Musings. Ex Libris

In 1946 the great American photographer Edward Weston, when being proffered the opportunity of capturing Point Lobos in Kodachromes, then a new invention, readily declined. He suspected that the intrusion of colours in a photograph would mar the peculiar beauty that only monochrome could achieve. Later, however, Weston confronted his undue reservations: “The prejudice against colour comes from not thinking of colour as form . You can say things with colour that can’t be said in black and white.” The notion of colour as form turns colour into an entity independent of the object to which it assumes an ontological subservience. In this new way of seeing we can say that an orange is regarded not as a fruit coloured with orange but a fruit that entails a contiguous existence of the colour orange. “Those of us who began photographing in monochrome spent years trying to avoid subject matter exciting because of its colour […] we must now seek subject matter because of its colour.” Weston ...

There is a Latin epigram that goes:  Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit , in English: what has taken place in the light continues in the dark. The reverse seems also true, though thousands of other epigrams also warn of the illusions that darkness elicits, the insidious workings that can so easily escape our beclouded vision. The riddle cannot be better illustrated through an even more insoluble enigma- that of dreaming. Nietzsche, in 1886, discovered that a man who acquired the ability to fly in his dream related this gravity-defying “upwardness” to an uplifted happiness he felt in his waking moments. From then on that man’s notion of happiness had been dramatically altered- whatever feeling that failed to evoke that peculiar upwardness would seem to him too heavy and, on a superior note, too “earthly.” The entrance of Sigmund Freud, in his audacious quest of unlocking the age-old mysteries of dream, effected a startling change in the psychological study of the subject. ...

Of all those that explore the troubled frontier of human psyche, there can be a few who have subjected it to a more penetrating study, and with a greater avidity for the discovery of its intricacy than Tennessee Williams. His plays centre on the lonely, the grotesque, the misunderstood, the crazed, the perverted and, ultimately, the tragic. One is surprised to know that one of America’s most loved playwrights is such a morbid purveyor of unhappy tales. And a wayward maverick, too, unafraid to challenge censorship by evoking themes like homosexuality and substance abuse. In Williams’s memoir he enumerates the countless events in which he made for “long, agonising exits” when his plays were roundly booed by the audience. Common to those who rebel against an established tradition, Williams was both reviled and admired, the acknowledgement of his astounding impact on America’s theatrical culture however unanimous. In the late 50s and early 60s especially he became a favorite amongst ...

The economy of words is a literary device that is difficult to come by. It was accorded a prominent place in modernist literature, the most masterful writers of which deployed the artistry to an extent that rivals the beauty of poetry. Language had by then transcended its traditional role as a tool of expression, and revealed its nature as something akin to a magician’s trick. Novelists of this period began to explore and experiment with the various facets and potentials of language. In the case of D.H. Lawrence, for example, there would be no better way to articulate the complex human conditions than resorting to the repetition of a few significant epithets. Conversely, Ernest Hemingway would advice the aspiring writers to steer clear of superfluity at all costs- for him an absence of words always generates the loudest bang. The development of modernism coincided at some point with the advent of motion picture, and curiously both share this penchant for textual ...

When we were young we resented being treated as children, being considered naïve, immature, unformed, being always the negligible inferiors tagging along their elders like lapdogs. This sense of inferiority dogged us, throughout the unendurable years of childhood, limited our freedom and, most exasperatingly of all, barred us from the fascinating world of adults. From time to time we would gaze with our burning eyes at the stars and wish for miracles- is it possible that we’d be grownups within a few blinks of an eye? Or perhaps a mysterious someone would suddenly materialise to save us from our protracted misery? Flannery O’Connor says it best: “Anyone who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” In truth, whoever suggests that his childhood was as idyllic as the ones cloyingly depicted in those edifying children’s books is, more often than not, holding in his hand the broken glasses of his shattered dream. Our first awa...

Throughout his career, Tennessee Williams had written plays that deal squarely with his interest in violence. Violence not of a senseless, excessive kind but one that is nevertheless destructive, and targeted most of all to bring out the vulnerability of the others. The lack of any outrage that attended his violent plays emboldened him in furthering his involvement with graphic materials, and it climaxed with the release of  Suddenly Last Summer   in 1958, a one-act play that draws on issues like lobotomy and cannibalism. Williams was almost certain then that he’d be tarred and feathered, but the play proved a commercial and critical success. This says much about the social currents of the time, which fed on narratives like that to help coping with the bitter reality and malaise. In this case the public was obviously taken to Williams’s measure of honesty, savagery and explosiveness. In the preface of  Sweet Bird of Youth  Williams attributes his propensi...

Theatre of the Absurd was coined by critic Martin Esslin to describe a particular style of modern drama in the 1950s that centres on the irrational nature of human existence. Some of the principal practitioners- Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet- riddled their plays with nonsensical dialogues and esoteric argots to enhance a sense of unease and hyper-reality. Their purpose is often to enlarge the powerlessness of human beings when confronted by a world that seems exceedingly deprived of meanings. The movement, coincided at a time when people were gradually convalescing from the traumas of WWII, but would soon be assailed by more upheavals in the coming years, served implicitly as intellectual comments on the fraught state of affairs. Esslin, in the eponymous article, redefines the notion of the absurd: “ Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose... Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, ...