Memento Mori

Dev Anand died last week. He was 88.


I feel a distinct sense of loss. For a figure I had almost forgotten and for a life I had tucked away.

Dev Anand was no ordinary 88 year old. He was what the film magazines called the "evergreen hero"; one who had been acting since 1946 and hadn't delivered a hit or any movie of notice in the last two decades. This is the man credited with having "discovered" various actresses who then, in his own narrative, went onto become highly successful stars. Zeenat Aman is only among a long list. And for those who have forgotten Zeenat Aman (shame on you!), here's a reminder.



In various places, he is described as "The man who provided glimpse of different foreign countries through his cinematic oeuvre", India's "Gregory Peck", and "the longest serving matinee idol of Bollywood cinema."

What do I know or remember about Dev Anand? That he featured in these heartbreakingly beautiful songs. Of joy, and life, and love, and loss, and mischief, and coy flirting. That the black and white films of his that I consider part of my childhood were filled with content. And they were all undeniably urbane. They were about people caught in circumstances that allowed them to attain a notion of who they wanted to become. They were films about jaunty men, mysterious disappearances, recovery of love, the discovery of self, and magnificent women. They were scripts adapted from Ismat Chughtai and R.K.Narayan and froze for us the story of urban India and it's urbane men and women, be they working class taxi drivers, and bar dancers, or paying guests, con men, and middle-class women in unhappy marriages.

And I am trying to isolate the reasons why I feel desolate. And mulling the folly of mourning the death of a public figure who had been all but forgotten, his poor film choices over the years since the seventies decried and ridiculed. And for those who think he's managed anything interesting since "Hare Rama Hare Krishna", please go watch this; I did, in Jaipur's Raj Mandir no less.


The act of mourning, as most of us well know by now is never about anybody but ourselves and our vanishing sense of memory and temporality. We rely on friends, family, actors, films, and songs to preserve for us our childhood, our youth, our tremulous possibilities, and the many other lives we could have and have led. Every now and then we turn to them to recover the joie de vivre of an assumed immortality and vigor. And then they leave and the thought that we have left something behind with them is a difficult thought.

When I try and write about the role of film in Indian public culture, what I have most difficulty in capturing is its affective density, the sense that it permeates lives far deeper than mere symbolism. It doesn't stand in for life, it is life. I have lived with film as fantasy, as possibility, and as the material of the air I breathe.

Songs, for example, I experience as triggers of places, and smells, and food, and people. They form the background score and the very articulation of my mental picture albums. They stand in for dusky evenings and tightly bound clusters of singing voices, attempting rhythm, melody and kinship. Shooshan and I used to sing "Abhi na jao chodkar" on the footpath by the row of buildings where I set up my first apartment. "Mana Janab Ne Pukara Naheen" is one of the first songs I learnt to play on the mandolin. My ability to sing the entire "Hai apna dil tho awaara" ensured that I would always be on a winning antakshari team. "Nazar lagi raja tore bangle pe" was the song I hummed in bad tune with a professor from grad school. And on long train journeys from Bombay to Madras, strangers and I sang "Yeh Dil Na hota bechara", "Accha jee main haari", and "Dil Ka Bhanwar Kare Pukar" in temporary cohort as we headed to the place where no one spoke Hindi.

The films of Dev Anand are also a reminder that in the eighties, I was watching and listening to songs from films from the fifties and sixties on an old Panasonic recorder that my parents bought in the seventies. Bombay in the film was still recognizable to me as Bombay from my weekend trips into the city. Radio Ceylon had a designated hour to play what they called "Bhoole Bisre Geet" or forgotten songs. And these were the songs I most had the capacity to remember.

In an age when google is said to have robbed us of the capacity of memory, we feel loss more intensely even as we only feel it for a few seconds at a time. This then is the desolation and the forlornness of losing something so long forgotten that I have trouble naming it. And I do not know if I mourn Dev Anand, or the time of Dev Anand.

A Little Tooth

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

-- Thomas Lux

Part Three: Love

LIII

Let me not mar that perfect dream
By an auroral stain,
But so adjust my daily night
That it will come again.

-- Emily Dickinson (1830–86). Complete Poems. 1924.


How to Build Cathedrals. Cildo Meireles, 1987

A Story in 500 Words

Nietzsche said that women make the highs higher and the lows more frequent. For who I wonder. I am a woman and I feel the highs higher and the lows more frequent. Am I becoming more woman? Is this what they call gendering?

I have known for a while now that this might just be the end of life as I know it. The world is at war. Thinking does not lead to change. Television no longer brings pleasure for more than a sum total of sixty minutes. I have become more dependent on alcohol.

