Wish away a scorpion's sting

Sometimes you go through days to see yourself through somebody else's eyes. Say a sentence rehearsed in your head and then watch the air deflate from its imagined lift in your head. Your eyes are narrowed, your smile genial, your mind congealed from the earnestness of your imagined acrobatics-- what you do not want to confront is that your earnestness is a function of practiced repetition in the hope that you can regurgitate art from all that you consume. Sometimes you blow your nose and take a deep breath to fill your insides with air--- and in that intake, you hope to have hope splayed out in your insides, from the tips of your fingers to the bristles under your nose. You want to feel the pit of your stomach rise and fall with the inlaid rhythm of hope.  Your mind reins you in. Be cautious. Hope can fall through the cracks.

I am most grateful for being able to witness the inner workings of intimate solitude, the kind that cut close to your bones and draws the outside inwards, a reversed cyclotron if you will. Before the pandemic, I didn't know what this all meant-- living through and with solitude in an intimate two-person space. The space isn't cramped but the ruse extends beyond the metaphor. There is the pressure of doing things, ensuring things are business as usual, putting up a front, and then there is the other being inside, who wishes away things in the quest to access an imaginary being-- the kind who can be the epitome of perfection in the middle of a devastating ordeal. 

Today I learned you can wish away a scorpion's sting by pasting a poisonous admixture on your skin and then watch the upper layer curdle. There, right there, is your immunity in motion!

JoJo Rabbit Reminded Me of What Films Can Do

 There are these rare moments when the filmic world melds into the real so seamlessly that the material frame of the screen holding the constructed universe becomes an extension of both our lived and imagined experiences. And even rarer is the moment when the material frame cannot contain the quaking existential graveyard inside our collective hearts and minds. Ten minutes into the filmic universe of Jojo Rabbit, similar to Moonrise Kingdom sans the uncontrollable symmetric precision of generic Wes Andersonian stylized aesthetics, you know you are in the presence of something special. It helps that the holocaust has been hitherto palimpsestically rendered; the precedent is there, and the director is activating collective memory. The stage is already set, no further paraphernalia is necessary for the exposition — we dive into a textured sepia-toned world that seems monstrously like our contemporary moment: children are blinded by hate beyond repair; they slingshot grenades like flying discs; blow up rafters in exchange of greetings; participate in desultory adult-like conversations with a worldliness that is comedic but played to frightening effect.

I have always wondered about the profilmic moment in front of the camera and the chosen angular posing that determines the audience’s point of view. What if the protagonist was someone else — the mother who executes (and is in turn executed) the impossible task of conveying what it means to be radically hospitable through time and timelessness — would the filmic universe still have that same hold? I use timelessness as a metaphor here, but the implication is real — celebrated philosophers will tell you that radical hospitality is timeless because it is impossible — impossible to perform, impossible to demonstrate, impossible to hold. But Taika Waititi comes really close to making it possible, which brings me to the question — what can films do?

I watched Jojo Rabbit in a theatre in Kolkata with eight other people, six of whom were at least ten feet away (way before social distancing became a ritual), situated like islands in different corners of the sprawling room. Nervous laughter from an unidentified corner of the theatre sometimes punctuated the sequences while silent tears rolled down my cheeks. Part of the theatre watching experience is to second guess other people’s emotions; you sometimes hear other people react to cues and you are startled by other artistic interpretations of the same event. The sonic, the visual and the performative had synchronously mutated for me into an unexplainable affect that found some articulation through oblique physical gestures — my being conscious of myself crying in a room filled with mostly strangers and my being conscious of the delicate fragility of that constructed space; the movie on the big screen, the material contours of a room, the intellectual proximity of a close friend and the nervous laughter from unnamed bodies. During intermission, I pointedly refused to meet the eyes of my friend next to me, also an artist, lest he witnesses the despair within.

But amidst all that quaking desolation, onscreen and off — I watched humanity unfold as a 10-year-old Nazi befriends a fourteen-year-old Jew. Just like everyone else, I root for the mother, her fierce strength and buoyancy as she traipses down the verdant countryside slopes in her summer hats. But, the profilmic narrative had already been parsed and carefully curated by a master conjurer who knows how to play his cards right. Like everyone else, I willed the mother to survive but my theory-addled brain already knew that radical hosts were impossible both in theory and art. The sequence when it comes pulses with hooded eyes staring out of droopy windows; a lidded hat pulled over the ears, drowning the sonic but transmuting the filmic into the specular — the hooded eyes fixate on us as we collectively shift in our seats. Contact is established but we see what Jojo sees — a shattered dream and an unforeseen settlement.

When the movie ends, and some amount of hope has been vindicated — everyone knows this part of the story by now — the quaking graveyard inside me is filled up by the corpses of many dead weights. Hope is entombed in despair.

