About Pierrotting

Well, also see this for more: Pierrotting

Does one explain why he is blogging? Even if he does, should be a silly thing to do. I hardly expect strangers coming across these pages. I have linked this blog to another silly page, and I can only expect that people would stroll down to this page from that one, might be they already know me, therefore they don”t need any explanations. If they don”t, I welcome strangers with a silent speechless smile.
I will hardly be personal, confessional or spontaneously “situational” in these pages. Too public a domain this is, personal things are boring to write about, privacy is still desired … Yeah, I am a flaneur in the Times, love walking down the arcades, but like all those people who like to walk down the streets without names, get lost, visit the unexpected and avoid the obvious known bends of streets, I do have certain alleys where I love to halt a bit, and Jean-Luc Godard”s Pierrot le Fou is one of them.
I travel the hours each day, each hour visited a bit by yesterdays, each hour haunted by the ghosts of tomorrows, and I fantasize Pierrot as a figure of the future which is already told. It”s like walking into a text each day, taking a break, staying until the air seeps in your bloodstream and walking away when a ring-tone chimes, or somebody has something to say, or another dreary work summons. And when I am sitting there, in a momentary lapse of living, I like to channelize a bit of everyday”s log of emotions through those images I love, the sounds that drip in my mind, the ideas which were streaming 24 frames per second in a film made in 1965.

I gather meanings, I collect words. Sitting by the water when I am trying to light a cigarrette in the breeze, this madman visits me in this place. I pay him a coin, he offers me a word. These days he offers me one even if I lack changes. I know it is a word which I have dropped few hours ago in another street and never knew that I have lost it. Tossing the word, I discover that a new meaning is there on the flip-side of it. Or, it is not exactly a new meaning always; I never knew it had a meaning afterall, or I have actually lost my dictionary, or I have forgot that words have meanings at all. I know words have their use-values, or their exchange-values. I use them each day to squeeze out their utilities or to buy things in exchange, but only when this madman gives them back to me I understand that they also have “meanings”.

That “love” or “dreams” return back to me most of the days is not accidental. Using “love” each day to get something, exchanging “love” to buy something … hmmm … but a meaning? I just remembered I dropped that word somewhere else. Or “woman”, which I wrongly misplace with “love” and “dream” so many times, paying someone more than he deserves, forgetting to collect the change in a transaction, and this madman returns the word many a days, and I find strange new meanings on the flipside. Bewildered, I finish my smoking (remembering that the cig deserved few more puffs when the butt is burnt) and I walk off. Out of the text, inside existence, still flipping the word untill unmindfully dropping it somewhere I confuse the “meaning” in my hand with just another useful word and use it or exchange it for something, forgetting that words are intransitive verbs, they just go but they go nowhere … and meanings should be wrapped in a handkerchief and kept in the pocket. But problem is, meanings and words are so similar in shape and touch actually …

Oh! I told you nothing about Pierrotting …

Soumya (again): I don’t like a certain tendency of blogging ’cause I think it is exhibitionist …

That was not a question, that was a judgemental comment. No answers to that, but thoughts can roll on …

Depends, on what you are doing. But, I think, when you write, you are actually stripping yourself. Lord Eliot of Wasteland County did that too, inspite of his depersonalising bullshits. But that does not mean going full monty (no one is bothered about your wand, it’s the same thing everywhere, so better keep it inside your closet), so confessional blogging is boring. But this strip-tease act is actually an unfair comparison, I think, when one strips to the public, here are the eyes rather passive and bored in more than one ways, and there is the body which sheds the layers of synthetic epidermis, s/he is bored too (routine act, nothing new); I don’t think that the act of writing and reading is (yeah, one act, so singular verb) similar. Well, presupposition: this type of blogging is maintaining a personal journal to be displayed in others’ browser windows …

Blogging is radical because of the speed of publishing – can’t publish a book so quickly (and also not private like the mails or messages, it is meant to be published) and also because of the apprehension of ephemerality, the easiness of perishing. I cannot withdraw all my books from the bookstores (different point altogether that there are none), but deleting this blog is just a few clicks away. A fit of rage can do that immediately, irretrievally. The entire cyberspace might crush oneday, anything lesser dramatic might happen and you might find the error page of your browser when you type in this address and go. This sensation of imminent possibility of death is what excites me. And one can tease and test the decreased attention span of a regular surfer in a humbler way, just a click here and just a click there and you are gone; flattens your ego, its assuring that you are a noone, a nobody.

