Sunday, January 14, 2007

why we write

Inspired by the movies I watched yesterday, The Hours and Daddy Long Legs (a Korean film), I 'realized' that ..
we write because we are scared..
not only of being forgotten, but of forgetting.

One might say it is a simple fact of life. What example could be more apt than our mundane acts of sticking those neon-colored post-its at the back of our notebook's front page or writing our to-do's on the pages of that bulky planner that came with liters of caffeine running in our veins.

But I would like to talk about those 'other things' (for lack of a better term) that we are scared of forgetting; by saying 'other', I did not mean to imply that these are rare. Rather, I refer to these as 'other' because these are not planned, unthought-of. And while the examples mentioned earlier deal with what we give time to (thus implying a certain form of control), these 'other things' refer to what time gives us and gets back just as fast.

I am talking about moments - moments that become memories when remembered, when not forgotten.

In Daddy Long Legs, it is by writing (specifically, email messages to be sent a year after) that the main male character who is suffering from a disease that erases his memory, tries to keep what he calls "memories of love".

In The Hours, it is by writing that the brilliant poet played by (Ed Harris) wants to capture every moment - all the feelings in a single moment, right then and there, but he fails.

And it is not surprising. Because wanting to grasp fully what is 'uncapturable' in its very nature is like wanting to hold water in our hands without expecting some of it to spill.

Every person is a moment. Every happiness is a moment. Every pain is a moment. Neither a beginning nor an end.

Echoing what the modern Mrs Dalloway said in The Hours - "It was the moment. Right then.";

and what Virginia Woolf told her husband, "to look life in the face, always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last, to know it, to love it, for what it is and then to put it away."

I am not against the fear of forgetting. I am not against writing (because if that's the case, then I am hating what I am doing now). This is just a caution for those who expect too much of the eternal in every person, in every happiness, in every pain; for those who fear extinction that when it comes to them, they crumble.

Life and death happens in a single moment; and the moment you write about the moment - it both lives and dies.