The Island of Incomplete Illusions

It is always easy to get lost in an illusion which we end up believing. We think it is so true that there is no escape from it. We enter it with an anticipation of honesty, fun, thrill & recognition. Sometimes we get what we are looking for, but in small portions & there are those other times when we get so much more that we forget the need for illusion altogether. It becomes us.

(Poster from imdb)

Such was an illusory experience watching Woody Allen's latest, A Midnight in Paris. He is so unassuming about the audience's taste, perhaps that comes with his age, that he clearly forgets that someone else is really going to watch his film. He characterizes himself into a much younger man, with a similar large nose & goes about trotting along the streets of Paris into the night.

He harbours illusions, so strong that even the most objective thoughts about the film & plot quickly dissolve into his imagination. Perhaps thats what really great story telling is all about.  The audience must get so absorbed about asking "why" about the right elements of the story, which lie at its heart rather than asking why about the plot. Immersive. 

But is it really necessary to have any illusions, can we help it? Can we avoid it? I think illusions are like milestones, they show us that there is still distance to cover till you truly reach your destination where ignorance doesn't matter. It perhaps is a product of not knowing what we exactly want from ourself. If we knew completely, in very simple terms what is it that we really want from every single action that we take, it would be pretty close to predicting our own future, minute by minute. I believe the fun in the future is to live it gradually & reach there to find that there is still more of future to cover, like a never ending Escher drawing, but unlike it until the point where we reach the end of our personal road & face a bottomless pit. This edge is our launching pad into the next phase of life, that is in plain english - no life. We leap off that edge without knowing if we will float upwards or sink like a brick. But the best thing is the final glance that we must take at the road walked so far. I would prefer jumping off the cliff with my back towards it, so that I can watch all the things that I have done behind me, good or bad, staring back at me for that one final moment as if to say 'goodbye' or in most cases,  ' good riddance'.

Watching Woody Allen's film shifted me into an alternate tab of mine. Into the tab where another fresh webpage was just loading. This is a tab which lists zero personal accomplishments, pretty similar to the other tabs, but with a slightly different template. It put me in state to reassess all my illusions, haven't been successful at all in doing so. I only realized that what I really passionately believed in, was true & not really an illusion. It was real to the point where I could hack through other emotions & watch these glow. But the illusions were more deceptive that reality. The moment I tried to look for them, they disappeared. This is where life imitates quantum physics. That constant state of shifting focus from one illusion to the next, not knowing where to land as if floating in a hot air brain full of helium like ideas zipping across various lands where sometimes thoughts grew like weeds & sometimes like oak trees. I could at least begin to see where I might want to land. The places where I had landed in the past & took off from were great launchpads & new areas await.

(Photo From: http://battleshippretension.com/)

I was hardly ever inspired so much by a single piece of work, but perhaps it's the Woody Allen effect, whose films I grew up watching. I realized that during my most formative years where I started to realize who I was & what I would like to do, I had laced my thoughts with a lot of ideas, including Woody Allen's works. I might have been looking at his latest work not from the point of view with which he presented it, but the point of view with which I had perceived it. But that I think works most of the time, because other people's thoughts sometimes seem like worse illusions than our own.

But nothing is complete without a satisfactory ending. I think this is where the greatest stories differ from the rest. What thought does the piece of work leave in our minds at the moment it ends. This post is perhaps the thought that I was left thinking about in between shifting the tabs from illusions to reality & back, I feel quite contented about it.