Doublethink: November 28, 2010

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

It opens in a dark, eerie, industrial, an almost blue-gray monochrome setting. “Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives,” we hear the harangue of an unseen ominous speaker.

In a tunnel, monitored by a line of CRTs, an army of zombies marches imposingly to the cadence of its boots in perfect unison.

“We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths,” the diatribe continues.

We see a “blond” track and field athlete, carrying a sledgehammer— wearing a white tank top and reddish orange matching running-shoes and shorts—  running into a dark auditorium filled with grim, hypnotised skinheads watching a telecast on the screen.

Behind the “blond”, a group of policemen— with full face masks, helmets and batons— comes charging toward the “blond”. 

The “blond” runs toward the screen airing the image of spectacled white man spewing his propaganda:

"Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion...”

The “blond” swings the sledgehammer in an arc, passing it below knee and above head several times, and releases it, with all muscle, into the screen.

“We shall prevail!”, the white man utters his closing “paradox” as the screen explodes and a burst of light engulfs the audience.

A voiceover reads a text that rolls on the screen:

“On November 28th, 2010,

WikiLeaks released 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables,

And you see why diplomacy

Is not like 'diplomacy' anymore.”

P.S

Watch the original here:

Avatar (2009) by James Cameron

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

“Braille for my eyes,” I said to myself,  after watching James Cameron’s epic.

“Avatar”, set on the moon Pandora which orbits Alpha Centauri A,  as a visual fable revisits planet earth— a place that we have forgotten in an eyes-wide-shut existence— with a fresh eye. Pandora, as depicted in “Avatar”,  is a deluge of color and form with its luminous flora— comprising a color scale of violets, purples, and greens—and its multifarious fauna. The mystical floating mountains of Pandora, inspired perhaps by Huangshan mountains in China, appear breathtakingly real.  

Set in the year 2154, “Avatar” narrates the story of Jake Sully, a paraplegic former marine, dispatched to the moon Pandora  to replace his twin brother, a scientist trained as an “avatar” operator.  Scientists use “avatars”— Na’vi-human hybrid bodies— to study Pandora and its inhabitants, the Na’vi. Behind this soft mission, a corporation called RDA aims to plunder Pandora’s environment for a valuable mineral unobtanium. Colonel Miles Quaritch, the leader of the RDA's private security force, promises Jake new legs in exchange for logistical information about extracting unobtanium.

Jake falls in love with a Na’vi native, Neytiri, and begins to understand and appreciate the ecologically connected and conscious life of the Na’vi people. Jake soon finds himself trapped between the choice of supporting his people or the peace-loving Na’vi people. Quaritch, eventually, decides to use violent and destructive means against the people of Na’vi, forcing Jake to take a stand with the people of the Na’vi. Jakes leads the Navi to victory in an epic battle and humans are forced to leave Pandora.

“Avatar” announces the birth of environmentalism as new religion, which sees everything connected in a total-field image of the biosphere. It makes a case for a philosophy that should not privilege one species over the other within the ecosystem.

“Avatar” is also an implicit critique of American imperialism. There are many parallels in Avatar about the U.S invasion of Iraq and the RDA’s invasion of Pandora. For example, the film makes an explicit reference to the shock and awe method, a military tactic that was used during 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unobtanium on Pandora can be seen as a reference to oil, which was one of the driving motivations behind the U.S invasion of war.

That being said, one can still accuse Cameron of pushing the white-colonial imperialist stereotypes, which depict white people as rational and scientific, while colonized non-white victims are depicted as primitive and spiritual. What is more, in the fight against colonization, the salvation for non-whites must also come from the “White Messiah”,  Jake Sully in the case of “Avatar”. 

Life as a Dream: Nostalghia (1983) by Andrei Tarkovsky

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

The film opens with a single long take of a family and their dog descending a misty hill and halting in a lugubrious freeze frame. In the next scene—also a single long take—  we see a car  moving in the bleak Tuscan landscape. It disappears from the frame only to reappear again. Time passes slowly in "Nostalghia". 

