Power over Themselves

This might be a good opportunity to pause and think.
About what?
Well, in the middle of the mayhem of discounted shopping, happy hours at the poshest pub in town, the endless run of romantic comedies on daytime television, a lethal overdose of Jennifer Aniston and Amy Adams, it is hard to forget that another of the so-called 'Day's is around the corner: Women's Day.
Everywhere the media is abuzz with discussions centred on women's safety, women's rights, women's health, with multinational corporations exerting subtle pressure on our dads, husbands, sons and lovers to be nice to us, women, this once-a-year at least. In other words, every one seems to be cashing in on the immense commercial opportunity such a well timed egalitarianism might open up. The image that it constructs, of the modern woman, in the process, happens to be totally silly and vacuous as a consequence.
A woman comes off as a creature who has to be endlessly protected, monitored, and infantilized by the state and society in order for her to survive in this adverse world. Mary Wollstonecraft, the great grandmother of sexual revolution in the west, lamented precisely this sorry state of affairs back in the 1790s in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women. the more things change, the more they remain the same, don't they?

Mary Wollstonecraft: the Great Grandmother of Modern Western Feminism
Picture Courtesy: http://www.feministsforlife.org/herstory/marywollstonecraft/

                           

What all this commercially fuelled effort to prioritize woman-centric products and services does, in a self-defeating way, is to construct an inescapable and insurmountable matrix of what Betty Friedan called 'the feminine mystique'--the trappings of femininity that help perpetuate its passive and intellectually bankrupt stereotype. Interestingly, the liberated woman, downing a drink or two with her girl gang is just another extension of that safe stereotype. It poses no real threat to the patriarchal status quo. It is like  a child's mimicry of an adult activity while the grown ups indulgently look on, at least until the child turns violent and starts damaging property.
And what happens when the child gets out of hand?  Genuine subversion of conventional morality, a radical reorganization of the status quo: revolution, in short.
Try to remember what the suffragists did at the beginning of the last century and the scale of public outcry it provoked. Think about the media hostility that was unleashed on the Second Wave activists who were simply asking for the right to be recognized as equals in every sphere of individual and collective existence. Nothing wrong with that demand, right?
In  recent past, we still remember the Riot Grrrls  manifesto with its extreme aesthetics; it is a different matter that the movement failed and fizzled out within a decade,and even on purely aesthetic grounds it was never particularly promising, still a failed revolution does not become politically irrelevant and pointless, just because it failed.


What is common to all these feminist initiatives is a determination to forcibly appropriate the means of power: political, economic, social and cultural. Practical and discursive.
They were just trying to lay claim to what is inalienably theirs: their own bodies and minds. And dominant power never tolerates such disobedience, such genuinely subversive agenda undertaken by  the governed class. It would arrest and force-feed a suffragette on hunger strike; it would shoot down an activist who tries to introduce literacy among the young girls in a remote tribal province, and more subtly but equally insidiously, shout 'slut' or 'dyke' in the face of a feminist punk rocker or try to stall the release of a film made by a woman director because it dares to go where the angels fear to tread: female fantasy and sexuality. The official reason cited for the decision is that the film is 'lady-oriented' which can harm the moral health of an 'incredible' nation.
'Lady oriented'? Is it an apologetic euphemism for a murkier 'woman-centric'?( Let's not even go as far as gynocentric)  The way the embarrassed Victorians whispered about 'the lady parts'?
Patriarchy has always remained scared of the power of fantasy. A woman's imagination is the true terrorist, the marauding mercenary that detonates the deadliest of the explosives to raze its most complexly constructed facades to the ground. And it is the most imaginatively gifted among us-- the woman artist-- who undertakes this task: to enunciate the collective fantasy of femininity to live in a freer world where the barriers and boundaries restricting us have been conquered. The Virginia Woolfs, The Sylvia Plaths, The Amrita Shergils, the Lady Gagas are doing just that.
In her famous 1975 essay Laura Mulvey ('Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema') pointed out that the default subject-position in popular culture is inevitably gendered male, and the gaze every time is essentially a male gaze that interprets the cinematic experience in commercial cinema. This subjectivity is shaped by patterns of desire that are socially constructed and phallic. It renders the woman into a passive  object that becomes a playground for its phallic fantasies. This, I think, is true of the entire history of  western culture itself where the female is a fragmented male, a castrated male. Impotent, in the most profound sense of the term. Eve, after all, is carved out of the rib of Adam. She is secondary and derivative in status. Passive and silent, in an ideal world. Randomly look at  three celebrated art-works post Renaissance: Titian's Venus of Urbino, Da vinci's Mona Lisa, Picasso's Les Damoiselles Avignon. The woman = a passive subject; the male = the active artist with agency. Isn't the equation water tight?

