wong kar-wai & feelings time

i am watching movies made by wong kar-wai which have made me think a lot about the duration of a feeling and its quantifiable potential--this could be called something like "feelings time."  does a period of happiness carry as much significance as, say, the period that is an hour?  equally abstract though the former tugs you in & out of a span understood viscerally.  inside the depths of a feeling, one is unable to pay attention to most time anyway, lost in love or sorrow.  no1 wears a watch at the pinnacle of a feeling, the place where it is most vivid & inescapable.  there r certainly no alarms, calendars, nothing more pressing than whatever rushes of good or bad capture us.

in the mood for love gives a sense of the way we piece together past time via a feeling.  the way snippets of love r sometimes all that survive from a period of greater stress & activity.  we craft a porous yet durable quilt from our most vivid emotions.  we find any time they were extinguished or nurtured or revived.  a year potentially known only for its brushes with love becomes a unit of time composed entirely by feeling.  we might forget things (whether consciously or unconsciously) that take away from this emotion's vividness or dissuade us of its power or stranglehold.  the emotion is in charge of our memory, thought, doing whatever it wants w/ it.  i love the first half of this movie, how the viewer chugs through the endless start and stop of love's first moments.  how they r all that survive from this period &, possibly, all that is worth saving.  love's past brushes--no matter how painful, fruitless, or flung out of space--making future longing impossible & possible all in one.  history repeats itself--that's about feelings, too.

i have a watch i wear to work most days which is part of a costume i wear--that of a servant 2 regular time, the boring kind, the one that has no feelings at all.  when i am at work, part of my job is to respect the boundaries of things like seconds and minutes and even the surreal 5-day work week.  i know deeply what it means to have a monday or a thursday--identical periods of time that will yield wildly different experiences.  that a month could contain some certain element, sectioned off of the rest of the world, is impossible but i, too, have calendars.

feelings time has the same unpredictability of regular time--that identical "units" could be felt in completely different ways.  this is perhaps why it is the best alternate measure to regular clock-oriented time telling or the one we most readily adopt when our memory traces our pasts.  love will never be identical, though might burn w/ the same bodily parameters.  some periods of depression are completely arresting, others produce great art.  the feeling of sadness, sometimes stops one in its tracks or other times that same kind of minor ticking.  these can go on for months of years, vivid sensations sometimes burning out much quicker than the things which we dully carry with us from day to day.  feelings that r bland in their familiarity being the ones that we r most afraid to have leave us--common happiness, faded love, quiet anger w/ the world.

chungking express lives, too, in feelings time.  & the feeling that rules is, again, love--the iron fist whose fingers grow like weeds.  a birthday not complete without the rush of acknowledgement, understanding, infatuation.  a year that passes composed entirely of longing; we don't need its particulars--we know exactly what this looks like (how this feels).  wong kar-wei's sunglasses-filtered worlds could not tell u what time it is.  they have beautiful clocks & calendars which may as well read the same time over & over again.  we r foolish in love--the groundhog's day scenario that we allow 2 derail us w/ the same blissful wonder every time.  dissolved in its warmth, we r careful students of tests we can never pass but probably would never want to.

in the mood for love, kar-wei says in an interview i watch, features foods which tip off the viewer to the time of year.  we are given glimpses of an exterior world--coats, rain from beyond hallways, seasonal vegetables on the table.  yes a sense of time's passing but ultimately time has no real authority against feeling.  snow can stop the mail but getting rid of love is literally excising some physical sensation from oneself--an impossibility.  chungking express's soft, boozy atmosphere makes the viewer feel uncertain of the world altogether--trapped in chaotic bursts of people then alone again, at work, in one's apartment, at bars.  "alone" is a feeling that people don't necessarily fix.  a world this hazy and uncertain is one in which we inevitably retreat inside ourselves looking for the feelings that will remedy the burden of having a body & moving about.  time's monotony--its rules & regulations--are part of this withdrawal.  we can trust only the felt, as these other measures r so ready to betray us.  to trap us in traincars and commitments.

as 4 me, i have no respect 4 time & will watch as many movies in a day as i please.  off 2 watch another wong kar-wai film...