Ranga Shankara will host The Blue Mug, a devised performance inspired by Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat which will be presented by The Company Theatre on July 2 at 7.30 pm.In The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Dr Sacks recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders — people afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations; patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognise people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr Sacks’s splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do.The Blue MugMillions of sensations attack us at each moment.We make an impression of things; of a world around us; the world imprints (itself?) upon our minds; and we carry these images with us. Remembering some and forgetting others.A person is the sum total of all his memories. Memory is our coherence, our reason, even our action. It is our fiction, our self, our very own personal narrative (through which we try and define ourselves).But what do we remember – twenty, eighty or two hundred privileged incidents that we choose to keep with us; and we like to think that somehow these are the defining moments of our lives.Which is a complete lie. Each moment, each experience, each sensation becomes a part of us. Our internal narrative is more about forgetting.Four actors struggle to construct themselves on the basis of what they remember.Significant and insignificant moments which they salvage (or reclaim) from the abyss of forgetting. They present themselves as they are, as they were. They struggle to separate the truth from the fiction of their past and present themselves here and now.Memories — we seem to make them what we want them to make us seem. It is easy to be all tall and proper and revel in the warmth of old childhood joint family memories, eating mangoes, picking heavy mattresses and carrying them through narrow staircases, but now living in a huge apartment with only one and a half persons.How easy it is to capture the essence of memory in a single wistful gesture, it does not matter if you get the memory or not suffice to say that the gesture has been wonderful enough for the doer.And of course the boarding school memories; father coming; confabulation, Hindi literature; confabulation.And of course there is my immense preoccupation with mirth, and try as it might, cannot explain my astounding 130-kilo girthconfabulation.If only Sacks knew what to do for his patients, if only Sacks knew what we do to his essays, if only you knew the sincerity behind each fabrication that we, with integrity, confabulate for you.
Comments
0 comment