I don’t have enough skeletons to show in my cupboard, neither will I try to increase the weight of the lightness of a ordinary day just by keying it in. But the act of reading and writing is an erotic game where consummation is deferred forever, I hide and reveal, you are not bothered about what I reveal but rather on what I conceal. The act of strip-tease is quantitative, there is always the next piece of cloth to be shed, and it decreases in numbers. The act of writing is qualitative instead, it just reveals something to conceal another within the same sentence. Not an act of surrender this is, but creating an entirely different body and placing it for your eyes only. There is something sinful in this kinda writing, something whorish, something carnal … in these acts of writing to the strangers’ eyes. Like lying in the confession box, playing foreplay when you are the impotent one, in other words, playing roles to satisfy and feeling the evil satiety that you did not play yourself. And the shivering nervousness that I am writing all these just because I am doing the reverse: you can see me because I am standing in the balcony unaware …

To sum up: dunno. I write each evening, and cannot say I can control what I do. Can say that you will never meet the writer in flesh and blood even when you meet me, the writer is the ghost in these traces, the reader are the faceless eyes. I break myself, I make you anew. And this you die out when you click away, you do your work, you pay your bills, you search for lunch. Only the ghost in these traces haunt me for the rest of the day, the other me born within me, these moments of Walter Mitty …

Pierrotting: the moments of incubus, the dress-rehearsals of another nervous breakdown, the ominous evenings of angels coming back and the regret when one is displayed on a browser window and the apprehension that she will start asking questions: is this the thing that you meant? And you know that she can hear those music which your male ears are deaf to; she knows she knows …

Soumya: Are you obsessed with Pierrot le Fou?

Incidentally, the Lionel White novel on which the film was based was named Obsession. But that hardly matters, I have a hunch that Prenom: Carmen (1983) is a reworking of the same story, though it was based on the famous Bizet opera. Nevertheless, questions to be followed by thoughts, if not answers …

Hmmm, apparently so, ‘coz I have an Orkut ID named after the film, and it was the first Godard film which hit me hard in the heart, and after years of certain engagement with Cinema/Godard I think it was the pinnacle film of early Godard phase. Therefore, you can have traces of the earlier romantic/existentialist auteur and an hint towards the later political phase. The May Revolution in 1968 is just few years away (“It was the first, it was the only dream”, Pierrot’s soliloquy after shooting Marianne), the next film – Masculine Feminine – would be a dispassionate political love story with younger and very real Pierrots and Mariannes (the boy commits suicide, the girl aborts and smiles, compare final fade out with that of Breathless). Pierrot is the final dream to be followed by Weekend (1967), the ultimate nightmare (final fade out: wife eating husband’s flesh, served not raw but cooked, and wanting for more). Inspite of the betrayal and the murder, Pierrot is the greatest dream. It is one of those rare texts which open up possibilities of other texts, other stories, other dreams; it is Jean-luc’s only myth …

Obsessed, yup. Because it helps. Certain texts, certain myths help to organise the comprehension of your life (if not its meaning). Like this blog, starting with art and love and women (those words, and sorry for being unabashedly hetero, will try my best not to be a MCP) intends to end up in politics. That does not necessarily mean adding a political post, but am in a search of a certain logistics, how to logically end up in politics (Revolution, the greatest love-adventure of all). Recalling Pyaasa, that great film, how it managed its slow-travel from a soured love to a political denunciation of the world (Burn this world! Yeh duniya agar mit bhi jaye to kya hai) and to another redeeming love (heh! everyone keeps an impression that Pyaasa is a tragic film. That man, Guru Dutt, great one … ), something which the ‘Devdas’ myth could have easily achieved, but couldn’t . So need to find out a logistics of emotions. These films provide me that structure of feelings, if I can say so.

Pierrot was mad, couldn’t cope up simultaneously with the absurdity of urban life and ambiguity of the woman. Madness is a pre-requisite to build yourself into a beautiful soul in flames (the junoon, the final fanaa), replacing the rational madness of this urban metropolitan capitalist muck-world with the irrational madness of art. Cannot afford to be mad in real life, can approach that sublime madness through art. And since I am an artist who is not sure of his medium, am trying to achieve it through writing. Pierrot exploded to warn that the urban absurdity cannot be redeemed through the feminine ambiguity. Pierrot the fool! Hmmm … still can’t comprehend why he went berserk, but will work it out, will feel it out (but won’t live it out, this is to all those angels who love me: I love you angel but will never live with you, never touch you, feel you etc.; there you are, forever freezed in my memories, and I have freezed you there means I have killed Marianne; she cannot be corrupt anymore, can’t betray, can’t leave, will remain there, not in a space, but in a zone of time, forever nurturing. Try to convince me out, I will run like hell)

… at least, I told a bit about pierrotting (that ‘rotting’ is interesting).

