Inner Revolution

Walk that trail which lines the dark to step on shadow of grown trees nailed to the ground. The edge of cliff calls your name and primal life colors your veins black. Feel the blade, unearth the pocket and grip your will to shred your lips. Blood seeps broken lines of skin stained with a past.

Look down at the cascade of wooden trunks webbed with the maya of green. Leaves have been constricted to spears and pine cones sharpened with age. Your fall is inevitable. Hair flows against the dirty wind in every direction your happiness has run away from you. Take one step and the war begins. Heart and mind corrode your cells with the radiations of life. Take two steps and the cells get sliced in tearing death by the surgical weaponry of the pines.

Shallow whims of heart and submissive temperament of mind had crippled your being into a void. You win the battle at the first step. Fear of losing existence brought you back to exist. Chromosomes of this new being tags its label to 48. You are an orphan. Parented by no heart and mind but by a complete sense of the body and being. 

You committed mistakes. You traded your senses for a sugarcoated life of the easy and pathetic. Self-complacent grease diminished your hunger for the unattainable. You traded the pulse of your veins for the closest rush of an apparent ecstasy. You traded time for healing sorrow. No more. You demolish what can be attained today. You attack what you had dreamed since your childhood. Heart and mind is stoppable. Body and being is unstoppable. You break the glass wall of your whims and rust ridden sorrows. There is no life. There is a being. You are that being. 

Look closely at the eyes. Humans’, beasts’, or the ones you see at the mirror. Just stare at the building hollow in them. Solve that labyrinth. Within it there is freedom. Until you accept that freedom, you are a slave. Just like the billions who lived and died before you.

Do not go to McLeod Ganj and Triund!

You are at the mountain top. Darkness beyond sunset has crept over the land. Streaks of dim light escape from the camping tents near you. Icy cold wind is nailing your body. Behemoth clouds are gunning down the horizon with their thunderbolts. There is ultraviolence in the air. Your pale shadow from half-burnt bulbs is shivering. Snow clad neighboring mountains stand taller and colder than you. Now live this experience with your mates and you will experience a dark night at Triund. Do not go to Triund.

You are at your workplace. The clicks of computer keyboards play a faster symphony than your imagination. Projects and assignments have formed skyscrapers on your mental farmland. Stuck in its gate is a board which reads “Creativity will be prosecuted”. Monotonous routine is drilled deep into your blood that you feel even the mosquitoes call you by your name. Your thoughts cannot get past the lowest common denominator. You trap others in your own confinement. You are experiencing a (capitalist) world of slavery. Please, stay there.

You get a call from your friend at 7 am to pack your bags and go for a trip together to a lush land of cold mountains. You will get over with college in a month. Your comrades and you will wander off to career oriented paths. Your time is running out. You reach the railway station and head off to a journey marked by humorous vices and overcrowded stories at the train box. You book a cab and stare at birds chirping a welcome song as the altitude gets higher. Air gets purer and your mind oozes heavy doses of tranquility. You are at the threshold of the Tibetan exile capital of India. Do not pick up that call.

You wander off to the market of McLeod Ganj. Your eyes see a neat fashion statement. Streets are lined with ornaments, food and an adventure of travel. What you actually see is freshly brewed freedom served with a calling of the wild being sold for free. Your taste buds are not working alone when you are eating breakfast at a café. Your ears also have to listen to the elemental music of divine Buddhist mantras. You relax at the balcony of your hotel room. The aroma of coffee does not pass through smog inflicted air. You binge watch tails of spectre clouds continually floating across a reddish moon. You are awestruck with that haunting beauty. Do not experience nights where your pupils dilate and hesitate to flatten.

You want to trek the 9 km long path of Triund. The sole of your feet longs to kiss the land of a distant dream. Your budget appears to stalemate that longing. You buy the calling of the wild from the streets and checkmate the king of monetary shortage. You begin to trek a path whose boundary is marked by the trees of rhododendron (Buraansh). You are walking in the middle of woods showering red flowers. Your eyes watch the scenery in pixels which your DSLR fails to shoot and hear the notes floating in alfresco air which your phone’s playlist fails to match. Clouds darken the sky in a flash of time and rain begins to wash your skin from the stench of the sweat of plains in a way that face wash products still cannot. Hailstorm replaces the rain and you feel your heart pumping blood like never before. You sit at a café and watch balls of ice hitting the façade of classist travelers and filtering them down to mere humans. Do not plan to trek the path of Triund.

You have reached the summit and you are motionless. Your jaw has dropped down to the abyss of wonder. Your feet have not failed you. You do not see anymore but feel. You are feeling the existence of the gigantic range of snow clad Dhauladhar range behind your camping site. Your eyes are moist. You are feeling your existence under grey clouds. You eat plain food and have some tasty laughs with your mates, while mother Earth provides an ambience of thunder and purple lightning. Your clothing is not warm enough and you are sleeping the night, best defined by the bard’s words- “sweet are the uses of adversity”. In the midst of the freezing night, you are losing your external self. You realize that even the sky is external; for the Sun is forever in your mind. Do not camp where your body feels comfortably numb.