And yet, this is also the beginning as I know it.

I had a conversation at the drugstore this morning.
Man at the counter: “How’s it going?”
Me: Silence
Man at the counter: “Shopping spree this morning?”
Me: Silence.
Man at the counter: “Going somewhere?”
Me: “No”

I am not going anywhere. I did not buy drugs. I bought a lipstick, combs, hairbands, concealer, eyeliner, pantyhose, nailpolish, eyelash curler, and breath freshener.

Tomorrow night, I will fill in for my friend Eileen. She is ill. Tomorrow night, I will accompany her client to a masked ball. I will be as womanly as womanly possible. How does one do that though?

The other day I watched the little girls on television preen and pirouette as they performed to Beyonce’s “All the Single Ladies”. It was uncannily real. If you buy into the notion of the real that is. Perhaps it is from them that I have to learn how to be feminine. The tilt of the hip, the jaunt of the brow. The awareness of beauty. The settling in of power.

Yesterday, I had an appointment at the spa. I decided to go all the way. It hurt.

These days I feel the weight of walking down the street. The air bears down upon me. I am not sure who I am, even though this is who I always wanted to be.

Do not get me wrong. I am not in crisis. I do not bemoan my presence in the world. I am beautiful. And striking. I catch my breath when I catch my reflection in shop windows. Doormen at the Majestic tell me that I am lovely. Men hand in hand with their girlfriends, and paramours, and dates throw me furtive glances. The boy at the dress store gave me a pair of earrings, gratis. My new landlord smiles when I tell him the rent will be a day late.

And this should add to the weightlessness of being. But it doesn’t.

I am a woman, and I feel the highs higher but the lows more frequent. It is a hypermodern age. Things don’t last. My feelings are intense, and short-lived. I careen up and down. Profound anxiety suffuses my existence.

Nietzsche also said that behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman. I never knew what that meant; until now.

You see, I used to be a man.


© Ed Paschke
Elcina, 1973.
MCA Collection, gift of Albert J. Bildner

We asked for workers, but human beings came instead.

Agency is a tricky word. It is, in shorthand, the ability to be an agent. Of change, of value, of worth, even of identity. Choice writ large, intentionality writ small.

Agency is a tricky minefield. If one understates it, one takes away the ability of people to represent themselves. For example, think of an oft-used fragment such as "The oppressed....". The use of the passive form of the adjective might indicate that those identified as "oppressed" have nothing to do within this narrative except be elected to the position of the oppressed. They function as markers rather than human beings. Think of the way Africans function within the social imaginary; as "the exploited", "the stateless", "the war-torn". However, if one overstates it, then there is the risk of according more charge to individuality and individual ability than the social condition allows to any one individual or group of individuals. Think of the form of the narrative that we know as everyday heroism, the exception that valorizes the agentive single-minded, individual, who "beats" the odds to make his/her way in the world (The American Dream of course feeds on this genre).

So how about we work with a compromised form of the word? Think of an agent who is never completely agentive. First tentative way out of the problem.

The second issue is of course, as always, the question of writing. A narrative that goes back and forth, and can never make up its mind, is not as compelling as a nicely stated, well chosen "argument". And argue I must. Back to square one. So then what form of argument do I choose? In talking about the condition of call center workers, who do we care more about? The condition or the workers?

In the middle of all this pontification, I do know that I cannot stomach writing about the "social condition" and "compulsions" of call center workers as if each one does not wake up everyday and live this social condition...and think about it. Yes, I know, awfully unfashionable and unsophisticated. But I'm trying to think through the body. And the body as we know is often the most compelling compulsion of all. As in the Max Frisch quote that is the title of this post, they are workers, and they are human. And I need to think about unpacking the humaneness of the human. Or my own for that matter.

In case you are wondering where all this is going, I am trying to not write about agency. And it's hard. And yes, I know this is all rather obvious. But I have to write it out. Why? Because. We'll leave the rest for another caffeinated night.

(And of course I completely forgot to mention that which began this thought. Sometimes, we have a strange form of agency when we affect people without knowing that we do. And it isn't always good. It leaves one with a distasteful sense of power.)

Marx, as usual, will have the last word.

"Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand." (Grundrisse)

Friday Frivolity

The Philosopher's Drinking Song

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'bout the raisin' of the wrist.
Socrates himself was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
after half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away,
'alf a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
and Hobbes was fond of his Dram.
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart:
"I drink, therefore I am."

Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed.

-- Monty Python