Well, but it seems the grass is always greener on the other side. Here it's been dripping incessantly right from Friday onwards and the miserable weather seems likely to persist till we're ready to scream with frustration. Which I already am.
And to add to it, I've not been well for some time. Abdominal cramps which began last Tue after I returned from a round of jogging and caused me to sit on the edge of the sofa with clenched mouth and contorted features, continued to haunt me with threats of a return for the next few days. Till I had to consult a local gastroenterologist on Fri noon. After noting all the related gynaecological complications, I was packed off to Somerset Medical Center for urine, blood and ultrasonography (involving some quite embarrassing invasion of anatomical privacy) procedures. Although each and every human being related to the medical technicalities was unexpectedly kind and reassuring, the very nature of the day, sullen and overcast, tortured me with vague premonitions of some unpleasant tale in the making. I'm not superstitious by nature, but as I remarked earlier, weather related changes influence me to a ridiculous extreme. The reports are due soon. I wonder.
We were watching X-Men 2 (X2) and 3 (X-Men : The Last Stand) back-to-back on FX Channel yesterday evening. It struck me as ominous that people like Bobby's parents and the President/Jean's parents should judge any aberration from the normal human condition as a disease needing some sort of cure, however drastic or painful the latter might be to the person in consideration. Or that Jean's id-like unconscious and violent passions, in the avatar of Phoenix, seek to be harnessed by Magneto for all the wrong reasons. It's most curious indeed how we all seem to have this predisposition to form cults/clans/groups/gangs against anything/anyone else that might threaten our individualism. As if ganging up itself was not a theoretic oxymoron with respect to the virtue of individualism and uniqueness. But I did find the use of the Freudian conscious = ego = Jean/unconscious = id = Phoenix symbolism intriguing. The portrayal of Jean as the life-giver towards the end of X-Men 2 in stark juxtaposition to Phoenix as the death-wreaker right at the beginning of X-Men 3 is compelling. Although it does remain a problem that all these moral implications somehow tend to get overwhelmed in the light of the visual kaleidoscope that is the film.
Amistad, watched on Friday night on DVD, however, stunned all our perceived notions of humaneness and nobility. The fact that Cinque actually has to fight for the basic human right of independence in a world where Declarations of Independence form such a mouthful in history, jars and jeers at our jaundiced desensitisation to the trauma that underlies the history of 'civilizations'. It was sobering, this rude realisation how we humans have knowingly and willingly contributed to the ghastly and shameful apparition of the subaltern. It is a testimony of incessant narcissistic human enterprises (instanced in the oft-dismissed diatribe of the 'Communist Manifesto') that we are too mired in academic technicalities to analyse with all the respect due to our collective conscience. We are too busy hoarding for our respective (a)moral futures in a world of globalisation to trace our tortuous way back to the lives we trample and tyrannise over in our effort to surface as the surviving elite. In short, we remain uncivilized primates, be it in our conspiracy to preserve class divides to serve our vested self-interests or in our blasphemous exploitation of God-given genes of complexion to further motivated neurotic (non)needs.
And all this for the ego ?! Which, as Lacan shows, is itself a human construct, the ultimate exercise in self-deception.
Mercy me.
1 comment:
Loved the way the words flow from the very depths of the soul..... as if the mind and the heart are fused into one.
Post a Comment