OC Past Lives

I think me at twelve would have been appalled that anyone would ever choose X over love, X being that space in a heart where one’s highest passion is placed, a silver candlestick perhaps, a normal hammer, or simply The Thimble. A space more natural than life. A house of worship where only one may tread, ivy alms caressing fifty thousand seats, a captive canyon, not sun, nor rain, nor dust. Only stars breach this cage, each one a punctuated moment, pinholes to reality, sharp reality, fuming reality, fifty thousand light years each way, such rageful, hateful stars that mean to ruin you. These looming stars! Place in this altar a chalice full and clear and still and these alone, if it is your true wish to see them spell a shape that is the face of the one you were meant all along, to love.

Love! Love, love, love. So it is that some believe, those same ones who dream of Past Lives, those hopeless romantics with the lights always out. Are they wrong to be so willful? We wouldn’t have eye-lids if we weren’t meant to choose darkness at least once.

(Spoilers for Past Lives to follow.)

A strange movie, Past Lives, where seemingly everyone gets along but no one really gets what they want. Supposedly, reality is the villain. It really depends if you believe in destiny. If you are a believer, then this movie is for you, and you should bawl and ball up your hands and beat those hands against reality, this undefeated villain. Nearly fourteen billion years, and still the champ. If you aren’t a believer then I don’t know, maybe it will all seem too silly. Maybe instead you will chafe at the long shots, the long looks, the long ings. At times this film reminded me of First Cow, which begins with a very long shot that prepares the viewer for the slower pace of life in 1800s Oregon. Or Chungking Express (which I wrote about a few years ago). Probably you’re both types. You believe and you don’t, depending on how old you let yourself be. I think many of us know both sides, and it can be nice to see that shaped into a two hour poem.

For my part, I enjoyed following the lives of the two main characters Nora (Grace Lee) and Hae Sung (Korean actor) as they lived and didn’t live, as they said and didn’t say life changing words. Even though I sort of knew each moment of the story before it crept onscreen, this didn’t bother me because like some frail bird I wanted each moment to hobble if it couldn’t fly. More than anything, they were me. I’ve been the twelve year old who has a favorite person who is swept mercilessly away by fate. I’ve been the twenty four year old who pours energy down a hole to keep a chance at love afloat. I’ve been the thirty six year old who accepts something less and feels all sorts of ways about it. (Well not those exact ages.) We see the two of them, the non-couple, at each of these times and it feels so true to life. First separated by a single decision, then by distance, and finally by twenty four years of decisions, asking such familiar questions.

A new question too, whether we have ‘inyeon’. The concept inyeon is one of those niche words one particular language nurtures but it can only be translated to English through cumbersome paragraphs (or elegant movies). In the movie Nora introduces the word to her husband-to-be Arthur (John Magaro). People have inyeon, connection that builds across past lives. It’s a beautiful and comforting idea, cumulative fate. Inyeon imparts a significance to each moment no matter how fleeting, recycling each point of contact from your multi-life, a spiritual stillsuit.

For those of us with fractured pasts and disconnected childhoods I think that’s quite a nice idea. Nora’s worry is a worry that many of us share. It’s easy to feel pulled in many directions, to feel that any choice could mean a betrayal or denial of some piece of yourself. But in future lives you will have that time, every chance an eventual. Those deepest roots will endure through even 8000 lifetimes of estrangement. Therefore the sorrows you feel in this life are not a negation of this love, not a loss of it, but instead a measurement of its magnitude so far. (It reminds one of poking turkeys with a meat thermometer.) Is that inyeon? Do you have only a single destiny, or destinies without end, a cosmic appointment book fully penciled in, each awaiting its turn of the moon? Me at thirty six, I’d think, would be proud to have the courage to believe in something like that.