As someone who sometimes attempts to write for an imaginary audience but mostly to assuage a deep sense of guilt for not always being viscerally cognizant of the value of what I do, there are these moments when I force myself to go back to the fundamentals. What is the value of Art at the end of the world? It is perhaps not a question of efficacy, after all, but one strictly lodged in the aesthetics. But can there be an objective value ever placed on aesthetics?

We have all seen those lists — books to read during quarantine, films to watch, recipes to perfect, list to end all lists and so continues the endless rigamarole of regurgitated curated hyperlinks. But what if the pandemic crisis is not as they say the exemplary condition of the present moment but something far deep-rooted and at the risk of sounding terribly pessimistic — the only condition that binds us together. What can be the value of the visual when the pre-existing profilm is a shared condition of loss, degradation and disaster; at all times inflected by variations of the personal and the collective experience. The question then perhaps is one of scale or rather a movement — how much a work of art can move you; or drive one to explore the banality of our existence, stripped away from all accouterments.

Like the novelist and the artist, both the seasoned and the amateur, the filmmaker for me is neither a historian nor a prophet, and neither they should be hailed as one or held against metrics to adjudge whether they qualify as one. There was a time when art thrived in collective anonymity and did not buckle from preset neoliberal aspirations of what it meant to be considered great or who makes it to what list. One knew of them through their greatness and not because they were dispatched by already adjudged greats. The filmmaker like the novelist is an explorer of existence and a host that must believe in the possibility of radical hospitality. The viewer is above all a guest that is choosing to participate in an exchange where they are opening themselves up to be moved. The medium, the film, and the storytelling must be able to create an unobstructed opening for that engagement. So this larger discussion is really about how much films can move you.

And above all is the question of aesthetics and playful inventiveness — the comedy at the heart of the tragedy and the exceptional at the heart of the banality. The present ongoing catastrophe can very well attest to the curious aporia of our time — people dying all around is catastrophic, while celebrities not having the correct flavour of ice cream in the house and migrant labourers dying of hunger show up on our newsfeed as personal and collective disasters. Taika Waititi’s hammy Hitler and exploration of radical hospitality reminds us of the optimism of extreme artistic will and the pessimism of cynicism.

I wanted to believe that day like Jojo, that I too will find my soul, but the world around me looked bleaker than ever as I made my way outside from the dimly lit theatre, scrolling through the news that notified me of more human rot. A student protester in Delhi was repeatedly shot in the hand by a gunman with links to a radical Hindu nationalist organization on the day of Gandhi’s assassination. I read the news and steeled myself for scheduled meetings with old friends, knowing that this moment too shall pass like most other things. But in the silence of my room, well past midnight, in the darkness of a semi moonlit night, I remembered the vulnerability of a ten-year-old boy who has butterflies in his stomach and a dance in his steps.

Amrita De

Writings on film and gender politics

writing as habit/ there will be typos

 Anything remotely resembling habit quickly becomes the habitat for worst impulses like a creeper canoodling a concrete wall (so much for icky imagery.  This is more inspired than I am letting on. There is a creeper gnawing through the living room wall, fangs blaring when observant but remarkably pliant and docile from a distance-- part of the grad school aesthete you know. Hah, creeper in living room ). 

Anyway, long story short, THIS IS IT. This will be the hub to visualize all the mess, knots in my head, literally the place where I wrestle with conflicting thoughts and make a free wheeling attempt to run a wooden comb through all the unwieldy tresses. There won't be much beauty to this madness, but indeed, there would be some sort of method. After all, isn't this the place to organize the mess.  So here I shall be thinking through some of my present obsessions. 

politics : always the politics but this time with the poetics

pedagogy: what is even radical inclusivity sans Derridean hospitality? There I said it.

attachments : shout out to Berlant, Ahmed and Hartman

literary : again, what gives when we consider the literary without the political or as a function of the political or at loggerheads with the political. That said, I am a Glissant loyalist. In fact, I should name this blog rhizomes.

Identity politics : And against Paranoid reading.  this is a special category. enough said.

love : against erotophobia

desire : pretty much desire for everything...desire for reattaching our alignment with the real. what is the real anyway?

writing : writing as an act of radical hospitality. And writers who inspire and provoke. 

I am not sure much good will come from this obsessive need to calibrate every thought nugget, to pulse it into digestible granules ala Adornean babyfood, but this is a very crude attempt to inject life into tired reasonings. To re-verve and reaffirm our attachment to the political by reminding myself that tired desensitization to constant impulses will not get you, me , or anyone else anywhere. If at all, it will definitely accelerate the gutting process. 

Anyway, in other news. I am teaching hopefully my last in-person course in a while, starting tomorrow. There is so much anxiety and unreconciled desire that I am not, yet, comfortable letting on here. After all, I am aware this is public flailing and even then, one must put up a show. But let this be a space to dial down knee jerk reactionary responses and participate in the hard work of thinking through this mess, with patience and care. Again, aware of how political care economy is, but hey, this is me pulling the strings in this space! I am militantly committed to preserving the sanctity of my hard limits. 

