Love in the Time of Corona

"Too many red lines have been crossed...we convince ourselves that sudden change is something that happens outside the normal order of things, like a car crash, or that it is beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We don't conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as woven into the very fabric of existence.

  We have entered a new era.

  Change is like death. You do't know what it looks like until you're standing at the gates.                                                      

                                                             Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, (2018)

At the end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, we see a dystopic future, a radically altered paradigm of human existence, where Man is forced to share his space with dinosaurs who have escaped a high-security bio-research facility and are roaming free as an unceasing reminder of technology's ultimate impotence to save mankind from catastrophe.

  

 The novel corona virus( SARS nCov2) has similarly created this 'new normal' for twenty-first century mankind, whereby we are forced to accept this new contagion as part of life, as wired into the human condition for the foreseeable future, until either a vaccine or a drug is discovered to contain the lethal epidemic, that has infected a sizable proportion of the global population already.

      Even shaking hands with a friend could get you killed; how apocalyptic is that? How much more phantasmagoric than even the most grimly futuristic Hollywood dystopia could have ever imagined?

   As the world has been suckerpunched by alien viral epidemics every few decades or so, the parameters of mankind's traditional reality have also been radically revised, transformed and renewed to make way for new and emerging  paradigms that have redefined human survival, culture and environment in ways no man-made technology or revolution ever could. How else could we have imagined a world order where Russia, China/ North Korea and The U.S are united against a common adversary? 

How not to be surprised by the fact that according to media reports, some terrorist organizations have recalled their overseas recruits to avoid covid-casualty, putting a brake on their subversive agenda temporarily?

 Fear did what love couldn't do.

   The first of these most massive and impactful European pandemics was The Black Death --the bubonic plague --that raged through the continent during the latter half of the 1340s. It was responsible not only for the depletion of more than half of Europe's population but also for revolutionary transformations in its economy (since it phenomenally reduced available work-force), demographic distribution, allocation of labour and socio-hierarchic status quo as a whole, which ultimately led to the gradual demise of the dogmatic, feudal and fundamentally oppressive social order of the Middle Ages, to make way for the more enlightened, egalitarian and democratic transition to the Renaissance.

The next major public health crisis that would occupy the cultural imagination of the Western World for the ensuing four centuries would undoubtedly be syphilis. It is surprising how so many of these aggressive infections affect and regulate human intimacy and love, to introduce new prohibitions and taboos around sexuality, that are necessary for species-survival.

    

Caused by Treponema Pallidum, a kinky, curly, noodle-like bacteria, Syphilis was such a scourge to ravage through Europe at the peak of its expansionist phase, that even the New World fell victim to its massive spread through sexual contact with the colonising race. Vernacular literature from the colonial period is especially sensitive to the outrage, scandal and morbidity of the disease, mostly in the form of the cautionary tale. Since it could be transferred, in utero, from mother to the unborn infant, it acquired its macabre symbolism of blighted innocence and paternal sin visiting the blameless progeny.

 Much of European literature from that era suffers from a cultural neurosis that is organised around the stigma and terror of syphilis' disfigurement and disability. Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts is a very good example of that literary trend. Since it spread through promiscuity and prostitution, the social elite, the ruling class, showed an above average vulnerability to the infection due to their dissolute and libertine lifestyle. Syphilis, thus became a trope of Victorian England's moral critique as well.

Government data on the subject is insufficient due to this embarrassment and stigma. It is rather the writers and artists-- the Rembrandts, Baudelaires and Bram Stokers--whose aesthetic depiction of the contagion is particularly eloquent. 

Baudelaire, who chronically suffered from the infection, writes poems that are are an excursion through the dark and infernal interiors of the afflicted mind. The Parisian subculture of addiction and prostitution is revealed as the sinful seat of the disease, that is the physical and metaphorical trophy of the poet who creates beauty--flowers--out of evil.

Bram Stoker's mythology of Vamprism (that, pretty much like viral reproduction, spreads through the increased availability of the host body) is said to be a sublimated response to the anxiety and shame of syphilitic blood poisoning through intimate erotic contact that Stoker himself might have been exposed to.

 In the absence of treatment or prophylaxis, isolation was the only recourse to stop the contagion--sounds familiar?

Picture Courtesy: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/it-director-andy-muschietti-eyed-for-dracula-prequel-dracul/

   The extensive prevalence and mortality of syphilis in the pre-penicillin era, especially in the upper echelons of society, is certainly responsible for the anti-elite sentiments of 18th-19th century's political philosophy which might have precipitated the French and English revolutions strengthening the balance against upper-class excesses and decadence towards a more democratic, and people-oriented polity. 

   During the 1940s, the world could enjoy a brief respite, with the commercial availability of penicillin that is the most definitive antidote to the infection, and the first commercial production of latex condoms in 1932, which could effectively resist transmission. The encouraging turn of events virtually gave license to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Life was a dream indeed, for a little while, with free sex and consciousness-altering drugs, until AIDS struck a blindsided population with its lethal force.

The HIV was to change the norms governing sex, promiscuity, monogamy and abstinence in ways that are so permanent and irreversible, that it still defines the behaviour, attitude and philosophy concerning sexuality in many traditional societies where safe sex is not yet the default option.

   Public health advertisements in India, during the early stages of the epidemic,( late1980s-mid 90s) emphasised the importance of, Restraint( 'Sanyam'), Monogamy( 'Wafadari') and Protected Sex ('Condom'). It was amusing to watch a relatively new nation, still hungover from Victorian inhibitions, awkwardly and begrudgingly confronting the reality of prostitution, homosexuality, and unprotected sex and beginning to accommodate sexuality as a topic of public discourse in schools, red-light areas and in the mainstream media---both in print and on television. 

   It became the voice in the head for many of us who absorbed the message as kids, without understanding the context. It is still a matter of deep-conditioning that Indian men and women in their 30s and 40s, are generally averse to sex outside a committed relationship, even though times are changing pretty fast. 

  Later on, when the first two areas of exhortation largely failed to cut an impression on the public, the anti-HIV campaign focused exclusively on encouraging safe sex, which finally changed the game. Indian parents and teachers could no longer ignore the rampaging elephant in the room and had to apologetically initiate a discussion on the merits of the condom, with boys and girls attaining premature puberty under the influence of the globalised mass media and capitalistic consumption. 

  As teenagers coming of age on the cusp of the new millennium, whose childhood and puberty have been spent in the deadly shadows of a virus which had no vaccine, no treatment, and once contracted, progressed along an unstoppable trajectory of aggressive morbidity and death, we, as a generation, have got our sexual morality shaped by hypercaution and excessive premeditation, which stems from a fatal fear of sexuality itself. 'Better safe than sorry', our mothers used to say, and so did our governments: what if there were a rip in the rubber?

Picture Courtesy: https://www.glamour.com/story/the-perfect-french-kiss-how-mu

Intravenous substance-abuse, one of the most common routes of transmission in developed countries, also came under severe criticism and censure. The drug-fuelled rock ballads of Lennon and McCartney weren't cool anymore. Mick Jagger was the role model to avoid. No parent wanted their kid to be the next Freddie Mercury.  Narcotics as aesthetic inspiration lost currency. The former hippies, who were now parents to teenagers, started to volunteer for anti-drug vigilance groups in schools and neighbourhoods. 

As a matter of mordant irony, Michel Foucault, the post-modern icon whose historic theory of sexuality is largely responsible for the contemporary perception and understanding of sex as a powerful cultural and philosophical force shaping the exercise of power, died in 1984, being one of the first celebrity casualties of this novel, sexually-communicated virus.