Set in Italy, "Nostalghia" narrates the story of a Russian poet, Andrei Gorchakov, traveling through Italy— accompanied by an Italian translator Eugenia, with whom he seems to have an ambivalent relationship— researching the life of an 18th century Russian composer. In the desolate gloomy parts of Italy, Gorchakov seems plagued by a nostalgia for Russia, and his yearning for his wife and children. 

Traveling with Eugenia, Gorchakov arrives at St. Catherine's pool in a Tuscan hillside village where he meets a local madman Domenico, obsessed with the impossible idea of carrying a lighted candle across the pool to save the world. 

In the midst of metaphysical symbols, hallucinations, memories, and eventful episodes, we slowly see Gorchakov identifying more and more with Domenico.

In the climactic end of the film, Domenico leaves for Rome where he climbs an equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius and burns himself to death. He does so against the backdrop of Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy" after sermonizing to callous onlookers on the decadence of mankind and the need for universal brotherhood.  

Meanwhile, Gorchakov successfully crosses St Catherine’s pool and dies after crossing it. 

The final scene zooms back from a still shot of Gorchakov and his dog sitting by the pool. We see his Russian country house behind him first and then we see the monumental ruins of an Italian cathedral nestling the Russian landscape completing the elysian synthesis of the rural and the empyreal. 

Through recurring images of dilapidated abandoned buildings and dreary landscapes—juxtaposed with a rich palette of sound, ranging from the music of dripping water to Beethoven’s ninth symphony— Andrei Tarkovsky, the director of the movie, creates a dream out of impenetrable material of reality. Each shot could be treated as a painting. Each subject in the frame could be seen as a portrait.

As a cultural metaphor, Russia, in "Nostalghia", stands for the eternal feminine, the great womb of Being, and the Christian spiritual world, while Italy represents the decadence and the transience of the modern world. 

As a political discourse, "Nostalghia" echoes a call for a supranational Europe, and perhaps a supranational world.

While cinema has expanded dramatically and has evidenced rich and diverse themes, "Nostalghia" remains a work of high art and profound themes in the canon of world cinema. 

Dream as life: Inception (2010) by Christopher Nolan

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”— Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph & Other Stories 

Imagine a dream. Imagine a wasteland. Now imagine a colossal city blooming into existence within a span of seconds out of the wasteland. Call this city Paris. Now imagine a procession of classical Parisian architecture folding over itself in a gravity defying mirror inversion. Now imagine another dream within this dream with another dream within it. Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” is an eye-bending Borgesian dream.

The plot is simple yet elegant. Saito, a Japanese business man, hires Dominic Cobb on a corporate espionage mission to break up the company of Robert Fischer,  the rich and powerful son of a dying energy magnate. 

Cobb’s expertise in the deceitful world of extraction— the art of extracting  secrets from  the dream space— has not only made him a sought after figure in the  field of espionage, but also a renegade on the run.

Saito offers Cobb a chance of emancipation from his renegade world in exchange for accomplishing an impossible “inception”— the art of implanting an idea inside dream to induce a desired act in reality— on Fischer. For this seemingly impossible “inception”, Cobb hires Ariadne, an architecture student, as a dream architect;  Yusuf, a sedative specialist as a dream chemist; and a Eames, as a appearance forger.

The “inception” seems overly simple but there are complications in its execution—the subconscious projections of the subjects in the dream space turn the absurdly tractable dream word into an uncontrollable nightmare, causing the subjects to spawn multiple dreams linked together like a recursive equation.  At the center of this nightmare resides Cobb’s haunting nostalgia for his deceased wife, Mallorie “Mal” Cobb.

While “Inception” lacks brooding on complex philosophical and metaphysical themes, it effectively captures the paradigm shift in how we are thinking about reality in the shifting landscape of technology. We can now envision a reality made up of dreams entirely. While dreams may influence our reality, and may affect our existence— by planting an idea or by performing inception— it is the dream world we are more interested in. Who cares about the real world if the dream world is more interesting, colourful and rewarding than the real world!

.
“Inception” as metafiction gives a visual vocabulary to the age old art of novel writing through its conception of dream architects. One can see how the creators work, how fiction comes into being, one can almost experience the jouissance of creation. Novels create realities which may or may not have roots in the real world. The writers, like dream-architects, share the dream space with their readers. 

