Maps from Beyond Dark Corners
As to why one embarks on making a habit of alcohol consumption, I do suppose there are reasons. In the beginning you can pretty much get it down to a face or two- women, boss, co-workers, friends- sometimes all of it rolled up into one face fatale but as the months and years swim by, the reasons pretty much cease to matter. Or more accurately, they change. The pub, the tavern, the bar, the eponymous watering hole, whatever you choose to call it, becomes more than a refuge. Between you and the establishment there is a definite metamorphosis. Together you evolve into an altogether wonderful organism- a being far superior than the sum its parts, a being of a greater liquid consciousness, almost a cosmos of its own. All through life’s journey and many emotions and facets, through joy and sorrow, through pain and comfort, through solitude and in the company of friends, through idling and business, the man involved in a long standing relationship with a bar is no longer at a loss to know and convey the most deepest and most complex of his feelings. The tavern and the man become a strange and beautiful locus where each part comes together to express mood- eyes, hands, raincoats, furniture, lights, company, the music across the counter, the topless winged waif mistress of Fu Man Chu plastered across the wall, the smoke, the reticent bartender, the waiter’s enigmatic Cheshire grin and obviously, alcohol. Mood and emotion are freed from the boundary of mere words and gestures and turn into a freewheeling spirit. Each night, you gently float the cosmos towards your dream, a grand expression of it and you arrive at the center of the universe.
“Every genuine encounter is an encounter with a monster”
-Michal Ajvaz, The Other City
It was in one such bar, real or dreamed, I do not remember anymore but which I believe is precisely why one drinks that I was one evening nursing my fourth pint over some vague news or the other of a deadly plague that had seemingly broken over my gloomy city, when a strange gentleman, tall, jaunty, cranes in his footsteps, all angles and no curves wearing a curious tweed jacket and hat came over to my table and requested for his presence in the empty chair opposite mine, diagonal across the rectangular surface of the table. Under his armpits was stuck a long chart paper almost as the equatorial axis of the earth cut right across his tiny waist. I nodded my ‘I don’t mind’ as he sat with the same angular grace that seemed to possess his body, almost as if he was snapping but he was in fact, only taking his seat. The waiter came wearing the mask of the swine, pink but made to look a strange blue under the lights and the strange man snapped for a drop of the very best. As the waiter departed from the spotlight into the surrounding darkness, the angular man unrolled his chart right across the table, pulled a mighty pocket watch from his coat and a eggshaped paperweight from another pocket and laid the chart crisp and straight such that each corner of his chart rested on each side of the rectangle table, a diamond within a box with a watch and a egg at the tropics, such that I had only a triangle of my own to rest my pint and across, another triangle to rest my elbow.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said,” I’m only a cartographer”
Under the cadence of the three and a half that I had already emptied, I thought he was offering something of a joke and closed my eyes imagining the word I had been searching for from the moment I first saw him- ‘vernier caliper’, and began to laugh. When I had finished my guffaw I opened my eyes to find him sneering at me with a green sneer.
“I fail to understand what could be so particularly funny”. Obviously he was three and a half drinks short and I apologized.
“I don’t suppose business would be great. I mean, mapmaking is surely not profitable with all the world so comfortably mapped out and satellites and everything,” I offered as the waiter reappeared from across the shadows only to place his glass under his nose and vanish back.
He tipped his glass at me, I tipped my bottle back. We’re all gentlemen in here.
“Just some of the few misconceptions the people seem to have formed about cartographers,” he quipped and then mumbled under his sip,” We’ve been around for much longer than you. You sir, obviously, you are a car salesman.”
“I get that a lot,” I replied,” I’m in insurance”
“Insurance”, he snorted in a way which displeased even the most jaded insurance guy like me… particularly me,” We cartographers were around before time itself was called ‘time’. Men needed maps and symbols much before they needed words and far, far before they came up with rampant ridiculousness like ‘insurance’.
‘What is it that you do that makes you oh-so-great-and-mighty? For all you know, you’re just a second-rate quack of a painter.” It came out harsher than I meant it to be but from the insolent blue that his face had on, I realized I came out as a raging fool.
