Amitabh Bachchan · @SrBachchan
26th Aug 2012 from Twitlonger
T 848 - a beautiful piece from my Blog of my Ef Satyam ..
A remarkable 'tale' in today's post both by way of the text and the images. The image with the monkey right at the very end is extremely evocative. From the hyper-photographed celebrity to the primate in its elemental repose. The latter the 'quintessence' of us all....
The Freudian lesson that the ego is always a bodily ego is often forgotten. We cannot but see ourselves mirrored in our bodies which is why even before our mental and physical powers wane the aging itself causes a shattering in the ego. But perhaps this Freudian insight could only have come about in the age of photography. Since then we are to an even greater extent victims of images. For a celebrity, especially an actor, it is that much worse. The museum of one's past forever surrounds one. In a sense one constantly lives entombed in the hyper-presence of these images. Time's 'it was' can never stop haunting what is. Could one dare to rewrite Macbeth?
Yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our tomorrows have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
I have just switched around two words and it still makes perfect sense. Rather fortuitously Shakespeare uses the word 'recorded' here. Doesn't the actor always inhabit 'recorded' time? What might it be like to live such a life? And what truly haunts the actor is 'yesterday'... the 'tomorrow' that will not be like 'yesterday'. And even as the actor keeps moving in recorded time towards ever-greater tomorrows he forgets that all these tomorrows are really yesterdays and the more he seeks the new and the different the more he becomes captive to those ever-proliferating yesterdays. And so it is in life. It is only the past that keeps winning because only in its infinite chest are the 'bezels' of time constantly cast. There is always necessarily more 'passed' than there is to come. Even gods have histories..
Tomorrow offers us visions but the ghost of yesterday keeps animating us. How we imagine tomorrow very much depends on how we have seen yesterday...