Dream History
About how I once became part of a movie crew; but also just a detailing of what my favourite movie, Jia Zhangke's 'The World', did to my dreams once upon a time
I was in a house in the middle of the mountains, and also in a house by the sea. I was not alone; at least three of my friends were around. The identities of those friends were scrambled in my head. They belonged to different groups that had been with me on two different vacations, one in the hill town of Mcleodganj and the other in the coastal state of Goa. The town of my dream was also a fusion of Mcleodganj and Goa. Somebody, I can’t remember who, told me that the sea had a bump and that a team had been sent to normalize that bump. I didn’t understand this till I looked at the horizon from a balcony. The sea had risen in a bell-curve and two large poles were stuck on either side of the bump. These poles were lit throughout their length, as if they were large tube lights, and on squinting my eyes I noticed that there were dozens of boats linked to the poles through ropes. These boats were keeping the poles upright through a complex dance of push and pull. There were ripples on the bump’s surface, made all the more pronounced by the shimmering of the poles’ light on them. This bump was a tsunami, I gathered, and it was coming towards us. Then, as sudden as a blink, there came upon us a darkness that brought with it a colossal silence as well. I could sense that a lot of water was flowing over the house, and I reasoned that the water was the cause of the darkness. I was in the garret (there was a garret), and the glass pane on the starlight (there was a starlight) creaked with the weight of all the water that was flowing over it. There was panic; we scampered around the house. But no damage was done, no one drowned. The tsunami passed us by, so did the darkness, and soon the air took on the cool fragrant qualities it acquires after heavy rainfall. We would have calmed down completely in a few more minutes, but before those minutes could elapse the house began to shake. An earthquake. It was as if something large was striking the earth in each passing second. And these strikes were getting closer. I walked to the balcony again, in the company of my friends this time, and saw a hill town sprawled below us. No trace of the sea now. Moving through the town’s tiny lanes, there was a giant horse mounted by a giant man, the horse trotting in the way horses do when they sense their riders in deep thought. Then the spectre disappeared behind a tall building, after which it was lost to the dream. I and my friends looked at each other in dismay, but the dismay on my friends’ faces did not seem commensurate with what we had just seen. On the other hand, my shock was strong, strong enough to force a dissolving of the scene. During its dilution the dream repeated some of the images that it had already shown, as if its engine were giving away fits and sparks while cooling down. Perhaps it was these repetitions that had allowed me to memorise certain images and thus mark them as pivotal.
That night, before going to bed and dreaming as described above, I had seen The World by the Chinese director Jia Zhangke. Given that title, one may be forgiven for imagining a film shot in numerous locations across the globe, but Zhangke’s The World is curiously constrained. Made in 2003, nearly the entire movie is shot in Beijing, most of it in a theme park called the Beijing World Park. The park houses replicas of the world’s most famous attractions—The Eiffel Tower, the Arc De Triomphe, the Manhattan skyline, the Pyramids, the Stonehenge, the London Bridge, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Taj Mahal, et al—with elevated monorails offering transport from one to the other. In this lies the tension and irony of the title, for the Beijing World Park, successfully constructing a semblance of the world’s highlights for people in Beijing, also carries in its very existence the suggestion that there is no need to leave Beijing to see the best things of the world. Shorn of their original surroundings, context, and history, the attractions may be argued to have suffered an instant devaluation through such Chinese replication, but to the consumerist mind a correspondence with a popular pined-for image can bring satisfaction, even joy. Throughout the film, Zhangke offers many shots illustrating local tourist interest in these replicas, and while it is tempting to label this interest as ludicrous, even vulgar, the movie itself shows no vulnerability for this easy labelling, and is busy, instead, with complicating our understanding—of (1) the globalised desires that have made the construction, sustenance, and consumption of these fakes possible, and, more so, (2) the localised constraints that, in constant interface with the fake world, create a feeling of entrapment that inevitably leads to an annihilation of desire for not only the fake world but for the real world too.
Zhangke builds a narrative around the lives of those who work inside the Beijing World Park—people who, either briefly from the stage or constantly from the background (destined to be forgotten in either case), enable the delivery of spectacles for the consumption machine. The workers he chooses are all migrants. For them, to have reached Beijing is already a considerable displacement; they have covered certain lengths of the world themselves, their travels necessitated by material rather than consumerist concerns. These characters’ emotional well-being is connected to their material well-being, which is in a state of crisis for most. Love is important as a sort of anchor to their displaced lives. However, love’s ability to provide thrill or sustenance are both absent. Where love is an anchor, it is also a burden of its own. To keep it is to provision for it, either materially or through sex. Sex, in turn, is difficult either because the drive for it is in exile, or simply because the characters are provided communal housing and have no proper private place to have it in. All along there is this repressed desire for something adventurous, something immoral, something real enough to break through the surrealism of the surroundings. Sadly enough, only one of the characters gets out, a Russian immigrant woman who quits the Park job and prostitutes herself.