Sex with a stranger was not 'romantic' or 'adventurous' ( as it is for the Tinder-generation, breathing in the safety of anti-retroviral therapy and a downward surge of the epidemic, in an environment where condoms are as normal as oxygen), it was irresponsible, stupid and seriously 'uncool'. Low sexual exposure--better still, virginity, both in men and women--signalled the fact that you were restrained, responsible and reliable; that you wouldn't endanger your partner through risky behaviour. 

This fetishisation of virginity persisted up until very recently, long after cultural modernity and capitalistic permissiveness had securely established themselves even in smaller towns of the Indian heartland. It is only after the advent of technologically enabled one-night stands that the paradigm is changing again. Casual sex is shining again, albeit with protection.

The Corona virus, thankfully, does not bring in the stigma of sexual transmission.

 And therein, lies the bad news. HIV was like the dreaded, but fundamentally reasonable, headmaster who left you alone if you stayed away from penetrative sex.

nCovid 19, pretty much like its predecessors, ie SARS and H1N1, is a deranged shooter let loose in a rock concert ; no one knows whom it will attack and when. Nothing, not even kisses, hugs or holding hands is safe anymore. Only an anti-social self-distancing works; the isolation of the paranoid, the compulsive obsession of the neurotic, these are the new standards of sanity and health.

How do you experience and pass on the ecstasy of a warm and delicious embrace if a 3-foot distance were to mediate your romantic communication?

How many love-stories have been nipped in the bud due to the unforeseen and interminable lockdowns, isolation and a mass displacement of the global population? 

In how many cases has the disappointment of job-loss been compounded by the heartbreak of physical separation with a loved one? 

These are answers only Time will yield.  The Corona epidemic will recede in a few months, as did others before it; what will remain afloat are these individual narratives of tragedy and triumph, of heroism and cynicism, of fear and courage. The government records of infection and mortality will never reveal this enormous and invisible human cost: these stories will remain lodged in the white space between the lines of Covid19's official dossier.

For now, we shall wait with bated breath for the first ray of hope at the end of a seemingly endless tunnel that is dark and airless.

We shall watch out for the dove with an olive leaf, as the boat on which the whole of humanity stays afloat sinks fast; as the civilization that boasts of technology to make the moon our next home grinds to a complete halt, compromised and abject before an enemy that is smaller than a speck of dust.

A vaccine. A drug.

We shall forget about talking furniture and a holiday in outer space for a while.

Then, we could walk out of the darkness of our loveless exile, walk freely into the light and warmth of contact--where holding the shopping bags for an aged neighbour, or catching a child as it falls down, would no longer be criminally condemned; where acts of human kindness, and love, could once again be expressed through the warmth of skin and flesh, where it would be finally possible to hug a long-lost friend or a lover without having to secretly obsess about his contact-history.

All this...such ordinary incentives restored! That is our biggest collective fantasy now, a return to what we already had. To go back to the flawed and frustrating world as we knew, hated, and loved it! 

The freedom to be whole again, to be enfolded in the physical warmth of another, out of this fragmentation and loneliness; The right to enjoy the beautiful mess of a lover's sweat and saliva, until, of course, a new virus strikes again.

        

     

Nothing Is Ever Finished

''Life begins on the other side of despair.''
                                                               Jean Paul Sartre


  The end of December is an emotionally precarious interval even for the hardwired pragmatists and cynics. It is hardly possible to escape the sombre awareness of  time slipping away, like the brief and fleeting golden hour of  a winter evening.  In the midst of all the yuletide mirth, there is a deep, melancholic shadow of  an impending closure; the long nights, the fog that obscures all clarity, the low, transient sun and the fatigued warmth it radiates rather weakly, the chilly and colourless nature-- all of this heighten the awareness of things coming to an end. Of youth and vitality fading away, of life giving way to death.

   So why is it that we are so paralysingly afraid of endings anyway? One of its most vital clues could be rooted in our infantile separation anxiety: the Mother, the source of security and nourishment, when they physically abandoned us--which every mother, however constant and perfect, must do at one point or another--triggered this profound but unutterable sorrow and helplessness, putting an end to the Edenic bond that is perfect and self-contained.
 In adult life, every time we react to loss and grief, with our indescribable anxiety and despair, we unconsciously dig deep into this primal ache of rupture and separation, our first ever lesson in life: however perfect and pleasing things are now, they must come to an end.

  In adult life of course, endings are more complex, more bewildering than that. And there are myriad reasons they terrify us. It opens up a chasm of absence of the object/ habit/ person that, pretty much like the nourishing mother, gave the identity its contour, guaranteed sustenance to our sense of being.

  A person who has lost his job is depressed because he has forfeited his individuality in a larger network of values where existence is justified by the signifiers of capitalistic ascendancy. His career was that signifier for him, in the absence of which he feels he has been rendered invisible.
  A lover who has broken off with his partner is on sleeping pills because he is ripped apart to stare at the empty days and nights staring back at him, where he is denied the comfort of the routine of a bad relationship--the quarrels, the conflicts, even the sullen silences. These exhausting differences is what gave his identity its justification, the end of which makes him fatally depleted.
   A grieving person is visiting his therapist twice a week because he is groping in the vacuum opened by the death of his loved one; this vacuum is the end of a long habit, of having someone around, which, as it vanishes, releases the nightmarish terror of not knowing what to do with oneself anymore.

Endings are frightening because it is the end of the familiar. What lies on the other side of ending is the wild freedom of choice, its dizzying infinity which is also vertiginous and terrifying in its own way. To have to make a choice, after the end of a familiar experience, is the matter of a tremendous existential anxiety: to choose is to risk going wrong, to fail and be abysmally let down, to grieve, to cry, to break. All over again.

Apart from the gnomic cliche that every ending is a new beginning, if we look closely enough at the phenomenon of endings itself, we would realize that no end is as final as it seems.
There is an exquisitely beautiful indie music video, called 'Cold/mess', where two lovers decide to end their relationship while eating a lemon tart which releases memories of intense passion and pain, images of emotional sadism, self-wounding violence, alternating scenes of distance and intimacy, conflict and surrender, at the climax of which there is that final collapse of trust and respect. But even in the cold aftermath of estrangement, what the lovers individually carry is their secret and abiding love of the lemon tart; the sweet closure that tempers the bitter, acrimonious ending and signifies a continuing togetherness on the other side of the seemingly total physical separation.

It is not hard to find this 'lemon tart' in every ending we would ever experience: it is the deep assurance  of a continuing benevolence and justice at the heart of loss. What makes endings brutal is the lack of this faith.
That is why it is necessary to give a respectful send-off to the laid-off employee, to break off with a lover with one final, honest hug, to raise a toast at the funeral dinner, to drink and dance and kiss at the stroke of midnight as we ring off the dying year.
 These are the formalised, ritualistic gestures of closure that make endings a source of gratitude and inspiration.  This is how endings add dimension to our character, enhance our individuality, deepen our reserves of empathy and experience, which ultimately make us the uniquely engaging characters that we, each one of us, are.

On a collective, public level too, endings of status quo are important for the evolution of the social order. The ancient Greeks understood this concept only too well. The denouement of  every Classical tragedy, every catastrophic bloodbath and ruination is also the bloody nascency of a higher and more stable world order, that incorporates--and never represses or denies-- the wisdom and enlightenment which was imparted on the civilization by events fraught with crisis and calamity.
The burning shores of Troy held forth the promise of the birth of Rome, because the ending that the Trojan war was never really faded or went away.

