Yet Untitled 054 - Legends: Plotting a map of Becoming

Nausicaa, Natalie Merchant + the little legends who got me by and keep telling me which way to go

Dearest Yet Untitler,

During the lockdown, I watched Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind at least 10 times with Ananya and Aahana, if not more. It’s one of the most profound animated films I have ever seen, one of the reasons why I watched it multiple times - there’s always something new that you catch on every viewing (check it out on Netflix, you’ll see what I mean). More than anything, Nausicaa’s is one of those archetypal stories that cut to the heart of Things - like asking what’s the very best and the very worst humans are capable of.

My sketch of an Ohm - one of the legendary, super intelligent, mutant insects from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I watched the film so many times that Ohms started appearing in my journals C. 2020.

In Nausicaa, its eponymous heroine grows up in a post apocalyptic world where industrialization and warfare have ruined the planet. Humanity is close to extinction and is at war with the natural realm (one of Miyazaki’s recurring themes). There’s not much hope left, apart from a legend about a “Golden Warrior” who is to appear with bird upon his shoulder, and lead mankind to safety. By the end of the film (and this is not a spoiler) Nausicaa proves that she herself is this Golden Warrior, checking every requirement other than the fact that the legend presumes that the Golden Warrior was a man, and she a woman.

Nausicaa saves the legend from remaining a mere story by turning it into a reality, by becoming the legend herself.

I’ve been looking deeply into the idea of legends over the past three days (part of my weekly routine with YU, extracting an instalment out of a hat!). After many 4am churns, I arrived at this:

Provocation 1 : Legends are templates for becoming.

Unpacking (my favourite word, lately) - Legends feel like they exist for this purpose alone - as a challenge - for someone (us?) to eventually rise up and become them. They seem to denote a possibility that once, perhaps even in a story, this happened / this sort of person existed. The more unbelievable, unreachable or unfathomable they feel, the more I feel they ache to be realised.

‘Legend’ is a big word - usually used while talking about Warriors, Gods and the like. But my 4am churns about Legends this past week did not constrain themselves to the ‘big’ vicinity of the word. I thought about so many personal legends - small and not so small - that I have encountered. Some I have become. Some remain serious aspirations.

I thought it worthwhile to briefly talk about these.

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Here’s a story I heard

Making films can be as soul crushing as it can be a soul’s sustained flight of hands-on creativity along with kindred spirits. But filmmaking usually involves large sums of money and sometimes people making films lose their humanity while doing it and the money usually has something to do with this. When this happens, productions become nightmares of 100-200 pained souls whose resentment mounts and manifests everyday for anywhere between 40 to a 100 days. It isn’t pretty, if not downright ugly - with the worst parts of people manifesting and sparking of each other in a life sized pinball game from hell.

But recently, I heard an about a film director who negated this trend, whose sets were full of music and good food - a nurturing place where you wanted to be, relentlessly chasing an artistic dream standing behind the director’s vision through thick or thin. “I’d happily have a sleepless night for them,” a young producer told me about this director.

I immediately said to myself, “I want to be that guy.” The guy who someone would gladly sacrifice their sleep for.

These kinds of legends. That’s what I’m writing about. Because, I want my story to resemble Nausicaa’s in this respect.

I want to become these legends.

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An aside on becoming

Vimal Bhagat was an actor who died in 1992, succumbing to Motor Neuron Disease after an illustrious career on stage. His autobiography - Stage Whisper - has stayed with me for over two decades.

After reading his autobiography, it was as if Vimal’s ghost possessed me somewhat. There were things he said in his book that spoke deeply to me, and now I realise that I was also greatly moved by what was - to my eyes - the legend of his having spent a lifetime doing what he loved. There was one thing in particular, and thought and I’ve looked hard for the exact sentence in the book, I had no luck finding it. Paraphrasing below -

“If you want something in life, and you stick to that dream day and night, in all likelihood you will achieve it.”