Subject Picasso, Object Women
courtesy: https://www.moma.org/explore/conservation/demoiselles/

 Changing this paradigm involves a 180° turning around of the perspective, which is not easy. The female avant-garde is a lone crusader, a frontier- explorer who breaks new aesthetic grounds to make hitherto uncharted areas of consciousness habitable for her sisters and daughters. Sometimes, she knows that she is destined to be defeated: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath had to live with the stigma of insanity for being 'different'; Kathleen Hannah had to regularly endure verbal violence form sexist hooligans among her audience during performances, Wollstonecraft had to go to the edge of suicide to know that a woman must pay the price for being fiercely original in a deeply reactionary society.

And yet, how difficult is it to understand a woman's soul? The unfortunate mystification surrounding it is ancient and trans-cultural. Just break on through to the other side. It is simple and beautiful: the mind of a woman who is creative and free. That is what makes a woman beautiful-- her independence and imagination. Her intellectual and emotional adventures: as mothers, daughters, lovers, or artists. As thinking humans.Without it, her jewels are futile. Do not get us diamonds or exotic holidays for Women's Day. Just listen to us. Understand us. Gift us your empathy and respect, because as Molly Neuman said, we are not anti-boy, we are just pro-girl.

Longing for The Face Withheld: V Day Musings

February is a month when romance is both ritualistic and compulsory. Everything, from cookies to diamonds, sells in the name of St. Valentine, the icon of stubborn conviction in the face of the repressive and regulatory forces of the violent military state that tries to control the faith of its subjects with an absurd arrogance. St. Valentine's connection with sexual love is a later day, mainly medieval, effort to Christianize Europe's pagan past.

At a time when division and intolerance increasingly define man's relation with the social-world outside the community/ religion/ race/ state he is accidentally born into, the formal reiteration of such subversive love that seeks to shake up the status quo is highly relevant, even necessary one would say, since every instance of the personal is ultimately political.

But just as Christmas is especially difficult for the socially unaccommodated, so too is Valetine's Day for the lonely, the 'unloved', which is all of us at some point or the other, it being a rite of passage for every adult. There is no escaping the shame and embarrassment of the solitary individual standing outside the magic circle of mutually reciprocated romantic affection among friends and family. May be, he too feels love in his skin and bones; love that keeps him awake in the nightly privacy of his bedroom  -- but being what it is, lonely, secret and sometimes even outlawed, this kind of love is denied the festive hype of  V Day which is oriented exclusively at heterosexual consummation.

Picture courtesy: http://hd-wall-papers.com/single/1580071-background-lovers.html

And yet who could deny the unlimited richness, the sheer creative potential of this brand of love? Literature and art open up a space of cultural catharsis where we typically encounter its raw and rabid energies, for such love to be absorbed by socially accommodated structures, such as marriage, procreation and family, this love has to shed much of its disruptive capacity, hence its intensity. Anyone who remembers Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights from his high-school reading, will immediately understand the failure of the effort to integrate such feral amorous energies into domesticated bourgeois respectability.

The tortured verses of the young Rimbaud, turning the stale and stagnant conventions of French poetry on its head to introduce infernal beauty in its place, would never have come into existence without the deeply conflicted, and finally impossible affair with a middle aged Verlaine, hopelessly entrenched in his marriage ( the film Total Eclipse is a devastatingly beautiful exploration of that torrid, sordid intimacy) .

There would be no Moonlight Sonata, no Fur Elise, I'm certain, if Beethoven's entire life had not been spent in affairs with women who were ultimately impossible objects due to their class, or marital status or both. His unsent correspondence to his so-called Immortal Beloved is so achingly exquisite in its frustrated, self-consuming obsession that they serve as an excellent extra-textual commentary to his sublime music.We still do not know the identity of the 'I.M'--Julia Guicciardi, Josephine Brunsvik, Antonie Brentano-- the candidates are several. And finally such scholarly  enterprise is bound to be futile as it does nothing to deconstruct the aura of that attraction. Its pure magic resides in its intractability.

 Closer home, the better part of Rabindranath Tagore's creative corpus can be interpreted as his obsessive quest to reach out to the love of his life (several lesser affairs notwithstanding) Kadamvari, the immensely gifted woman married to his older brother Jyotirindranath, and who acted as a muse to an adolescent Rabindrath's fledgling creativity. Kadamvari committed suicide at 26, in the aftermath of her infamous intimacy with 'Rabi'. He lost her at 24, but even when he was dabbling in visual arts quite late in the day, in his seventies, the sombre, incandescent portraits staring back from a shadowy backdrop, have the same gaunt face and hauntingly intense eyes of his first undead muse. In the preface to Manasi, the big bang of Tagore's creative expression, written shortly after the tragic affair, Tagore describes his writing as a way out of his personal depression and a larger futility and randomness at the heart of creation itself.