The two main characters, Tao and Taisheng, are in a love story, their love beset by all of what I have described above. Tao is a multi-purpose actor—now part of the mega Miss-Universe-like evening show the Park hosts for its visitors, now donning a kimono for play-acting in a Japanese tea party, now playing an air hostess inside a fake airplane. Taisheng is a security guard at the Park. He is a migrant from Shanxi province and is prone to helping friends who come to Beijing in search of work. One of Taisheng’s friends takes up a job at a construction site in the city. This friend chooses to work overtime and is subsequently killed in an accident caused by his own lapse of concentration. Taisheng is the one who listens to his last words inside the hospital. That night, because of attending to this dying friend, Taisheng misses an appointment with Tao, who is waiting in the hotel room they have come to spend some intimate time together in. This hotel arrangement is by no means a regular one, and it is shown to have transpired only once earlier, which was the first night that Taisheng and Tao had sex. Even this first night took long coming, and happened only after Tao realised that the Russian worker Anna, a good friend of hers, had turned to be a prostitute1. Sex in a love relationship, one could posit, became necessary for Tao only after she confronts the horrible prospect of sex as livelihood. And that confrontation leads to palpable changes in her character. The night when they make love, she asks Taisheng to promise that he will never cheat on her and also tells him that he is her ‘entire life.’ Clearly, the stakes of the connection with Taisheng have increased manifold for Tao. She will even propose marriage at some point.
But by the time Tao’s and Taisheng’s first night of sex happens, Taisheng’s story has had a slight deviation from loyalty to Tao. Taisheng has come in contact with Qun, a local entrepreneur who runs a sweatshop of sorts and is not associated with the Beijing World Park. Qun is married to a man who migrated to France some years ago; now it is she who’s trying hard to get a visa to go to France. To the viewer, and perhaps to Taisheng as well, Qun represents global aspirations. It’s clear how these aspirations, along with a certain confidence regarding their fulfilment, can appear desirable to someone like Taisheng, whose conundrum is at once both literal and figurative: the object of desire is in proximity (Tao; the world, as represented by its monuments) but the fulfilment of desire is prohibited (Tao denying Taisheng sex; the world being fake).
Qun’s first invitation to Taisheng to visit him at her sweatshop—a text message—is a revelatory moment in Taisheng’s story. The message arrives when Taisheng is on one of his nightly rounds through the park. He’s shown on horseback at first, standing still in front of a fake castle in the background—him and the castle and the white horse’s bulging muscles aglow with a source-less light, as if set up for portrait. In the next shot, he’s walking on the ground and pulling the horse alongside him, a white monument with Grecian cornice and pillars standing to a side. That’s when his phone beeps. On reading Qun’s message, Taisheng is at once thrown into tizzies of fantasy, shown by Zhangke as an animated sequence (he does that with all flights of fancy in the movie). Taisheng is back riding the horse now, tiny pink hearts bubbling out of his lips as he whistles and kisses the air; in the next shot flower stamen are bobbing like restless sperm cells.
But in this and future meetings, even as she dances with him and allows him to hold her and talk to her, Qun, too, denies Taisheng sex.
After watching the movie I thought at length about its ingenuity, and then took to noting the aspects that I believed made it exceptional. Lying on my bed, awaiting sleep, I replayed the slow scenes in my head. Details that I had apparently missed came back to me anew, and through the linkages I made with other parts of the movie the import of those details established itself in my head. I also made connections with my own experience in the world and felt all the better for it. For example, the movie had shown a kind of large, super-effective thermos being used by the characters, for sundry purposes needing hot water, and this was somehow significant to me because these were the same kind of vintage thermoses that I had seen locals use during my numerous trips to the high Himalayas. My mind took me to the Mcleodganj trip I had made not so long back.
But there was one image that I could not make peace with, that I could not reconcile with the overall conception that I had by now constructed. This was the image of the horse. Why was Taisheng on a horse when he received the message from Qun? What was the import of him and the horse beside a monument in miniature? What effect did the director Jia Zhangke want from this last image just before the animated frenzy?