It’s a simple, almost obvious line but I think it’s stayed with me for precisely this reason, because it was simple and obvious about something so huge: human desire. Desire, to me, is a fundamental force of life - the force behind becoming. Another 4am churn yielded -

Provocation 2 - Perhaps legends are desires in apotheosis - desires given a shape so as to become targets for us to move towards, or - at the very least - become signposts giving direction to our lives.

When I first read that line from Vimal’s book, I’m pretty sure I thought about my dream about becoming a filmmaker and felt it closer and more imminent than I had ever felt till then. For this, I’ve been thankful to Vimal all these years.

However, as I write, I’m pretty now that the real question in my heart was less about what my personal legends helped me become and more about who they helped me become.

Even if Nausicaa realised a legend and became a hero - the hero was a person at the end of the day: someone with courage and enough compassion to want to lead humanity to salvation. Perhaps we forget this, the fact that our legends are made up of people, and our heart is calling out for us to be like them.

Have a listen to “Sister Tilly” from Natalie Merchant’s new album “Keep your Courage.”

Yes, Natalie Merchant released a new album this week! It’s lovely. I fell in love with her voice when I heard 10,000 Maniacs Unplugged back in the late 90s, but I hadn’t tracked her all these years. I was both happy and not surprised to hear that she’s been a dedicated artist and a political activist all this time. One listen of the new Keep Your Courage will communicate volumes about her depth and compassion.

But these attributes were not earned alone.

There were many who held Natalie up in her early 20s - as she shares on this amazing BBC Front Row podcast - when she was smoking “way too much pot” and “not eating right”. “Sister Tilly” is a song about one such legend in her life who took her in and nurtured her, perhaps helped her survive her precarious 20s when she was touring almost constantly with her band.

Oh, Miss Tilly, I think you should know everyone’s missing you here —
Your bright yellow walls and your pashmina shawls
Crystals, chimes and your moonflower vines
Tinctures, teas and your secret remedies
And your voice like Buffy Sainte Marie
I just can’t believe that you’re gone
That you’ve gone so far away

Though she doesn’t say it - neither in her song nor in the podcast interview - I can feel that Natalie became a Sister Tilly to many young women who met her in her life.

Like Nausicaa becoming the Golden Warrior.

So, here are a few personal legends of mine…

…who have given me - at the very least - great direction for becoming.

• I’ve had an army of Sister Tillys who have appeared at various stages of my life. In Cambridge, there were you two in whose tiny house I cooked Dahi Chicken and then watched The Ring Trilogy and This is Spinal Tap, feeling the warmth of home in your presence. And then there was you in Mumbai, who opened your home to me on Sundays when I was a lowly intern in a production house, letting me step into your family life, feeding me, letting me play with your children, helping me build a picture of how I’d life to look in the future. You’ll be happy to know that it’s the life I’m living now.

• There’s you who bought me a camera - a very expensive camera - just because I expressed my desire for it. You who always give big - and always filled me with awe that it could be so easy and so filling to have a generosity like yours. I’m still not quite there, but I work at it every day. I’ve seen different versions of you in my life, as if life’s telling me through this recurring legend that this big generosity is waiting to be picked up like an indispensable tool and deployed by me in the world.

  

  My Leica Q, a symbol of someone’s amazing generosity. A lot of the photos in YU are from this amazing legend of optics. C. 2018

• There’s you who taught me that courage can be learned. You taught me that there are ways to unlock it because it’s sitting inside me in the first place.

• And then of course - there’s that lovely director who I’ve never met 😄 but whose vibe I really want to emulate!

This list could likely go long for a lot longer, but it’s publishing day and another YU to look forward to next week!

Thank you for listening! I’ll leave you with a question.

Would you please tell me about one of your personal legends? In what direction did they inflect your life?

I’ll leave you with a wonderful orchestration of the music from Miyazaki’s Nausicaa, by the legendary composer and longtime Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi.

Enjoy and see you next week!