Stinking Lizaveta

stinking Lizaveta

standing in front of white, white Taj Mahal
stinking of marigolds and paper dry aboli

stinking Lizaveta

wandering through Amsterdam Centraal

sobbing and searching for her lost God, in blue mascara

stinking Lizaveta

sleeping outside Hotel Diana

dreaming of hot idlis and Bombay cutlet

stinking Lizaveta

singing of sunshine and seasons

amidst cold toilet tiles of an alley in NY

stinking Lizaveta

smelling her torn tar-stained clothes

that remind of the night, coal and her dead child’s eyes

stinking Lizaveta

stinking stinking stinking of this world 

and all its moist mouldy coziness.

~

//excerpt - chapter 'Stinking Lizaveta' from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov // 

“There was one special circumstance here which deeply shocked Gregory, having finally strengthened an unpleasant and revolting suspicion he had had for some time. Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya was an undersized girl ‘just under five feet’, as many pious old women of our town touchingly described her after her death. She was twenty and her healthy, broad, red face bore an expression of complete idiocy; she had a fixed and unpleasant look in her eyes, though it was meek enough. She walked about barefoot all her life, in winter as well as in summer, wearing only a hempen shift. Her very thick, almost black hair, curling like lamb’s wool, formed a kind of huge cap on her head. It was, besides, always matted with mud, and had leaves, splinters of wood, and shavings clinging to it, for she always slept on the ground and in the dirt. Her gather Ilya was a homeless sickly artisan, who had lost all his money and was perpetually drunk. He had been living for many years as a workman with some well-to-do tradesmen, also artisans of our town. Lizaveta’s mother had long been dead. Ilya , always ill and in a bad temper, used to beat Lizaveta unmercifully whenever she came home.

But she came home very rarely because she used to be fed by everybody in the town as a saintly fool. Ilya’s employers, Ilya himself, and many other compassionate people in the town, especially merchants and merchant’s wives, tried many times to clothe Lizaveta more decently, and towards winter always put a sheepskin and boots on her; but, although she let them put everything on her without protest, she used to so away, preferably to the cathedral porch, and take off everything she had been given – kerchief, skirt, sheepskin, or boots – and leave it and there and walk away barefoot and in her shift as before. It happened on one occasion that our new provincial governor, on his tour of inspection of our town , caught sight of Lizaveta and was deeply hurt in his tenderest feelings. Though he realised that she was a ‘saintly fool’, as indeed he was officially informed, he insisted on pointing out that for a young girl to wander about the street in nothing but her shift was a breach of the proprieties and that it must not happen again. But the governor departed, and Lizaveta was left as she was. At last her father died, and she became even dearer to all the pious people in our town as an orphan. Indeed, everyone seemed to like her and even the boys in the streets did not tease her or molest her, and the boys of our town, especially the schoolboys, are a mischievous lot. She would walk into strange houses and no one drove her out; on the contrary, everyone tried to be nice to her and give her a penny. If she were givne a penny, she would take it and at once drop it into some alms-box in a church or outside the prison. If she were given a roll or a bun in the market, she would go away and give it to the first child she came across, or else stop one of the richest ladies in our town and hand it to her; and the ladies were very pleased to accept it. She herself lived only on black bread and water. If she went into an expensive shop and sat down there, the proprietors took no notice of her, though there were costly goods and money lying about, for they knew that even if they put thousands of roubles before her and forgot all about it, she would not take a penny. [...]”

'The page is a touching'

The touch screen - the screen where I come in contact with the outside runs deep. The depth beyond the touch far exceeds an imagination of what an infinity can be. To imagine an infinite world all within your touch. Possibilities that exist only through the mind and implode silently. With each swipe, touch, tap and pinch.

‘The page is a touching, of my hand while it writes and your hands while they hold the book. This touch is infinitely indirect, deferred, but it continues as a slight, resistant, fine texture, the infinitesimal dust of a contact everywhere interrupted and pursued. In the end, here and now, your own gaze touches the same traces of characters as mine and you read me and I write you.

If I write I create sense-effects. I displace myself from bodies. Exscription passes through writing and so we have to write from a place, a body that we neither have nor are.’ 

