Secrecy in life is a means to modern enchantment, explains Basil. He delights in the secrecy of his personal life that creates a charming and a mysterious vibe around his personality. But with social media doing the rounds, what kind of secrecy are we willing to let go of? Not only that, why are we all of a sudden, so open about talking about every other aspect of our lives, leaving no secrets behind in its wake.
Perhaps, the life that we see of others in a technological yet artistic reflection is much like Dorian’s life. His life that is best preserved in his portrait executed with technology like precision by Basil leads to a perfectly bifurcated society between the pleasurable and the sufferable. Thus, dividing our thoughts in pretty much the same way. Where there is all pleasure, the secrecy is in the relief of not knowing the suffering. Where there is a suffering, the joy and the relief is in knowing that there is adjacent pleasure available, perhaps right after one refreshes their Instagram or Facebook feed. This all, of course, belongs to the world of the social, that is paradoxically, the personal as well now.
For Basil, it is the secrecy that brings in the romance, but for us the romance is a careful combination of the presence and absence of both pleasure and suffering. A secret divulging of sorts. Checking the mobile has become a morning ritual, accompanied by a hope that something or someone might have changed. This hope, for me, is undying.
All talk of youth and Dorian Gray’s gorgeousness and his beauty’s contemplation, thus, can occur only in a dreamlike state. It is also the state that we enter when we enter the world of social media where the moment one starts reading, or going through the medium, one already knows that they will come back to it. You would come back to the novel, too , where everything is written and told with such bold confidence, very much like the way social media has done by giving us that unprecedented confidence. To gain that sense of aggressive beauty, those raw truths when we look for the sufferable, and the aesthetic when we look for the pleasurable of our world. It always leads you back, in the very same way it does to Dorian via his spiritual mentor Lord Harry, who leads him to an unending source of youth equalling happiness and youth equalling unhappiness.
“To me beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge the appearance,” says Lord Harry. Also telling us that what is beautiful in the world is the visible, and not the invisible.
One of the many axioms that Lord Harry cares to motivate Dorian Gray with is ,“ something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain.” The myth of Dorian Grey can live and exceed the person himself, as long as Harry, an equivalent of our social media and the motivation that we get from it, keeps on continuing with his fierce axioms. One thing was however clear as well, that a certain kind of spell breaks when an objective reality in real life shows up, as soon as a servant enters the elegant and high-social drawing rooms full of lords and duchesses in Wilde’s luxury ridden novel.
Not only that, the subjective nature of our confidence is of no real value as “experience is of no ethical value.” It is also one of the other hand outs of Lord Harry. It means that an experience does not gain any morality or tells us what is right from wrong, rather it just views what one has lived and recounts as experience. For experience is one of the most brutal things that can be applied to a young life, but our parents do that all the same. They try to save and salvage us having learnt from their experience, even though it does not change the rightness or the wrongness of it or the sensation inside a person, for which experience in itself is poorly equipped for.
Our tragic lives too, are much like Dorian’s mourning for Sybl Vane, our protagonist’s fiancé, whom he cannot mourn. This is so because Lord Harry once again gives him the hope of having experienced a “marvellous” experience from the death of a person who loved him dearly. I experienced that marvellousness of experience having lost my very first relationship. In retrospect, I learned a lot from it. Experienced it. Emotions are thus demeaned and brushed under the experienced carpet of experience, a curious phenomenon, which in turn, may as well decrease the overall pain in itself but also shows grief as an insufferable disguise for hope.
Thus, Dorian’s life and mine too, remained involved in the modern romance of hiding and showing based on the hope that Harry gave us both.
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