Goodness, Greatness, Me

I met a girl on an airplane, once. She was a Management student in a tracksuit and cargo pants with her hair unkempt. I gave her my laptop because hers had died and she needed to make a presentation. I gave her my flash-drive when mine was about to die as well. We struck conversation on a funeral note about false-advertisement and sleaze in product endorsement and how she vouched for both. We conversed for as long as the flight lasted – a span of six hours – five and a half of which I spoke. The rest of the time was spent in sleep and embarrassment, hers and mine in that order. I knew she started talking because she wanted my computer, I knew she kept on because I gave it to her. I wasn’t embarrassed, back then when it happened. 

It reminds me of what Woody Allen said about indulgence and guilt and, more importantly, guilt in indulgence – in that it’s post-dated and shows up after the damage is done to do some more. 

“When I was a kid, I used to play softball. I’d steal second base, feel guilty and go back.” 

In fact, there is no damage done, initially, if you think about it. The case of embarrassment is not a case of a crack widening. It’s what I’d like to call a pencil-mark illusion that blurs your vision that you fashion a crack that grows and grows enough for the building to collapse. And you wake up from destruction in a pool of sweat and thank the sunshine for making your body glisten – as though the forces of nature have nothing to do but avenge your fate and save you some grace. 

Take, for instance, the scene in Chaplin’s ‘the Circus’ where the Tramp listens in from behind the curtain as the woman he loves hangs his heart out to dry, telling a friend that she loves another man. She does nothing to cause his disappointment but he is, needless to say, disappointed. Nothing had happened, no visible harm done. And yet he is ashamed and humbly so. Is it sadness because his castle fell? Partly, yes. For the most, however, it has to do with the fact that he let himself build it in the first place, without the assurance of a foundation stone. 

Shame, that way, is what you do to yourself. It’s like an orgasm, but in reverse; the effect of a mind wide open. It’s like a half an orgasm. It’s like two orgasms when in a coma that you get out of and find yourself spent, much to your displeasure. If fame is the child desired in a union of self-interest and self-deprecation, shame is the bastard. In a life that is performance, we’d like some fame. There’s fame in acceptance, there’s fame in infamy. And there’s this gift-voucher that’s a coin on the bedside table. It’s smooth, it’s shiny; it has two heads. The call is ‘tails.’ 

Here I go back to Allen’s paraphrase of the Groucho Marx quote – “I’d never want to belong to a club that has someone like me for a member.” 

But then it so happens that I always sign up for it, first. 

“Love is sadism, love is treachery; love is the single most selfish thing in the world,” I once said. I’m ashamed I said that. Love is like chocolate on an empty stomach, guilt is the acid churned that helps process it. And I’m ashamed I said that as well. I’m ashamed because it’s a statement and a statement is conclusive. But life isn’t conclusive – art could be conclusive, where art is representative. The image beckons, the source eludes. Much like love itself. 

I was sitting in an interview, once, when I was asked if I’ve ideas for films I’d like to make as I had already mentioned I’d like to make some. I pulled a title out of the hat inside my head. It was called ‘her Secret Place’, one I found when sitting through Springsteen in a Leonard Cohen trance. And it met some images from ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ and it became something else entirely – that which drew the writer out in me. It was about a man’s facilitation in love by the woman he loves except he doesn’t know it till she does it and they’re together; he’s in constant fear of the facade of attraction, with doubt that threatens to tear it down. 

It’s a flit between ‘he loves her’ and ‘he knows not’, in short, but it is optimistic in that it puts the onus on the woman. The man is, perhaps, a bottle of beer and a scramble for responsibility. The woman keeps it (responsibility) in a jar in her kitchen and sprinkles some on top of tomato-garnish. The man never eats it, the woman never stops. She takes it upon her to put the man at ease, he does his part in that he learns to let her. Still, he does enough damage. Ego comes to play. Cynicism hurts it, guilt resuscitates – guilt, the fur-ball monster slain and sewn into a blanket that protects the fire as frostbite looms in a spectrum of cold, on your ears, your nose, your throat, your body, your knees that creak and sides that cramp as hands and feet and courage go limp as you decide to not decide to wake up; to tell her what you think. 

Dr. Chaubey, the man who interviewed me, asked me if I had read T.S. Eliot’s ‘the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ I told him I haven’t. He didn’t have with him lines to recite, but he asked me to take a look some time. I told him that I’d make it a point to when I got back in front of a computer again. 

When I did, I found these lines. 

Do I dare 

Disturb the Universe? 

In a minute there is time 

For decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse

Somewhere along the way is a line that says “in short, I am afraid.” Why does he hesitate? What does he fear? Hesitation, to me, is the fear of letting oneself down, which, I think, is what causes disappointment in being let down to begin wit. It’s a foresight of shamefacedness, head hung low, when facing oneself in the eve of such a letdown. You play both hunter and prey to the same cannibalistic meal – you hate yourself for not tasting better, you hate yourself for not having had a different taste. It’s a win-win situation for the monster inside. 

I think every negative emotion, every measurable amount of suffering in the world, thus, can be narrowed down to two kinds of guilt – guilt in intention against guilt as a consequence of action. It’s like Dostoevsky writes about Raskolnikov in ‘Crime and Punishment’ – “If he has a conscience, he will suffer for his mistake. That will be punishment, as well as the prison.” You make a mistake, you repent it, you suffer. You intend a mistake, you never really bring yourself to do it, you still suffer. Dmitry Karamazov never killed his father, but he lived with the knowledge that he meant to. You’d need to be your own Devil’s Advocate to exonerate yourself from that sort of accusation. 

I ask the same question that Allen asks himself in his ‘Early Essays: On Youth and Age,’ validating myself constantly as I pose it to myself. 

“Is it better to be the lover or the loved one?” he asks. 

“Neither, if your cholesterol is over six hundred,” he answers. 

I can’t come up with a wittier response on my own – where mine would be to resign to fate. 

I’m embarrassed I wrote this essay 

I’m embarrassed you’d have to read 

I’m embarrassed I try to snap out of it 

I’m embarrassed I find I can’t beat 

my embarrassment