plagiarism or revolution". Not large, noisy revolutions, but quiet moral stances, unbending, compassionate, and relentless.

I say you get out!

I Say You Get Out! Today is not a very good day as I have been basically feeling sorry for myself, for my poverty-stricken status, for how difficult it is to pursue Art (naturally this must be in capital letters), for a one and a million things that generally I have no business feeling sorry for and yet today, I must. I chucked in the towel as soon as I got up and called in a There's No Way I Can Drag Myself Out Of Bed into work, and am prostrate on my bed that substitutes for a couch having drunk copious amounts of good quality coffee that I can no longer afford, and generally feeling a sorry for myself, or as one writer puts it I HAZ A SAD!! Giving myself a tight slap now. Peeyow!!! Wahhh that hurt leh. Okay back to reality.

I met a girl

I met a girl today, young, beautiful, with the world in front of her. She is just 21, about to graduate from college. Already, she has seen too much of the world; while others her age were opening kegs or glossy magazines, debating which shoes or bag to buy, or yet others, competing furiously for lucrative internships or well-connected jobs on the Hill, she decided to take a year off college, when she couldn't afford to pay for it, and went to a country that shall continue to be unnamed (not Lanka) and worked with refugees for over a year, setting and running a nonprofit that dealt with resettlement, psychosocial trauma, and gender based violence. She survived frequent sexual harassment, and intense loneliness, away from everyone she knew, and very far away from a world that made sense. If the phone rang, it would always be an emergency. After a year, she was back in the United States, watching events unfold in the country that she had left behind, 'freaking out', spending nights and days tense and anxious, worrying about the safety of those she had left behind. I met this girl, who I had never met before, today, connected through a friend as she was looking for a job, for a year of peace and stability and no doubt healing, before applying to grad school. I recognized this girl; impossibly young, but I thought she was older than many of my grad school classmates at 30; from the way she talked, her grasp of policy, her kindness and most of all, her quietness. I thought about the things that she had seen, which no childhood could have prepared her for; and I recognized her loneliness in the modern world, and her sense of being out of place, everywhere she went. Most of all, I understood her confusion about the path that lay in front of her, and the choices she had to make. I hope she sticks to the courage she has shown, but I also hope that she becomes happy in the life she makes for herself, and sometimes the two paths do not converge.

Ships

"A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for", - Grace Hopper.

back from haiti

"Then I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. I have seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it. As I walk along the passages I wish I could see what is behind the cardboard. They tell me that I am in England but I don't believe them. We lost our way to England. When? Where? I don't remember, but we lost it."

- from Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys

1 Corinthians 13:11

And so the Bible says,

"When I was a child, I thought like a child

But when I became a woman, I put away childish things"

llosa

From the Paris review interview with Mario Vargas Llosa,

Q: Why do you write?

Vargas Llosa: I write because I am unhappy. I write because it is a way of fighting unhappiness.

bethlehem

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And She Is Like That (aval appadithan)

What is feminism? The term, especially in South Asia, conjures up a rabble rousing, unwashed, shrill, masses of women protesting for equal rights, enforcement of existing laws promoting equality, - protesting against religious and sexual norms that subjugate women; - protesting for pro-choice (and the ability to have a safe abortion), equality of inheritance, political representation, recognition in the eyes of the law (the police), security and safety, the right to enter the workforce at par with men (something that is lacking even in the West), the right not to be stigmatized for independent choices...

Then after this, might come a total re-conceptualization. These are after all norms that are defined by men, and by a political/social contract that privileged men and their ideas. So women are left in the position, as someone pointed out, of having to struggle for parity for laws that are inherently conceptualized by somebody else (laws both domestic and international that have all sorts of tendencies built in, not the least of which is the primary role assigned to violence).

When I was younger, my eyes would glaze over at the above litany. After all, I was a product of an affluent, seemingly-female-liberated society. Choice was available to me, in nearly all senses of the word, at face value. And then I grew up and realized the struggles that a generation prior to me had undergone, the battles left to fight, the responsibility to help those weaker than me (something which I have abrogated at the moment, to my own disappointment) - and realized how far I personally had left to go, in this struggle for 'feminism'. I used to dismiss the term, and now I feel that it has begun to define me. Even the smallest instances of hypocrisy, I re-frame now in the lens of feminism. Perhaps it is not useful to do so, probably not all the time. But the tradition and political history of feminism has made me sensitive now to perceived slights, hypocrisies, small violences.

