Meme se Maya: The Bigger, Dirtier Picture behind the "chapa" episode

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Quit playin' videogames with my heart.

The pastiche intensive music video to Lana Del Ray's "Videogames" is postmodern Americana at it's hypnotic, dizzying best. It's heart break in the time of i-PODs, hyper-reality, paparazzi surveillance, Youtube, homevideos, webcams and retrofitted Hollywood nostalgia.


This is a music video situated precariously on the "bad edge of postmodernity" (ala Mike Davis).


The ground here says STOP and says you're on the Walk of Fame both at once. Fame is subsumed in the city's larger security apparatus, frequently and relentlessly policed.


I can't think of a more fitting metaphor for love and heartbreak. Lovely song title. Haunting lyrics. 


It also helps that it is significantly allusive to a movie I consider my religion, David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. and channels something of a Mulholland mood, what with the darker side of LA and Hollywood. There's some Twin Peaks in here, too. The raw footage reminds me of Laura Palmer and Donna dancing in the woods. All the falling recalls one of the opening scenes of Mulholland Dr., where Rita's character is seen stumbling through a palm-tree dotted street in LA, in a moment of surreal amnesiac abandon. David Lynch has often had as his muse the idea of a Lady in Trouble.  Lana's beauty in this video is quaint and melancholic and I can almost envisage her creeping out from behind Lynch's characteristic red-curtains.  Lynchian-esque would be an adjective I could use to describe her...mood, her dis-ease. and that voice. 


Another interesting touch is the inclusion of Paz de le Huerta, of BoardwalK Empire fame, in which she played the coquettish vampy siren Lucy Danziger. This seems an appropriate reference to the period drama, set in a gilded age of jazz-age excess, Prohibition, speakeasies, criminality and celebrity. Of course, all of these themes are refracted through a decidedly cinematic lens in Boardwalk- courtesy Martin Scorcese, whose aesthetic is felt vividly in the series.

 There's a sense of privacy, here, on Lana's part. A privacy gone dangerously public. A privacy surrendered and a privacy invaded.  A lady in trouble- a pouty lipped siren on the edge. A videogame postscripted by the looming presence of a GAME OVER sign- lit in sexy, sultry neon no less.

                                       

A Daily Particular

(Written in 2009)

Comfort zones discomfort me. I begin to take myself and the world around me for granted when I am safe and secure in my comfort zone, and in the process, I cease to question, challenge, and upset the status quo. Every once in a while, a little something happens in my life that shakes things up; ruffles a few feathers; disturbs the peace. And it is in these precious moments that I feel most vital, most alive, most free. One such significant moment that I still recall with perfect clarity chanced upon me 9 years ago.

I can still recall his face, and how its contours changed as he smiled at me. 9 years and it all seems and feels so immediate. He jangles in my head along with all those other daily particulars, names of people, places and other groceries one stores in their mind's address book without ever actually reaching out to them, or wanting to. 

I like thinking of these items as permanent household fixtures if you will. They exist. I trust my bed because it doesn't grow wings overnight- it sticks around. I trust my network of family, friends and acquaintances because they occupy delineated spaces. The soap dish for the soap; the washing machine for the clothes; the front porch for the car. The electricity bill hangs around too, in all too officious earnest. 

They could be coupons- the ones that ask me to cut along the perforated lines. And the ones that caution me not to use the scissor in mommy or daddy's absence. They could be the contacts on my cell phone's address book; or my friends list on Facebook. Ever accessible, ever navigable- like my fridge, or the national archives. 

This is my safe, ever polite cereal box existence. (Please) Cut along the dotted lines. Be safe. Be supervised. (Kindly) Don't talk to strangers. (You are advised to) Protect yourself from the unexpected. (Please) Return things where you found them. 

It's been 10 years. I can still recall his face. He is a Clarks salesman who sold me a pair of shoes on Oxford Street 11 years ago. He's a really good guy. I had a relationship with him that lasted all of 7 minutes. I won't say I've forgotten his name, because he hadn't one to begin with. He is the Clarks salesman: Australian, million dollar smile, priceless goodness.

I guess it would be fair to say it was the moment. If I could, I would clutch it and spin it around on its invisible axis to show you, but I'm afraid I can't. Rather, I'm glad I can't. It was the moment- my moment- and I was and am sovereign over it. For there it was. No perforated lines to cut along here. None of the safe and boring linearity of my address book. 

