hermeneutics on rye

I’m just waiting for my computer to suck up all the footage from my camera.  It happens in real time, so it takes a while.  It’s a strange to get paid to spend all your waking hours staring at peoples faces, pausing on it if you want a stare to linger…usually people begin to feel awkward if you stare, but all I have to do is press pause and I can stare as long as I want.  It’s as though I have this power to overcome all these boundaries that society places on our physical space and the value we place on that.  Is that fair?  I don’t know.  I guess it depends on if they knew I was staring at them at the time that I was.  I can make people’s faces look as though they are about to cry, or about to go to the bathroom, and I can hold it like that for as long as I want.  It’s a somewhat strange experience, and makes me think about what it is that I have in my hands when I am filming someone.  What makes someone want to speak into a camera, speak to a camera about things that are so hard to fathom at first hearing.  Is it the disconnect between a face and a lens, an artificial eye?  What is it that makes me think that it is so important for us to communicate with one another, and that there is truly very little else that matters?  Is that unreasonable, naïve?  Forgive me, I have just been sitting in front of my laptops for the past 3 weeks editing and stealing people’s expressions.

The camera is whirring as I write this.  If I look at it, I see a man with a coffee can trying to aim it towards a wireless Internet router on an island 2 km away.  We are all on a boat.  It is 27 degrees outside, about 4pm.  A woman wearing a hijab has now taken the coffee can.  It is a homemade antenna.  This seems ordinary to me, and perhaps that is a sign that I should really take a break.  So much can happen so fast.  One day it is February and you can hear your mother practicing scales on a harmonium just down the stairs.  It is bitterly cold outside, there are few people around, it’s often dark.  All you do is work, everyday, trying to make some dreams approach reality, trying to make everything happen.  But everything is uncertain, and at times you feel hollow, alone, and aimless, rudderless, though in reality there are so many things that lie ahead of you it is as if the girth of those prospects tips the balance and throws up a brick wall that blocks out the sun.  Then you are suddenly in a war zone, there are children dying, you are listening to young boys tell you how they were forced to murder, and you are eating beef three times a day. It’s just an airplane ride.  It’s just rocket fuel.

Somehow, placing yourself behind a camera allows you this insight into peoples lives.  Your day to day becomes a process of having the ability to ask someone you have just met very personal questions.  This is, indeed, your job.  You are supposed to convey their feelings, their thoughts, to other people.  And so you become, in essence, a medium.  You become a device that allows the perspectives of one person on the other side of the planet to be heard by someone else very far away.  You put their faces on the internet, and by typing a few letters here and there anyone can see it.  Communication is like some other language entirely, or rather the visual medium seems to amount to the ultimate lingua franca.  We can all sense emotions, we can all realize what it means when someone’s eyes are downcast, or when they smile at you because they have just said something clever, something honest, something that they felt was appropriate to say.  These things don’t need subtitles, or voices to illustrate further what it is they are trying to convey.  Or rather, what you as a medium are trying to convey to an unknown audience.

There is something both very appealing about this process, and at the same time there is something very frightening bout it.  The latter as you, as a sculptor, have this power to convey a person’s personality without them knowing.  I can make you look like an idiot, or I can make you look like a pontiff.  It’s a process where you feel as though you are getting to know someone, but based only on 10 minutes of their speaking, or their gestures, of the movements of their hands and how their eyes shift from left to right when they are trying to emphasize a point.  But in reality, you don’t know them at all.  It’s as though you have this opportunity to go back in time and readdress and process a first impression.  You hear your own voice asking questions to be answered, and you wonder, why did I ask that question?  Your own voice surprises you.  It’s a process by which you can sense why it is you react with that next question when you did, because you can reflect it in your own understanding of how you look at people, the things you want to know and ultimately the things you value about new knowledge, people you meet, the value you place on getting to know something new about someone.  And yet, intrusive as this may arguably seem, it is as though you have free license to do so.

You’re in a bus, you’re on a motorcycle, you are in the passenger seat of a car and it is going to somewhere else away from the previous somewhere else.  And whn you arrive, you say ‘Apoyo’ and then hands exchange.  There are bricks all around you, there are wireless routers all around you, there are tin shacks, palatial mansions, blue eyes, brown eyes, eyes that look at you and then your pants, eyes that have seen you before, haven’t we met before?  Perhaps.

