This (somewhat kaleidoscopic) post has been triggered by watching Mr Holmes, which is an elegiac reflection on memory and narration.

Pursuing the lost memory of a troubling case, a frail and aging Sherlock Holmes (superbly played by Ian McKellen) finds first a frustrating partial memory, then a larger-than-life cinematic interpretation based on Watson's (already polished up and rounded off) version, and only later the "real" story, with all its tragedy, as it is coaxed out of remembrance by new relationships and rediscovered realia.

Bound up with the effort of remembering is Holmes's growing realization that human beings do not live by facts alone. The "truth" is not always the gift it might seem to be, and a softened narrative is what is sometimes appropriate.

(I haven't noticed any critics remarking on this, but I wonder -- given this focus on our human inability to digest unadorned, unpalatable facts -- whether the happy ending with which we are presented is in fact an elaborate irony. What REALLY happened to the little boy, the housekeeper, and the bees, I wonder...)

The same day I saw this movie, I heard again Sia's Chandelier. This haunted my early time back in Malaysia last year. On the bus. In the shops. Always there.

That new beginning was about a year ago.

I didn't know then who the singer was, and I could never make out the words (I thought it was "swim in the silvery sea" rather than "swing from the chan-de-le-lier"). But there was something about the high, driving, desperate intensity of the song that really resonated with me.

When I heard it in a shop the other day, I asked someone what it was. He told me, and I looked up the lyrics. And sure enough -- though situated light years away from my character and experience -- they talk about someone who is "holding on for dear life", and "won't look down won't open my eyes".

Yes... Yes... Just keep wildly, desperately, madly pushing forward. Holding on for dear life. Not daring to look. That was the spirit of a year ago. That was exactly it.

In those early weeks, everything entered my brain through this filter. Movies, for example:

We watched The Hundred Foot Journey. It is visually stunning, if lightweight. But for me it was about wanting to belong, and wanting to do well -- and the price paid for both.

We watched Soekarno, which depicts the tangled politics and personality of "Sang Proklamator", giving -- as this critic notes -- a rare glimpse of an Indonesian "icon". For me it was painfully nostalgic. I was back in Java, back in Blitar, back in that whole mesmerizing Indonesian world I'd so recently -- and so unwisely, it seemed at that point -- chosen to leave.



As Sia sang on the fuzzy bus radio on my way to work -- "I push it down, I push it down" -- I was reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. This "deliberately difficult book" gives us "six separate stories, spanning the planet, that cover roughly 1,000 years of time". According to one critic, it is "a fascinating meditation on civilization's insatiable appetites... how the will to power that compels the strong to subjugate the weak is replayed perpetually in a cycle of eternal recurrence".

It uses several narrative forms -- a journal, letters, a book, a movie, an oral history. There are fascinating connectors, in that each story is somehow read by a character in the next (but in this area the book is much more subtle, tantalizing, and satisfying that the rather overblown film version). There are recurring motifs, such as freeing slaves or subhumans or the "living dead", saving the innocent, being poisoned, and committing suicide. Certain characters down the ages share a comet birthmark. The point is interconnection.

Though a good read, Cloud Atlas is a profoundly pessimistic view of where the world is heading -- which is basically downhill since the 1970s, according to Mitchell. Dark though my mood was when I read it -- "won't look down won't open my eyes" -- I could feel myself pushing back against its relentless blackness.

It was as if I was saying: I don't need your manufactured bleakness. I have my own. I have my own chandelier (although I didn't know it was a chandelier back then).

And my chandelier will become -- what? A funny little interlude, or the beginning of a terrible tragedy, or just a tiny, meaningless episode in a millennial cosmic soul journey? It will all depend on memory and narration.

We will see...