A dream swells through writing. Its surface stretches and becomes smoother, even as its depths are farther from that surface.
Dreams are cinematic. This is so obvious so as to be able to carry only the tiny meaning-load of a cliché. In my opinion, dreams are novelistic too. They contain, and are often able to convey, information about that which is hidden or unclear within the dream, information that only an omniscient narrator, and no dream-camera, can know.
In my dream, I am unsure if there was really no sea in my second viewing from the balcony. Maybe, beyond the large buildings that hid the horse and its rider, there was a calm sea. The vision is unclear to me. But blur or no blur, sea or no sea, I know that the town was also a mountain town. And now I can say that I know that the town was Mcleodganj. Even as the cinema of the dream was unclear regarding that information, its novel could deliver it with ease.
One of my unemployed friends (I once had many) wanted to make a movie in Mcleodganj, a movie about Mcleodganj. He called it ‘The Untitled Mcleodganj Project’. It was to be a movie about the elusive soul of the town, about the various forces pushing and pulling there, about how the town is at least a respite if not plain refuge. With such delightful, perhaps measured, vagueness, my friend had managed to get together a small crew of nine, members of which were at least amateurs or semi-pros in one or the other component art of movie-making. He wanted me to be the tenth member, for which I was reluctant, firstly because I was scared of the repercussions of skipping work for the whole eight days of the schedule, and secondly because I had no clue about movie-making and could not imagine myself contributing one bit. I passed days in indecision, sometimes imagining Mcleodganj from my cubicle, while over the phone my friend urged me every now and then to join the crew. He said things like, It’s a once in a lifetime thing, or, I need you to make this happen, or, You will contribute by helping bring my vision alive, or, You can even act if you want to. Compelled, not by any of his promises or offers but by simple curiosity, and also the desire to escape work for some days, I made my decision a day before shooting was scheduled to begin. I took a morning Bom-Del flight and then another to Dharamshala. In between the two flights I messaged my boss that there had been a family emergency and that I had had to rush to my parents. To lie further and concoct a more solid excuse seemed unnecessary at that time. Distance from Bombay had made me comfortable.
When I reached Mcleodganj I headed straight to the roadside café where our crew was already shooting. My friend came forward and hugged me. I am happy to see you, he said, but the expression on his face was that of anxiety. Behind us, on a table, a person from our crew was having a conversation with a white woman. It was being filmed, but I noticed how the lapel mikes on their collars were clearly visible to the camera. Was that intentional? I wondered. The woman was red in her face from too much talking, and our person was nodding blankly as if he had no clue how to direct the conversation to something substantial, something that my friend, the director, might have wanted. It’s terrible here, my friend said, with a forced bass in his voice. Let’s have lunch. You must be hungry.
The two of us moved toward a restaurant further down the road. I asked my friend if something was amiss. Everything will be alright, he said. The rest of the crew joined us some minutes later. I noticed a surprising lack of camaraderie in the group, something that I had not expected at all. Lunch was a silent affair. And then, on the pretext of showing me the way and giving me company, everyone walked towards the hotel and took the afternoon off. Clearly, no one wanted to shoot. ‘The Untitled Mcleodganj Project’ was already in trouble.
At the hotel, I grabbed my friend’s arm and pulled him to a corner. At first, he deflected my attempts at a conversation, saying that what I had seen was merely a case of jitters, which would subside as more time passed. But why was everyone in their hotel rooms at this time? I asked. Why aren’t people getting over their jitters by shooting? My questions became more strident and my friend realised that he would have to tell me something more. It is me who is having the jitters, he said. My mind is stuck at basic problems and it can’t seem to make any headway. We tried to shoot something meaningful the entire morning, but I couldn’t give any proper direction to the rest of the crew, and they are all frustrated with me. Coming to the hotel is a kind of protest.
I was confused. But isn’t there a script? I asked him. He laughed at my question. No, there is none, he said. It is all in my head.
This was uncharacteristic of my friend, whom I had known as a diligent person. Surely there was a good idea behind the scriptlessness of the thing. I probed him for the same.
