[Reader-list] Re: reader-list Digest, Vol 19, Issue 28

[sou dhamini]

Many thanks Karen,

Was lovely to hear from you and talk. A lot of the references you are giving me sound exciting. I’m also glad you are mediating the texts for me with your impressions. Makes it easier for me to choose what I want to read and in what order.  Will wait – with you, for your trunks, before I decide what to buy myself.

I’m going to respond with some ideas that came to me on reading/re-reading your mail.   I love the idea of the senses as retention pouches of experience, I like to think of  that as bodily memory. But rather  than polarize the present vis a vis  a past that is  either dead or lingering as trace, I’d  like to see it as a continuum. So then the past is not about loss or absence, but time itself  is about fruition and maturation  which necessarily involves duration. So then memory  is not an accretion – sediment, but a running stream  in-forming ( forming from inside)  life. Perhaps that’s  because I’m more familiar with  pickles and wines in the extended-family  circuits -  rather than the ‘common market’?  I agree that difference mark specificity though 
 I’ll work it out, the relation between the two. 

Had this lovely image of a peach being sliced by a knife – from the peach’s point of view. Of the young girl, senses on red alert, moving around the city  like an extra-terrestrial ( for every child is born an alien into this world) but succulent, absorbing the juices, within, and the city somehow slashing through her – I don’t necessarily mean violence though some of it may be so, which is the gender politics I  want to explore, I also simply mean because she is receptive, without ( or with the minimal) armour of conditioning, all of life both good and bad – and how do make those distinctions –  slice  through her - like light. Prism remember.

And I got another fantastic idea. The other voice/gaze – older – that I was talking about could still be her but when she is older. So she is looking back at her childhood. That way the child is in/within time, while the voice is outside/beyond  that lived time. Also this way, the ‘creation’ of memory, gets worked into the text itself. Oh man, you think I should have held the suspense 
. 

I read Victor Turner once. He uses the word ‘communitas’  for that sense of bonding that a community reaches through ritual. ‘Twas  beautiful. As I mentioned in my response to Keith,  I’m trying to understand lets say a private ritual or ritual-like experience that one can consciously enter into, perhaps from an understanding of religious ritual, but as a way  of processing/understanding  personal experience. 

After I wrote to him, I also  realized the idea of  walking through a  city is  perfect, because its simultaneously walking towards and walking away from. The ‘receding points’ are spatial, not just in time. In fact, it seems to me, its with open spaces – Nature – that one moves towards the horizon, or the ‘vanishing point’ that painters talk of. In urban spaces, the city ‘surrounds’ – and I mean that as an active verb. This could be claustrophobic or  stimulating, that’s a state of mind ( and should we now say body), but the depth is behind one. Not just personal, but history -  all that human endeavour that the constructed space of the city symbolizes. 

Anyways, more later. Its  great to talk.  

 If you need any inputs on your film/video, please feel free to ask. Am also making a list of old and new Tamil films featuring Madurai  to  buy the vcds. Don’t know if you – or anyone else - would find that useful. Will be glad to share. 

Ciao
s

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