we have that bright infinity all around us
Past Lives, the illusion of fate, and endless beginnings.
I had a colleague, a friend, who passed away in her forties. I knew Lisa for a brief time when I was in my early twenties and she made an indelible impact on me. She was funny and crass but never mean, really good at her job and didn’t take anything too seriously. She told me something once that stayed with me.
She said that when you’re young your options in life are like this - and stretched out her hands wide - and as you get older they start to get more like this - she narrowed her reach, in little increments, until her hands were almost touching - and before you realise it you’re stuck with what you have.
Thinking about my life in that way used to scare me because knowing that I’ve made choices that shut off certain possibilities that I can never reclaim made me feel regret and sadness, and judgmental towards my past self.
But I’m coming to terms with the actually comforting fact that out of all the seemingly endless possibilities laid out in front of us when we’re young, we will only live one life and exert limited contol over its contours.
And people do manage to fit in enough for several lifetimes, allow me to point to some key divas as examples - Jane Fonda had three very different marriages and has been deeply engaged in various forms of activism for several decades, Barbra Streisand is a living legend, built an underground mall and keeps cloning her dogs (?!), don’t get me started on Mariah Carey or Rihanna and how they went through the wringer and emerged with lives that truly seem like the right fit for them.
I watched Past Lives at MIFF and it was lovely and cathartic. Its characters are afforded a rare chance to get closure on one of those untied threads of possibility in their lives, and understand that there is no way to go back and know for sure if the lives they chose are correct. We just have to accept that we can’t possibly be intertwined forever with all of the people that we love. In an interview about her film Celine Song says that fate isn’t something to run towards, its something to accept.
And even if we did have a way to see into the future so that we could predictably take actions that would steer us in what seems to be the right direction, wouldn’t that take all the fun out of it? At the end of the first episode of Nathan Fielder’s unhinged televisual experiment The Rehearsal in what feels like a thesis statement for the series, and a sentiment that is disproven pretty much immediately, he intones: “maybe it's easiest to choose a path when you can see the future first. To free yourself from doubt and regret, to always know the answers.”
In the Dune series, Paul gains prescience and can see all of the possible paths that humanity could take, including the one course of action that is seen as their salvation, described in God Emperor of Dune as “…that bright Infinity all around us, that Golden Path of forever.” Various characters think they can achieve what has been promised to them for thousands of years, by manipulating bloodlines and wiping out their enemies. But we see that it is ultimately futile to try and control the future or achieve immortality. Death comes to everyone. From Dune, “Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here”, and in Dune Messiah, “do not compete with what is happening. To compete is to prepare for failure. Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything.”
In Halt and Catch Fire, Joe McMillan is trapped by his need to figure out the big idea will be, the thing that will give him an edge in the endless race to find the next innovation in tech. His friend Gordon reminds him, “most of us in the human race, we don't get to know what comes next. We just feel shit as it's thrown at us. This, right now, is all there is. Welcome to the future, Joe McMillan.” And this is only tangentially related but I’ll put it here because I like it a lot: a quote from Mackenzie Davis, one of the other stars of HACF, talking about her post-apocalyptic show Station Eleven, “the end isn't the end; it’s an opportunity to begin again. We have thousands of lives we can lead, even when the most obvious one has disappeared in pretty traumatic fashion.”
xx
P.S. here is a playlist of songs inspired by the above.