What I wanted to capture was the essence of Mcleodganj, he said. To write a script and to follow it in shooting would be to over-emphasize aspects that are already over-emphasized in my head. The spontaneity would be lost, he said. There is a soul to this place, but that soul cannot be brought into relief through orchestration. All of us discussed this in the morning. Obviously, the next question was, Where do we shoot? Also, What do we shoot? When you go a bit farther from the centre of the town, where the mountains stare in your face, you can set any frame and be assured of its beauty. At first, this excited me. The far-off snow-covered peaks… their geometry alone was something to behold. But how far can such beholding take you? Soon I realised that this beauty was a stale beauty, even an archaic beauty. And as I looked at the viewfinder, I saw that in capturing part of the… of the monumental stillness of the Himalayas, my frame was also monumentally still, monumentally dead. To write characters and introduce them to this frame was possible, but what would these characters do? Because… to introduce any human drama to the frame would also necessitate a rationale for the frame’s choice to the viewer.
I could only partly understand what my friend said, but I allowed him to continue.
And then we moved to the town centre, he said, where things were completely the opposite. It was crowded there. I got rattled trying to find a frame that could capture anything at all. And then the problem of people not behaving spontaneously if they knew that the camera was gaping at them. The sheer surfeit of the action made it impossible to capture anything meaningful. When I say impossible, he said, I mean impossible for me. Our director of photography—he is a nice guy, you will see—had a bit of a quarrel with me. He was pained that none of this was making any sense and that I was acting like a lunatic trying to grab things without any conception of what I wanted to grab. He actually made a dog-chasing-a-car reference. I’m sure that amuses you.
To avoid the boredom of the picturesque, zooming in to something dramatic is necessary; it being another matter that zooming in and choosing a frame is a contrivance.
This is how I understood my friend’s conundrum—as a trade-off between the desire for spontaneity and the need for some drama, the latter necessitating a contrivance that he was ill-disposed to be at peace with. I had no solution, and there was no point in me trying to burden him with my understanding of his woes, more so because the words that I have put down now were not so well-formed in my head then.
But now, having thought of the problem further, I have come to believe that there is an abstract formula, simply that cinema has to find a way to combine contrivance and spontaneity. For inspiration, it can consider dreams. A dream is a contrived spontaneity, its first and only allegiance to the expeditiousness of image creation. Isn’t it both contrived and natural when an astronaut inside a space station dreams of his wife, who in the dream appears as lying on his left side on their bed on dear Earth, her hazel eyes looking back at him? Imagine a frame from this dream that captures only his wife’s face, that too from the level of the bed? Unlike a hyper-eventful dream, this dream derives from a very identifiable source, which is the love life of the astronaut as it is in his mind. But still, it knows precisely where to zoom in, doesn’t it? It renders the idea of an image to an image. Somewhere, quick decisions are made regarding the idea and the image. The dream knows what frame to capture. And even though that knowledge may appear to be a singularity, like an inscrutable rock, efforts can be made to at least understand that rock’s surface. Not for nothing is cinema called the language of dreams.
So if there was any advice that I could give to my friend now, it would be this: Write, at least vaguely, what you want. Cinema condenses through writing. Its surface gains texture and its depths give the illusion of accessibility. Then set your frames. Make characters do things. Or choose characters that do things. Don’t worry about the contrivance of the frames. Shoot, shoot, shoot.
The Untitled McLeodganj Project failed. In the few instances that my friend found some inspiration, some or the other technical problem surfaced, and the desired image could not be captured to his satisfaction. The relationship between the DP and him soured further, and although I tried to play the pacifier, and sometimes even had to take the reins in my hand, not much could be salvaged. Quite simply, we were moviemakers who didn’t know what movie they were making.
All of this frustrated me no end. I had wasted eight days of my vacation here, and on more than one night I had dreamt of the dreadful treatment my boss would offer me on my return. I had not even had the time to really see Mcleodganj, for although we were without a rudder, our movie-making boat still moved obstinately along, and throughout the day we shifted from one place to the other, setting up camera and sound and trying to shoot something that would make sense apropos Mcleodganj. Ironically, all that left no time for really getting at the soul of the town. We were constantly busy with our stupidities, like bees without a queen.