- Jean Luc Nancy, Corpus

pencil outline of a detail from an Ukiyo-e woodblock print 

Dancing is writing, writing in space, making space within the opaque, hollowing it out so the inside and outside are no longer apart. The inside-outing of an intestinal desire. Akka Mahadevi wraps herself in silk rays from the sun, Krishna opens his mouth to show his mother an entire cosmos. The eye is the crack whose infinite darkness saves brightness from staining - a suction pump that deletes and erases all temporary files from Random Access Memories.

A sincere body, acting behaving, dancing and imitating everyday touches sincerely the ground it walks, tumbles and crawls upon. Writing about the dead owl outside our house and its passing makes the owl die two times over. Thriving on the ink and paper or the incandescent glow of the laptop screen and its flickering letters, the white feathers reappear on the grey belly of the owl, electrocuted by the electric pole by the street outside our house.  

A body is perhaps made by its documentary. It lives, it dies, it breathes when it has been written in the world of others. A lone human on the planet might as well be a plant or an insect or the wind?

‘But it was in vain that I lingered beside the hawthorns – breathing in their invisible and unchanging odour, trying to fix it in my mind, losing it, recapturing it, absorbing myself in the rhythm which disposed the flowers here and there with a youthful light-heartedness , and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals in music – they went on offering the same charm in inexhaustible profusion but without letting me delve any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret.

I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to return to them afresh.’ 

- Proust, Swann's Way , In Search of Lost Time  

a fetish for the manuscript

The handwriting has come a long way. The letter, the outline of letters and the sentences that churn out of the pen as a grandmother writes a letter to her granddaughter or an eccentric makes notes in his diary with his pencil. Here a small walk through manuscript lane. (in the order of mention)

Audrey Hepburn wrote back to Kubrick in round wobbly letters with what looks like a blunt fat pencil, just like her big round dreamy eyes, polite and stern. The writing permeates through a page along with the smudges of sweaty fingers flipping through them, ages after they have been written. That or the air conditioned humidity controlled glass casings of a gallery like Intensive Care Units maintain the lines on permanent ventilators, resuscitated in cycles, like Mira Schendel's graphite on rice paper, the ECG of these lines rising and falling like a restless summer ocean . Da Vinci found comfort in writing through the mirror while Dostoesvky often lost his sentences into solemn faces of his heroes. And as Vladimir Nabokov had just finished colouring the butterfly from his garden, it flew and planted itself on the window sill of a  far away Bengali mansion as as Rabindranath Tagore allowed his pen to consume his page and his words completely.

[all images sourced from google]

# interesting link - Digitised manuscripts of the British Library

Deposing the listener

'Are you speaking to me?' asks a frightened youngster to the middle-aged man sitting across her in the tube-train in London. He has been looking in her direction for fifteen minutes now, but not at her. She frowns and hides behind the novel in her hand. He continues his speak. He is speaking animatedly of colonial imports and exports from Jakarta, Indonesia and trade sea routes unacknowledged by historians of the imperial colonies. This man would be just another stranger going to work this ordinary morning, newspaper in hand if it weren't for this little detail. - that he is speaking to no-one in particular with devoted attention. The row of commuters sitting along him and opposite him become increasingly edgy and shifty from behind their book shields and tabloid shields. He would go on even when the train empties at the next station and I walk away feeling disturbed and unsettled by this incident. Consensus would conclude that such behaviour is aberrant. He must obviously be insane. This man was having a 'conversation' with the entire imagined people in the train coach, equally and unconditionally - a conversation where himself was the only person he was talking with yet is his thoughts were on offer to the 'all' that he was not speaking to. It makes me think of expressions of soliloquys and the vulnerable face of human expression that it brings to the fore. The soliloquy is often used as a theatrical technique to give the audience insight into the actor's thoughts while not being heard by the characters on stage. Imagine this theatrical trope trickling out of the stage and into everyday life where the listener is deposed and dispositioned.

The word 'Selfie' was declared the word of the year 2013 by Oxford dictionary. Self-timed photographs and selfies in the digital age seem be non-instituionalised familial descendants of the self portraits of artists we are so familiar with, be it Van Gogh or Amrita Shergill or Pushpamala N in present times. Selfies also speak with the similar unconditional command of the soliloquy. You don't wait for an audience - you are your own audience within your urgent condition.