You wake up to a sunny morning. You have the urge to look at a mirror and gaze at the body vibrating at the frequency of unparalleled love. In a list of your most beloved things, you have finally climbed up to the number one position. The dog sitting next to you agrees on that. You bask in the sun. You photograph different lives posing a new sense of meaning, they secretly feel from within. You trek down with your four college buddies who have lived the same experience. You pack McLeod Ganj and Triund in the bag of your heart and leave for the place where henceforward you will wear the shield of freedom against the attack of monotonous monetary routine. Do not wake up to a sunny morning at Triund.

I repeat, do not go to McLeod Ganj and Triund!

The Shape of Water overview

The Shape of Water (2017)

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro

Screenplay by: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor

Cinematography by: Dan Laustsen

Starring: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon

She gazes and learns an interesting art form from the telly, shuts the door and enters the hallway. Realizing the emptiness of arena which has always guided her home; she livens it up by tap dancing her feet to “Bojangles, the stair dance”. Or perhaps, her mind realizes the emptiness of her disabled world and her young heart reloads her body with daft hope. Dance is a beautiful cinematic totem attributed to our protagonist Eliza Esposito (Sally Hawkins) by the master puppeteer of the story, Guillermo del Toro.

 She exits her apartment and an old owner of her neighboring theatre offers her two free tickets of the screening of a ‘Bible show’. In the beginning of the film, when the overall box office performance of the theatre was not clear, I wondered whether that owner gifted her free tickets as a symbol of kindred spirit or for the sake of pity. Upon deeper introspection of the film, I realized that the scene was a ‘Fade in’ for del Toro’s fantasm for Church, its obscurities and people’s evolving spirit for something greater the usual Holy.

Eliza sees the amphibian man, or as the folks of its native land refers to him – God, for the first time when he is under water. Water is a special sign. Its love stories are not decorated with mundane bourgeoisie houses and status but with intense complexity that only a few rare lovers get to live. You surpass the human wavelength and become a God or Goddess yourself, when water drives your soul.

Our protagonist is mute and shares friendship with a struggling artist, her neighbor. The artist wishes to go back to his younger self and the mute’s face shines curiosity for a regular life. He teaches her the essence of dancing, in the world of a black and white past. Colors after all, build a façade over the world dancing in the binary frequency of black and white. They watch telly and tap their feet to the rhythm of the music. I guess, sometimes all it takes is two special people to tap their feet together and their soul gets to liven up a little bit more.

 Del Torro renders her libido, routinely. Her janitor work, routinely. But he reminds us that amidst what has become routinely chores, there’s always a catalyst to convert this routine into life. A shining star who renders the mundane and taboo into humor and feeds oxygen to the suffocating human in us. Zelda (Octavia Spencer) is that shining star in The Shape of  Water. Natural, spontaneous and converses with her eyes. Brilliant!

To gather the company of the Amphibian man with whom she begins to share an amorous spirit, Eliza cracks an egg with a spoon and it’s the first time we see the creature in alfresco air for just a second and the frame shifts back to her. In that second there was an adorable confusion in his eyes as he watches her. He watches her like how my dog gazed at me, resting his head on the railing, when I was about to enter my home, wearing a face mask for the first time. That adorable confusion in his eyes feeling ‘it’s you… I know it’s going to be you.’

While discussing the decadent morality of a few flawed characters in Bible, in a subtle stroke the antagonist, Strickland (Michael Shannon) taunts the black woman, Zelda over the image of God being more of white man than a black woman. In another scene the café owner debars a black couple from sitting at the empty counter table seats. With these strokes, del Torro slams all the worldly religious hypocrisy, racial and female discrimination matters right onto our faces. This is how you portray the prejudice of humans, by neither exaggerating nor deviating from the flow of the story. As my school teacher used to say – “short and effective like a bullet.” This is brilliant screenwriting.

During her daily commute, Eliza uses an apparel as a cushion against the bus window during her daily commute. Lights and cinematography reaches a grand, praise worthy summit at such scenes. It’s at these times during the tiring commute that your eyes want to rest, but someone special occupies your mind and enchants your world with a starry sky. At times, with eyes shining blue gems.

 At times, with their rubies embroidered face.

Their lands of birth were separated by miles. Their countries, different. But somehow his pulse throbbed with the same music she loved. A quiet land with each other, in the ambience of that music and food is what became xanadu for them.

