Yet Untitled 106 - Where does it all come from?
Yet Untitled 106 - Where does it all come from?
A short, unconventional tract on gravity
Dearest Yet Untitler,
How are you? I haven’t ask you this enough, so do tell me. I love it when I meet readers like you after a long gap and am surprised by how you know so much about the inner workings of my life via this newsletter. I do love, when it happens, how conversations triggered by YU get us talking in small though meaningful bursts. But I don’t feel it happens enough. I’m always craving for more.
So. How is it going?
Now, to the meat.
I want to write more about dreams. Lately, I’ve been finding them to be more of a resource than ever. This is happening at a time when I’ve been commissioned to write something that could potentially freak the shit out of me, mostly by having me feel incapable of writing it. Thankfully, I’ve not felt that way and I think I have my dreams to thank for this.
My dreams tell me repeatedly that there’s more in my life than what I access when awake. This is heartening, especially while the demands being made on me as a writer feel theoretically, on paper, larger than what my meagre 🙄 44 years would have to offer. Those troubling questions - do I have what it takes? Do I have the experience? Do I know enough? None of the answers are easy.
But…
Fifteen years ago, a few months before I got married, I wrote a screenplay about a couple who had been married for 40 years. The first draft of ‘Sebastian Wants to Remember’ was a surprising one. It all flowed out of me in one steady stream, where I felt that I was discovering rather than writing. It was and remains (to me and others) a touching narrative about conjugality, a story that speaks of the trust between two long-term companions and how this trust is tested. It feels like - I’ve been told in one way or another - that there’s a lot of lived experience in that story, and it rings true; enough to attract a growing number of supporters of all ages to stand behind it. It’s been a long road to getting the film made, but I’ll get there. Do send me that good juju.
But…
Where did all that come from?
I’m pretty sute that ‘Sebastian Wants to Remember’ didn’t only come from my then 29-year-old, slightly cocky, slightly-jaded-after-5-years-of-Assistant-Directing life. Where was all that life-truth hiding, and how in the dang hell did I access it?
As a Buddhist, I do believe in Karma. To me, one of the most interesting perspectives on this well-known concept is regarding karma as ‘conditioning’ rather than ‘memory’ - treating the belief of life continuing after death not as a transmigration of an identity but of impressions from one life to the next.
This idea - that our life carries impressions, not memories, as it moves across cycles of existing sits well with me. Perhaps my life carries impression of many many marriages and companionships. Even if this is true, I can tell you for sure that I don’t access these impressions like I access the taste of the kasundi broccoli that I ate at Soho House Mumbai today.
I sincerely wonder what triggers these impressions into play, and then has them feed into to my waking life to use in my work.
What are these triggers, then?
Man, I want to know!
I remember an interesting communion that took place between my outer and inner lives when, in my 20s, I took a sabbatical to work - upon a whim - on a graphic novel (I wrote more on this in YU 008). I was in my 20s, I really wanted to draw and my elders (parents, bosses) granted me this permission to go scratch that itch.
Itch. Whim. Interesting words.
By making that choice of taking the sabbatical (not an easy one at any given time), I was essentially responding to conditioning (unexplained, compelling urge from within), throwing myself into a sea of triggers that would manifest what lay hidden and beneath the floorboards of my life, causing it to tap out in big, bold morse code - “Hear me you dufus! I’m as much yours as that blackhead on the side of your nose (and more useful). Use me!”
Over the years, I kept responding more and more readily to such calls from the deep.
The other night I asked myself a question about something I did not understand well, something I needed to write about. That night I had a poignant dream in which I felt surprising, truthful emotions that were not unrelated to my question. I came away from sleep with insight. I had asked nobody else except myself.
I’d like to tell you that it was as simple as that, but in truth - I feel that was both simple, and…not. It has something to do with what the beliefs I hold as true about my life.
My relationship with belief tells me that that it’s most powerful in its simplest and most uncomplicated form. But we live in a complicated world that challenges this idea with scepticism. So when my dreams push something towards me, I can imagine a scenario where I dismiss it all as some emo short-circuit during slumber only to be regarded through the sour lens of suspicion or embarrassment, never to be discussed again.
Dear YUer, I choose belief.
It’s an easy choice. If I chose differently, I feel I’d be denying a rich, fertile resource that my life’s giving me for free.
The stuff from my dreams is served up HOT, like flaming coals of life that I catch as they burn through the stratosphere of my inner world and get pulled into my consciousness by some gravitation that I feel I create.
This gravitation, I hazard, is nothing but my belief.
I wish you belief, dearest Yet Untitler. May it hurtle you towards everything you desire.
Lots of love
V
PS
Something other than a dream woke me up the night after publishing. I didn’t mention a very important resource that feeds into my world - my collaborators.
They too have precious stuff hidden under the floorboards of their lives which they painstakingly and generously give me to place in our work.
You all know who you are. Pulling you all towards my life, that too perhaps happened by virtue of some amazing gravitation.
Ciao
V