Places, Time, Desire
In All We Imagine As Light, a pair of lovers walk hand in hand. It is getting dark in Bombay, and around them stretches out the constellation of sights and sounds that constitute the sprawling city. The lovers are two specks of light among many. He describes how shifts in space and time have changed his experience of evenings. Back home as a child, evenings marked an ending- time for a day of playing outside to end, time to go back inside. Now (and here), evening seems to mark a beginning- the day is only getting started.
Speaking the same language is intimate when all around you there is the ebb and flow of a stream of otherness. But unintelligibility can be a ground of intimacy too. I make the effort to spell out for you something that is as basic as breathing to me. Somewhere in the space between the need for effort and my willingness to perform it, might lie love.
Wordsworth thinks bleakly of the city’s potential to engender and nurture love. “…nor does it easily thrive/In cities, where the human heart is sick, And the eye feeds it not…” He was wrong of course. Where would our lovers be without the city, a protective net of anonymity cast over them? It is an insufficient and provisional protection of course, but for now it is there. If the city sickens the human heart, it also gives it enough to heal. Over the course of the film, the intimacy of one woman’s head resting on another’s shoulder. The intimacy of clothes coming off, of bodies bared as part of an unremarkable and unerotic routine, of fish curries being cooked as a way of saying sorry. Darkness is often uncomfortable in the city, the spaces where light cannot reach are created through intentional, willful acts of cruelty. But if it leaves us in need of light, it also provides us with spots of it. Here and there.
I think a lot about how my experience of time changes drastically based on where I am. Winter in Toronto is not winter in Calcutta. The sun sets so early back home. The year ended so comfortably there. Does our experience of time not provide us with the frameworks through which we experience life?
Wordsworth talks about the spots of time that redeem in some sense our very experience of life. When I lived with family, evening brought with it a breath of relief. The sun would retreat, and the threatening darkness of nighttime was not here yet. I could take a walk outside, unsupervised. I could go to the rooftop terrace and play music out loud. An hour or two like that could make life bearable, even if it only came once a day. These fragments come back to me now, and I am grateful for the comfort of nostalgia. It insists that home could mean something bearable. Something to go back to one day.
We never really go back anywhere. You know that saying about how you can never step into the same river twice. The city is a river too, always in flux. This is also true of the desires it breeds.