But seriously, I don’t understand why people are still relegated to the archaic tendency of linking a persona with a flesh-and-blood person. I know of readers who considered me as a lovelorn, sick bechara boy for the last few weeks (more about me and my love later). Someone called me pessimistic. A tyger, with much well-felt concern, then told me not to reveal myself too much in these posts. Neither of them are wrong, but nor are they exactly right. Question 1: if one can easily read a novel written in first-person, why cannot one be convinced of a blog written in first person? i.e. should the ‘I’ of a blog be always conflated to the ‘I’ of the author? Are the man who suffer and the man who blogs about those sufferings or the suffering ‘I’ of these words you are reading the same persons? Why can’t a blog be a vehicle of pieces of fiction? And fiction does not always mean the fictitious, the not-real, fiction is a step away from the real with one foot firmly on the real. Why can’t a blog be such a piece of fiction? To sum up this paragraph, reading this blog as reading me, is slowly becoming a sort of irritation to me, a kind of reading-turned-intrusion into my person. Read my writings, not me.

Now I will quote. Here is something from a person who loves to be enigmatic, she changes not only her Orkut pic-and-profile (many of us do so), but also deletes all her scraps after playing something; she says (in public, in my orkut scrapbook):

yeahhh doppelganger…now i know…evil twin thingie….well i guess ppl we actually interact on orkut r all doppelgangers if the person in reality…jerokom amartaoo kichutaaa…there4 da anonymity…well i dunno but i thnk this is like a warm shelter for introverts [i can be wrong]….maintaining the existence or doing things that is usually impossible to do in reality…[i for example have this habit of frequently chngng my profile pics names abt me so much so that people actually forget who i really am]….this mite be cuz in reality i know i mite crave to be a changeling but thats not possible its da same me every day…atleast i can get rid of the mundaneness or inspidity over here….well positives of an orkut life…

Sister of my soul, she is then. To clarify the context, I told her that Pierrot is my doppelganger.

Even she does not mean that we kind of bloggers are certain depressed persons in search of a online therapy (I know there are similar bloggers). Please don’t miss the notion of playfulness offered by the new media which life seldom offers us. I am not depressed babies, I am enjoying! Read a post which yearns about love, if you notice the pining and suffering, why don’t you notice the play (in all senses of the word)? The sheer erotics of language which only a man too hedonist with words can enjoy? Is he suffering or is he relishing the touch and taste and smell and zing and trip and high of words, words and words? When you peek into me whining-and-pining away into sighs, you are missing someone going heady with language. And the masks: this entire blog is a tribute to some greatest artists (and their works) ever; well Jean-Luc Godard and a couple of his films might top the list, but how do you know I won’t play Hamlet or Jimmy Porter, Mersault or Raskolnikov, Dr Rieux or Daktar Sashi, Apu or Sergio Correiri (even, depends, I might play a Norman Bates or a Hannibal Lecter)? I am a cannibal who eats up human life and digest it to sieve out the nutrients (you know there is a difference between eating sumptous food and imbibing triglycerides, that is the difference between me and I), and I have started with and might stick to me only (because I am an extremely kind person, can’t harm a fly). Come on! Wanted to be a novelist or a filmmaker, ended up into being a commentator of others’ finished works; so lemme create emotions, situations, persona(s) even if it means hijacking others’ works. Pierrot in Calcutta? Would have been possible and is possibling in present-continuous-tense, but instead of being a movie, the movie is being a blog. And if something like Nandigram happens again, I will react within this fiction, ’cause it is liberal enough to accomodate non-fictions (like Vietnam in Godard’s films).

My name is Poiccard, Pierrot Poiccard. More about this surname, a man and a mask later, about Michel and Bogart, and an author who gave away his ‘character’ to the cops, and laid all the blame on the girl.

And lastly, about this author of the blog: he is kiddishly in love with a wonderful girl … hihi! And no wonder she is a regular reader of this blog, and she knows she knows … and each night, quite late, I whisper it to her … that I am happy loving her.

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Had a conversation with Paul Knopfler earlier, why is it here? Because I lost all these comments because of sheer ill-management and because I like this man…

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