SELF

An ongoing lull in writing practice forced me to think with Alice Rohrwacher Jr’s short film An Urban Allegory. I had been somewhat put off by its academic sounding title. An Urban Allegory sounded like a literary theory paper turned into film, something that maybe Godard would have made. A child speaks of the need for collective realisation of the chains that bind us to the illusive reality of the world from which we can’t escape. A child who has made a kaleidoscope which breaks into pieces in collision with a passerby on the street when he is being dragged to his mother’s ballet audition. He has made the kaleidoscope for his father who evidently he sees only sometimes. The mother is anxious about the child; her precarious situation at the audition, and as a single mother. The film takes a surreal turn with animation effects as the child starts to peel layers off the walls of Paris to reveal the cave. Plato’s cave. The ballet that his mother is auditioning for is an adaptation of Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave. The film starts to dance. It lifts me towards writing albeit slowly, unevenly.

The mountain peaks of the Annapurna Range, including the fishtail-like Machhapuchhare, revealed themselves to me in Sarankot, Nepal,as an allegorical device. An an-urban allegory for sure. Revealing my own journey of attempts at peeling the walls of reality. My own busybody reality back in India seemed insignificant. I seemed small, anxious, still and still moving, in an inertia of motion. An allegory, I am told, is a metaphor in motion. Mountains move, if at all, across millenia, and slowly. I move fast trying to pack in lots of things in my five-minute longevity. I am reminded today, in Alice Rohrwacher’s film by the child actor, the world is an illusion. But the chains are real. They are as real as the car chase or the cliff fall deep in the chambers of one’s night dreams. Until you wake up, you cannot see its illusory nature.

[Lightly edited excerpt from my Substack, June 2025.]”