blind man's meal

i've found myself wondering about the sensation of indulging in the most sensual experiences without the power of sight (from 'baser' things like bodily expulsions) to eating, listening to music, and so on...consequently when i stumbled across a picasso painting the other day, i was moved and found myself returning to it again and again without a clear reason why..

of course the painting is problematic as it may be romanticizing the austerity of a blind man's life, most probably inflicting his own feelings of what blindness may feel like, yet i think the beauty of the image is, despite the artist's inflicting what he feels blindness feels like, that his vision of it in itself holds something important, some kind of romantic excess and fullness of experience. for example, the wholeness of the bread in his hands, these objects, the water jug become all encompassing, the bread is not a brown flaky spongy-looking thing but rather a solidity that occupies a space in his mind, in the same way, everything is assorted not by sight but by feel, by the innerness, essence of it. and there is something so large about this, the concavity of his body expresses this, as though the weight of the world overwhelms him in some crucial way ... and the juxtaposition of that with the meager bread and water and the concave shoulders, it is an underestimation, a retraction, a withdrawal of the blind man because this superfluity of feeling can only be expressed by the sense of shrinking away from it, keeping yourself guarded against the awe -- and watching, the onlooker, the painter -- he can only see the shrinking because that is how he feels ...and that is the only way in which he can express the magnitude in these colors, on this canvas.

traveling

i find it impossible to prepare for a trip all at once. i need time, long lengths of it, give me a year, tell me we will make a trip in a year and i will spend every day of it, learning to leave the place i am in, so that i will have made the trip already before the trip has begun, so that i am always traveling, so that i don't have to begin traveling --

how is it possible for a place to invade you? i can picture the landscapes of bangladesh in my eyes now. the cold sweaty windows, the hordes of people, my quiet relatives. my cousin with pale skin and dark eyes and a disapproving mouth. my little cousins who have grown up to become strangers, the suitcases we will take with clothes which i don't normally wear. there is such a nakedness in traveling, an absolute vulnerability, to be exposed to some place so entirely new that it becomes like a sound reverberating in the hollows of your ears, so full like a bite --

every moment has a different texture. waking up to a different sunrise, to different sounds. every moment is so pregnant with the alterity of the life i normally lead, the patterns i have learnt to sway with.

yet when i return, everything will taste brighter and sharper. all this dread, and all these words will have shrunk into wisps of smoke, like a dying fire, full with secrets of the burning.

memory

more and more with my struggles with memory (some one who does not think she has a bad memory but will tell people she does because it appears she does) i wonder if forgetting is some crucial ritual that humans find themselves perplexed with. of course there is so much which burdens a human being (language, time, other humans) but memory might be the one most devilish gift-curse. i saw a film today morning (wild strawberries) the protagonist can only live when he indulges in his memories, but in order to indulge in them he has to make a point to forget them in his daily life, to live austerely and remember them, all at once, in dreams sharp and potent. it is strange that i should see portions of perfect sense this week as well, which deals with a deadly contagion which robs people of their five senses. it is only when they are about to lose a certain sense are they overwhelmed with the sense - for example, before losing one's sense of smell, the characters are flooded with memories sharp evocative - memories which are triggered by smell.

it's such a cliched topic i think, 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' or 'hunger is the best condiment' but there is something so intrinsically paradoxical and truthful about it - forget sadnesses in order to Live, but one can't Live unless they have experienced the sadness. and how can the act of forgetting ever be on purpose? or can it be? your dog dies, get a new one, knowing that you are doing it to forget therefore you aren't really getting a new dog but getting a new-dog-which-isn't-your-dead-dog -- and perhaps, then, you want to make it clear to yourself that it isn't your dead dog you see in your new dog and so you recreate the feeling of missing your dead dog, so you look at pictures to remind yourself -- and then consciously 'forget' it again as you play with your 'new' dog. such a delicate and tricky balance, remembrance/non remembrance in the same breath. or it is all a giant puddle of memories, and the human brain as they say can only hold 7 things at a time -- knowing you can only hold 7 things at a time therefore you are holding far more

i was trapped, too (the way you might have been, reader, reading this last paragraph) with the old professor in wild strawberries and with the two lovers in perfect sense. it is most obvious that the deadly virus is no more than some psychological construct (metaphorized as a deadly contagion) but more importantly, it was self inflicted, it has to be, one has to create this feeling of knowing that all senses will be gone in order to appreciate these senses, and yet yet all of this is shown with the utmost incredulity, shock almost that the senses are going -- and it's this shock that is fabricated in the same way that getting a 'new' dog is fabricated, it needs to be play acted in order for the game to work, in order to really feel sharply, feel strongly, appreciate senses, or whatever it is that you can only appreciate once you have lost it (be it your body for an aging person, so on)

and even this, this old man in wild strawberries looking at this picture you can see how infantile he looks on his arms and knees, mouth slightly open in a garden (a symbolic womb perhaps) revisiting his childhood because to have reached this age, every other sensation has been experienced and re-experienced to the point of numbness and he simply wants to feel it all over again, feel it newly, he must now (symbolically) return to the womb, be born again in order to experience.

where does that leave us - self conscious human beings with something as slippery and monumental as Memory in our palms?

a new year

-i've begun to collect my hair in a box named Paul. the box is cardboard, black with golden lettering and used to hold colorful macaroons...they were immensely sweet and decorative. my hair looks wispy and uncanny clumped together in there shadowy like a bird's nest. it occurred to me that if there were a fire, i might not save anything in the house but this box of hair. most objects are just as fleeting, just as perishable in the long run.

-i'm speechless and wordless. language can become such a tricky monster, and allows me to reveal only the most petty information, what i ate and what i wore and what i plan to do but nothing else. not what there could be, not the thoughts at the second layer, that part of the mind. that he holds tight, indulging in my thoughts hoarding them for his private uses. for the time being i will assent to my tongue not being mine.