Christianity elevated this idea to its logical climax and cancelled the idea of death and loss itself--in the realm of the spirit--so that the end of innocence in Eden becomes ''felix culpa'', the fortunate fall, that heralded the coming of Christ, uplifting the destiny of humanity.
Even as Christ's mortal flesh perishes on the cross, unfelicitated and abandoned like a common criminal, his message, his personal mythology, resurrects to change the course of human history--sacred and secular. We had to await the end of his mortal body before a more enduring miracle of his sublime soul could begin, and ultimately a more permanent and rewarding metaphysics that would revolutionize the religion and politics of the ensuing couple of millennia.

Endings are never terminal. It is our fear of them that makes it fatal. Perceived in this reassuring light, every ending makes our soul a little stronger, deeper and more colourful:  the skill we picked up at a particularly unrewarding job-- that we understandably left behind-- can prove to be a life-saving asset in a subsequent, more satisfying career; a lover, who left us long ago, may have had ignited a passion for cooking or pets in us which has stayed and made our lives richer and fulfilling in unexpected ways; the dead and departed too have left us their wisdom and values, their memories and stories that are intensely alive in our own vivid existence, each day, in every new way.

As long as the last of those stories lives, those memories survive, those words are spoken in pubs, bedrooms, on stage or at the dinner table; in fiction, cinema, painting or oral tellings in tribal villages; across generations, communities and countries, things refuse to end.
Whatever ends in the realm of experience branches out into infinitely diverse beginnings--in nostalgia, art and life. As secrets, as stories and as histories.












 

The Angel and The Beast

''Desire changed my brutal behaviour...I fell in love with Helena and that changed me.''
                                                                                             Franz Wunsch, (an S.S officer at Auschwitz, who felt attracted to and rescued Helena Citronova, and her sister, who were Polish Jews and inmates under his charge)

Helena Citronova and Franz Wunsch: The Startling Revelation of Libido and Compassion in the midst of  a Grim Tragedy    

It is more than a year after the seismic wave of #MeToo hit the entertainment world in America; its aftershock has claimed many worthy names in my country, India as well. It is a year on and the horror stories of harassment and exploitation are trickling in, without pause, almost every day confirming our worst expectations of human nature and the depths of depravity it can reach down to-- all in the name of momentary gratification.

The stories of survival and resilience are no less uplifting either; the courage and hope displayed by women at its receiving end are exemplary too. Deeply inspirational and salutary.
No, they are by no means the weaker sex anymore. Patriarchy cannot silence their discontent and revolt under the pretext of propriety.
My concern, however, is elsewhere.

As women (and I was told by a male friend that some men too, especially as younger boys and teenagers) we have all been subjected to sexual abuse, in one form or another, to a greater or lesser degree. Some of us have bled in silence within the safety of our homes, families, marriages, others on the streets, on buses/ trains, in boardrooms, or suspended mid-air, in the sky, on an aircraft. That is no news to anyone.

What worries me, at this stage is what I would call a 'stigmatization of libido' that characterizes inter-gender exchanges, in a paranoid, post- #MeToo world.
There is  a correlation between the unfolding narratives of inappropriate sex and the cinema industry: 'fantasy' being the operative word here. What Hollywood or popular cinema does, everywhere in the world, is activate and detonate fantasies, centered on power, control and sexuality, by giving them concrete visual representation. As audiences of popular cinema, we are guaranteed a collective release of our darkest, most troubling, most unspeakable fantasies, a socially accommodated orgasm, in the safety of the silver screen that is larger than life, not without a reason.
How can the human protagonists of such an erotically fraught enterprise be entirely immune to the ideas they are translating into flesh and blood? Flesh and blood will claim its due, at some point.
What begins as physical chemistry soon degenerates into gory tales of exploitation, humiliation and vendetta. That is the nature of postlapsarian sexuality itself: power and appropriation, in the absence of innocence and love.

Fantasy is inappropriate by definition. High and low art are united in using it as inspiration behind their complex and essentially sublimating articulation: Fifty Shades of Gray is indelicate and unimaginative, where as Lady Chatterley's Lover is philosophically rich and more complexly coded while delivering its message.
Much of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fiction would be outlawed if we were to observe strict appropriateness and legality: in Of Love and Other Demons, a thirty eight year old ordained priest loses his place in the church trying to romantically pursue a twelve year old girl, in which lies his social destruction and spiritual salvation; indeed, it is through the road of this humiliating, paedophiliac obsession that he accomplishes a total transcendence of flesh and discovers the glimpse of the divine; the sordid becomes a vehicle of the sublime here, as it does in Death Constant Beyond Love, a quest of immortality in the face of death through sexual salvation promised by an underage girl.

Picasso would be convicted in our century, for the remorseless cruelty he inflicted on his wives and mistresses, and out of the darkness of which arose his most triumphant art. Roman Polanski, in our time is a similarly ambiguous icon who attracts equally fervent admiration and contempt for his cinema and life, respectively, to say nothing of Woody Allen accused of abusing his step- daughter.

Picasso and his deeply problematic attitude towards women he objectified for his aesthetic ends

The point is that surveillance and regimentation of desire is never good news for human civilization. It consolidates institutionalized regulation of the body, and sexuality that thrives in the site that the body is. Attempting to control this site results in the demise of imagination, art, individual freedom and the brilliantly beautiful manifestations of  individual dissidence that have historically subverted and challenged, and in many ways re-configured, social control and institutional power. #MeToo, in spite of starting a timely conversation on a long-neglected topic, has also initiated a move in the direction of an expanding institutional control of desire and sexuality which I find dangerous.

Michel Foucault had identified four key areas of sexual discourse through which society extends its pervasive power on the sexual imagination of the individual: sexuality of children; of women; married sex; perversion. These four portals of discursive access allow power to penetrate family and society in ways that go to determine how they perceive, regulate, define and practise sex. This is Foucault's ''Repressive Hypothesis'' that postulates how society stigmatizes sex outside the haloed confines of matrimony, criminalizes sex that is decoupled from the express goal of procreation and tries to outlaw self-justifying sex through law, religion, psychiatry and communal censure, to make it invisible and unthinkable.
Conversely, like the underside of a tapestry, there are moral free-zones, that are created by this same process of repression: prostitution is one such area, as is, in our century, popular cinema.

 The current movement, deploying the second and fourth constructs in conjunction, is giving rise to a problematic configuration, whereby women= victim, men =predator,  strips women of all agency in the stories of initiating and imagining sex, which can be enormously liberating and empowering. The icons of modern entertainment, the adventurous women heroes of Hollywood knew it all too well: Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna are to name a few. They paid their dues to the censorious world, Monroe with her life, but that never compromised their status as towering icons of  invincible erotic energy.

'' Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard, though silently'', wrote Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, the chillingly brilliant vision of a futuristic dystopia where patriarchal- puritanical control of women's bodies have subsumed femininity under a starkly utilitarian role: that of a child-bearing machine, so that their bodies are subjected to the most degrading, stultifying and ultimately dehumanizing conditions. The erasure of individuality and difference, are important parts of this process--ergo, make-up, costumes, flirtation, sex outside the context of state-supervised procreation, even erotic eye contact are outlawed. Imagine a total, inescapable Talibanization on a global scale.

 The Handmaid's Tale: A Dystopic Vision of  Total Disappearance of Erotic Freedom

But even there, the heroine Offred's explosive and covert affair with two men-- illicit sex with Nick, her guard, and a non-procreative emotional affair with her master--serves as a basis for individual resistance, as well as of a political revolution against the dominant ideology. Her freedom and choice to fantasize, even under the most crushing and repressive external conditions, is a weapon of subverting control and authority that will ultimately change the course of history, or is it her-story?
Sometimes these assignations are downright humiliating for Offred, rendering her powerless and objectified in the hands of the two men who temporarily control her destiny. But she refuses to let go of the nostalgia of old times when there was abuse and exploitation for women, yes, but also the relentless pursuit of choice and individuality; flirtation, seduction, anxiety and heartbreak, yes, and also the terrifying beauty of erotic freedom. A lost age before the state got sexuality naked and prostrate under its ruthless gaze.
In our times women are co-opted in their own enslavement by being forced to surrender this freedom to institutional control in the name of welfare and protection.