He clasped his thin fingers across each other, laid his elbows on the table and with a mild arch of his eyebrows, directed me to his chart. A curious chart, to say the least. All inked out in strange black, only a kind of black that when I tilted my head to the right turned blue and green, when tilted left. And the shifting colors formed just the tip of the iceberg of strangeness. It was a sketch of such chaos, the more I stared the more it maddened, like the mere sight of it was poison to the senses, poison that the iris soaked in and then through the optic fibre went down my spine and then through, the veins and arteries and capillaries, began to numb my body before it took possession of the soul.
“What is this?” I asked, my whole self agape and transfixed.
“This, my dear friend, is the map of the strange worlds of Tim Burton”
“Burtonhoo?”
“Tim Burton, surely you have heard of him. Maverick motion picture director, a man of uncommon…”
“Does he have anything coming out soon that I must have heard of?”
“Yes. Have you heard of ‘9’?
“A movie named ‘9’?
“Yes, ‘9’. An eagerly anticipated film unlike anything you have seen before.”
“9… hmmm.. 9, 9, 9, 9, 9… I can’t seem to place it”
“I pity your salesman existence”
“Cut the crap and tell me about the chart,” I said, raising my voice a bit.
“Cool it, will you? I was telling about ‘9’ only because you pushed me into,” his voice now acquired something of a silver snake.
I stared back into the map. The edges reminded me of a schizophrenic fusion of Escher and Munch but it was the chaos at the centre that felt like your soul being transported through a portal of smoke into a land where I knew nothing was familiar. It was as if a chasm had opened up where my brain was and I was desperately holding on to my spine. Then a goblin walked across the table, leeching his way quick. I jolted. Perhaps even screamed.
“What in God’s name was that,” I stammered, wiping my clammy palms against my pants.
“I didn’t see a thing,” grinned the cartographer.
Madness. Nay, Delirium.
“Pray tell me what is the meaning of the terrifying chaos at the center?” I asked, gasping as I spoke.
“Look closely,” he whispered, his long nails moving along the sketch with the kind of grace that accompanies deviousness,” It is no chaos. It is detail. Each line, each angle, each curve, each dot holds and claims its place. It is the pattern of nightmares and dreamscapes. Merely a map-maker’s symbols. It has something of the tortured soul about it. Something to do with the past and memories and the fears and desires of the childhood.”
I pulled my eyes away before I feared I would lose control of myself and I heard laughter, and it was not just the cartographer but it also rang from the surrounding darkness. The neon shade of the bar lights had found its way into my thought and there like venomous jellyfish they swam. Pulsing, wriggling, appearing, disappearing. If the laughs were still ringing or they had stopped, I couldn’t say.
“ I do suppose you haven’t seen ‘Faust’?
“Jack Frost?”, I asked,” Where Michael Keaton is reborn as a snowman and his family…”
The laughs rang out again, echoed with the neon in my head until I clasped my head within my palms.
“Faust. A German legend adapted in 1925 as a motion picture by one of the first masters of cinema- F.W. Munrau- the story of a man who bargains his soul to the devil for the sake of his own vanity, which so happens to be the devil’s favorite sin. It is a movie that begins with an incantation opening the portals of hell onto earth and then it takes you through a cave of smoke to the demons of hell waging plague and war on us puny humans on earth. Skeleton puppets, grotesque and twisted, riding in a thick fog before God himself, a glorious angel makes a wager to the devil, a giant mad bat- far more imposing and far more immediate than God. Earth is put at stake and the wager plays with the poor mortal soul of the titular alchemist Faust. While it a movie that inspite of a glorious ending, reduces man to a slip of existence, the movie itself is a glorious paean to the imagination of man. Each landscape, each doorway, each corridor, each beam of light of the movie is carefully constructed, carefully lit and shadowed. As Faust descends deeper and deeper into the pact with the devil, as his beloved the beautiful and tragic Ophelia-like Gretchen descends into madness, it is landscape, light and shadow that mark their pitiful states and turn it in the audience’s head into a fever dream-nightmare. In the very first scene, Munrau shows God on a pedestal aloof while the wily devil… he lurks amongst us. Later the devil descends on Faust’s town to wreck havoc, thus finding a path to tap into Faust’s vanity. The scene where the alchemist finally renounces God at the crossroads and accepts the ways of the devil is a startling one with swamps and mists and dead trees and a circle of fire. When devil’s angel ‘Mephisto’ first appears the effect is spine chilling. Munrau takes in his gargoyle silhouette and from afar we can see his devious beady eyes. Another sequence, a cartographer’s delight, is when Mephisto takes him on a magic carpet to the court of Parma to seduce and woo the Duchess. They pass over strange lands where the landscape has turned mad, slanting in at angles, towering into the sky and a flock of mysterious birds are migrating. Parma itself is something of an exotic oriental fantasy, a land that flames and overpowers the senses.”