Anyway. We are all a long way off of that. As women, we are yet to recast the world in the image of ourselves and it is enormously difficult to escape the 'lock'; to be truly original; to see the world the way we want to see it, and not in a way that we have been taught to (by men, and by other women).

And to change the perceptions of other women too. In this i am hesitant. Nobody wants to be evangelical; to proselytize; to preach from a pulpit with a bullhorn. Indeed, this method does not allow the message to get through even; all it will do is propagate dogma (which liberals are equally capable of, as anyone else). - Yet it is important to change other women too; to be role models, to live the message in everything we do, at sometimes, the cost of contentment, and happiness.

I saw this movie the other day. I don't think it is a paean to feminism; rather; there are a few scenes I especially like in it (Aval Appadithan). First, it shows the subtle effects of living in a society (where one has superficial choice, to get a job, to live independently, etc.etc., but ultimately one is at the mercy of men who are cruel, who use women for sexual pleasure, who dominate women and repress their capacity to express themselves, - a society where one has to be an extreme, one has to be contrarian in order to live at all; one is pushed to the furthest edges in order to survive (in fact, there is an entirely realistic episode where the heroine is almost overcome by exhaustion, fear, anxiety and apprehension and becomes delirious, only at the end, for the moment to end in sexual ambiguity as she is saved by a man, and she faints. Then comes a very real dialogue between 2 men, as they discuss the plight of women; pulled in one end to be dependent (on a father, on a husband, not only financially, but that the state of the family is emotionally, physically and psychologically structured as such) - and pulled in the other end by this urge to be free, to be INdependent, but what does that look like? Can one really live with a man and be independent? (A question to which there is no textbook answer). - and the man goes; this is the state of woman. It is true, and yet, what a terrible tension, a contradiction at the heart of women, to live with everyday. One way lies extreme isolation and despair, on the other end, lies subjugation. And then the final scene, where she asks another woman; (the woman who marries the man she has finally found, who she thinks she can live with, resolve this contradiction within herself, be herself AND be happy- and in the end, he abandons her because he cannot live with her cruelty to herself and the jaggedness of her dichotomies) - do you know women's liberation? And the other woman, says no. And she says, and that is why you are happy.

Bleak perhaps, but true.

two lives

In another life, I talked to school principals about libraries, talked to publishers about bilingual publications, talked to contractors about foundations and the ratio of cement to sand in a sand-strapped economy, talked to academics about identity, talked to filmmakers about what is home, talked to soldiers about poverty, talked to Buddhist monks about child psychology.

In this life, my life is punctuated by watching Covert Affairs, about a Jo Malone perfume-wearing covert agent who had a steamy affair in Sri Lanka that she can't get over, directed by Tim Matheson who I used to avidly watch in Sri Lanka when he was in the West Wing, - and think that it's good television, go to work in a glass tomb sealed off from reality, navigate the crowds of midtown in order to consume more, not less, and repeat the cycle endlessly.

I am sure there is cause for deep despair somewhere in here. But I cannot sadly say that have the faith and optimism needed to live the first life well, only the cynicism and weariness to live the second.

Maldives Fish

The Maldives is mystifying. Away from the resorts priced at USD 1000 a night with sharks running wild under glass shower floors, there is a country that is deeply dysfunctional underneath the surface of wealth and affluence. (and wealthy it is; the capital Male has no beggars, no rickshaws - only airconditioned cabs, and no filth, shanty towns, no visible signs of poverty even though tourists rarely come to Male).

And yet, the divorce rate is 80% in this Muslim country that is drifting towards fundamentalism (with a lot of young men leaving to train in Pakistani Lashkar camps); health outcomes are poor due to a lack of freshwater and vegetables, political repression is high with torture victims everywhere, patriarchal domination and sexual abuse (somehow the two seem to be always connected) and a stagnating economy due to the deterioration of the fishing sector and a lack of labour discipline leading to low diversification in the economy.

And as the Country Manager of a large bank here mentioned, there is no alcohol sold here, so life is very difficult and sometimes we have to go to the resorts to get a drink, otherwise we cannot survive. (no prizes for guessing which country he was a national of; hint; it starts with sri).

It would be nice for a SAARC country with the highest development outcomes and indicators, to be on an upward trend of progress. But even here, in this country of 300,000 scattered over 1200 islands, - our manifest destiny makes itself apparent.