The desired and desiring body, the subversive sexual imagination of the recalcitrant human subject are the ultimate obstructions posited on the path of the totalitarianizing tendencies of power. It is because this space of subversive liberation exists that attraction/ seductions happen within institutions: churches, schools, prisons, asylums, The White House and Auschwitz.

Helena Citronova, the Jewess rescued by the aggressively anti-Semitic S.S officer, Wunsch, from the gas chambers at Auschwitz engaged in a number of casual sexual encounters with him defying the notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws, prohibiting sexual activity of Germans with Jews, a violation of which would result in death. You would think there is nothing new about the exchange of sexual favour for privilege, a trade-off women are most routinely used to.

After the war, in spite of the incriminating evidence of genocide presented against him in abundance, Wunsch was acquitted solely on the basis of Citronova's testimony: a startling narrative of whatever is high and sublime in human nature in the lowliest and wrongest of places. Helena Citronova was in love with Wunsch, who had retrieved her gas-chamber-bound sister Rozinka, inspired by nothing higher, at that moment, than blind libido, the erotic stirrings in his brain and probably groin. It was  his momentary, base impulse that aroused him to fulfill his noblest act of heroism in that indefinable gray zone lying between right and wrong.

I just hope that an urgent movement aimed at the redressal of a grave wrongdoing that sexual exploitaion is, does not destroy in its wake the miraculous and unseen places of redemption, the unexpected or unimaginable beginnings of triumphant stories, the ennobling narratives of transformation and healing that the fallen, damned, and guilty imagination of man alone can dare to conceive. This imaginative freedom is what inspires the highest ethical as well as aesthetic ideal: charity, compassion as well as abidingly engaging art.
When surveillance and control take away this freedom we throw the baby along with the bathwater. A paranoid avoidance of freedom is no good for anybody.

In Praise Of Folly

  ''[The] hip, cynical, transcendence of sentiment is ...some kind of fear of being really human.''
                                                                                                                               David Foster Wallace


''Am I crazy? Or am I  just so sane I blew your mind?'' 
                                                                                  Kramer, Seinfeld


Now, I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace (DFW, as he is fondly called by his fans). Make no mistake about it.
During a particularly trying phase of my personal searching, This Is Water (2005)--a moving thesis on the enduring relevance of compassion, empathy and the power of cultivating human connection in the process of our most mundane and ordinary engagement with the world-- rescued me from the depths of cynical despair that had fogged my perception of the world and eroded my faith in humanity.

It had liberated me from the tyranny of my own ego to rediscover optimistic and empathetic connections with a seemingly self-serving and apathetic world.  It is a struggle we all must go through as sensitive individuals, every day, in every way, to avert the relentless assault of cynicism, through a conscious choice of compassion over callousness, through acts of small kindness and an unflagging  exercise of  charity which has nothing grandiose or dramatic about it.

It is a difficult and arduous choice indeed. To stare at the futility of existence and still to try to give it dignity and significance by ordinary, un-heroic altruism is by no means ordinary.It is no coincidence that the prophet of New Sincerity would envisage this deeply rewarding, but difficult, road to save the ego from its self-consuming excesses. It is especially relevant today, when human connections--in personal as well as political spaces--are getting destroyed fast and furiously by self-oriented thinking.

It is a pity that DFW's epiphanic wisdom could not save him from suicide three years later. Or, perhaps it was his gifted insight that precipitated this personal catastrophe?
He was so uniquely aware and alone in his wisdom, so filled with a love that no one could understand and receive, that his only way to appeal to his deaf audience was this big bang of self-annihilation. Like Cassandra, he was cursed by his gift: his prophecy was destined to be discredited. His consequent alienation was interpreted as insanity.

DFW's personal creative voice, and the school of New Sincerity in general,was an aesthetic/ philosophical reaction against the inescapable influence of Postmodern irony and its deconstructive humour that shaped American television and advertising during the 90s.
MTV, SNL, Seinfeld--the iconic cultural artefacts of the time are all unfailingly about this ironic alienation and deconstruction of grand narratives, the values and the sacred institutions of Western modernity, that gave meaning and stability to the worldview of the post-war global community up until then. David Foster Wallace felt, ''irony, cynicism, irreverence--the schticks of postmodernism are enervating the culture itself.''

If you are an auteur, you would know that irony is a notoriously difficult tone to create and sustain in a text. The sentimental trap lies in wait at every turn, in every corner. Sentiment is what guarantees an immediate and powerful connection with the audience: it hardly ever fails. A war photographer capturing a wounded and wailing child is sincere, sentimental. There is hardly anyone among his audience who will not instantly connect with its sentiment.
But this mode of creative expression operates on a level that is intellectually inert and stylistically lazy, albeit its being effective and inclusive. Its articulation is loud, obvious and unproblematic.

Now how about the same war-zone, where a faceless commoner is photographically captured in an unguarded moment, pissing on the monument of war heroes?
That is irony.
It is confrontational, subversive, irreverent; it raises quite a few hackles, on purpose; but executed honestly, it stays burnt in your memory as an unforgettable testament of war's laughable futility, cutting through the legitimising lies of nationalistic/ patriotic discourse.

It is not everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone is comfortable with its aggressive assault. And herein, burdened with this tough task, comes a person like Jerry Seinfeld: the Postmodern hero,a victim of unceasing confusion and indecision, who possesses nothing but his scurrilous postmodern irony to guide him through the baffling paradoxes of metropolitan modernity. In the process of his quest for personal fulfillment, he must dismantle the sacrosanct institutions of the modern west, complacent in the delusion of its own progress and power  --Love, Sex, Family, Parents, Kids, Friendship, Religion, Success,Money, Death, and finally, his own comedy itself, he has a bone to pick with every single notion that lulls us into unquestioning sentimentality.

In the postmodern world of fragmentation, in the middle of the disintegration of traditions and values, in the absence of a unifying narrative that would give universal meaning and legitimacy to the subjective experience of the atomised individual, this devil-may-care irreverence is invaluable: when the confused inhabitant of this experience gets tormented over these inescapable gaps and conflicts, Seinfeld seems to cock a snook at the sacred myths of modernity and asks, ''really? You took that so seriously?''

Too much sincerity or seriousness, too deep a commitment to empathy and connection can destroy you when the world around you does not care. DFW's sincerity destroyed him; it massively devastated his ideological peer Jonathan Franzen whose life-long battle with clinical depression was responsible for his personal neurosis and the sublime glimpses of a seething tragedy at the bedrock of  human existence, which he so compellingly portrays in his art.

 By  contrast, Jerry lives in a world that excludes the very possibility of tragedy and sublimity. The world that he and his most adorably confused and incompetent friends occupy is one that spins around the most trivial, inconsequential and meaningless problems-- some real but most of it imagined--that assume the proportions of earth-shattering crises for its benighted protagonists who believe in their own infallible omniscience in every field of experience, to be chastised everyday, by a ruthless reality. Tragedy is impossible under the circumstances, the most heartbreaking choices and predicaments of the postmodern hero can only give rise to buffoonery,or farce.