The film has its flaws as well— the dream world in “Inception” remains too logical, too tractable, too bland, and perhaps that accounts for its lack of profundity.  Compared with Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Nostalghia”, “Inception” lacks poetic value. I guess comparing “Nostalghia” with “Inception” would be like comparing Leonardo’s  Last Supper with Dali’s. 

“Inception” is not a work of genius, it is a work that exposes genius and that is why I love it.

A Chicago Odyssey

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi[i]

The blog post has Homeric/Joycean parallels. Each episode in this narrative corresponds to the Joycean schemata of Ulysses/Odyssey.

 

It is 4:20 p.m. The turret of 830 Lakeshore stands in priestly[ii]

isolation surrounded by a water country and defiant skyscrapers. I put on my sweater and head out for a run.

The weather is unusually warm for November. I cross over to the other side of Ontario street. "This is life.' Shedd Aquarium’s panel flutters on a pole in the Chicago wind. 

4:25 p.m. in my watch. 5:25 p.m. in Toronto, 3:25 a.m. in Lahore. Legs are stiff as I start my run on the Lakeshore trail. 


'History is a dream from which I am trying to awake'[iii]— on my left,  an endless array of stone and steel jutted out by civilization; on the right, the murky green water of lake Michigan breathes in geological placidity. The engineering marvel of Fazlur Khan, the cross-bracing structure within the structure of the Onterie building, makes itself visible behind the W hotel. 

'Ineluctable modality of the visible'[iv]. As I peer into the distance, something keeps clinging to my consciousness. The narrow strip of Ohio street beach reels in my mind superimposed over Manet’s The beach at Boulogne.

Just over half kilometer and am still trying to settle into rhythm. A grizzled man dressed in brown jacket is reading a book in an apartment on the Chestnut street. He seems quiet, comfortable, and languid[v]. Glad I got out of the cosy apartment. The sun nearing the turret of 830 Lakeshore.

Pace brisk now, and the heart pumping as I cross the Walton street. Calf muscles hurt today. Industry is the opiate of masses. People oblivious to their surroundings are driving in their sedans. 'Always passing, the stream of life.'[vi]

Nina Simone rolls in with her sinister Dambala in my head. Pace slows down. Cannot concentrate. An unkempt black man, who looks like the ghost of Du Bois with 'bloodshot eyes'[vii], sits on the concrete trail steps on the left. In his eyes everything is visible. I see him. I see myself. I see the negritude of the world melting into a cacophony. 

The song finishes and I slough off the uneasy dread. The windy[viii] city shakes again, the wind picks up speed.  I pick up speed  as I run over a copy of Chicago Tribune. Notice a seagull eating[ix] a fish on the edge of the lake. 

Settled into rhythm now. Lake Michigan appears much deeper and more bluer around the curve around the Oak Beach. A strange vertigo between the towering Hancock centre and a deepening lake Michigan[x].

The Lakeshore trail widens into a flat concrete pavement. Goethe street abandoned. See many runners now. Some teenagers roller-blading amid stray[xi] pedestrians.

 

Beethoven’s Scherzo[xii] looms in my head now. Driven forward by the mad timpani beats. Breathing heavily but feeling charged, the chess pavilion in sight. 

I reach the chess pavilion and stop for a breath.  A squint eyed[xiii] white man screams out of nowhere: “You know he is a Muslim and a Marxist.” I turn around, I smile at him. He seems puzzled.

Sweating profusely. Take off my shirt. A girl[xiv] with 'lustrous lashes and dark expressive'[xv] brows passes a smile at me.

Largo from Dvorak’s 9th symphony breaks in with sombre big horns and soothes into subtle violins perforated by oboes, nostalgic reeds, speaking about going home. Chains me to Rumi’s Lament of the Reed. Resume my running, a crowd[xvi] under the waning sun.

The DRAKE[xvii] sign in Old English typography visible behind the horns of Hancock tower. Conjures clandestine thoughts of a sin city. 

I see Marko, my Mexican friend, running along the curving Lakeshore trail. He takes some time to recognize me[xviii]. He waves his hand from distance as I curve away from him.