Our antagonist, Strickland is perhaps the personification of time, torturing a naïve and sensitive face. In the reel life, that face is the amphibian man. In the real life, humans don that face for a tortured masquerade. Here’s something though, which makes us the possessor of becoming an enlightened being but the Amphibain man fails to possess. It’s the human will, which can bend the time to one’s favor and alternate the conditions of his present and future universe to his/her heart’s beating. I do feel the emotions being portrayed in such scenes but realizing the essence of such emotions in real life, makes me enjoy and live the message of the movie on a twin fold level of emotional and logical gratification.

      

“He sees me for what I am, as I am. He’s happy to see me, every time every day.” signals Eliza, a person victimized for the better parts of her life, for the one who gets her heart beating. A blissful pehomenon. A continuum of subjective and objective love. Love of a high standard.

Moment arrives when she thinks she will have to bid adieu to her one and only. That moment of separation is not gut wrenching but rather slithers your gut into pieces and roasts it on burning coal. Oh, but how can she say goodbye when her heart has finally begun to live? In a moment of cinematic brilliance, del Torro brings Eliza into an epiphany of expressing her love which will make your eyes bathe red in the shape of water. What appeals to me even more is the eye for optimism, shown in the end when the moment of separation reaches its most sensational point. Their love hits rock bottom and in the bleakest of darkness emerges this light which burns the black and illumines their new found love to the frequency, which would’ve perhaps taken the Greeks years to fathom. Water signs, you see.

Strickland attains revelation and speaks, “Fuck, you are a god.” It’s the time you realize that you are greater than your past. It’s the time when oppression itself realizes that you cannot be tamed with dejection, self loathe and depression. It’s the time you create a new destiny for yourself. It’s about the time you lose the Ugly, acting fraudulently as hope, gather the soul's Bright from the past and find eternal freedom to create the most powerful and happy future. Only happens when you believe in your heart’s unfiltered wish and work towards it.

Each movie that I watch is a journey to the inner self. The more I watch them, the more I see and feel my inner state vividly. It is through cinema that I find myself easy to describe. It is tough to phrase but I am just energy’s human form who looks at life through an empathetic, dreamy set of rose-tinted shades and now, unabashedly drive my will to the heart’s desire.     

Click to watch the trailer of The Shape of Water

Killers and Psychological Thrillers

Vengeance of the Cursed.

Starring:
Cursed Few, Sane

Ugly impulse against the world; their [Cursed Few] hearts have no pity for the Sane. Gold and diamond ridden necks of the Sane turn into charcoal ridden skeleton; their eyes have no sense of Vanity Fair. Beyond the decadent morality of humanity; their mind boasts a novice religion of bloody sensuality. It begins with the world in general and then their steady stream of rage engulfs only the Sane who laughably comprise this world.

Not unlike a conundrum, which the gifted resident of Baker Street can solve, the horror of psychic fluxes have gunned their childlike emotions down to the misery valley. The environment has become a whirlpool of dark void and only a stab across soft chests can cease their null desires. They may rise to the moon or lick the crevice of hell like a tide, but deep within, they wish to be gentle, even and stable. Three words, which if brought to life can only be visualised erupting as a persona on a mirror, where just one naïve attempt to touch that mirrored soul and it smokes away to oblivion.

Channel your vision to a beautifully embroidered carpet. The tapestry of colors, their edges and infinite arcs. Gaze at them and imagine a life following these patterns. You may classify it as an exotic, abundant, archetype of fondness, but you also know that a minute from now and you will return to YOUR life. You won’t realize that once you look away, this world molds the life of a cursed few into that tapestry. You won’t realize that once you look away, these patterns and arcs turn grey. That these patterns do not have soft edges but posses such lethal sharpness that its sufferers have become inherently numb to blood and heartfelt contentment.

The sane began with pity, then annoyance, followed by hatred for the cursed ones. Their demeanor, presence in the vicinity and then their existence; the sane hated and continues that hatred with much more vigor than their religious fervor for fictitious figures. Sanity is a façade for meager senses of emotions. It is not a term for exuberant form of living, but since most humans flourish in its domains, the cursed ones get attacked by them.

These cursed ones have realized that only through the occurrence of astute psychological trauma, they have been able to strive towards a self-generated purpose of breaking the façade of lifeless dreamscape; dreamscape built by nature and rendered lifeless by the Sane. Some wish and other have been able to achieve it through murder - the only action which is beyond the shallow justice of the superficial entities or the Sane. They will murder humans or their own complacency, but either way, they will rise beyond the venomous tapestry of grey life, erasing any emotional bankruptcy. If others wish to dear them, they shall sign onto a life, declared corroded by the Sane.

Lover of an aware and awoke killer is fulfilled wholeheartedly, as the great deception of pretentious being is destroyed by the void of his/her past.

(Images used are screenshots from the movie, The Killing of a Sacred Deer by Yorgos Lanthimos.)