Empty Vessel

I was privileged to be born near books, with a priest in the family who awoke at four in the morning and recited Chandi stotra and and other hymns as he tended to his daily ablutions. I was also privileged to have as many women in my family. After a hard day's work in the village, the women gathered around a lamp or two for their only luxury--recounting their hardships and happy endings, gossiping, anticipating and dissecting and building in the air and taking the air out of other enterprises. I listened, often until I fell asleep in a corner, and i must have continued to listen in my sleep as well, because many things come to me which I am sure I never experienced.

Another way in which I was fortunate was the ethnic and cultural diversity in the village, and the social fabric of which my families were a member, one which stretched over the mountains to villages a couple of days walk away. There were certain forbidden territories--the temple of the Old Goddess where the Magars sacrificed their swines, the spring near Mulpaani where the children were forbidden to drink, the washed roots at the mouth of Mulpaani where the source's serpents lived, a bend in Khare Khola where stillborns were buried--and there were specific spirits or decapitated skeletons or wandering witches who roamed their own territories. The landscape was a narrative in its own, made possible only through hundreds or thousands of years of habitation, where it was possible to see in the shadows of a tree a woman who hanged herself there sixty years ago, or a rocking rock on the edge of a precipice from where a laborer fell to his death.

The landscape existed, thusly, as a layered narrative composed of stones and trees or fields and paths shaped by specific events in the village's history that jumped up afresh to the eye, each time transformed by the gown of dusk or the clamor of birds, flapped by vultures alighting and jostling in a litter of carcasses, and as a cast of real, dead spooks and kin, drawn from various generations, colored by very different stories told by the same person, details picking on their own scabs or wearing borrowed jewels from myths and epics similarly heard in the haze of half-sleep. One was outside, the other flowered inside.

As a child, I populated my head with as varied a cast as it was possible for a child's mind. I also had many friends in the cracks on the wall or in the shapes made by leaves against light. I named them, these creation of chance that had acquired permanence, and i spent hours talking to them. Amazingly, invariably, they talked back. As soon as a mind reaches the stage where it can sustain a conversation, it wants more of it, because it recognizes that each of such conversation is a perfect conversation. The most agreeable opponent is within the mind.

[more to follow]

Origin of Stories

To really understand what centrality cinema has come to possess for me, I have to look as far back as it is possible: If this mode of narrative seems most natural and necessary to me, I must peel away the mysteries that house other familiar forms of story-telling.

Immediately, stories beget a nature that is public or private, root or fruit, impressed or sold.

Any exercise to dissect the following will be arduous. A man doesn't sit down to write about the foundational, formative experiences of his life and achieve that in a few sentences. A daft writer can perhaps accomplish that about his wife or a new, minor character in an unfinished story. But the journal he keeps is necessarily fat and cluttered, irreducible.

Narratives weaved around the stones and bits of colored glass and rags and twigs and cut-outs from newspapers, which formed the cast of the stories told by three-year-olds, were the first public form of narratives I experienced.

There are always a small number of stories that children are told by other children--perhaps a few years older, at most--that incorporate themes older than humanity: fear of the unknown, biological functions, sensory rewards. The story I remember is about an old couple who are visited by a bullying bear, who ends up eating their turd and is scared away when the old woman lets go an alarmingly loud fart. This story no doubt still circulates among Nepali children giggling in the dark.

Swasthani Brata Katha, a book recited an impressive seven times in a matter of a month, established the necessary understanding of karma, basic Hindu scheme of honor, piety and heavenly reward. But, it was also a story where a seven year old girl is married off to an eighty-year old leper. It is also a story where a god with the ability to destroy Creation carries the decomposing corpse of his beloved in a mad expression of high melodrama surpassing adolescent tantrums. It is filled with equally gleeful descriptions of beautiful women and horrible demons; the eyes of a temptress stirs the heart just as much as the description of a flesh-eating rakshasha's blood-plastered face.

Such recitations are also the first experience of the cruelty inherent in a lyrical medium, where sound and images cascade without chance, a complex dance, and the reader's gentle recitation deceptively simplifies the horrors within the narrative.

[More to follow]

New Town

Movies since last post:

Adaptation
The Italian
Grindhouse

I have lost access to movies, unless I go to the theatre, which costs money and time. I have started working at an Indian restaurant, which means inconvenient hours and very bad pay. I am still hungover from yesterday [I suppose Sushrut and I celebrated Nepali New Year 2064, after all], and I don't have the focus and energy required to do any creative thinking. Still, a blessing to be in a library: Santa Rosa Junior College's library isn't as well equipped as the Mountain View Public Library; The students aren't as courteous to other patrons of the library either. On the flip side, computer access is plenty and without restriction.

More than a post about movies, this is meant as a return to the blog, from which I have stayed away for 18 days.