I taste It very meaningfully, as if It alone is capable of articulating what I am trying to say; as if It were able to consummate those wicked, ever evasive thoughts that ricochet across my mind, this way and that, mixed up, simultaneously seeking and resisting a permanent postal address where I can call on them as and when I wished, at whatever hour any day and I would be sure they would definitively remain the same.

The salesman hasn't an address, however. He remains a stranded moment, not whole but membranous, uprooted from time and space, residing on continuum avenue (no left or right turns here), resisting my permanent fixtures, defeating the stationary and mind numbing tangibility of electronic appliances, microwaves and postal addresses. He happens. 

He is more alive to me than so much of the immediate world around me. I tire of the daily particulars. They are too constant, too secure, too earthed in their safe, reliable existence. 

The convivial chatter, the eating utensils and their perfectly rehearsed cacophonous clatter, mother's reliable daily platter- they come easy; so easy that they lull me into that distressing state of......half sleep. I am Marx's proletarian and they are my daily opiate. I know not pain nor pleasure, but only the soul stifling anesthetic of a convenient life complete with 'Directions for Use'. Be safe. Be supervised. Cut along the dotted lines. 

I can't deny that I have often longed to cut along this precious memory of mine- to borrow Horace's phrase, 'seize' it as you would the day. I have wished to hold it and turn it around and examine it in the light, when I am suddenly and joyously reminded there is nothing and no one to hold, there is little to seize, indeed seizable. There is a smile. There is a personal history engraved. Not on stone- but on whichever breeze chanced upon my path that fateful day. There is revelation upon revelation but no Holy Book upon holier pedestal. There is Truth. But there's another customer. In line. 'Thankyou. Have a good day.' There is Big Ben which must strike 12. 

I've bought my shoes. He's handed me the receipt. And I haven't an excuse to linger, probe and stay. Whatever we had is far and away. And I haven't an excuse. There is nothing to excuse. Forgive me please for sounding this obtuse. 

I've bought my shoes, and he's handed me the receipt. 

I've lost the receipt. Never mind the shoes (I was swept off my feet).

Never mind his name. And just as well. 

I had a relationship with him that lasted all of 7 minutes.

Not accessible, not navigable, but simply, lovingly, sincerely,

there.

Centre Justified.

It's interesting that as I've progressed through school onwards to college, the more I wish to unlearn and the more I wish could be undone.

There are lots of reasons for this, one being that I haven't had a conventional educational career- already being in my third gap year. This present gap has proven disruptive in so many ways, both good and bad. But always instructive. I feed off disruption.

All the same, I must believe that between all the scholarship and reading, writing and thinking, deconstruction and agonizing analysis, I can retain some semblance of a pre-intelligent, pre-literate, pre-narrative self.

That self has so much to say and so much to do. I know it. I'm just hoping it hasn't died beneath the weight of all those words.

Sometimes I think that the shelf-life of a book is its afterlife. All these prophecies, histories, mythologies- are posthumously ours. We're all just paying our awe-struck respects.

A library is not unlike a cemetery to me. It's where knowledge goes to die. Goes to rest in silent peace. But like any good old ghost story, I believe, not all of it (knowledge) is dead yet. Some of it still haunts. Still resists. Feels like the oldest haunting in all the world. Feels like a mystery that's not myth yet. Feels like the unknown and unknowable. Feels like the stuff of a story, in search of a narrator. But there's no narrator to be found because maybe- the narrator is as implicated in this story's wonders and horrors as the characters are themselves. How could the narrator tell it, when he/she too, was it? All authority is lost. Authorships are disrupted, turned on their head. The scene is set- the camp fire frustrates against the firewood in its hunger for secrets, the marshmellows are ready and there's an appropriately spooky night chill- but no storytellers.

I have never wanted to get to know my pre-intelligent self more than when I'm at the library. In a flickering moment of semiotic disruption, I tell myself- there is nothing here. This is a maze of knowledge. All the truths here are centre justified or left aligned.

None of the books make any sense. They say nothing at all. Maybe if I held them, or smelt them, or tried tasting their pages, they'd mean more.

The universe seems to say, get over yourself, I came a really really long way, and I am not studied in my absolute awesomeness, nor am I cautiously humble about my infinite vastness.

I'm so much bigger than you and better than you and infinitely smaller than you too, and you will never shelve this.

