One of the many clocks my uncle, an antique collector, bought and gifted to my mother. He has more than 50 clocks in his home.
We are doomed.
Alluding to literature, film, and art to explore the dark hole in our hearts
Why do you go there? To that dark corner of the room to brood like Sméagol? You hunch over your flaws and beauty to protect it all, because your heart has been broken and the world is much too big to pay attention to it all.
I recently read Marguerite Duras’ novel The Lover. It is essentially an autobiography from her experiences as a young teenager in Vietnam during the Indochina colonization era. She has a poor upbringing in Saigon and finds solace in a scandalous relationship with an older Chinese man. Her evenings after school would be sexual encounters in his small place at Cho Lon. In the arms of her lover, she is told how much she means to the man, that he won’t forget this moment even though she might, and that he would still be okay with that. These sweltering evenings conjured up by the muggy weather and passionate sex seep deep into the two’s anamnesis. They will never be the same as before. For the longest time, decades later when she’s old and wrinkled, retired at an office in France, the Chinese man calls her by phone to tell her that he had never stopped loving her. And so begins, at a late stage in Duras’ life, a confessional novel about The Lover.
The fact that she waited until the last stages of her life to write such a novel pains, yet fascinates me. How many evening had she spent thinking of that man over the decades? Specifically, how many moments? Perhaps, it is my young and unexperienced love life that piques curiosity on how people handle romantic relationship break-ups. I am not sure why, but I contest to the idea that I have never been in a relationship. The truth is, no, I have not been involved romantically with someone, but I have experienced many rejections in life. Before you say it’s not the same, how can you explain to me that I feel so deeply wounded at the thought of things and people that I once carried with my heart to never return back to me? For sure, I know it all too well. And so again, Duras’ decades of remembrance is profoundly felt by me.
Why do we do things that tempt us? Why is pain and sadness pleasurable? Well for one, it takes our mind off of things perhaps. Secondly, it is human nature to self-deprecate. Thirdly, we are blinded by love. Am I wrong?
…
Love is everything, in the slightest speck of light. It is in the eye of the beholder.
We get to define things however we want. And that is, itself, privilege. Sometimes it’s too much, people break down on this pressure.
I rise from these chains and call bullshit to the capitalist ideas that give rise to idiocy in our society. The veil of innocence is so opaque, we cannot see our own faults in the consumption of materials.
It’s hard to truly own up to our own mistakes even though we recognize them. When grappled with rejection from those we love, we don’t take it well. We revel in it, like fools, and say stupid shit. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts right? That’s why I turn to artists like “The Blaze” and movies like “American Honey” to dance my life away. That’s where I truly embrace being and feeling human. It’s freedom, dancing around a fire with all your emotions out of your soul. It’s a live recording of an echocardiogram, except it’s written in invisible ink and interpreted in the air with those around you in that specific moment you choose to let it all go.
Art. Art. Art. Create meaninglessness jack shit.
But I have good news. People have the choice to cut the slack. Those scissors are given for an exchanges of art. Because only art can exist when there is suffering. When one suffers, they see the beauty in things. I am determined to find the beauty in all this.
…
I had a conversation with a stranger, a French student studying English literature, whom spewed out words of wisdom. I confided in her, “What if my breakthrough is as late as Marguerite Duras?” She replied, “Well, we should look at time as if it is our friend.”