There were, however, some silver linings. Once, in what was a desperate move to make something, anything at all, I was made to come in front of the camera and interview a Belgian bookseller who had married an Indian woman and settled in Mcleodganj. Initially, we were both so mindful of the camera and the constant shuffling of its angle—my friend forcing the DP—that our conversations remained stilted, traversing the limits of common decency and no more. But there came a point that the DP took charge and asked my friend to leave the scene. Thereafter, the camera found its footing and settled down. And as I and the Belgian guy talked on, the camera came to be forgotten by us both, the net effect of which was that within no time our conversation veered toward an intimate discussion of books, which was an interest that both of us shared. We talked of Fernando Pessoa, of Franz Kafka, of David Foster Wallace, and ultimately of writers who died young and still left behind gargantuan legacies. All men, which in retrospect embarrasses me. Anyway, like the process of all developing friendships, a shared interest led to a sharing of personal details. I talked to Yannick (the Belgian) of my French girlfriend, who had left me without rhyme or reason, and Yannick talked to me of his divorce with the Indian wife. And then we talked of the chasm of cultural difference that our sort of love had challenged and failed to overcome. And then we talked of issues of race and identity, of how some French people still say ‘One less to the Germans’ when opening a wine bottle, and how most Indians automatically believe that all Pakistanis are bad people. Only once or twice in the half-hour conversation did it cross my mind that all of it was being captured, that this delightful conversation, shot in Yannick’s bookstore’s balcony, with the picturesque mountains as a backdrop, could be revisited. It gladdened me no end. When the DP finally said CUT, both I and Yannick groaned because it was as if he had interrupted us.
And then there was the thermos. After we had finished shooting, an assistant at Yannick’s bookstore brought us a thermos full of tea, and with the camera turned off the three of us had our steaming beverage. Yannick told us that the tea we were having had been made early in the morning, and that the Chinese thermos was incredibly efficient and kept things hot for a very long time. I nodded in blank agreement, taking a moment to look at the floral design on its porcelain surface.
During the filmed part of our conversation, Yannick had remarked that I sounded like a creative man. I told him that I dabbled in writing and that I might end up writing a novel one day. But I am not a writer in the true sense, I said. I, in fact, have a job that most creative-types will consider life-sapping, even end-of-the-world like. Yannick wanted to know more, so I told him that I worked in financial services. There is a hierarchy, I said, I find myself somewhere in the middle of it, and I am used to that middleness.
Yannick didn’t seem satisfied. Why are you doing this job if you don’t like it? he asked me. Does it at least pay well? It pays well, I said. But Bombay is an expensive city. The thing that you are really working for is the year-end bonus. So your life depends a lot on your boss’ appraisal of your performance. Yannick wanted to know more about the exact process of that appraisal, and so I talked about it. Your boss scores you out of a maximum of six, I said. The scores are collected across the department and a frequency distribution is observed. The ideal frequency distribution is a normal distribution, also called a bell-curve. Which is to say that most people are supposed to get scores of three and four, a few are supposed to get scored two or five, and only the outliers – either in a good or a bad way – are supposed to get scores of six or one. More often than not, the boss’s initial assessments do not fit a bell-curve. But they have to be made to do that. Approaching the deadline, which is always kept too tight, the boss may just be tempted to alter the scores of some of the people under him without even giving it a second thought. And so, in the boss’ desire to force-fit a curve, a certain capriciousness is baked into the process, based at best on faint recollections, if any, of an excellent presentation, or an ultimate blunder in an Excel sheet, or a stupendous idea for increasing penetration in a key area, or a shoddily-explained absence from office…
So mediocrity and randomness are inherent in the system, Yannick said, cutting me short. It cannot work if most of the people are not mediocre.
I laughed in absent-minded agreement; concerns regarding my own appraisal had started to surface in my mind then. How would my boss react to my badly explained absence? Would I find myself in the middle of the curve, or would I be relegated behind that line that demarcates ‘Below Expectation’ performers? The camera had captured my reaction at that moment as a shadow of worry over my face and also a general fidgetiness in demeanour, and now whenever I see that section of the short film, I instinctively feel embarrassed and look for a hiding place. In that scene, I looked like a guy who worried about petty things, which is painful because that is perhaps who I am.
For a while, the failure in Mcleodganj put into tough waters my friendship with my friend. I blamed him for making me take risks at my work for a mere fancy of his. His defence, often vociferous on the phone, was that I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had nothing to complain about. This was not entirely true. But anyway, ours had been long friendship, and whether my friend could be a movie director or not he would always be a decent person. So we made up; after a month or so we could even joke about the debacle. I teased him if there were other to-be-unscripted projects that he was brewing in his head. He threatened me with something way more sinister.
The more important effect of the Mcleodganj trip for me was the rekindling of an interest in movies. I began hunting for the best that contemporary cinema had to offer. I saw movies by Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Lars Von Trier, and others. I also saw adaptation of novels that I had read. I watched the magnificently made The English Patient. I watched the terrible Midnight’s Children. That said, it was not till I came to The World by Jia Zhangke that I came face to face with a masterly rendition of the very problem that my friend had faced.