It says, every time you begin a new sentence, the words are actually just falling off the goddamn page, because the world of words, is flat. The world of words hangs on an edge. Reading this world is a tenuous exercise and requires adjustments for loss of idiom. There’ll be seepage and stuff will get out; top secret stuff. Some of it will get out because it never really got in, to begin with.

All the same, I am sure you will search me out and call for me in the void, which is not the same as emptiness. It is the most fulfilling hollow of all, and if you try, you can hold it in the palm of your hand. The void is a giant metaphysical cunt. And I use the four-letter word here with the utmost deliberation. It is no mere coincidence that one can conceive both an idea and a baby. There is a pressing linguistic relationship between sex and knowledge. 'Ken' means both 'know' and 'give birth' (Barbara G Walker, 1983). When I am conscious of the yawning divide between the sign (signifier) and the signified, the image of falling into a gap or a hole, helps me express that lapse in signification- it's a deep and dark cleft. It's as frightening as it is welcoming. I feel that in order to achieve a better understanding of Self and Source, I must come to terms with the hole. All of them. The one I came out of- the one my words come out of and the one in the iris of my eye through which light enters. Each of these holes is an opening- it's a way in, and a way out. I must not fear the dark. And here's why.

The pupil- that dark, circular aperture in the iris of my eye, the aperture of the lens through which we view the world and maintain perspective and host worldviews,  is black.
The pupillary lumen is black. The word lumen is Latin for light and an opening. These connections remind me that for all our preoccupation with vision, illumination and seeing the 'light', all our light, all our luminous ideas and insights are refracted through a void of utter blackness. I do not fear the dark- I cuddle up next to it, and in its deep chasm and dark cavity, I sense possibility and promise. I sense a source. There is an opening in the dark.


As for words, and language, instead of an opening, I am presented with the obtuseness of an edge. Thales was right. The world is flat.

That's a lot of fallen words. We reinventorize them so that they rise again, and fall again. and rise again. left to right and right to left. We collect ourselves as we gather all the words together, as we pick up the fallen ones.We learn em up and commit them to memory, without asking whether they're committed to anything beyond their own semantic schemes. As Korzybski said, the map is not the territory. The word is not the truth. The word is not the first or the last, nor the beginning or The End. I speak and write in words but these words are never really, truly, my own. We killed it when we christened it. And yet, here I am- such a  mouthful. I'm gagging on the galaxy, choking on cosmos- not quite getting there. Every word leads me to yet some more words, as every map leads to yet some more maps, ad infinitum. As Bateson says in Steps to An Ecology of Mind (1972), "The territory never gets in at all....Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum." We are locked in a loop of recourse. I know my references but I know not the source. Maps of maps. Words of words. Gods of gods. Narrative of narratives. Texts of texts. Names of names. Kinda like the cover to Memento. Damn, that was a great film! And so, I regress infinitely.

Speaking of names,  something about the culture of “naming” in general fascinates me so much. It's very functional and irrational at the same time. Pseudonyms have always been as much about evading the public eye and masking the private as they have been about resisting the convention of naming all together, despite acquiescing to the 'need' for a name in the first place, a true testament indeed to the importance of being Earnest. This begs the following questions:

 If we could re-name ourselves as we willed, what implications would that hold? Would such an exercise leave way for protean shape shifting identities? 
Has the concrete, given name anchored identity and rendered it static?Am I as personal as my name?
Is the extent of my Person the extent of my Name?(and vice versa) Can my person extend over and beyond my given name? 

 

You know those moments when words and language and names of things, for a brief moment, don't make sense? but make lots and lots of sound. Not so different from water-sound, owl-sound, cricket-sound, neon-buzz sound or empty corridor-sound. That's where it's at. That's the magic. 

I like to think every word has an underbelly. And sometimes, when a word leaves my mouth, my tongue longs to lick its nether regions.

As I fall, the universe seems to say: You will soon recognize that your intelligences will do you little good, or bad. they will simply do. Your sentience however, will save you. It will not wonder whether to be or not to be. You won’t need to make sense of the world around you; you will have sense.  Sense will be had, not made.

and then and then pre-intelligent Ahmed dies. Society and correctness resurrect him; he's come around again, back within the margins. And he can spell truth all over again.

Here he is

Centre justified

Left aligned.

Posthumously yours.

Forgive me for sounding obtuse.

That's a lot of fallen words.