The Ferris wheel at the Navy Pier lures me to the comfort of my home[xix]. Listening to Cecom.  Sailing into the wind and reaching the dawn. I check the time:  roughly 25 minutes for 5 km. Not bad but not good either. Make my way to home.

I crash into my sofa[xx] as I watch the turret of 830 Lakeshore. As the sun goes down in Chicago, I think about waning empire cities in Claude Lorrain’s paintings, I think about Arabic and French inscriptions in Algiers, I think about ethereal and metaphysical cities in India, I think about histories and geographies forgotten and imagined on the dusky horizons, and I think about David Harvey’s troubling geographies.

---

[i] The blog is based on my daily run but it has Homeric/Joycean parallels. Use Joyce's schemata as a key for this text: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/ulysses/#schema

[ii] In the first para ‘priestly’ alludes to Telemachus: "Introibo ad altare Dei" I will go up to God's altar.'He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains' is text from the chapter Telemachus. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/1/

[iii] 'History is a dream from which I am trying to awake’ is an inversion of the text  ‘History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ from chapter Nestor. The art discussed in the chapter is History.http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/2/

[iv] 'Ineluctable modality of the visible' is a text from the chapter  Proteus. The allusion to Ohio beach echoes the introduction in chapter Proteus.‘Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.’ http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/3/

[v]  ‘He seems quiet, comfortable, and languid.’ As Ulysses was imprisoned by Calypso,  the man in brown jacket is imprisoned by the comforts of life.

Bloom is portrayed as Molly's servant in the chapter Calypso. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/4/

[vi]  'Always passing, the stream of life' is text from Lotus-eaters. Industry is the opiate of masses is allusion to Lotus-eaters. Chapter: Lotus-eaters. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/5/

[vii] ‘bloodshot eyes’ is a text from the line ‘Mr Bloom nodded gravely, looking in the quick bloodshot eyes’ in Ulysses. Hades = Grotesque/’Underworld’ in Chicago. Chapter: Hades. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/6/

[viii] wind/windy is a reference to Aeolus, god of wind, in Ulysses. 'The sack of windy Troy,' Chapter: Aeolus. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/7/

[ix] seagull ‘eating’ a fish is alluding to Laestrygonians, a tribe of cannibal eaters. Homer visits them during his journey back to Ithaca. Chapter: Lestrygonians. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/8/

[x] towering Hancock  & deepening lake Michigan = Scylla and Charybdis, the two sea monsters in Odyssey.Chapter: Scylla and Charybdis. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/9/

[xi] ‘amid stray[xi] pedestrians.’ Is an allusion to wandering rocks from Ulysses, ‘wandering rocks’ were a group of rocks, between which the sea was merciless. Chapter: Wandering Rocks. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/10/

[xii] ‘Beethoven’s Scherzo’ is allusion to Sirens, the three dangerous bird-women who lured nearby sailors with their music. Chapter: Sirens. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/11/

[xiii] ‘A squint eyed’ is an allusion to Cyclops, single eyed giants from Greek mythology. In Ulysses, Cyclop is represented by an ill-tempered nationalist. Chapter: Cyclops. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/12/

[xiv] Reference to Nausicaa. Chapter: Nausicaa. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/13/

[xv] ‘A girl’ is allusion to Nausicaa, who falls in love with Odysseus as he comes out of the sea stark naked; 'lustrous lashes and dark expressive' is a text from Nausicaa in Ulysses which describes Gerty, a young girl. Chapter: Nausicaa. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/13/

[xvi] ‘crowd now under the waning sun’ is an allusion to Oxen of the Sun, the beloved cattle of the sun-god Helios. Chapter: Oxen of the Sun. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/14/

[xvii] DRAKE is allusion to Circe, a nymph, witch, enchantress. Chapter: Circe. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/15/

[xviii]  ‘Marko, my Mexican friend... recognize me’ is an allusion to Eumaeus, Odysseus's swineherd and friend; he does not recognise Odysseus is in disguise when he is back. Chapter: Eumaeus.http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/16/

[xix] ‘comfort of home’ is an allusion to Ithaca, the home of Odysseus. Chapter: Ithaca. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/17/

[xx] ‘my plush sofa’ is an allusion to Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus.

Chapter Penelope: http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/18/