For instance, where is the scope for tragic elevation when one is emotionally crippled over the choice of underwear?
What wisdom can come off when one is crucified by one's conscience as his mother is hospitalised after having walked in on his solitary love?
What enlightenment can help somebody who loses his sleep over the correct direction of finger movement to ensure effective foreplay,  and in the heat of intimacy consults notes on the back of his hand, to this effect?
What is sublime about being devastated because a condescending waiter at an upscale restaurant denied you dinner reservation?
What redemption is expected to arrive when you are plunged into a profound existential anxiety as your favourite bakery runs out of the pastry of your choice?

None of it is elevating, or heroic, in the least; This is the sordid, the mundane, the petty, the embarrassing that are too small to be acknowledged, but too momentous, too unsettling to be accommodated by social discourse. These are the minuscule inconsistencies, the tragic ironies of everyday existence that we helplessly swallow because the cultural conventions have made them invisible. And yet, they are unavoidably enormous to whom they plague--that is you and me; the hotshot and the nobody.

Seinfeld's world is a place where traditions are dismantled, hierarchies inverted, and conventions interrogated to expose their empty core; the process then mocks us for the absurd and exaggerated seriousness we invested in them. Here, nuns abandon their cloister on the day they are to be ordained, drawn away by the 'animal magnetism' of a rather clumsy and off-kilter man with absurdly big hair and a pathetic dressing sense.
Sons prevent mothers from getting divorced, no, not because family is sacred but because he is horrified by the idea of inhabiting the same dating pool with her.
A perfect romance is ruined because the suitor is tempted to gobble up a half-eaten sandwich from the trashcan at the house of his fiancee's parents.
Here, human connections are unmade over parking spots and a budding union can fall apart, not because of hostile interference from society, but because polite compliments go wrong at the sight of a new-born infant's--no, not ethereal innocence--but aggressive ugliness: religion, family, romance, community, children, nothing is spared the ruthless ironic deconstruction, to finally reveal that no tragedy in life, if there is any, is worth more than a couple of laughs.

What all this irreverence does is that is blurs the lines between high and low, tragedy and farce, the sublime and the sordid, to point out that  there isn't really any distinction between one kind of heartbreak and another; it smashes such distinctions and hierarchies to establish the compassionate egalitarianism of the ironist: we are all together in this mess and confusion, you are not alone in your unspeakable embarrassment.

One of the standard objections raised by New Sincerity against this kind of deconstructive humour is that it is not philosophically redemptive, that it does not suggest any remedy or resolution to the contradictions it exposes, the hypocrisies it debunks. And, perhaps that is the whole point of it. It does not have a remedy:
''What kind of a sick society are we living in where nice [guy] is bad?'' cries out an anguished George Costanza, the perpetually confused intellectual in the group, defeated by his never ending self doubt.

 True, we no longer live in a medieval world of ''virtue rewarded'', where rewards and retributions are predictable and symmetrical to actions and choices. This is a baffling world where there is no justice. So why should there be an easy philosophical remedy to our complex and unique individual crises? Why should there be the comfort of a grand narrative when we know that they are redundant?

As life gets too hot to handle with its paralysing complexities and contradictions, as we try to live down the rejections, humiliations and indignities that are wired into the process of survival, as we lose sleep obsessively rationalising our own asymmetric responses to these insuperable dilemmas, when one choice is as bad and as disastrous as the other, suddenly Seinfeld's ironic voice sounds in our heads, ''Seriously, George? Oh please. Move on!''

Seinfeld refuses to concede seriousness to life when it does not deserve any, to rescue us from avoidable anxiety and self-pity and to make survival a little less unbearable in a world that is essentially indifferent to our suffering, and this is no ordinary wisdom.
This is wisdom of the highest order, the wisdom that makes us laugh at the hopeless world we are thrown into; to make us able to take as a joke the pathetic creatures we are forced to be.

Love Love Me

''Oh plunge your hands in water
Plunge them up to the wrist;
Stare, stare at the basin
And wonder what you have missed.''
...
''O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing 
Although you can not bless.''
                                                W. H Auden, 'As I Walked Out One Evening'


''Love being single as you can have fun with all different people and life is full of freedom and potential.''
...
''Whole London is full of couples holding hands...Am going to be alone for [the] rest of [my] life. Alone.'
              Bridget Jones:The Edge of Reason (pp 189-90)

The rains make me crave Romantic Comedy. It is the soul's junk food. It is like putting your brain on a diet of cheeseburst pizza with fries, along with full-fat cappuccino with a topping of Belgian chocolate. It makes your intellect fatty, lazy, slowing it down with flab of fantasies and impossibilities, which brilliantly seductive as they are, would never be allowed to happen by the reality principle itself.
But then the rains make me crave cheeseburst pizza as well.

I was reading Bridget Jones recently (the films being my perennial favourites during the valedictory and vulnerable week between Christmas and New Year ) and wondering about the precise nature of its enduring appeal to the generations of women between twenty and fifty five or thereabouts ( i.e mothers and daughters alike) that speaks to their existential dilemmas in the the most incisively comic, yet compassionate, manner.

Helen Fielding's was an honest, fresh, brilliant and genre-defining text that unfortunately started the end-of-the-millennium trend of 'chick-lit' (a disparaging publishing category) which eventually spread its contagion to other forms of the mass-media in the forms of romcom/ chick-flick and  telly sitcoms that centred on the ersatz female angst over not being able to find a partner well into her thirties while her biological clock ticks away. Think Rachel and Monica from Friends--smart, attractive women tortuously obsessing over the subtextual meanings of whatever happened or did not happen during their frightfully ambiguous dates, wondering whether this time they had indeed kissed the Prince Charming or it was yet another frog.

Friends: The Anxiety of New Age Courtship

These were essentially urban, post-feminist fairy tales which addressed a generation of emancipated and empowered women who believed that they had the power to write their own destiny, that their mothers, the pioneers of the Second Wave feminism and Sexual Revolution, had inculcated in them, which would finally usher in the economic independence of the women of the 80s and 90s.

Herein comes 'The Bridget Jones Paradox': on the one hand she is conditioned by the Western, Capitalistic rhetoric of individual reliance and self actualization, under the aegis of the democratic- Welfare state, on the other hand she is retarded in her progress by a more primordial and fundamental need-- which the Greeks called 'Eros--the life force, the organic, creative urge to be emotionally and sexually complemented by a sympathetic Other, who rounds out the jagged edges of our own fragmented and flawed egos. This second process requires a surrender of the independent and competitive ego to the demands of companionship and co-habitation. Caught in the crack between the two conflicting worlds, the modern woman must struggle a lot as she finds happiness in neither, and if she tries to bring the two together, they combust in her face in some sort of  inexplicably flammable reaction.

As to why this genre flourished in the 90s is easy to detect. It was due to a millennial anxiety over the future of marriage and family, as sacred, inviolate institutions,in the face of divorce, gay rights, live-in / casual sex, to say nothing of the involvement of technology in the forms of cyber hook- ups and dating apps. Thankfully Tinder, with its horror stories, was still beyond the stuff of wildest nightmares of Bridget and her romantically maladjusted tribe of friends.

Stragglers like Bridget--the dreamers, the idealists, the urban Cinderellas--must fall behind in the race, as it is all about sexual marketability and manicured perfection in the brutal, fast-paced, opportunistic, and unforgiving universe of new age dating ; anything less than that, one is out.

Bridget, the hot mess with her ill-timed humour, goofy sincerity, her cellulite-ridden thighs and golden innocence is a recipe for disaster. But she is also Everywoman, all and each one of us with her inept, pissed, humiliated 'loser'- girl persona; with all her pratfalls, blunders and imperfections, waiting to be accepted, loved, invited into the arms of the man who will see through all that and just understand.
This gendered fantasy gives rise to an urban community--a sorority of acutely confused women--offering each other disastrous dating advice, solely on the basis of second-hand theoretical knowledge derived from unrealistic dating manuals, and outright harmful coaching from dating Gurus. It is all because they are scared to engage with a man's raw, unedited emotions that can destroy their carefully constructed self perception.