Desire, according to Lacan, is an effort to staunch the wound inflicted on the subconscious by an always-already absent object. Art, in this context, becomes a space of fantastic intercourse, where desire that is denied gratification in reality is consummated on an aesthetic, rather than erotic, plane. The beloved who is perennially out of reach is finally appropriated and possessed in and through the artist's creative imagination. She never deserts the creator thereafter, defeating in that way, the vagaries of fate and the mutability of the universe. The artist has laid claim to her existence through his authorship and that right, for him, is inalienable.

The intensely lacerated lyricism of Rilke (to whom I owe my title and whose lifelong obsession for Lou Salome is responsible for much of his troubled poetry), the dazzlingly dark beauty of Leonard Cohen's music, the pained serenity in Goya's portraits, the young Shakespeare writing Twelfth Night to heal the cracks of his lost love, commemorating his cross-dressed beloved through his heroine in drag (in the end of Shakespeare in Love, so beautifully written by Tom Stoppard) are all instances of this disruptive, subversive and ultimately self-renewing love that will never find its way to the pretty V-Day cards and merchandise. And yet, this is the most triumphant and enduring love that shakes civilization out of its stupor and complacence and sets human endeavour rolling in the direction of revolutionary transformation.

The Year That Wasn't

It was no coincidence that the last big release of 2016 was La La Land. A film about regrets. Every dying year is also essentially about that-- regrets. Just as every life folds within itself several lives that it isn't, every passing year too, is a chronicle of things that didn't come to be.

La La Land--a musical drama about heterosexual intimacy and its tragic demise in the face of worldly ambitions-- as it were, a lingering suspended chord that is unable to find its resolution (I can not resist this operatic metaphor since the Hollywood musical, as a genre, is deeply indebted to the Italian Opera)is fundamentally about loss and creating a redemptive philosophy out of regret. Sometimes slipping into downright sentimentality, almost routinely touching upon the formal imperatives of the genre every now and then, the film denies you the comfort of  closure at the very end, like a true modern classic. With its ethereal visions of the 'What-If', La La Land is a detour through the miracle that is wired into the mundane, i.e the road not taken at the turn.

In commercial cinema around the world, wherever individualistic choice of upward mobility is brought into a polarized conflict with romantic fulfillment, more often than not minor and temporary compromises on the road to success guarantees the securing of both the laurel and the lady; the choices, as it were, are flippantly or leniently played around. The process is divested of its starkness. The guy takes one deep, long look into the weepy, blue eyes of the delicate girl in his arms and he happily throws away a high-flying career in business/ law/whatever- translates- as- ruthless moneymaking in cinematic shorthand. But then worry not, their sacrifices shall be rewarded and more than compensated-for at the end which is compulsorily feel-good: the normative/ procreative heterosexual couple must not perish in poverty on the streets of the town, paying for their youthful folly.

La La Land shows you the more serious and damaging effects of choosing success over 'happiness'. 'Happiness' in this sense is an inclusive idea that finds realization by positing the self in a mutually enriching conjugation with the other ( here a romantic other to be specific) as opposed to 'success' that is exclusively focused on the material betterment of the self.
To be 'happy' in this sense you have to surrender  a crucial part of the self to the other, expose your most vulnerable core to the mercy of the other, surrender to the moment and wait for the transforming miracle that may or may not happen. You strip yourself of the defenses of reason, and commonsense, and wait to be overwhelmed by a divine un-reason.
The choice is risky. Terrifying. It can, and does, end in rejection, humiliation and the endless agony of having to watch the ideal die; and each time it happens, a part of the self dies too, beyond redemption, beyond resurrection. And yet, without this choice, we are dead. La La Land, if anything, lays bare that deep death of the spirit.
 It encourages us to commit that awful daring,of a moment's surrender,which an age of prudence can not retract. At the end of the day, we are not rationally optimized systems, guaranteeing predictable outcomes, but unique consciousnesses surprised by our own depths. The way we articulate our rational consciousness is often, by going against reason; by making choices that are mired in the gore of self-wounding motives, confused and irrational the way a human can be. Not an ant or vole in heat.


The ending of La La Land is packed with such beauteous surprise. Like a knife suddenly stuck through your heart, it is unbearably beautiful. It is the pure enchantment of  the counterfactual, the sublime play of fantasy unleashed, with a vengeance, into the quotidian. Its power makes you soar above gravity itself. The final, lingering gaze of the former lovers, with a vast physical distance in between, is a cinematic tour de force. The last shot packs in a lifetime's regret in a single moment, without a single word of dialogue being spoken.
Life after all, is lived in the detritus of such ordinary loves and losses: a word written with a quirk, a scent, a song, a certain way of starting a hug. Nothing momentous, but it is by this, and this only that we have existed-- not by the wills and bank statements we leave behind.

