Love in the Time of Cholera. (A moment.)

“Despite the perpetual rain, the sordid merchants, and the Homeric vulgarity of its carriage drivers, she would always remember Paris as the most beautiful city in the world, not because of what it was or was not in reality, but because it was linked to the memory of her happiest years.” - Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Marquez Garcia

I’m reading (continuing from three months ago, because ‘reading for pleasure without needing to write an essay’ is unthinkable while at uni) this right now, and I came across this passage which is breathtaking in its beauty and truth. A case of someone else setting down what I’ve always felt and never said (c/f Alan Bennett!).

It always amazes me how much places become infused with the memories of certain experiences or people (and I guess obliquely, people are experiences). I don’t think I could ever conceive of Oxford or London without certain people; London would be much sadder and without half its excitement/charms for me without Someone, for example. Paris – which is, for me also, the most beautiful city in the world! (although I didn’t encounter the ‘Homeric vulgarity’ of any carriage drivers….what is  Homeric vulgarity?) - is so linked to memories of experiencing winter and Christmas in all their European glory: vin chaud from outside St.-Pierre-de-Montmartre; chocolat chaud; crepes in Montmartre and the Quartier Latin; the Christmas market along the Champs-Élysées!

The Seine.

One lives out one’s life in emotionally distorted spaces: every walk along the Thames or every step in the Tate Modern becomes value-laden, feeling-laden – it constantly gestures back to another time and another feeling. The problem arises in time, because people fade in and out of one’s life and places do not (although there is the transience of rooms and homes, which is another matter entirely – I guess I’m thinking only about cities here). I suppose when that day comes traversing along streets of happy memories will be the saddest thing of all.

Until then though – there is little or no seeing places for what they are in ‘reality’, as Garcia writes; the only reality they have is one which is redolent of anticipations and fears, filtered through desires or one’s particular and momentary mood on a day.

This is also wonderful and not all sad, in its own way: stories lie over cities for me like palimpsests; London is never just my London but has traces of Dickens’s London, and Austen’s; Naipaul’s and Virginia Woolf’s.  Paris is never just my Paris but Djuna Barnes’s and Jean Rhys’s; Choderlos de Laclos’s, Flaubert’s. I cannot dream of New York divorced from Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, or Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. Places become soaked in the memories of books too, and while I may romanticize this excessively, it definitely adds infinite amounts to their beauty and charm for me.

Parisian streets.

Edit: Oh golly! And merry Christmas everybody! That was a bit of a downer note to end a Christmas post on, now I think of it….!

Boardwalk Empire: A paean

I just finished watching the second season of Boardwalk Empire, which means that the rest of my holidays are going to feel strangely, sadly empty and devoid of television. I don’t watch many TV shows (which makes me an inexperienced commentator, I guess), and there is absolutely no question of returning to Gossip Girl which, though always enjoyably and gloriously stupid, has surpassed even itself in recent seasons (or so Wiki-ing the synopsis indicates).

Though Boardwalk Empire has been (wrongly, unfairly!) likened to a “beautifully tailored empty suit” by a few dissenting voices, I think it’s gorgeous. Beautiful cinematography (the colours – sets and costumes – are stunning!), lovely atmospheric soundtrack, historical accuracy with an almost pathological attention to minute historical details… what ain’t to love? The Prohibition era was one of the most interesting periods of American history, flung into the melting-pot of burgeoning modernity and whatnot. (I’m reading about secularization right now, and while I don’t understand much… the writer talks about how some theories of secularization suggest that with secularization comes the privatization and marginalisation of religion, especially in the face of scientific post?/modernity – and yet the Prohibition is very, very much a manifestation of religion actually entering, affecting, transforming the public and allegedly totally ‘secular’ sphere in a radical way. As indeed are things like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, I guess…)

I started watching Boardwalk Empire while writing my essay on 1920s/30s Parisian film and literature, and while European avant-garde BE’s Atlantic City ain’t, the general cultural shifts brought on by modernity seem by and large the same – particularly in terms of gender relations. Of course BE depicts the rabid misogyny that was so much a structural aspect of its era, but I find it fascinating how it also shows the sheer dynamism of different types of women, how they each react to their restricted (or not) circumstances and carve out (or not) an autonomy for themselves within their domestic spaces etc. Some women fail miserably at escaping the domestic space even as they challenge the heterosexual structuring of that space (Jimmy’s wife); some are caught between church and illegal brewery (as exciting a binary as any), running from religion and unable to escape. Etc etc. It’s a historical snapshot that seems aware of the issues it inevitably raises with that historicity, but it takes (some) time and trouble to explore them. Some of the possible things one could read into it – questions and doubts about faith, whether faith is a positive influence or not – are (I feel) still relevant and interesting things to think about. (Is Nucky’s absolute lack of it, in any religious or non-religious sense, meant to suggest that faithlessness is sociopathic? Does religious faith do some basic paradigmatic thing right, if not in any actual doctrinal sense – where it seems to be inversely evil, almost, à la van Alden.)

But these are only retrospective thoughts; readings and projections, not – I think – any grand intentional social/theological critique or debate on the behalf of the writers and directors. Although I have noticed a lot of Scorsese films play on the same themes of faith/no faith, good/evil (and the sheer difficulty, if not downright impossibility, of this binary); maybe he set the tone for the series with his pilot episode? The best thing about Boardwalk Empire really is the fact that it’s a cracking story – one which sometimes makes Nucky-like sociopaths out of us all in our ability to approve of, if not enjoy, peoples’ heads being blown off with Tommy guns – which presents an indelible feast for the eyes. Atmosphere is everything; one should never underestimate how many nostalgic fantasies people can harbour – television, films and books are all such people can turn to. I’m certainly – maybe unfortunately, because Midnight in Paris was really quite bad – of the Scorsese/Woody Allen school of living in the past a little bit.

books & musicks

Reality trying to mirror fiction (or front book-covers, anyways) as closely as possible.

A few days ago (though it feels like light years and lifetimes) I was sat in the college library – which smelled of dead rat, one (or some) of which was presumably beneath the floorboards… – and frantically hashing out an essay on Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, and ‘cinematic bodies’. Don’t ask me what that latter is, because I just don’t know!

But feelings of exaltation, desperation, pessimism and general agony all aside, I came across a couple of songs which really should go onto any soundtrack built to accompany the reading of Jean Rhys’s early fiction – all novels or short stories about sad and desperate women, seeking solace in drink & loving Paris but desperate to look right (think size 0 culture is bad? Imagine living in cosmetics heyday…)

Compliments of my iTunes on shuffle, I give you two particularly relevant songs (or two nice atmospheric songs with relevant lines which really make sense and seem poignant and heartrending/lifechanging after 12 hours in the library aka ‘ratland’):

1. Dance Anthem of the 80s – Regina Spektor. Note particular aptness of those climactic lines towards the end: “I went walking through the city, like a drunk but not, with my slip / showin’ a little, like a drunk but not, and I am / one of your people, but the cars don’t stop…”

2. Chelsea Hotel no.2 – Leonard Cohen. Just because it’s sad and about hotels, and all of Rhys’s heroines live out their sad lives in dingy little hotel rooms (which almost, in the final analysis, seem kinder than the world outside!). This could be the bathetic end to one of those novels.

 

I wish I had the patience to trawl through the worrrl’ wide web and/or my iTunes (which is quite big, insolent though it is to use ‘and/or’) and find more songs so I could build a decent ‘OST’ to the (cinematic ho ho!) reading experience that is reading Rhys. Unfortunately I don’t.

But I will leave everyone with these beautiful lines from Barnes’s Nightwood anyhows; that book confused me a whole lot, but moments like this one pop out at you and make you sad and exalted and astounded all at once.

“as a lover we are beginning to forget dwindles and wastes; for love and life are a bulk of which the body and heart can be drained…”  (Nightwood)

learnt some new words today

ひきこもり(hikikomori)

Noun. A shut-in, stay-at-home. Recluse. Person who has withdrawn from society.

ほんね (honne)

Noun. True feelings. Real intentions, motives. Disposition or nature.

たてまえ（tatemae)

Noun. Official stance, public position/attitude. Antithetical to private thoughts/nature.

Reading a movie synopsis (‘Tokyo!’, for anyone who cares!) led to reading about certain sociological/psychological concepts in Japanese society. I find the idea of a hikikomori morbidly fascinating – people who shut themselves away from all human contact (sometimes), from society itself, from people and the ‘outside world’. What is it about urbanity that drives people into isolation? Is the ‘outside world’ just too easy to access (in some sort of proxy form) through things like televisions, radios, and most of all, the Internet? Are strangers in chat rooms more comforting than people in the flesh (who are not so easily blocked, shut out, silenced, etc)?

I always find myself in phases of life tinged by (Techni)colours, laid over with (as aforementioned) false images of cities or times, or with the heady scent of certain books. Last week I dreamt of New York and windows. This week I am dreaming in Japanese literature: my dreams are redolent of a Banana Yoshimoto-style minimalism, where people live out their urban tragedies in tall apartment blocks and over telephone calls; they are palimpsested over by Haruki Murakami’s sad lonely men and women who run mad through surreality’s night. These tinges are often coloured as well: New York was blue and yellow – sunsets, taxis, and sky-reflecting skyscrapers. This week I am dreaming in white and grey. Minimalism.

I wonder if cities which cram the millions of lives they contain together – cities which, like the king in that folktale from the Dominican Republic, try to reach for the moon – send people into isolation by creating the (inaccessible) sight of millions of lives being lived out. A city in which even the sky is not blank is a city which pretends to perpetually be there for you – when really it shuts you in, confines you to being the observer (watching from behind windows, from inside houses).

And yet they are so beautiful, cities like this:

Kuala Lumpur during a thunderstorm, view from a balcony!

Notes on India (II)

From outlookindia.com - Protests in Kashmir.

Scarves-over-mouths in this context could be read as many things: it could be read as a hiding of one’s identity; as a religious necessity; or as a symbol of voicelessness and impotence. Kashmir is an issue about which much has been said, and very little understood. Kashmir is an issue that many speak about, and very few reach consensus on. I am not here to discuss Kashmir, because I know too little and can decide on what I support or feel even less – suffice to say, there are some real atrocities committed there, and yet it seems to be more complicated than any easy dialectic of oppressed/oppressor.

What I do feel strongly and passionately about though is this: the cancellation of a literary festival that was to have taken place in Srinagar next month. It was to have been the first ever literary festival in Kashmir, but has been dogged by criticism and questioning – and rightly so. Over 200 people signed an open letter which took issue with various aspects of holding a literary festival in Kashmir: the juxtaposition of the intellectual and political freedom represented by literature, and the oppression and lack of freedoms in Kashmir; on the way the literary festival might (might) have been yet another state ploy to convey a sense of ‘normalcy’ about Kashmir; on the literary festival’s self-professed ‘apolitical’ character, in a region of the world which grapples with so many pressing, dangerous political issues.

All of these concerns are valid. The open letter demands the utmost respect for having pointed the flaws of this ‘literary festival’ out, and for forcing the public – who perhaps, otherwise, would indeed have accepted a sense of normalcy in Kashmir too glibly and unquestioningly – to rethink the political significance of even such an ‘apolitical’ event (although importantly, even the letter notes that only the event is ‘apolitical’ – does this mean that they were not expected to be similarly so?)

But now that the literary festival has been cancelled, I cannot help but feel strongly that it is a great loss to India and to Kashmir, and above all to the Kashmiri people. These authors and intellectuals had a chance to be in Kashmir and engage directly with the people. Their fears about complicity in being figures in the state-propagandist image of a ‘normal Kashmir’ is entirely legitimate, and the problem arises when one weighs the pros and cons of a festival such as this: on the one hand, taking part means possible complicity with a freedom-curtailing state, a legitimation of their acts and stance. On the other hand, taking part means that people have a chance to initiate dialogue, share ideas, talk – about and with Kashmir. And to me, that far outweighs the evils that accompany participation.

What many people called for is a revolution – what they had the opportunity to do was to question and subvert the system from within, a far more effective and less harmful method of questioning and reforming any system (I feel). And they rejected that opportunity. What they had the opportunity to do was go to Kashmir, and engage in conversation – to make not only their own but other voices heard, to listen to the people. What they have ultimately succeeded in doing is writing a letter that was published on a fairly obscure corner of the Internet, which will ultimately pass into the vault of Kafila’s archives – and they have left the Kashmiri people with nothing. I cannot support this. The pen has satisfied itself with one little letter on the Internet, falling silent before the very idea and possibility of the sword! How tragic!

The same faults of Anna Hazare seem to be in lesser form reflected here: a desire to have one’s way – all – or nothing. The sooner people realise that while revolutions and rebellions work in the world of dictators and tyrants, they are not so feasible an option for imperfect democracies, the better. Imperfect democracies require reform, and reform requires dialogue. Reform requires ideas to be shared. And for this sharing to take place, sometimes one has to make the sacrifice of working within the very systems one is trying to change; this does not necessarily betoken complicity (one still has a voice, and a mouth, with which to point out a certain institution or event’s flaws and mistakes, right?).

My darlings, it’s extremely extremely easy to type away on a blog and pick holes in things (see, even I’m doing it!) – but it would have been much more of a heroic thing to make something special of this literary festival, regardless of all its intentions – its intentions are not yours, after all. It would have been much harder, and much more meaningful, to go to Kashmir University and share wonderful, brilliant ideas with those young people, who are probably starved for intellectual freedoms and opportunities such as this.

On windows

“Let us dally a little longer, be content still with surfaces only–the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers’ shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists’ windows.”

- Virginia Woolf, Streethaunting

I’m watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window right now, and although I’m not too far in – so the suspense which would prevent me from pausing to rant on here hasn’t quite set in yet – I can’t help but think that this is a movie Woolf would have liked a lot. I like it a lot: watching people live la vita quotidiana unselfconsciously; the more diminished pathos of human life played out behind glass panes. It reminds me of that scene in The Voyage Out where Rachel & Helen watch people in the hotel.

“They had come out upon the broad terrace which ran round the hotel and were only a few feet distant from the windows. A row of long windows opened almost to the ground. They were all of them uncurtained, and all brilliantly lighted, so that they could see everything inside. Each window revealed a different section of the life of the hotel. They drew into one of the broad columns of shadow which separated the windows and gazed in. They found themselves just outside the dining-room. It was being swept; a waiter was eating a bunch of grapes with his leg across the corner of a table. Next door was the kitchen, where they were washing up; white cooks were dipping their arms into cauldrons, while the waiters made their meal voraciously off broken meats, sopping up the gravy with bits of crumb. Moving on, they became lost in a plantation of bushes, and then suddenly found themselves outside the drawing-room, where the ladies and gentlemen, having dined well, lay back in deep arm-chairs, occasionally speaking or turning over the pages of magazines. A thin woman was flourishing up and down the piano.”

- Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

I like that about London, too, especially in the winter-time – the streets get dark very early, and everything is sort of shadowed and muted. No neon lights & bilboards galore, like the cities I’m used to. So I like looking at windows, empty frozen but lit-up living rooms, etc. I can’t quite figure out why, but there’s something incredibly comforting about it – maybe it reminds someone on the outside that there is a warmth, there is an inside, there is this cordoned-off little sanctum-space in which life plays itself endlessly, even if somebody else somewhere stops to watch. We are not all out on the streets, ‘hustling for a buck’ or running from point A to B with our heads bowed down and scarves wound tightly round: some of us bask in the glow of yellow lights & linger in the liminal space of tenement stairs.

'Rear Window'. From Google Images.

I suppose this would be a good time to add that I’ve been dreaming of New York. I have never been there, but I tend to have a nostalgia for places I’ve never seen anyways – one absorbs their (often falsified, poeticized, romanticized – yes, all of that) aura from Paramount pictures in 1950s Technicolor, from the pages of feverishly typewritten novels, et cetera. I want to go to New York so very badly!

Conscientious lens

Prena's 'room'. (c) James Mollison. Prena is a 14 year old domestic worker in Nepal. She earns roughly $6.50 a month.

A series of photographs by a man called James Mollison recently came to my attention – they have received a lot of press, in the NYTimes, for example. My first reaction to his photos was one of slight horror (sometimes), awe (because even rubbish dumps in Phnom Penh acquire some sort of aesthetic charisma through his lens) and profound humbling. It’s a strange word to employ, ‘humbling’: Oxford dictionaries define it as a verb – to “cause (someone) to feel less important or proud” – and a noun – “(of a thing ) of modest pretensions or dimensions”.

Of course these photos are all of these things: a stark reminder that even the innocent life of children is sometimes shut in by iron bars, or reduced to a used tyre in a dump. How sometimes it is inflated to excesses of pinks and frills. They tell wider socioeconomic stories: somewhere behind the glitz and glamour of Chinese urbanity are little rooms with faded portraits of Mao Zedong on the wall; somewhere in Kenya, a boy sleeps under the stars. They are poetic and tragic and awesomely inspiring all at once.

Susan Sontag wrote that “photographs cannot create a moral position [although] they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one”. This encapsulates precisely the potency of Mollison’s photographs: they appear to be taken first and foremost with an almost Arbus-ian sense of detachment from the political in favour of the aesthetic, with a staunch refusal to tack on any sort of ‘social conscience message’. But they are let loose, nonetheless, as little snippets of other worlds and realities, bare truths offered out to inexperienced eyes. By putting art first, politics second (if anywhere at all), these images make people face up to realities which are otherwise too easy to ignore, too ‘other’ to really care about.

I know Mollison didn’t take these with any specific sociopolitical/charitable agenda (he says on his website that he “didn’t want it just to be about ‘needy children’ in the developing world”, and perhaps that is why they are so extremely powerful in their ability to move the viewer. They are lacking in self-consciousness, without any of the dramatic qualities that underlie appeals, pleas, and the image-heavy social-conscience attacking of people (which by and large people are immune to, now).  They force the observer, firstly, to observe at all, catching the eye with their distinctness, their lack of conversation. And secondly, they make that observer consider those very sociopolitical dimensions and contexts so cleverly left unsaid (but so entirely captured) by these photographs.

I hope everyone takes a look at them if they get the chance (there are many select photos displayed through the links above, and then some!). All of them are in this book:

Where Children Sleep, James Mollison (From his website)