Helen fielding creates a delightful comedy of manners, set in cyber age London, to expose the confusion, vanity, nastiness and bad faith that surround the war of sexes in the contemporary world of seduction and courtship.
One of the laughable moments of  such false enlightenment and confused clarity goes: ''The more a man likes a woman the more he will avoid getting involved.'', declares one of Bridget's best friends, to help her get over an especially painful and humiliating break-up. ''So chucking me could be a sign that he is really serious about the relationship?'' surmises a distraught and miserably muddled Bridget. It is also a stab at the now infamous Mars-Venus theory laid out by John Gray that became the dating Bible of an entire generation.

What all this theoretical confusion did, in effect,was poison the ground of honest and spontaneous engagement on a basic, human level between the sexes, creating cut-throat suspicion, distrust and hostility on both sides of the gender-divide. Women, dying to secure their lovers' respectful affection, were, and may be, still are reeling under indifference, infidelity, flakiness and downright lies from them; they are feigning cool detachment whilst bleeding and feeling suicidal inside.

This expectation is not simple, neither is it easy to fulfill. There is no authoritative guide to help one navigate through the tricky waters of another persons true emotions which he is trying his best to hide. As it turns out, men on the other end, on whom the onus of this expectation lies, who are supposed to just miraculously understand us simply by looking, are equally awkward, afraid of rejection, emotionally inept and clueless about what women want. Like Mark Darcy, Bridget's dream suitor, they try to look distant and angry when they are devastated and sad, giving women a totally wrong message about their emotional reality.

We, who are addicted to Friends,  Sienfeld,  Will and Grace, or How I Met Your Mother, i.e classic television sitcom, know how men let themselves be pointlessly torn between the 'Bro' obligation to act 'cool' so as to maintain sexual tension, and a more human and primal need to be emotionally and sexually rewarded by a woman worthy of attention.

As cynical adults we all have baggage. Love has burned us before, and we have been Love's fool, against our best judgement, over and over again. So we do not trust our gut anymore. Even the 'diary' that should ideally record our deepest and most honest emotions (the English Puritan tradition especially encouraged journal keeping as a form of spiritual exercise, hence the first novel in English language was a fictional diary indeed, that of Robinson Crusoe) is no more a trustworthy record of our innermost reality, as the content comes filtered through the individual's bad conscience, corrupted  both by complex modernity and the gradual process of  maturation in such an atmosphere heavy in cynicism.

In other words there is no end to our lying to ourselves. And these lies are ultimately self-wounding. ''It is awful being single'', bursts out Bridget's feminist friend Shazzer, ''no one to put their arm around at the end of the day...Alone. Completely alone.''
So here we come. Cynical adults in love. Chronic (self) deception our forte. Unlike innocent teenagers, unashamed of their emotions,their romantic fragility, the prelapsarian Romeos and Juliets, confessing their love for each other in cheesy but honest platitudes, we, the older folk, are cautious, guarded, repressed and most fatally inhibited. We are protecting ourselves from the hurt and betrayals by our constant defensive lies in order to barricade our emotional core, our scared and fragile egos, against the assault of disillusionment. We have walked through numerous break-ups/ divorces,and acts of disloyalty, to learn that love is a mug's game.

So is there no way forward from this insuperable deadlock? This dilemma that eludes answers? Must we accept the cynical reality of the unattainability of love and simply grow up into embittered old men and women with nothing but a misanthropic worldview to see us through the slow and painful years of dotage--emotionally bankrupt, spiritually destitute?

It seems that there is. But it is an arduous road to take which is not for the faint-hearted.
 It is through the painstaking stripping away of the defenses and lies, the prejudices and false selves, of the paralysing fears and doubts discrediting our most authentic and legitimate desires, that the road to salvation lies. To be finally able to stand naked before the Other who has such unlimited power over us that they can annihilate us with their rejection. The secret is to be able to embrace our vulnerability.
It is not without coincidence that all major Romantic Comedies deploy this symbolic moment of  emotional nakedness through the metaphor of  literal and visual denudation,a sequence of physical exposure, a literal glimpse of the protagonist's raw skin:
In The Proposal, Ryan Reynolds must see Sandra Bullock (his tyrannical boss) emerge naked from the bathroom before he can break through her tough exterior of professional ambition and emotional resistance, and engage with her on a romantic/sexual level;
A nearly naked Bridget (Renee Zellweger) hobbles through a particularly bad London snow, in flimsy lingerie, chasing a wounded  Colin Firth walking away from her life, attracting disapproving stare from elderly pedestrians, before she can confess her vulnerability for him and be invited into his open arms offering warmth, refuge and covering her dimpled thighs, her thirties' girth and her shame. It is a typically kitschy and effective moment in conjunction with an earlier scene when he lists the things he hates about her and tops it with a stilted and awkward confession, ''I like you as you are''.

This is it. The salvation.
The key to every woman's ( and I suspect every man's too) deepest erotic fantasy.
Every adult's emotional G spot. To find acceptance with our skinny arms or saggy breasts, our fat bellies and gray hair. Our lies, our secrets. Our scandals and crimes.
Our mistakes,our imperfections.
Our shame,our failures, without any extenuating explanation.
Our naked, naked rawness, where we bleed and know you hurt too, because of the hurt we have caused each other.
To be loved liked that. In spite of that. Because of that.
Love in  this profound sense, is forgiveness.

Just as a fully dressed Mark Darcy covers a naked Bridget in his arms, her naked surrender, with the ends of his coat, love is that compassion too.
And love is that moment of nakedness. It is the most awkward and risky act of self-exposure, which does not come without inspired grace. This decision to finally take off the protective layering of lies, defenses and denials.
Now what if the person standing across you stabs you at your most vulnerable moment?
They can. And they do.
It is quite common in life. But the fun of inhabiting a text, is that unlike in real life, there is a teleological structure in a text ,ensuring a happy closure as a generic imperative with Romantic Comedy.
We love Bridget because she has the emotional courage to do what we can not.
To risk self exposure in the face of infinite odds.We know that the author is on her side. In life we do not have that faith in either karma or fate.
So we let life pass us by.
 Before Sunrise, A delicate, meditative poem on celluloid, uses a few stanzas of Auden's text I have quoted in the beginning, as a philosophical commentary on our hopeless reality :
''In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have its fancy
Tomorrow or today''.

We are scared but Bridget isn't. That's how fairy tales end; And fairy tales are precious because they give us what life denies--the miracles, the redemption, that are tucked beneath the wrong choices and the bad timings that life is made of.

Quite a Love Story

''Given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and woman ...is inferior to that which can exist between man and dog. ...the question that plagues human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short... The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no... scenes.''
                    Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.                                                                   

Given that it is Valentine's season and The Oscar fever is underway, I thought that I would write about my personal response to Phantom Thread (one of the strongest entries for this year's Academy Awards) since it is being marketed as an unusual love story-- not the usual kitschy stuff that gets you teared up, but a dark, subversive, almost cynical stab into the heart of romantic desire-- which it is. Whether you have stomach for that kind of dark and morbid romance, is a different issue altogether.