“Does he get the girl of his dreams,” I asked.
“The lovers burn at the stake but God pulls out the ‘love’ clause and beats the devil to earth. Meanwhile, the lovers are reduced to mere ash,” the cartographer spelled out with clear delight.
I screamed for my fifth and dug my eyes into my palms.
“It was Germans. The Golden age of the Weimar period. They changed the way cinema was made and perceived. They were the first to shake the soul. ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ where every corner of the bizarre landscape was carefully worked on by artists of the then-avant garde. The movies of Fritz Lang- the darkness, the sets and the music, what tango they play across the depths of the mind! And Munrau himself- Nosferatu, Faust and The Man Who Laughs.”
“The Man Who Laughs??”
“Surely, you wouldn’t have missed that. It served as an inspiration for an immortal creation to an individual by the name of Bob Kane.”
“So what are you trying to say,” I gulped my fifth down straight.
“They were all cartographers. They started with carefully, minutely designed and planned sets and sequences- cardboard, foam, paint, powder and bulbs and they ended up creating a portal to the soul. It is also something I have found in Tim Burton”
“I cannot believe it. It is just material. A clear case of illusion.”
“Can’t you? Well allow me to demonstrate. All you need is a little perspective,” the cartographer angled and loomed over the table across to me and snapped his fingers. At the sound of the snap, two pairs of hands came out of the darkness lifted me from my seat and dropped me to the ground.
I looked up. The ceiling and chandelier went vertiginous. The world swung anti-clockwise in a riot of grotesque. The bar I knew, my second skin suddenly seemed dangerously alien. The rectangle of the table jutted over me and cast a shadow on my vision. Over it I could the cartographer’s face stick out in green, blue and yellow. He had the devil’s grin on and was beaming venom at me. Right next to him was the goblin leech that I thought had not zipped past me but now it seemed in fact it had. From its blubber lips it drooled thick yellow on to the table. The swine-masked waiter was there, guffawing snorting. The neon carnival of the undead cranked up in my head. The music howled. The lights shifted from blinding my eyes to the patrons of the other tables- pale, skeleton and laughing.
“Now do you see,” screamed the cartographer demon,” Now did you find the perspective?”
I picked myself up and ran for my dear life. Or I woke up with a start. I don’t seem to remember anymore.
(The Excerpt from More Adventures of Jeremiah Finnhorne were brought to you by Potion 9. Potion 9 would also like to thank the excellent A Journey around the Skull and Tsutpen)
Enter the ‘9‘
Fight it out in
A landscape beyond time, a nightmare, a fever dream, freaks, creeps and mechanical beasts
RUN for your life
9
Tim Burton's 9 releases worldwide on September 9, 2009
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Hi Siddharth,
I may be off mark here, but are you the one who is in charge of Deep Focus mag? If so, What ever happened to subscription and distribution?
I’ve been following your blog on PFC. Really great work. My guess is that you have already gone professional. Am I right? If not, you should soon. Such writing skills are rare. BTW, This one, as always, is a fabulous article (just skimmed through for now, will complete it shortly!). One tiny thing – you’ve spelt Murnau inaccurately.
Cheers!
Srikanth,
Your blog is equally awesome too. Discovered it two months back, and have been hooked ever since. Keep writing!
Thanks Tanul. I thought it was time I started reading more. That’s how I got to discover Siddharth’s blog a couple of weeks ago and a few more sites and blogs. There is so much to read!!!
