If only it were possible…Alas!
My choice would no doubt be Mayakkam Enna, a Tamil movie released in 2011.
I am an artist. Everything I am passionate about; be it painting, writing, cooking or sewing trace their roots to that primal need within me to be curious about everything. I am all about being an explorer. My right brain is an explosive creator wanting to express itself through everything.
Anyone who knows an artist knows that we are wired differently. We see and experience life differently and it reflects in all that we do and in all the ways we just BE. From a tiny piece of nondescript thread to the big African clouds; anything can inspire us and make us suspend ourselves in awe. For days. To you it’s just a thread. To me it’s a whole new concert. To you it could just be a beautiful sky. To me, it’s a flight into the unknown, meeting with the gods and guides at the peripheries of the multiverse ( Yes! I am a believer! Howzzat!).
Mayakkam Enna starring my favorite man Dhanush didn’t give flight to a million dreams of mine as anyone might have expected. Instead it gave me the courage and the conviction to stand under my share of the sun when no one else shared the awe, the vision or the dream. It SAW the repressed grief I was going through alone as an artist. A grief that couldn’t be shaped into words or painted into a canvas. Nameless, this grief was gnawing through my insides everyday even as I went through the motions of being a solopreneur in fashion for an entire decade.
A decade spent with people walking in and out of my store, without a single person turning back and saying, hey! I loved what you have done with this! Thank you! Not one would hold my hand and say, you know what? This is exactly what I had in mind!
I like it but you know L…something is off… Those are the words I remember when I think back about that decade of being in business. As an artist, everything I create is my baby. Each time a client gave me that look of curtailed appreciation that reeked of a cheap desire to scrape of a discount off an already discount product, the inner child in me felt the rejection. And the mother in me felt as if my baby was being snatched and put up for adoption against my wishes. Hurt is too small a word to capture the pain I went through.
Artists work in isolation. But if and when they share their work out there, they usually expect someone if not all to share the same awe that inspired them, the same deep sense of knowing they experience. Thus becoming a significant part of the process of witnessing the awe and glory of the Universe we go through when we create. Being able to share the camaraderie of that feeling that only comes with I see you.
Sadly I never experienced it with anyone. Not with family. Not with friends or lovers. None. Except this movie.
Mayakkam Enna gave me something no one could. The protagonist in the movie shares a similar angst. The difference? He is a photographer and I was a designer/ am a painter now. We design with light and shadows and create meaning by holding space to unsaid grief and unshared love. Alone and lonely in our dreams, in our friendships and relationships. Searching for a lone and elusive quiet moment of recognition. Not of the self. But the divine within the Self that we share through our art. A search for a homie in a horde of colourless noise and verbose chaos. Someone to share the warmth that fills our souls when the creator finds his/her muse in us and expresses himself/herself through us. Someone to quietly stare into the void with us with the knowing of I SEE IT .
As someone who expresses herself only through art, it’s perhaps not validation I seek from you. It’s something else…something more sacred than mere sugarcoating. The movie was able to breach all my walls and healed me in places I never even knew I needed healing. I have never gone back to seeing it, simply because I wanted to hold onto the sublime impact it left on me. I am afraid a repeat viewing after all these years would tarnish what I have. If I could, I would love to go back in time and watch it for the first time all over again. Just to feel SEEN.
Care to drop a tiny pearl from the ocean of your mind?