Beginnings

The potential of beginnings is on my mind.

A dispersal of points. A setting forth.  A series of beginnings and no ends- perhaps a most precarious method of functioning today.  False alarms, panic starts, carburators that refuse to ignite but are in the continuous labour of combustion. Bollywood films with only first halves ( which would spell paradise for the scriptwriter!)

In one of Edward Said’s earlier books, Beginnings: Intentions and methods, he suggested that the literary form of the novel was a step towards a manner of institutionalization [my reading] of the story teller. The novel involves a pre-disposition - the writer who consciously chooses a method of expansion to tell a story. Either the story begins with an intention of being a long one or is an episode that promises to churn more. Either way, a potential is realised in the ‘beginning’ and harnessed further. What of the storyteller who is not keen to know the end, or the one who has foreseen the end too soon and would rather not execute this foresight?

We are left with a folder full of empty word files, others with just two lines or paragraphs, each carrying immense possibilities and a writer who is content in creating these moments of possibility in the unwritten and eventually never writes. 

"A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order."

Jean-Luc Godard

Ouroboros

The Mobius Strip

I came across this quote as a status update on Facebook a few days ago - "Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor the dead. For death is certain to one who is born; to one who is dead, birth is certain; therefore, thou shalt not grieve for what is unavoidable." These images of the cyclical are all too familiar. What begins ends, what ends, begins. But what if nothing ends and it is completely vital to shift gears and begin elsewhere just to save yourself from one kind of endlessness and begin another. A violent proposition of constantly spiralling out. An asceticism that pushes towards discomfort and constantly escapes the comfort of its routine.

~

The archaeological site is a site of projected possibilities into both the future and the past. An end point  and a beginning at once, waiting, pausing and pushing the moment of the action just a few more centuries away. Like Apu who decides to miss his train and stay at home one extra day.[Aparajito (1956) Dir: Satyajit Ray]

"Imagining oneself as a child is like running backwards. Imagining oneself ancient is funny, like a dirty joke." 

Agnes Varda 

 ~

The image below is a frame from Agnes Varda’s film Les plages d'Agnes (the Beaches of Agnes) (2008). 

For a long time I struggled with this image that has ever since been my obsession. I see in my imagination, the trapeze artist swaying from one trapeze to another, tossing into the sky further and further until one fine day managing to hook onto it with an umbrella and hang in suspension until further notice. The umbrella has a pencil point with which the trapeze artist can write on the sky, draw tails and signatures of acrobat-kin. But the imagination was in a spasm of trying to actualize an impossible image. The sky and the universe as being an ever expanding material that refused to show itself. 

Yesterday , while wandering in the Science museum in London, I found this. 

The caption reads as follows:
Glass Sphere
This rare example of a celestial sphere belonged to Stephen Demainbray, a lecturer whose collection becae amalgamated with the royal collection. It was designed by Robert Long in 1742. The Instrument was used to demonstrate both the real and the apparent motion of the heavens by turning either the Earth globe or the glass globe. The glass globe is engraved with the major constellations.

Here was an image of the world and its sky- with a beginning, with a circumference. The glass globe as the sky helped me stand outside of it. Made it possible for me to imagine my trapeze artist finally having a surface to fall into. Skyfall was within reach.  

The moment of labour is the one suspened in between the two bars - mid–air when she turns and begins her next journey to the other trapeze, without a safety net below her. It is the work of a beginning. A moment of courage that begins by the momentum accrued by her self set in motion by the trapeze pushed by the friend on the other side, her acrobat-kin.

Beginning now.