Tuesday Quote of the Week

"I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition. I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it. I am trying to learn from it.
"Our lives teach us who we are."
~~Salman Rushdie (From "In Good Faith," A 1990 essay response to the reaction to his book The Satanic Verses)

Tuesday Quote of the Week

"The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own image reflected. A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return."
~~Salman Rushdie (From "In Good Faith," A 1990 essay response to the reaction to his book The Satanic Verses)

Tuesday Quote of the Week

"We aren't dead yet. We may be in deep trouble but we aren't done for. And while there is life, there must be analysis, struggle, persuasion, argument, polemic, rethinking, and all the other longish words that add up to one very short word: hope."
~~Salman Rushdie

Field of Butterflies

I recently came across a 1985 essay by Salman Rushdie about an unlikely pairing of a New York artist and an Indian English teacher who briefly influenced each other.

Harold Shapinsky, an Abstract Expressionist painter from New York, lived, painted, and died in relative obscurity. Compared to Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in terms of style not popularity, he lived for his art, but never tried to garner attention (and therefore sales) by the New York art scene. He had a brief revival in the mid-80s and had a one-man show at the Mayor Gallery in London, thanks to Akumal Ramachander, an elementary English teacher in Bangalore, India who stumbled on his work and took it upon himself to share it with the world.

Ramachander explained what drew him to Shapinsky’s work in Rushdie's 1985 essay: “The answer, it seems, is…butterflies: ‘My art school was a small field near my house. I would spend quite a long time there, chasing butterflies. Hundreds of thousands of them, you know, in all their brilliant hues. I would never destroy a butterfly, just chase them and wonder at that great profusion of colors. And I think all that colour sank into me…all those permutations and combinations, they were already there in me. All that had to happen was to get someone’s work, and see if I could get back all the colours I saw in my childhood. And Shapinsky seemed to come very close to that.’”

The Shapinsky revival was short-lived. He sank back into obscurity and died of Alzheimer’s 20 years later.

[For more on Shapinsky, here's his 2004 obit in the New York Sun.]

Reality, it's your dime

A bizarre coincidence has led me on this voyage that I may take in full someday, or at least in bits and pieces.

Yesterday, I was talking with a friend about movies and he mentioned the movie Brazil, which he couldn't really remember (he saw it over 20 years ago), except that it had left a profound and troubling impression on him. (He didn't say this, but it seemed to me like the feeling you get when you wake up from a nightmare that quickly falls out of your grasp as wakefullness takes over, leaving only the emotional afterglow.) I was intrigued, but pretty much left it at that.

Today, I left work and didn't feel like going right home (where more work was waiting) so I stopped off for dinner. This morning, thinking that I might be in that kind of mood, I had tossed a book in my bag. I have been reading Imaginary Homelands off and on for quite awhile. It is my favorite author, Salman Rushdie, but, as a series of essays (and criticism, to be exact), it's best in small doses, both to think through and to prolong the experience. Anyway, as I was waiting for my dinner, I pulled out the book and opened it to the next essay, a movie critique of, you guessed it, Brazil.

Brazil, as it turns out, is a dystopian totalitarian fantasy in the tradition (but uniquely its own) of Orwell's 1984. In Rushdie's essay, "The Location of Brazil," he explores the themes of the movie in his own unique way. Rushdie compares Terry Gilliam (the director) to Lewis Carroll and James Joyce (at least in Finnegan's Wake) as all being able to create an alternate reality, a place in the imagination (or of the imagination) or fantasy, or dreams with its own rules and logic. And we believe.

Rushdie explores other reasons to be affected by this film, one of them being the idea of being transplanted from one's homeland and looking at it from afar, a circumstance that he shares with Gilliam (for Rushdie it's India, for Gilliam it's America). And how that colors how one looks at one's homeland.

Rushdie talks about Brazil as a triumph of the imagination over reality. It turns out there are two endings to the film, an English one and an American one. The American one has the happy ending, or as happy as it gets. Happiness aside, as Rushdie writes, it is a battle between imagination and reality. "[It] is of great importance, because it reminds us that we are not helpless; that to dream is to have power....Unreality is the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that it may subsequently be reconstructed."

So I am intrigued by this connection. It's been said there are no accidental coincidences. So I want to explore this. I want to see this film, ideally with my friend, as I am as much intrigued by his reaction to what is, granted, a powerful and dark, but ultimately hopeful, film. (I assume he saw the American version.) He did say he wasn't sure he would feel the same way as he did back then, so I'm not being sadistic about this, just curious.

I also did a quick Google search of the essay and find that people have had a lot to say about this film and essay, so I have plenty of places to go to explore this further. The most intriguing site, and probably a branch to a whole different discussion, is the idea, "Reality is what you can get away with."