There is no doubt that Zhangke set his entire movie inside a formally picturesque location. To give an example: The Eiffel Tower at the Beijing World Park, although only one third the size of the original, does light up in the same manner in evenings and does produce a similarly beautiful effect when framed. But Zhangke’s picturesque is not akin to the picturesque of the Himalayas; it carries in itself a political dimension, one that the Chinese censor authorities missed. Set against this backdrop is drama of the most basic nature, formed of the most banal characters. There is simple love, there is simple jealousy, there is simple betrayal, there is simple revelation, there is simple disappointment. The story of Tao, Taisheng, their friends at the park, and Qun, if told before the normal cityscape of Beijing, would be trite and uninteresting. Just as showing the picturesque monuments without any drama would soon begin to approach the boredom that a montage of high Himalayas shots is sure to provide. The choice of the Beijing World Park for shooting was a definitive one, and not without mischief. But the choice of only the simplest drama to unfold before those fake monuments, to ground our interest in the very common trials of a relationship between a security guard and a performer, and through this provide a tense juxtaposition of background and foreground, is an act of genius. The World was contrived and The World was spontaneous. With a power that I have never experienced in any other work of art, Zhangke manages to convey the simplest of messages, that even if a economic system manages to bring faraway spectacles home, it cannot rid itself of classic misery. Or, alternately: in a world that has a surfeit of exceptional images, human life and its drama have remained as unexceptional as always.
The short movie of my conversation with Yannick has the natural background of the Himalayas. What we say seems to blend into that still background, and the effect is a soothing one, as friends who have watched the movie also say. Things are quite different in the feature film The World. The reality of the characters there appears warped because it takes place in front of (unreal) replicas of monuments. A water dispenser right in front of the fake Taj Mahal is nonchalantly re-provisioned, a character slaps another in front of the fake Pyramids, two security guards have their daily lunch on the top level of the fake Eiffel Tower, a character enquires another of his salary in front of the fake London Bridge, two characters talk of their village in front of the fake Manhattan skyline (‘The Twin Towers were bombed on September 11,’ Taisheng says, ‘[but] we still have them’)… The surreal dividend here is from the quotidian mixing with the faux-spectacular. Such shots, comprising a considerable length of the movie, leave a strange residue in the mind of the viewer, something like ripples of incongruity. But this effect reaches quite another level in the ‘horse shots.’ When Taisheng appears on top of a horse, he is doing something that is perhaps daily routine for him, but for us viewers it is a bizarre image. Why? Because it’s not normal for a security guard to roam around on a horse, is it? Also because of the heroic, absolutely un-quotidian connotations that come into play when one sees on screen a man on horseback. The ‘horse shots’ don’t create mere ripples but big waves of incongruity. They form the kind of visual material that dreams get most interested in.
It was Taisheng and his white horse that had appeared in my dream, and I was part of their miniaturized background of Mcleodganj. What symbolism or signification this carries, I cannot know any further, except to utter plainly that this was a commingling of dreams and cinema. My dream was also a dream of great dread, which can be noted from the simple fact that there were not one but two catastrophes in it. The first catastrophe is a bell-shaped tsunami, and the easy link with my fear of performance appraisals shames me to no end. Thankfully, the obvious metaphor between appraisals and tsunamis is soon lost and the word tsunami is then understood literally, which is to say that my dreaming consciousness establishes a link between tsunamis and earthquakes. An earthquake follows a tsunami then, and perhaps that is when the absurdity of the situation begins to strikes me. And because it is precisely these sort of dissonant moments that most dreams choose to respond to with even more absurdity, there soon followed the horse and its rider.
But what about the sea in the dream? Did it exist only to justify a tsunami, or did it exist for some other reason whose relevance I am at my wit’s end to realise? There is a lot that is unexplained, which is fine to me, for I didn’t really commit to writing about my dream to make sense of all its ends. Even the ends that I have tied, the ones that I have made some sense of, they have the power to unravel and stare at my face with their inscrutability.
The above essay was written in 2014.
The best scene in all of cinema is of Anna and Tao in a rickshaw of sorts, going back to the Park after a night out in Beijing. Anna, knowing what she has to do, has futureless eyes; Tao, unaware, is still seeing her problems as solvable.
The scene, especially the shared smile at 0:25, has stabbed me every time I’ve watched it over the last ten or more years: