Nobody's Fault But My Own

It is time to set adrift another year on the nebulous realm of memories. And like any other event in life that involves letting go off and moving on this too comes with its own set of rituals, or perhaps you'd prefer the more rational sounding term processes.

First, we begin by owning up and accepting all that has been done, undone or not done. We begin by telling ourselves whatever we choose to term as a success or a failure is, "Nobody's fault but my own.*" In a time and age when the genes we inherit to the kind of society we live in at some point or the other stand accused for every little thing that comes or doesn't come our way, the one thing that can liberate us from our self-created labyrinths is to accept that it is, "Nobody's fault but my own." That way no mountain of fear seems insurmountable, nor any ocean of doubt unfathomable.

For the one thing we can be almost certain of is our own heart and our own mind. We may depend on and even be aided by the support and kindness of others. But all that is essential and important lies within, it must emanate from within. Searching for it elsewhere is futile and will only lead to disappointment. Being responsible– accepting our part in the whole is therefore paramount.

Depending on your disposition you may find this 'gospel' to be bleak or liberating. However, no matter how we perceive things – upon contemplating water we may either be overcome by a fear of drowning or the thrill of surfing the waves but neither contemplation encompasses water in its entirety– similarly all our perceptions are subjective and partial. That's why taking reigns of the thoughts, emotions and actions that originate from within us is essential. And that applies to not just acknowledging all that is beautiful and wondrous but also accepting all our faults and frailties.

Perhaps it is time to bring back the capital 'I' as a symbol of responsibility, as a symbol of possessing a backbone, that one essential anatomical feature that no human can borrow from another.

I end the first part of the ritual with two songs – two hymns, if you will.

Here's Led Zeppelin with 'Nobody's Fault But Mine', a hymn worthy of frequent contemplation.
Here is Beck with his meditative song, '*Nobody's Fault But My Own'.

Untitled

"And this, Lily thought, this making up scenes about people, is what we call "knowing" people, "thinking" of them, "being fond of" them!"
– Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Our story is noble and tragic

As the face of a tyrant not fun not for everyone
No drama or magic
No detail of what we’ve done
Can make our love pathetic

And Thomas De Quincey drinking
Opium poison sweet and chaste
Went dreaming to his poor Anne and listened to his eyelids blinking
Let it pass let it pass because everything will pass and be effaced
I will be back not yet erased

Memories
Are hunting horns whose sound dies in the breeze 

– Guillaume Apollinaire, Cors De Chasse (Hunting Horns). This translation is from The Paris Review No. 202 Fall 2012

You may have heard of a cognitive bias called frequency illusion– the illusion in which a word, a name or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly appears "everywhere" with improbable frequency*. Even if you haven't heard of it, I am sure you must have experienced it a number of times. 

Considering that the human brain seeks patterns everywhere, this isn't much of a surprise. After all most human learning depends upon it. Whether all human brains seek the same pattern is a completely different issue. When coupled with the recency effect, a cognitive bias that inflates the importance of recent stimuli or observations, this illusion gets magnified. We end up becoming more aware of things we heard most recently when they come within our sphere of attention again. Coincidentally.

Well. I have been working on an essay for some time and now everywhere I go (and by that I mean in the virtual world) words seem to appear calling out to me, "Look at us. We can be of help." It is slightly unnerving, though mostly thrilling. But most importantly reassuring that my brain is active.

However, the world of words is also an illusion of sorts. One can get trapped in it. Look at all the people in India  (they like to 'think' of themselves as the intelligentsia I am sure) who wrote reams upon reams against the recent people's movement against corruption– they were appalled that all people weren't like them and the revolution appeared to be nothing like what they had read in some books in college. Imagine! Many of the protesting, unwashed masses had never read a word and could articulate their anger only in coarse, pithy slogans. And still they were angry enough to take to the streets.

Real life has a knack for mercilessly crushing all illusions.

It reminded me of a segment from 'The Daily Show' in which Jon Stewart talked about how people keep mentioning the importance of satire, for example during Nazi Germany and he ended the segment with the words, "Yeah! They really showed Hitler, didn't they?" Words for all the power we bestow on them, for all our illusions about them, are simply squiggles on paper– transcribed guttural sounds.

And just when seekers of immortality look at words– that they have read or that they think they'll leave behind for perpetuity– death clears its throat and with a small poof blows all illusions and biases away. At such times the first thing that we lose, no matter how beautifully people have written about death in countless books, is our ability to come up with adequate words.

Afterword: What about the essay? As Mavis Gallant said in the introduction to her short story collection, "Stories can wait." And I'd like to add, even if some of them end up never getting told, lets for once dispel with this false pretense, life will still go on. Regardless.

*Wikipedia. Also known as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

Fragmentary Blue

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

Fragmentary blue, a poem by Robert Frost. 

While for a physicist blue is the colour of light between violet and green on the visible spectrum, to a believer the vast blue sky is a glimpse of heaven. Blue doesn't exist in itself. Neither does heaven. Both are a result of perception and longing. 
In eight pithy lines, using blue as a synecdoche, Robert Frost shows how human perception and longing are the basis of all meanings. We can't know the complete truth, but only fragments of it.

I dreamt I was a butterfly

I dreamt I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke.
Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a
butterfly dreaming that I am a man? - Chuang Tzu*

*Chuang Tzu's butterfly dream is a Taoist parable on the interchangeability between appearance and reality: Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things. (2, tr. Burton Watson 1968:49)

Transformation of Things proves that differences between things aren't absolute. Most meanings we seek in this world are bound up in apparent contradictions.

You can read more about Chuang Tzu's dream here.
And about how chasing butterflies is so much more than what the eye sees here.

The Science of Sleep

The Science of Sleep (2006), Directed by Michel Gondry.

Either you get into a film since the first shot, or you slowly slip into the lives of the characters as it progresses, or sometimes no matter how hard you try the film completely eludes you. The science of cinema is much like the science of sleep. Not surprisingly people have such divergent experiences even when they have watched the same story unfold on the big screen. Though what is surprising is how everyone is such an involved and passionate critic when it comes to films but has so little to say about the events in ‘real’ life. However, I digress.

It is not yet time for bed. Tom Waits playing in the background sings,

When I'm lyin' in my bed at night
I don't wanna grow up
Nothin' ever seems to turn out right
I don't wanna grow up

And then after a few more songs he starts to say,

but you're innocent when you dream
when you dream
you're innocent when you dream

But again I digress.

As adolescents we’d stay up well through the night because life was short and sleeping was a waste of time. But then we also believed that we could grow up to become almost anyone we wanted. And the story of our adulthood would be dominated by only one character – the almighty me.

However, now as thirty somethings there is nothing we look forward to more than sleep time. In fact, we are often reluctant to wake up to face another day in the life. For in dreams lies our real world.

At last coming to the film in question – what is there not to love about this whimsical (you say, write genius) film about Stéphane meeting Stephanie and (we all) meeting his world of dreams? As the boundary between dreams and reality blurs, how does one distinguish between the two? They say in our dreams the ‘impossible becomes possible’. But who is to say what is impossible to begin with?

People may either dream about a plane not taking off or of a dead relative gifting them a ruby ring. Similarly there are many ways of ‘seeing’ this film. Best to let our imagination and creativity make sense of our dreams and reality.

I'm exhausted, I'm gonna wake up now.

(On cinema part 3)

Unbounded Reality

Sweltering in the heat of Delhi you revisit your mountain idyllic. The house set among the mountains and meadows. The smell of burning wood. The old man with blazing eyes, his wife of many years and the friend. The potter’s wheel obeying the perfect synapse between your brain and fingers. The pears nodding shyly among the branches not yet ready to be picked. The fresh grass, the dog, the voice of Tom Lehrer; images flashing through your brain.

While in a flat in suburban Bombay the mouse gets ready to gnaw through the mattress, visible due to the hole he has chewed in the bed sheet, and curses his luck. Human folly and grave miscalculations on his part have distorted his idyllic vision. But now that he is here he will make the best of it.

Meanwhile I read about Jane Austen and the tiny table she sat at to write her masterpieces and marvel at ‘the modesty of genius’. As the blue tits on the balcony outside jostle for pecking space on the overcrowded feeder. The high-pitched notes: pee-pee-ti sihihihihihi, pee-pee-ti sihihihihihi fill the air with their silvery trill. While the bee rushes about from the fuchsia to the lavender before settling gentling on the verbena. Even as the wind begins to lead the trees in a dance of ecstasy under the brilliant blue summer sky. Only to be joined in by the shrill sirens of the passing police cars and ambulances. Just then the phone rings. It is my mother. And a moment passes away.

Reality once again refuses to get bound. Time, neither a moment nor eternity appear sufficient. Leaving us with at best a perception. Subjective and inadequate. Just a little short of untrue.

Rashomon

Rashomon (1950) Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Then came Rashomon. And it was not a moment too soon. We were in our mid twenties crawling towards the thirties- the age of cynicism. We had crossed the moment when reality and truth are enthusiastically, even euphorically embraced. Right or as we were soon to discover what we perceived to be right and good were passionately defended. And life was simply a struggle between the good and the evil with naturally the good always emerging victorious. We were suspended in that nebulous region somewhere between passionate adherence to our sense of right and the soon to engulf us unfathomable skepticism.

At that moment Rashomon happened. The rain falls incessantly and the three men take refuge under a gate and soon the monk and the woodcutter are narrating to the commoner a most incredible tale. A woman is raped and subsequently her husband is murdered. At the enquiry the woman, the accused bandit, the ghost of the dead husband and the woodcutter who chances upon the lifeless body in the forest narrate four versions of the story. Each version totally different from the other and yet each describing the same truth while dragging us through a labyrinth of trees and human deception with the dappled light hiding much more than it reveals. The sun peers through the dense foliage, the leaves rustle, the shade flickers, the shadows stretch across the faces and the rain refuses to relent. Even the elements conspire to obscure that, which should be self-evident. The camera seems to run to capture the truth that shifts shapes with every passing moment to elude it.

So, a simple story gets transformed into a philosophical treatise on the relativism of truth and the subjectivity of our perceptions. It becomes a film about, as Kurosawa writes, “…such human beings–the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are…this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave...Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem.”

Rashomon showed us who ultimately wins when reality and the ego clash. Therein lies the truth. And we think we became better humans, if only in our perception, just by becoming aware of that.

Another thing, Rashomon went on to win the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival and the American Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Kurosawa writes, “ Japanese critics insisted that these two prizes were simply reflections of Westerners’ curiosity and taste for Oriental exoticism, which struck me then, and now, as terrible. Why is it that Japanese people have no confidence in the worth of Japan? Why do they elevate everything foreign and denigrate everything Japanese? Even the woodblock prints of Utamoro, Hokusai and Sharaku were not appreciated by Japanese until they were first discovered by the West. I don’t know how to explain this lack of discernment. I can only despair of the character of my own people.” (Something Like an Autobiography)

If we replace the word Japanese/Japan with Indian/India the above thought would still hold true.

(On cinema part 2)