Soliloquists.
Images from left to right: Screenshots from Autumn Sonata(1978)  Liv Ullman , Ingrid Berman., Persona (1966) Liv Ullman, Portrait -  Frida Kahlo
[Late Latin sōliloquium= Latin sōl(us) only, sole + loqu(ī) to speak]

Ingmar Bergman in his films Autumn Sonata(1978) and Persona(1966), makes his woman characters (brilliantly played by Liv Ullman, Bibi Anderson and Ingrid Bergman) engage in long, tumultuous soliloquies before the camera. The camera becomes the petrified spectator, as we watch and listen to the characters speak their most internal thoughts aloud naturally and circumstantially. Through the camera we witness them speak to no-one in particular yet to every-one. There is freedom from the tyranny of reciprocity in the narrative solely driven by unleashed moments of speaking to the void. Characters bathe in their own aura, after the ebb of hysterical deliriums, mostly from stubborn minds. ( The words 'aural' and 'aura' are in this matter not so far from each other. The soliloquy exists on that fine line that separates the etymology of the two words i.e a perception by listening in the former and a perception possible without listening in the latter.)

The listener exists in her absence

Confronted by a person who doesn't care if you existed as their audience but at the same time whose being entirely depended on it, the listener is put into the most precarious of positions. We are taunted, dismissed and captivated. We exist precisely through our absence in the speaker's voice. In this moment of nakedness, no pretension, no protocol, no courtesy defends us from them - the soliloquists. Persona embodies this stubborn mind's wrath - when one chooses to speak/ not/ listen/ not/ talk/ not/ exist/ not/ react/ not/ remember/ not/ forget/ not/ record.

Woody Allen's latest film Blue Jasmine(2013) poignantly and eerily hinges on the image of Jasmine speaking to herself in delirious states. Succumbing to a traumatic past, she is entangled in a mental time warp, a kind of seizure ( allegorically in sync with the economic seizure of many countries at present ) that rewinds, forwards and tries to change the course of events in the past mentally but is ultimately condemned to exist within a looped soliloquy. The stranger sitting on the park bench next to Jasmine silently gets up and walks away as the camera edges away too, leaving Jasmine staring infinitely across and beyond the camera.

~

The silently clicked self-photograph is one small channel to this internal ebb - an acknowledgement of those modestly immodest times when you realize that 'this' right now, right here needs to be inscribed. You get over the inhibition of judgemental eyes and set your camera on a timer, find a suitably high ledge to place it on, and run back to position yourself within your inscription. The narrative is internalised. The listener is successfully made dispensable in the internal moment and pushed out into the every-one/no-one sphere, which is often social media - facebook/ twitter/ blog. This act gains strength in its willingness to reveal a weak moment in an increasingly singular world. Personal records get made by the second by this accumulative uploading of anonymous faces inscribed within their memorable moments. A vast tableau vivant emerges of rather vulnerable and helpless individuals battling their soliloquies where internal distances further away as physical distances collapse. 

'Are you listening to me?' 

Canon Self-timer - 10 seconds. Clicked at 3.17pm on Sunday, 24.11.13.
Time to resume position - 6 seconds. Time to think - 4 seconds.
 [interiors] London, U.K 

PS: 'I dispose of you by being intimate and impersonal[..]' - Gertrude Stein

       #interesting read - Bruce Andrews - Reading Language , reading Gertrude Stein 

Work of sight

Jean Luc Godard in Les plages d'Agnes- as seen through Agnes Varda's eyes, by me

Agnes Varda reminisces how Godard gave her the rare privilege of letting her see him without his famed sunglasses. 

"I loved his beautiful eyes and his cinema". 

This image is a special moment for me as I look at a pair of eyes that I have only mostly seen through or shared a vision with. Being confronted with the eyes of the seeker whose vision you have comfortably shared, through his camera is almost like coming face to face with an alter-reflection , a moment of suspense undone in a film noir.

Godard in this image may as well not be looking, or looking at someplace else, beyond and far behind me. The distant gaze is both projected outside of him and back into his sight . Its like a mirror that reflects the distance it sees. The dark pupils are opaque and yet piercing, infinite and zero at the same time. Staring into the zero or 'shunya' (more complex Sanskrit translation for the 'nought') is at the same time gazing into the infinite, constantly battling the limits of a horizon and wanting to see more.

L'inconnue de la Seine ( 1880's)

The Unknown woman of the Seine , L'inconnue de la Seine , whose death mask became an inspiration for many literary works and speculations is also an image of a woman who could be seeing into the distance, despite her death; a state of forced blindness despite sight where the slightly bulging pupils behind the eyelids perhaps are an indication of the eyes open even when they are closed.