Hey Srikanth.. i’ve been to your blog during your Godard fest.. was excellent.. then you started with Slumdog and well, the mood i was in i dropped out.. I also planned to write a comment disagreeing with your naan kadavul take esp. the ‘damsel in distress’ reference.. but hey, finally we meet
and yeah deep focus is chuging along.. you should think about writing for it man
What a complex world. And I think I might have called you once for some query about screening…
As for naan Kadavul, as I have mentioned in my review, I will hold it in high regard some 20 years down the line, for it would have gained a high historical significance – a time when I believe India would have got ts own Bunuel. That damsel in distress paragraph was just a rant – to get all the irksome details out of my mind.
Me? For DF? No way man… Am just a hobbyist. Let the magazine be a magazine, not a blog.
Srikanth, if i am not wrong, some time back i had a read a detailed analysis of “Hey Ram” in your blog. It was one of the best movie writeups i had seen, and an excellent attempt at understanding what i feel is a vastly under appreciated, not properly understood movie.
Thanks Ratnakar. Yes, very underrated movie, considering the kind they hype up these days…
That was some plug for a bar! Anything for that twist though. It comes by rarely, that kind of a treatment. A little Landis, a little Zombie.
THE NEON CARNIVAL OF THE UNDEAD – register this one.
“Terrified, she waited”.
“Sell your soul to the devil”.
BTW, whenever I go to that 9 site, the guitar riff takes me in.
And Ladies, this guy ain’t write all that abstract, don’t go by the cover.
Landis! Landis! Landis! Landis! I could do it all day.. and we have a solid round of ‘American Werewolf in London’ in pending.. yeah man, the bar, what else.. should happen sooner than later
Bar Council shall soon step upon a new fledgling.
The Bar, Neon Carnivals, John Landis, majaa aa raha hai, just need to get Wes Craven and John Carpenter into the mix.
Ya man, Carpenter has a lifetime membership in the League of Cool.
“…a lifetime membership in the League of Cool.”
I mean except of course for that one time when we didn’t let him in as
1) He was too late.
2) He wasn’t carrying any liquor.
3) We thought the night was over.
Sid, Though I haven’t got in to much of Burton but I loved your post! I felt like I am reading Kafka and am amazed to know cartography plays so much in to film making. Brilliant! Like you said, Portal to the soul! Honestly speaking, I was mildly directing this whole episode in my head.
.
BTW, the blog “A journey around the skill” doesnt exist, thats what it said when I clicked on it.
et tu, Neeraj? :-)
Try this
http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/
I don’t appologize for the screw ups.. they’re not screw ups.. this and MUNRAU.. they’re Satyajit Ray references.. get your heads around that.. winner gets a carlsberg on the house.. the crooked house down the crooked road built by the crooked man who lives there with the crooked cat
neeraj.. i will follow up on the mail.. been a tad busy
LOL! That sounded like you know who from Tropic Thunder.
Whoa, my bad then. Now I’m curious now about the Ray connection…
Yeah Sid, I completely forgot about that. Hmm Colt 45!!! Am waiting!
okay, i was just kidding, it was a typo, i just called a Ray bluff. I’ve been hanging out with too many bengalis these days. But for the Ray reference- it’s Jatayu.
LOL, BTW, Is it possible to subscribe to back issues of Deep Focus? I forgot to get them last time I came to the BFS office?
And I just realized someone is not talking about apparently the most happening film of our times that released today.
Those images at the journeyaroundmyskull blog are jaw dropping! I want to like frame them all and put em in my room. Like now!
Sidd!!!
I finished my first Philip Dick novel – Friends From frolix 8 and I am ever so grateful to you for having shown me the door!!
I am loving it!!!
Thanks for reaching down and pulling ppl like me up!!
hey VPJ.. glad to see you in infinity man. I knew you’d make it. Thank Philip Dick. If you believe in God, then Thank Him for Dick. I haven’t read Frolix 8 yet but it’ll happen pretty soon. Right now, i’m loving Oh pure and radiant heart by lydia millet. If you like Dick, there’s a helluva chance you gonna dig this big. I heart lydia millet.