037 - Permanence
A small note on vaccination before we proceed. Do get one if you can. But, the vaccine right now is a lottery. Those who haven't had theirs might get anxious and stressed, so maybe not share it publicly till we all see better days?
At least, that’s how I feel about it. I thought I'd share that with you.
Writing from an inoculating Bombay, this is Maneesh and this is Bombay Daak. Welcome to the new readers.
Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time.
- Virginia Woolf, Orlando: a Biography
This quote is how this essay on the scenes from Paul Graham’s But Still, It Turns begins. It speaks of how the photos capture multiple eras at once. And I felt nothing says better of this letter than that.
My YouTube feed is filled with scenes from The Wire.
Come 2022 it will be twenty years since it first aired. But I am sure if we one were stroll the streets of Baltimore you will see shadows of a new Omar or Barksdale or Michael. City cops like Bunk and McNulty and oddities like Bubbles and Presbo. The Wire is a rare show that remains timeless. Its five seasons runs like a wheel.
The roles change, but the story does not. The players come and go, the game stays the same.
Another indictment of America's failures I saw was Nomadland. Scene after scene of pure cinema.
The movie works because Chloe Zhao, in the vein of Terrence Malick, gives room for her scenes to breath; even when she fills the movie with plenty. Striking visuals and stunning music. I couldn’t even skip the credits till the music stopped.
Fern, the protagonist suffocates in the permanence of the world around her. She tries to make a world of her own on the road. Nomadland is her fight against the indifference of a world that moves on without her.
Last week was great in that sense. Before Nomadland, I saw Cake, and Asim Abbasi in its first hour or so gives us equally evocative scenes. It was beautiful to watch.
The edifice of human achievement is marked equally in its fall as much as its rise. This city from a millennia ago, once thriving, suddenly abandoned. Who will tell the artists what is to become of their work? And if there remain none to see it, do their art exist?
The impermanence of things is a given, hence they don’t dither.
Petra, 2018