The final, somewhat complicit, glance of the lovers is what redeems this tale of heartbreak and failure that is intimate as well as epic.It is a fleeting resolution, after all, to the series of dissonant chords that the love-story degenerates into, after our heroine Mia, the struggling actress is stood up by her jazz-  pianist lover, Sebastian on her debut night. Like an island of empathy, and consolation, it stands out in the choppy waters of sorrow and regret that is past repair.  In existence surrounded by death, loss and separation the least we could offer each other is the momentary awareness of a truth that is far more enduring than the signposts of external reality, a recognition of an affection  that extends far beyond the end of an affair, the acknowledgement of something inalienable that outlives the mortal and transient.

An year ends with regrets, ritualistically reminding us of things we could not get, the ones we lost to death and neglect. And like the year yet- to- be -born, life too promises a way of salvaging things out of the wreck of the past: if only we would dare to take the risk. Let's, for a moment, give compassion a chance instead of regret and hatred. Let's take a cup of kindness for old times' sake!

The cafe outside the theatre, in keeping with the valedictory mood of the year-end, was playing 'Auld Lang Syne' on it's sound system. Who says that life doesn't give you closure outside the text?


-----------------

Picture courtesy: https://www.fastcocreate.com/3063128/quick-hit/emma-stone-melts-our-hearts-in-the-new-la-la-land-trailer

Tangled Up in Dylan

Bob Dylan: courtesy Mojo (http://www.mojo4music.com/artist/bob-dylan/)

Everybody knows that babe's got the Nobel. So what has changed? Dylan, I believe, is already past his creative prime like almost every other winner of the award. It is unlikely that it will change the nature or volume of his lyrical output so late in the day. What it hopefully might do is rescue him from a certain oblivion-- a deeply heartbreaking yet undeniable one--that surrounds him in non-Anglophone countries like mine. Sadly, young musicians in my city do not cover Dylan anymore in pubs, malls and music schools. The throbbing vein of the mainstream that keeps popular music alive in radios, nightspots, adverts, in the long and hopeless rehearsals of adolescent garage bands and in stadiums full of girls mounted on their boyfriends' shoulders, has lost Dylan long ago. In the ever-capricious field of evolving taste, Dylan is somewhat passe, or is he?

The Dylan that sang about the changing times like a 20th century folk-youth messiah is no longer relevant, true (except every once in a long while when he can be appropriated by Apple or Victoria's Secret) perhaps because the times that were a'changin' back in the 60s have changed so many times over that even Dylan felt out of range and finally stopped caring. The political Dylan of statements and movements is dated, true, as every manifesto, every slogan, every instance of collective revolution must fall out of fashion sooner or later. But is that the end of the story?

As far as Dylan goes, it is not. A poet in India once wrote,'only that which is personal is sacred'. Only that which is personal is timeless too. The song that got me in love with Dylan was 'Don't Think Twice it's Alright'. Like every heartbroken college-goer I too had a phase of raging self-pity. Dylan rescued me out of that blackness and taught me to look for pride in loss. That was probably the only song I could fully understand at that age: the unashamed celebration of anti-love, of the proud individual who walks out of the demise of intimacy to discover beauty in alone-ness. And yet, who says that Dylan is all cynical about intimacy? Like a brutal commentator of modernity he does accept the complexities, paradoxes and the impossible resolutions of  mutually conflicting choices, and in the chaos of all this non- understanding, quietly refuses to give up the ideal that Johanna is. Who else but he could insist, 'I want you' with such incantatory firmness?

 When the noises of protest have died , there is a Dylan--a private Dylan, a tortured Dylan, a bleeding Dylan who is Everyman and woman in love and out of it. This could be love in the sense of charity, yes, but where Dylan is essentially himself is the eternal space of eros that have inspired the most triumphant acts of lyrical enunciation everywhere, in every culture. Let's not forget that private Dylan of the modern individual, defeated by the contradictions of his own desire and crying into the secrecy of his pillow.
'Tangled up in Blue' took him two years to write and ten years to live: we, his lovers, are living out his verses and choruses everyday, in deep, secret and unspeakable ways. We don't stop living Dylan till we die as laughing, crying and desiring individuals. Everybody who has discovered freedom in a break-up ('Don't Think Twice'), has found it impossible to end a bad affair because the ideal inspiring it refuses to die ('Tangled Up in Blue'), has discovered a sudden compassion for an unfaithful ex whom one would love to flay alive  ( 'Like a Rolling Stone') --anyone, in other words, who has celebrated mortal love and loss in any whichever way, has been tangled up in Dylan whether or not one knows it. Hope, the Nobel prize at least reminds us of that.