This has been brewing in my mind for quite sometime, but could not quite find the time to sit down and brood over matters philosophical, or put them down…pen on paper or otherwise. Two strands of discrete yet related thoughts meet here, related in some obvious but coincidental manner, in the way the mind works when you are in a rather excited state of emotional anxiety (for myriad reasons) and you indulge in pursuits that engage an amount of creative energy.
The emotional anxiety was of a very personal nature—thinking about relationships that I’ve been involved in, trying to figure out how exacting each one of them can/could be in its own, ever so unobtrusive way. Relationships involve love or care or nurture or empathy or hatred or none or many or any of these and many more. As we walk down life we engage in or dissociate ourselves from relationships, create new ones or grow out of them almost with a Darwinian inevitability. As you sit down to think, you start to wonder at your own gregariousness, at the innumerable relationships you have walked into and out of—however significant or otherwise they have been. Even those that are begun and ended on the road—those bus and train journeys reeking of food and conviviality, an exchange of phone numbers—and then complete oblivion….they also leave their marks, the ever so insignificant, yet indelible tick-tock mark on your mind.
The other strand was that of good, continental cinema that I’ve been watching the past few days. And the strange way they reflect on your reflections on relationships. I watched The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, a film based on the eponymous novel by John Boyne, De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, and The Reader, a film by Stephen Daldry. I found the first one somewhat weak, but of course, having read the novel beforehand gives you that sense of proleptic superiority which admonishes the ever so slight chink where your expectations falter. The other two—brilliant. Each one of them, in its own way, talks about relationships, and the very poignant, taut, exhausting desperation that they take you toward.
There was a strange connect between these two strands as they kept occupying the locus of my thought for a few days, and kept colliding against each other. The inevitability of relationships (and falling into and out of them) is undeniable. But one cannot fail to notice how we sometimes move towards a relationship with a deliberate and pronounced certainty, and engage in it with an unfailing purposiveness. As if this is the action that I must perform, this is the relationship I must embrace—for reasons personal, social, behavioural or otherwise. We maintain families, visit relatives, bring up children, make friends, get married—and all of this not always because it is inevitable, but also sometimes because such companionship gives us a sense of security, a sense being part of a familiar milieu. In fact, I was wondering, if this is the only reason why we do get into relationships. There is a certain social pressure to acquire security through relationships.
On the other hand, these films were saying quite the contrary. One cannot deny the profound intellectual content of these movies. They are good movies, and they talk about life in a realistic and dependable way. Yet, do they not explore the idea that relationships breed insecurity and crisis. A man who has nobody to care for is therefore free and much more secure than the one who has a family or a lover or a friend to care for! His desperation would be less intense as he has not a care in the world, nobody to feed, or to house, or to nurse except himself. It is relationships that make one more insecure, febrile and charged, more prone to commit acts of insane desperation to feed a child or treat a parent or make the lover less sad! Man alone is man happy. All the films are, in their final message to me, subliminally prescribing an Adornoesque detachment from the regular world of relationships.