Also trying to finish the dissertation this semester. Long day's journey into night.

Feels good to be back here. Last time I checked, I was really whining about unrequited love. haha. Some pleasure in the foolishness after all. 

 There will be typos. 

late night mutterings.

This year has been an important year.

 Nothing can quite match up to the continued extravagance that has been this year.

And now at this unearthly hour, dulled by the searing cold, I feel strangely situated and adrift at the same time. There is staid contentment, laced with a tinge of melancholia- of roads not taken and words not uttered -of bridges not burnt and quests, hurriedly abandoned midway.

But above all, there is hope that next year will be as extravagant as this one.

All the jazz.

 I have spent the past two hours digging up my old posts and reading other old, forgotten and now defunct blogs of friends, acquaintances - the works.  I have obviously been cracking up at the sheer immaturity and the startling level of transparency displayed in most of these writings.

 In a time, when  words are weighed out in terms of rhetoric and carefully constructed sentences that reek of a certain cultured eloquence-- these writings stand testimony to the fact that there was a time when we were brave enough or probably young enough to lay bare our souls without worrying about being judged. We were not so much taken in by a turn of a phrase as much as by the turn of events which deserved a worthy mention on blogsphere.

Most importantly, it made me reflect on the girl I once was and the being I have morphed into today. Interestingly, each one of those events which lie concealed in this blog under a haze of flimsy embellishments have been so instrumental in helping me morph into this being that I do not so easily recognize now.

As I lay cringing in my bed for the better part of the two hours, eyes glazed from the fixity of gaze that held the laptop screen in rapt attention, old memories were rekindled- churning out easily recognizable patterns that my life can be broken into; the same fears, the same insecurities staring back at me like old friends reunited after years, embracing- silhouetted against the backdrop of a setting sun and rapidly falling dusk while I zoom in and out of the frame- never too far, never too close but always lingering- ALWAYS lingering- just within reach.

For all the smugness that I can grant myself for having accumulated some amount of sparing wisdom, there is a deep hollow inside - for things that can never really be ever filled up to the brim. There is always a price. For every reckless joy and every wanton sorrow, there is some compensation- some creases that need to be ironed out, some bloody price that has to be paid. For who can be so blessed to drink deep from the chalice of both sorrow and happiness without having sacrificed something in the process?

There is no love without pain and only the love that has exulted in the deepest throes of pain can be worthy enough to be recorded for posterity's sake. No other love is great enough or noble enough to warrant such singular distinction.

And blessed are those who have seen it all.

Blessed are those who have quavered from the sheer intensity of it all and have experienced the state of being broken into a million pieces.

And amidst all this mindless cacophany, you find a part of yourself being born anew- soaring in the endless sky- rising like a phoenix from the ashes and in that single moment when you are poised to fly, you are infinite- a million worlds nested within but so delicately congealed into that singular mass.  This is when you find all the reasons that is reason enough to worth risking such a love that is so delicately fragile but grotesque in its intensity.

A part of me does not believe in anything that I have typed out here. The part of me which is too cynical and too weathered to negotiate the possibility of such occurences. All of this looks good in movies, old Bollywood movies-soulful and melancholy like a Geeta Dutt number. But there is a certain specificity to this kind of melancholia. It hovers around you, enveloping you but never quite touching you.

And then there is another part of me which believes that one day I will get back all my reasons to risk everything for a cause that might tremble against the limits of sanity, but in all that trembling insanity- I will be complete and infinite. And it shall always be worth the effort. Always.

I can't help but crack up inside as to how easy it gets, when you try churning out long drawn , meandering sentences with a generous smattering of misplaced punctuation, in the quiet silence of darkness- all in an effort to sound grown up and mature- when in reality you can never live up to all this jazz. :D 

Lost in translation

Fumbling with letters, feelings and the multiple voices in your head- a curious patch work of words clumsily sewn together which transform into one of those fancy quilts that adorn your bed. So much and I mean so much is always lost in translation.

Beautiful, poignant words; of the poetic kind can lift your spirits like a jesting wind raise those fallen leaves in autumn- just an inch before the wind dies down. But there is a mad rush: a flurry of excitement which precedes this inevitable death that can be read in the collective swish of leaves being picked up and dropped. This is what beautiful words do to you. There is a soaring feeling inside which dies an eventual death.

But in that brief instant of soaring, you experience a million worlds erupt within you, of watching fireworks burst into the night sky and of feeling more alive and more real than what you have ever experienced before. 

long after the music is heard no more.

Sometimes it takes a special kind of hearing to hear most of the words that are left unsaid, even when the obvious reality prods you into hearing otherwise- there is always some music playing in the background. You need to strain your ears to hear it but when you can do that, you will feel the music engulfing you in its soft, feathery grip as you viscerally feel your heart soaring and plummeting to the rhythm.

And long after the final cadences are played out, you can still hear the music around you as it trails farther off, leaving a wispy haze behind.