Set in the self-involved coutoure  world of Post-war London, the plot revolves around the  celebrity fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis) and his muse/ model/ servant-girl Alma (Vicky Krieps).
 Woodcock is a middle-aged, ruthless and neurotically narcissistic artist who utilises  his lovers/ muses and chucks them off like used tissues when their function is past the emotional expiration date. His assistant/ soulmate/ business partner, his sister Cyril (Leslie Manville) is the one who does all the dirty job of disposal of the girls-on -their-way-out for him. Together, they form an intense, and almost incestuous dyad that is seemingly indestructible. Women just pass through, as temporary objects of  Woodcock's lust, without in any way threatening their self-contained world that is rigidly predictable and sterile.
How Alma, the shy and submissive country waitress, the most unusual suspect, disrupts this bond and breaks through Woodcock's resistance against romantic intimacy is a startling revelation.

 While discussing this film, critics are generally eloquent about the Pygmalion- like function of the artist and his active masculine gaze in relation with his passive, feminine muse as a playground for his fantasies of creative omnipotence. It forms a large part of the complexity, true, but is only a part of it.
''You have no breasts'', he declares bluntly while measuring Alma, who cringes at its mention in front of a coolly spiteful Cyril, ''but I could give you some, if I choose to'' he surmises with cold arrogance.

Reynolds Woodcock is a consummate artist indeed; and like all artists, is a nightmare to be around. Moody, difficult, self-obsessed and avoidant, he is also an expert seducer of women and, yes, a speed freak at the steering wheel of his suave sedan.  He is vain, self conscious and a snob: 'chic' is a word he despises; the person who coined it, he feels, should be taken out for 'public spanking'.

He is aggressive, dominant and Godlike with his female clients, the society ladies who surrender to his mastery and charisma like limp-legged Eves: exposed, passive and totally under his command; they are anxious to impress him because he repairs the flaws that God left behind. He is a man who makes women--young, old, ugly-- look beautiful. The fitting sessions are especially long, ritualistic and fraught with sexual tension: as a man taking charge of the female body, touching them in their most intimate parts with a cool professional disengagement, he looks divinely powerful and it makes the frisson all the more palpable.

Alma, by contrast, is feminine, demure and her supreme virtue is that she can endlessly 'stand' while he sits, day-in, day-out, inspecting her critically, with equal measures of admiration and dismissal. The power equation is evident by the number of occasions he is seen seated and she standing in front of him--open, undressed, spectated.
                                           

 The way he keeps dressing and undressing her is also responsible for making her look infantilized: and indeed, he is a much older, parental, cynical and dominant lover, hovering on the brink of dotage. But there is one crucial problem: he has an unresolved Oedipal issue; he has an obsessive 'mother complex'. His dead mother, who keeps haunting his dreams, is the third angle of all his love affairs that inhibits their romantic fruition. The sister is only an extension of that maternal incest-fantasy.

Food, a typically maternal object that involves nourishment and pleasure, becomes a metaphor for adult sexuality, its acceptance and rejection an oral signal of love and/or the lack of it. This is the chink in the armour of  Woodcock's cynical emotional resistance: and Alma knows it.

After a virulent episode of food poisoning  (out of spurned and frustrated love, a vindictive Alma feeds Woodcock poison mushrooms) through which she nurses him back to health, like a mother looking after an ailing child, and during which he hallucinates the dead mother and refuses professional medical intervention quite stubbornly and without explanation,  he proposes marriage to her. We are confused ; we can't quite figure out what happened to cause such a romantic epiphany.

At the heart of their dark and disintegrating marriage, lies the most subversive discourse on desire that I have ever seen in mainstream Hollywood cinema. While Alma pitches her passive aggressive resistance to counter his indifferent superiority--she eats grossly, makes maximum noise at the breakfast table, flirts with other men; in short does everything to put him off that she knows would unfailingly do so--we stay pretty much unsurprised. This is what was expected of such an unequal marriage after all. The girl was practically his servant, standing in line in her calico uniform, with his seamstresses most of the time. They are both consumed by unhappiness, locked in a stalemate of hatred and hostility.

 As their marriage continues to deteriorate inexorably, heading towards its inevitable collapse, Alma plucks poison mushrooms from the backyard again and cooks a seemingly sumptuous hell's broth with steely equanimity. We are to helplessly watch the poor old husband eat the toxic food--or is it toxic love of the vampish wife?--when he sensually swallows the food, giving her a knowing, complicit smile and says, with infinite passion, ''now kiss me my girl before I'm sick''. An astoundingly unruffled and  smiling Alma declares, ''I want you on your back... tender, helpless, open.'' And this, for me is a rare moment of triumph: content-wise and stylistically.

He knew.
He knew all along. And chose to play into her hands, participating in this near-fatal role-play; putting his own life on the line. He too, with Alma, was pushing the limits of their morbid love. But why?
He is a person whose existence is entrenched in habit, so much so, that a surprise romantic dinner oppresses him like an 'ambush', for which he crucifies Alma and expresses his intention to break up with her. So why does he, so uncharacteristically, indulge in such a wild and dangerous erotic game?


 He does, because with each episode of sickness, he  experiences a temporary regression into infantile passivity, surrendering to the maternal love and care of Alma. Alma becomes the absent mother during that brief interval, giving his lifelong Oedipal crisis a logical resolution. The absent object of desire is momentarily reclaimed that fills the hole of Woodcock's longing and makes him whole again, albeit for a while.

Like a BDSM role reversal, Alma, the timid and shy muse assumes unlimited power and control over the dominant male artist with a narcissistic ego, who is only happy and relieved to let go,even though for a moment, in the sinister privacy of their shared fantasy, their morbid sado-masochistic dependency.
It is in this radical moment of erotic role reversal that they rewrite the aesthetic paradigm of the male artist and the female muse. It is not accidental that she is called 'Alma', the immediate association being 'mater', together, literally meaning, the 'kind/nourishing mother'

As Woodcock lies foetally curled on her lap, abjectly at her mercy, a glowing and dreamy Alma confesses to the doctor that she would feel happy to meet him in the blessed afterlife, in case he were to die during one of these scenarios. She is proud to proclaim that she would continue to love him through all the possible afterlives to come.
Delusional? Demented? Criminal? Or is it superhuman romantic idealism?

That seduction and sexual love is propelled by a dark dynamic of power and control and a compelling need to appropriate and possess the romantic other, is no news to the readers of Alexander Sacher Masoch. Even discourses within popular culture ratify this unflattering psychosexual reality-- such as through songs, Harlequin romances,and blockbusting movie plots. It is mainly a cynical acknowledgement of the fallen nature of human sexuality.

What Phantom Thread does is that it opens a space for romantic idealism, of sublime beauty within the larger and mostly cynical context of  morbid co-dependency. It demands us to be non-judgemental while we look at the unconventional and rather pathological attachment of Woodcock and Alma with horrified fascination. We realize that the best love-stories are the ones in which the contours of each others' fantasies fit perfectly.
Did I say 'fit'?
That is perhaps the reason why the most furiously incompatible types often make the most bafflingly successful couples. Outer success has nothing to do with the repulsive beauty of this rich tapestry of erotic diversity, the phantom thread that weaves it is Desire.

The Radiant Depth Unfolded: Rumi

  ''My story gets told in various ways: a romance, a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy''.

''The minute i heard my first love story, i started looking for you...lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along.''  Jalaluddin Rumi                                                                                                       

   My blog is named after one of Rumi's mystical ideas, Sudden Wholeness: it denotes a state of being, a phase of awareness in which the seeker/ lover glimpses an unexpected organization and purpose underlying the chaos of external phenomena; it is the discovery of a silent harmony in the cacophony of experience. I was fascinated by the idea. I decided whenever I write something original, I would use this idea in one way or another.