All of this is like some predetermined process of getting more hair on your chest, as it were.  That is to say, you are indeed getting older. Which, however, is not to say that the number of hairs on my chest are like some biometric by which I can count how many days I have left and what it is I need to do, but rather that all these things seem to make me look back at my life and think; that I am one person who has lived this life in a way that was initially predetermined by someone else, well, by two people in particular.  My physical surroundings seem so alien in retrospect, living on a dirt road where no one spoke my language and there was no one my age to really talk to anyway if I wasn’t in a classroom.  But at the time it was all I knew.  It seemed normal to me, to have my mother around and no one else, to dig holes in the snow and think of what I could put in it, to cross country ski across the lawn as the sun was setting and the sky was red and all I had to do was get home and eat something.  It’s as though…it was just…it was just all I knew.  My community was my mother.  I saw my mother do so many things.  As though she also knew nothing else, and that her life was just what was given to her.  Though I am not so sure if it was indeed like that, as she was an adult, and as such was blessed (cursed) with the faculty of memory, of other faces, of a community that was so different from that place in which she found herself then.  To make do with a situation, rather than to simply exist within it with no recollection of how others live, as what you feel and see is a first draft, there is no eraser there.  I have been thinking about that salmon colored house a lot lately.  I have been thinking about the basement, and finding my mother there one afternoon, and there was something terribly wrong.  But I couldn’t understand what it was, and I couldn’t do anything about it but try to be close to her.  The lingua franca is such; certain things are beyond adjectives, adverbs, I’m ’sad’, I’m running away from here, ‘quickly’. But my eyes aren’t glass, and I knew that person I saw with my own lens.

If I were to grow up somewhere else, if I were to have been born in India, if I were to have known only a farming community in West Bengal, if I had to work when I was 8 because my father had passed away, if I were someone else entirely then I would be elsewhere, I would be away from here, I would have different clothes and I would smell different, and maybe I’d be wearing a wristwatch.

I was not allowed to play with guns.  When my parents found out they were very upset.  I didn’t understand why.  It was the first time I had people to play with in my neighborhood, it all seemed so new to me at the time.  I had never played with guns before as I didn’t knowhow.  Some things should ever be learned.  Some things only make sense when you are older.

I can see myself in that boy’s face.  It’s as though I knew him, but I don’t.  I just see myself in him because of the way he is blowing his cheeks out and pursing his lips together.  But he isn’t me, and I am not him.  I don’t know him, but I can see the community that surrounds him and cherishes him.  I can see that he has two sisters, do they play with him or do they only play with other girls?  What did he eat for breakfast?  Did he like it, or did his mother make him eat it?

‘Anyway if you don’t eat it I’ll call the police and then they will
come and get you.’

‘No!’

(dial dial dial) ‘Hello, Police?  Yes, Rana isn’t eating his food…he
is being very naughty –’

‘OKOKOKOK’

But maybe it wasn’t like that.  I don’t know.  Everything gets rendered into a moving picture when you stare at a 640 x 480 frame all day.  Everything gets rendered to how fast his arm is moving, and when you need to cut that frame out.  Everything becomes scripted, and everything seems, in some bizarre way, predetermined.  Though of course, that would render it fiction.  And this is not fiction.  It’s not fiction, I know, as the moon was not like that yesterday, and 2 days ago the clouds looked like Europe without western Europe.  Well Western Europe is boring anyway.  No, its real, it’s happening.  These things are real.  I was like that once.  But that was a whole lot of clouds ago.

Time becomes this ever pliable sustance that can be altered with a remote control.  Music is like some transportation device.  With both in my control together I can see what I was like when I was his age. But I should know that in any case.

I think about what it has been like, now, not in the distant past when I had corduroy overalls, but just in the past.  Just in the recent past, just where I was…just now.  If I think about where I am, I picture a map.  And then I see my parents.  And then I see my sister.  And then I see me.  And I can draw long lines to connect the dots, and I can make the triangle as big or as small as I want, as my brain is not to scale in any case.  But the angles of this triangle are always changing, sometimes acute, sometimes obtuse, but never…round?  No that’s a poor analogy.  I don’t even know if that amounts to an analogy at all.