I wanted to make a film about loneliness based on the story I wrote for Narratives class. It was about loneliness – how a girl hallucinates her body parts as being separate entities from herself, sentient beings that speak to her and talk to her. She thinks her body parts are her friends, a sort of twisted kind of imaginary friend.
The thing is – no one else sees these body parts as sentient beings. And so it is significant to consider that loneliness is a state of mind accessible to only the individual experiencing said loneliness. And said loneliness is experienced through a lens that distorts the objective physical world through emotions and skewed perceptions.
I also realized that what I did for Assignment 1 also aligns with this idea somewhat – on the idea of perception.
So, this film will continue on the theme of perception – subjective versus objective perception of spaces. Specifically, alterations caused by loneliness.
There is a book I want to read.
But I predict I will not have the time to read it + think about it + evaluate my thoughts + come up with a concrete conclusion about the book that would inform my thought process for the film in time for submission.
But I did read a Brain Pickings article [here] that talks about the book and about how Laing describes her loneliness.
It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.
Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair.
Beautifully poignant. But also, I think these did not do much to inform my thought process about the work, more so, it has cushioned my own feelings of loneliness.
Some say that one does not know loneliness until he/she has felt completely and utterly alone whilst in the company of others. Then perhaps Laing has alleviated some part of this lonely 20 year old girl by speaking words she herself is too crippled to form.
In response to reading about other people’s Lonely, I thought more about my own Lonely. Here are some raw thoughts from the stream of consciousness (if you are interested):
Idea of loss
Emotions associated with losing somethings that was once there
Losing objects/people/things in general
Missing the lost object
Why keep objects?
For their sentimental significance
Sometimes this gets a little manic and illogical – the kinds of items we keep
There is no objective reason to keep these items but
We keep them to justify/ the last thread to the thing that is lost
Objects of permanence vs memories/feelings of impermanence
How does a lonely person live life?
Either succumbing to the loneliness
And therefore crippling themselves, not doing anything for long periods of time
OR by distracting themselves with things to do, people to see
At the end of it all, here is my conclusion:
The film is (will be) a representation of the objective world and the lonely state of mind of the artist.