मरने के बाद भी आँखें  खुली रहीं , आदत  जो पड़ गयी  थीं तेरे इंतज़ार की  

 Faiz Ahmed Faiz 

French writer, literary theorist Maurice Blanchot in his Thomas the Obscure, 1941, speaks fantastically of this dichotomous sight

"It was night itself. Images which constituted its darkness inundated him. He saw nothing, and far from being distressed, he made this absence of vision the culmination of his sight. Useless for seeing, his eye tool on extraordinary proportions, developed beyond measure, and stretching out on the horizon, let the night penetrate its centre in order to receive the day from it. And so, through this void, it was sight and the object of sight which mingled together. Not only did this eye which saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision. It saw as object that which prevented it from seeing. Its own glance entered into it as an image, just when this glance seemed the death of all image."

The blinding turmoil of the eye seeing into absolute darkness is an exhilarating moment- one of hitting the opaque surface beyond comfortable reach; of encountering a resistant world of images refusing to reveal itself as anything else but itself. The pendulum keeps oscillating.

#interesting read - Merleau Ponty on The Primacy of Perception   

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.  

Apichatpong's Tropical Pulse

I discovered Apichatpong Weerasethakul in my global art cinema class taught by Dr. Mark Betz. We were shown his film , ‘Syndromes and a century’ and were left quite disoriented at the end of the film.  After then, having seen Tropical Malady and Mysterious object at noon , it is only but evident that this filmmaker has his emotional quotient very deeply rooted with his people in Thailand. Apichatpong’s narratives seem to have the lightness of a grasshopper, effortlessly moving from one figment to another, yet , binding all these figments in a close network of emotional  ties, which weave the film into a overwhelming mood piece.

While watching his recent short , Ashes, shot using the Lomokino , which premiered at Cannes this year, the most eloquent aspect of the film that struck me was his keen ear to the sounds of memory. The visual aesthetic of the flashy overexposed film lends itself the hazy misty air of transformative contingent recollections. The dog  on leash, the ambitious pig in the sty,  the sounds of birds in the distance, of rustling palm leaves on a breezy coastal afternoon, of steaming rice in the kitchen , and a stroll in the evening, all these little details are intuitively captured. The film gradually shifts into craftwork when the filmmaker overlays the same ‘home’ footage with digitized aberrational sounds that echo a certain kind of appropriated pulse of technology. Ashes , performs a simple act of placing a finger on your wrist to place your pulse.  

A similar pulse ran through his first film, Mysterious Object at Noon, which uses both enacted and documentary style of filmmaking , to present a collage of deeply personal narratives that evolve around myths and folklores of Thailand, and emerge out of a vernacular sensibility . There is a sense of nostalgia in every fragment , a revocation of intimacy and helplessness. The mise en scene has touches of tactile everyday domesticity. The film which explores a narrative based on the game of spontaneous story building , which the surrealists indulged in, therefore , opens up the margins of the film. The film makes room to allow moments of collapse of the control of the camera. The pace of the film is as if the whole two hours of viewing were drowned into a time warp bubble, the heart beats of the audience seem to race beyond the pulse of the filmic experience.      

The story of a mysterious object which turns into a  mysterious boy who is said to have killed his teacher , gains life, like a local myth, through its renewal and retelling through various people . It turns into a seed to develop different modes of performing the story , while at the same time allowing for spontaneous filmic siestas . The element of magic , of course, is the tiger , which enters the plot towards the end,  into the hitherto human story , which pushes the realm of the narrative into becoming a fairy tale, the storytellers being curious and inventive school kids. The tiger finds again an important part to play in his ‘Tropical Malady ‘, again resorting to a dispersed thread of narration of folklore. In ‘Syndromes and a century’, the vast slow camera pan around the different urban and pastoral locations , and elongated time lapses generously given for the spaces themselves to emote and take forward the film’s mood, reflect a keen sensitivity towards spatial emotive topographies , that perhaps could have come from Apichatpong’s primary training as an architect prior to his education in fine arts and films.

His regular video art pieces and shorts, which have been produced religiously over the years , alongside his long features , seem to help keep agile his film craft and inventive  fervor. Apichatpong’s cinema seems to resonate with a certain wisdom . A wisdom which is nurtured by the international fraternity and as apparent by the widespread press coverage, is celebrated as a unique coming together of a global and a regional sensibility in the filmmaker.