  Like most  non-Muslim readers of Rumi, my entry-point to Rumi was Coleman Barks' exquisite translations. Like the lay audience, the uninitiated, I too was drawn to Rumi through Sufi humanism and its exalted ideals of tolerance, peace and universal love. Like most of Bark's Western audience, I too discovered Rumi at a turbulent time of my life, trying to look for ways to silence my inner turmoil.

   Due to its effortless conflation of the erotic and the ascetic, its seamless blending of the carnal and the divine, its welding of the flesh and the spirit, on the discursive level, Sufi arcana and Rumi are an endless resource to popular culture. From Bollywood cinema to Hindi rock music, there is no end to Rumi's influence.
It is this half-cooked, pedestrian understanding and  appropriation of a discipline that is arcane and highly structured-- practised within a hierarchic teacher- student tradition-- that has been responsible for its cultural abuse. A serious philosophical order, today, is flippantly associated with mutinous boy-meets-girl romance in Bollywood cinema that sets its bar far lower than the enlightened climax that Shams and Rumi aspired for.

Subcontinental  Islamic scholars, such as Sadia Dehlvi, feel deeply offended by such vulgarization of Sufism. She sees it as a problem, the way Sufism stands expunged of its theological element and is divested of its academic gravitas. She holds the reductionist Western approach to Rumi responsible for inhibiting a deep dialogue between mainstream Islam and the non Islamic audience of Sufi.

And perhaps that is the whole point of the West's enduring fascination with a religious mystic poet from Medieval Persia: he needs no Quoranic annotations, no academic rigour to be explained. Whoever has loved and lost anywhere in the world will understand Rumi. In a world where institutional religions are losing relevance more than ever, Rumi's lyrical philosophy addresses the modern condition more effectively without getting involved in the scholastic debates.

  To me, Rumi, the poet, is what justifies his continued relevance in today's world than Rumi, the commentator on sacred texts. 'Sohbet', the central idea of Rumi's mystic practice, his metaphysical dialogues with Shams, is an inexhaustibly mysterious form of philosophical discourse that blurs the contours of the identities of the participants.The ' You' and 'I' are the lover and the beloved, the master and the student, God and the seeker,  the persona and the anima of the same person, sometimes it is the inner self schizophrenically split against itself, into the sentient and spiritual halves:
     
You said, ''Who's at the door?
I said, ''Your slave''

You said,'' what do you want?''
I  said, ''to see you and bow''

''How long will you wait?''
''Until you call''...

''What do you want from me?''
''Grace''

''Where can you live safely?''
''In surrender''

''What is this giving up?''
''A peace that saves us''

''How do you walk there?''
''In perfection''.

The beauty of this ontological exploration is the radical interchangeability of the self and the other.''We are the mirror as well as the face in it. ...We are pain and what cures the pain, both''. It is difficult to determine who the lover is and who the beloved, between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz; it is not easy to know the precise nature of their engagement either, Shams is somewhere between an inspiring friend and a wise master who actively seeks out his true disciple. Together they create a philosophy based on profound interpersonal sharing, that attempts to answer one of the deepest anxieties of life: how to come to terms with loss?

  Obviously, their unconventional intimacy did not go down well with the religious establishment of the land. Rumi's professional commitment as a teacher of the holy texts was being adversely affected too. Like a responsible lover, Shams leaves Rumi for Damascus, plunging him headfirst into the bottomless pit of despair. This is the traumatic turning point that transforms Rumi from an ordinary religious scholar to a sublime interpreter of the mysteries of existence. His master/ lover Shams did not discourage Rumi's knowledge of Islam's theology and scholastic arguments but inspired him to travel beyond them. Faced with the howling absence of the person who gave his life its purpose, Rumi is forced to confront the dark core of separation, and discover healing in creative art:

'' We know separation so well because we have tasted the union...the pushing away pulls you in.''

 They unite one more time after this, when Shams returns from his self-imposed exile in Damascus, and they greet each other by falling at each others' feet, blurring the status of each one within the romantic as well as the hierarchical / master-student relationship.

picture courtesy: https://onbeing.org/programs/fatemeh-keshavarz-the-ecstatic-faith-of-rumi/

After Shams is brutally murdered by Rumi's family in 1248, Rumi's wanderings begin, in Damascus, his personal pilgrimage steeped in the association of Shams, with an unquiet, gutted soul that denies him oblivion and closure. His lacerated lyrics hang like a jewel in the ghastly night of endless absence of his companion, as the separation this time,is veritably, final.
His tortured quest for the meanings of life, love, and death; his self-wounding pursuit of the purpose of existence; his impossible quest for a lover on the other side of inexorable physical annihilation ultimately precipitate a spiritual breakthrough where he realizes :

''Why should I seek? I am the same as He. His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself''.
This is an instance of consummate union, a total surrender of the self to the beloved other, the complete annihilation through which the self is renewed. Fana--or the death of the self in love. This may remind us of a return to the state of Platonic wholeness and plenitude, before the cracks of living separate the soul from its original companion.

This is also a state of blessed blankness, a nonbeing, a void paradoxically loaded with spiritual wealth:
''I used to be respectable and chaste and stable, ... I saw you and became empty.... 
To praise is to praise how one surrenders to this emptiness.''

What we can see here is an extraordinarily effective management of separation anxiety as well as of a traumatised ego; by integrating the object of affection into the self, Rumi's therapeutic philosophy gives way to a stronger and more stable ego that is dialectically evolved. The fusion of the ego with the object of its desire--without denying its legitimate role in the transaction-- seems to be an extremely successful strategy to counter the debilitating effects of separation from its object, through death, distance or the unfortunate demise of affection. The fracture that opens up due to the frustration of desire, and which is at the root of almost every form of neurosis and anxiety, is assuaged by this  mechanism that helps us accept the randomness of experience,without resentment.

Rumi's poetry is pervaded by an obsessive recurrence of images: the intense longing for an absent lover, glimpses of the distant face, torrid fantasies of union, and visions of an ecstatic surrender. While it is not impossible to discover resonances of the ancient Middle Eastern tradition of erotic poetry, such as The Songs of Solomon ( no artist can create in a vacuum of influence) what stands out in Rumi's art  is a harmonious resolution of the oppositional tension that is at the heart of every act of intercourse: sexual, romantic and spiritual; with a human lover, and/or  a divine other. The other, that by definition, resides outside the frontiers of the self, is made to invade the barriers of  the self until it is incorporated in it and dissolves completely in the self in an ecstatic (ex+ stasis= lit. outside existence) union whereby the individual identity of each is erased.

''...dissolve me if this is the time. Do it gently, with a touch of hand, or a look. 
...Or do it suddenly like an execution.
You keep me away with your arm but the keeping away is pulling me in.''

It is easy to understand the seduction of  such an orgasmic healing, such a calming, restorative philosophy in today's world, when the political climate is divisive due to toxic egos, when there is increasing personal alienation between individuals, when relationships are fragile and more than ever divested of emotional seriousness, and when break-ups, deaths and separations hurt exactly as badly as they did in Rumi's time.

This is coping mechanism adorned with the finest aesthetic beauty, it is the anxious and terrified soul's fortification against the ravages of Time and mutability, in the wisdom rising out of an empirical appreciation of  tragedy. It is enduringly relevant because it answers a modern, complex and deeply existential quest. It is the miracle of salvaging the self through the erasure of the ego; we don't have to look for this miracle outside ourselves. The love we search for, has been there in us all along.

She asks ''do you love me, or yourself more? Really, tell me the absolute truth.''
He says, ''there's nothing left of me. I'm like a ruby held up to the sun. It is a stone but has no resistance to the sun's light.''*

When we render ourselves open to the Light we make ourselves more precious, more dazzlingly beautiful.

*All translations, of Rumi's texts, are by Coleman Barks.