The perpetual wound : Part I

‘The pain of love is the pain of being alive; it is the perpetual wound’

I don’t remember when I heard of Maureen Duffy for the first time, even her name doesn’t register much, her times and work mean nothing to me, but this statement has remained engraved in me somewhere and peeps out with a smile, whenever I see some random movie with grief marking a character, with the old “I had told you so” smug look. You think it’s crazy that I imagine about words smiling and jeering, poking and pestering, please don’t, I am normal with some loony fascination with books and movies. But this blog is not about Maureen Duffy or “The words”, Sartre or otherwise, this blog is about grief and how movies have showcased this singular emotion in movie after movie, across time, space and language.
Grief is a potent weapon, an all-powerful one, with the power to decimate the million of opposition ahead, the power to annihilate the all-exhuming soul of one, the power to eradicate humanity as a whole. I remember watching a frail old woman spewing venom, literally spitting on the soldiers who had killed her son, destroyed her land, and made her desolate. But as promised, am not presenting an essay on grief, its about some of the movies which try to address the issue, not that it provides a solution, there cannot be any, but it shows people suffer from grief and their personal salvation and redemption.

Now that my resolve is made, my fingers dirtied, eyes twitching, brains (check the plural) racing, my mind is giving up. Coming so far I realize, I am without a structure, without any ideas of narration, without content and the more I think I am getting scared of the brick bats. Grief because of bereavement in itself can fill books, how on the earth, can I stop describing the tears of a mother who has just lost her teenaged child just because my self-imposed thousand word restriction is over. How different is this loss from that of an unmarried mother who had an abortion and is watching her four months fetus through a six inch thick glass vessel. The dead fetus, unmindful of her mother’s stare, swimming in the smelly formaldehyde, mistaking it for the womb that it was swimming in before, may have a different story altogether. If I can write about the story of that unwanted fetus, I would find myself in a completely different world linked just by the river of grief.

But this is a story I wish to tell; maybe this has to be in multiple parts covering the various types and movies that can soothe the abrasion and bring peace. Movies do have that alleviating effect; making you a voyeuristic stranger, letting you peep into the lives of others, create an impression of the omnipotent and omniscient god that we so long to become. I just hope these selections of movies help some random reader in coming to terms with their own individual ghost.

I have a self-imposed limit that I diligently follow, mostly unsuccessfully. So maybe it will be one movie in this first part and the following parts will cover all the types of grief, from bereavement to the empty nest syndrome, from trauma to the much-trivialized break ups. In accordance to my restriction, maybe will just review this one movie that is an amalgamation of all emotions fused together by a master craftsman who sadly is no more. And it is he, the Krzysztof Kieślowski that I dedicate this blog to, the man who maybe understood pain.

Part 2: Review of Movie Dekalog