Monthly Archives: Feb 2013

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The Curious Case of Daniel Day-Lewis

Am increasingly intrigued by the actor after reading almost everything I could found about him, his interviews, film reviews, tabloid rumors about him, even therapeautical analysis on his personality based on scanty information scattered around in the media about his childhood.

He gives exquisite interviews (as long as he is willing to give one), one of those that make light of real topics without diminishing them.

“The important thing is it’s a game. And that’s what people misunderstand. It’s a game, a very elaborate one. But, as far as possible, each of us is trying to go back to the playpen to retrieve that state of naivety which allows us to to to go through solid objects. You know, to create the illusion for ourselves that we are changing. So it’s a game, and a game is a pleasurable thing. The work is pleasure, yet it’s always presented as a form of elaborate self-flagellation.”

“I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language. My mother [the actress Jill Balcon] loves the language. Yet for me, for whatever reason – maybe it was my small rebellion – it was inarticulacy that moved me.”

“The truth is – and this was part of the problem with Hamlet as well – you explore these things, you try to unleash these things which you hope will inform the life, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be in control of them once you’ve opened the box.”

My favorite is the one done by The Independent seven years ago, in which he said he could spend upwards of a week “just staring out of the window, watching the wind whip across the Wicklow hills. Some people will consider this shamefully neglectful when one considers that there are always more pressing matters at hand, but for me, I have to tell you, it is time very well spent.”

Based on what I read, including all those demonizing stories that cast him in a caddish light [famously, or infamously, dumped Adjani by fax when she was pregnant], I tend to think, the person he could end up with, shall be the one who can be a good companion to all aspects of his personality, just like how he described Rebecca Miller (Arthur Miller’s daughter) in her Oscar acceptance speech.

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The Reality Is Somewhat More Prosaic

So all great minds, including mine, have come to a conclusion, peak experience is a rare thing and won’t last.

Schopenhauer says, life is a pendulum swinging between pain and boredom. You want something, you make an effort to get hold of it — this is pain; after you possess it, you get used to it and grow bored. The only peak moment is the short time right after you obtain what you want. But that sweetness won’t last long.

Proust says, love is moving back and forth between desire to possess, and equally strong desire to flee upon possession. The limits on eternity doesn’t lie specifically with love. They reside in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that’s always around.

Human psyche is built as such. One the one hand, you have a burning urge for possession and security; on the other hand, you have a tempting tendency to get bored with what you’ve got and seek novelty. This is after millions of years of evolution.

Average human being craves security more than novelty. But long acquaintance is taxing for consciousness, which is embodied and would lose its elasticity after long-term gaze, at which point, it starts to wander and look for variety.

Proust again: “Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her.”

Love A Refuge In Disguise

Nothing is more tempting than to use another person’s existence to escape from your own responsibility of living your life well. We cooked up so many devious means and elaborate facilities, a divinised love concept among the most powerful one, to run away from our own sufferings and the burden of responsibility to live the life that has been granted to us as a rare gift.

That is what Proust described as “vague, sentimental glow that our superficial self enjoys at being able to lean on another person as a convenient prop, and draw from the comfort and consolation that we cannot find within ourselves.”

Most of the time we look away from ourselves, inventing a number of grandiose excuses to do so.