Yet Untitled Lite 013 - meanings offered, meanings missed and meanings taken

A reaction to fears about missing “the point”

Coherence.

When I don’t have it, I look for it. That’s me, looking for Meaning everywhere. It’s a useful way to be, especially if you write a weekly newsletter!

Sometimes, meaning is elusive. Right here, in Yet Untitled, I have chased the meaning of my dreams. Remember Pointy Hegde from Yet Untitled 012? I don’t mind meaning being elusive. The chase, the hunt for meaning always feels worth it. Who know what you may uncover, especially about yourself as a result.

I watched Aftersun, debutant Charlotte Wells’ celebrated first feature and was extremely moved. It’s a film about memory - about a particular time and a place, and about a person. It about love and how it’s remembered.

Is that what it was?

When I finished watching Aftersun, it was as if a new empty space had opened inside me - a gaping hole asking for the answers to the questions that the film seemed to ask.

It was both wonderful and frustrating. When the film ended, I felt as if I had understood something profound, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. What had I understood?

It’s my usual practice to read the screenplay of films that I like, and most are readily available on the internet. I did the same for Aftersun.

And there it was.

Reading the screenplay confirmed that the original intent of the film was quite different from what I interpreted. This bothered me at first. This botheration was the starting point for the present meditation on the meanings we receive from dreams, books, films, art and life.

Dad, Again

He’s gone. I’m left with memories and photographs.

Among his slides - there are images of an air show he watched in Australia. I saw that he witnessed a crash. What must have that been like for him, to see an aircraft burst into a ball of flames and disintegrate in a cloud of dust and smoke a few hundred meters away?

I will never know. But, I was in a car with him once and we crashed into a bull off the Jaipur highway at about 120 Kmph. The bull’s body was smashed. Dad broke his foot in five places. My white kurta was stained with blood. We all survived. For years, Dad needed to have his feet massaged regularly because those bones never healed properly (something my mom always did for him lovingly). Could the memory of that crashing plane have run through his mind when we crashed into that bull?

I will never know. Perhaps he is the only one who could have ever known what trauma that plane crash imprinted on him. The trauma’s gone now, with him, into the beyond.

He may be gone, but here I am with memories, photographs and imagination doing a waltz in my head. In my head, I can see a version of him - much like Paul Mescal’s portrayal of the young dad in Aftersun - with a vast, private world inside him; traumas and all. I’m in the place of the young 11 year old girl, Sophie, from the film - quietly watching her dad - up close, but distant, his inner world in the end as inaccessible to her as parts of dad are to me.

Whether I read the film as it was intended or not feels unimportant in front of the days spent seeing the world through eyes coloured by it, to see myself in the film’s young father (an age I was not so long ago) and glimpses of my 8 year old twin girls in the 11 year old Sophie. Correctly interpreted or not, the film took root in me. I proved good soil for Aftersun to take root in - me who has been looking at memory artefacts of my own, trying and give better answers to questions I ask myself.

This film will now exist through me in different ways - perhaps its poster may go up in a future office. 15 years ago, I might have ordered a DVD off Amazon UK, had it delivered to a London address and waited for someone to fly across to carry it for me. 10 years ago, I might have sketched a frame from it in my diary using ink and wash. Tomorrow, I might talk about it in a writers’ room. Today, I’m writing about it in Yet Untitled.

It’s part of me, all right. I’d say I gleaned all the meaning from it that mattered. It offered me something and I took it. Isn’t that all we can do? Isn’t it enough?