22 June 2009
A Boy, a Flute, Isabel, 'My life', that of 'Words', 'Elegy'... in short, rambling...
)Published on June 22nd, 2009 @ 04:45:54 pm, using 1507 words, 642 views
I had a flute I was forced to play when I was that age myself. Mine was a dark shade of brown instead of that ivory. The brown of my eyes away from sunlight and just a hint of that same ivory right where my name was carved on its surface. A measure of possessiveness in that carving, I can now see, a measure of selfishness, and also a touch of girlishness in that handwriting script. All minor differences in the context of the very dejavu-ish image of this boy and his flute. The one screaming difference was his absolute determination to do what had to be done in spite of the audience in attendance - the worst kind of audience, in fact. One that’s physically there but acts like it doesn’t want to be bothered, one that’s in its own bubble and seems to like it just fine that way. The kind of audience that is no audience at all but rather a bunch of gloomy-faced individuals sharing space for no higher purpose than to get to where they’re headed - simply immersed collectively in the common stretch of their routine and made temporarily lifeless by it.
I still can’t decide for myself which would take more guts - for, say… a stand-up comedian to take the stage and face a roomful of paying customers or for that boy to unzip his backpack take out his flute in the middle of a speeding subway car and begin practicing the theme song to Popeye, The Sailor Man, as he did.
Shocking, I thought. Being the kind of person who’s always drawn a line between myself and the world and never fully joined in, I found that invitation remarkable. Coming from a teenager, with the added layers of selectively embraced social skills and easy aversions that the phase entails, remarkable was upgraded to unthinkable. And still there it was. A young man in his early to mid teens playing the flute in a subway car.
I wanted to start with a glance and work my way up to staring. The scene was definitely worthy of such attention but then the thought that a stare might stir and awaken the boy’s self-consciousness and shrink his resolve quickly shrank my own. I couldn’t help but see him as a fidgety bird that might require absolute quiet and stillness in exchange for the pleasure of his company. Though not exactly pleasurable, his behavior was fascinating to me and I welcomed the opportunity to ponder on it. Pondering, in turn - it seemed to me - would best be accomplished in proximity to him. Who knows where the fidgety bird that is my own mind might fly off to if the boy suddenly acquired the airy distinction of a memory? So I listened instead, glanced occasionally and continued my northbound ride with my back to our common destination, facing him, yet taking pains to avoid his eyes.
There was no music to his notes just like once there had been no music to mine. There was our age. His now and mine then. There was, I’m sure, some kind of a test in his near future, perhaps the threat of a failing grade bearing down on him, dark-cloud-like, creating enough terror to dislodge embarrassment from its top spot in his list of fears. There was fear of something bigger propelling him to do the normally undoable. Pressure that led to practice as obligation. There were the motions he gave in to like a zombie, the notes he went through in record time, allowing them no respite, managing to twist meaning and joy out of them like water from a towel or control from an arm. Yes, there certainly was his age. Age and its power to either optimize or altogether squash a given venture or adventure. And forcefulness. There was age, there was forcefulness, and there was fear. And a vivid illustration of how their combination can make us go against ourselves - go against ironically, what is expected of our age and our personal fears themselves. This was the picture I saw illustrated for anyone willing to give it some thought. Utter and urgent preoccupation with hitting a particularly difficult note and forgetting the music. Like a writer racking his/her brain for the perfect word while losing sight of the heart of the piece. Like a man so taken with a woman’s looks he fails to see her.
There’s a little of that condition, analogized to fit the context, in every Isabel Coixet film I’ve ever seen. Three so far and counting. As I sat down to write about the boy and his flute, I began to find my way back to her stories, mingling again with her characters and the soft narrative that wraps them like a blanket, looking and looking for their truths and stacking those up in a pile beside one of my own. I can find in each one of her stories that focusing so voraciously on a detail or idea or ideal or idyllic detail that the big picture becomes blurred and momentarily unimportant.
Every life engages in a lifelong flirtation with habit, which is the sometimes poison, sometimes antidote in charge of distracting you from the passing of time. Too big an attachment to habit can rob a life of its much needed unpredictable swirls - like the sea of its waves and each wave of its uniqueness. On the other hand, too eager and efficient an avoidance of habit can set you adrift.
A suspension of habit can act as a jostling force, a helpful well-intentioned push, a blaring alarm clock, coming in the form of a terminal diagnosis (My Life without me), the prospect of connection to someone who has been tragically led to give up on people (The Secret Life of Words) and in the form of love to someone who has spent years rejecting the notion and building up an immunity to it (Elegy).
There was a story behind the boy who unzipped his backpack, took out his ivory flute and began to practice amidst unsmiling strangers. He came from somewhere, was going somewhere else and jostled me by trampling on my expectations.
That’s where Isabel Coixet came in, with her welcome invitations to ponder quietly on the human condition. My mind went straight back into My Life without me (2003) and the questions I posed to myself upon watching that movie. Does the once exciting product of habit necessarily have to be meaningless? How to feel about someone’s decision to push a husband, two daughters, a trailer home, a difficult but happy life (arrived at through a perfectly blended mix of choices and circumstances) into a corner in order to make room for what’s missing? To share importance with a dying wish list? That movie gave the audience of me a chance to consider the last stretch of life. The stretch from a terminal diagnosis to death itself. A stretch blessed with foresight and the possibility of preparation while cursed with the horrors of anticipation and decay. The missing details suddenly magnified as a lifeline, once immeasurable and full of potential, is chopped off into a futureless stretch. And all the unfulfilled dreams and all the ‘uns’ - everything undone and unsaid and unworried about - explode in the night sky like fireworks.
My Life Without Me (Opening sequence)
My Life Without Me (Trailer)
And what of horrors? Real, tear-jerking horrors derived from the deep end of human cruelty, that must be lived with by some, and not merely avoided as by the rest of us. There is blindness and deafness in The Secret Life of Words (2005). Both self-imposed and injury-caused. There are scars and burn wounds and a sense of disconnection and close relationship to time and how to fill it with words and silence. All surrounded by the fluidity and persistence of water. There is delicate reaching from places in the human landscape that have been cruelly mistreated and shrunk and made to reach for solitude or company. Solitude and company.
The Secret Life of Words (Trailer)
And then, there’s crippling fear, as portrayed in Elegy (2008). The crippling fear which often gets misread as admirable, enviable independence. The fear that keeps us from life, that leads us to overthink matters which should sweep us like a wave just short of tsunami size.
In between doses of poison and antidote, life calls for attention and inattention, focus and distraction, releases and tight grips. A constant rethinking of standard perceptions. Whatever propels such a rethinking - whether it’s a boy and his flute in a subway car or an Isabel Coixet movie to challenge your tendentious insights - my advice to you is… seize the opportunity and learn from it.
Elegy (Trailer)
(November 2008)
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Thoughts, musings, movies, Coixet, boy, flute, audience, self-consciousness, self-awareness, routine, terminal, life, words, elegy, videos, destination
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