My persona. That is to say,
how people think of me,
or what my external aspects make people think about me. Yes,
in reality I may not be anything like my persona.
Two people. One speaking, the other listening. All the doubts within,
the regrets, the conflicts rising one by one into words. A person discusses their old sins and mistakes with someone
they consider close. That is what
is happening here. One says they are this way, they are that way; the other thinks they are that way, they are this way. This is how it always is.
I keep changing,
but you never change!……….The heart’s cry spills from the lips!
The other listens and thinks,
I don’t change, my persona changes. What would you understand of that?
The speaker suddenly withdraws from the conversation. Does the conversation end? Or will someone else arrive now and begin saying such things again,
which are actually the listener’s own thoughts? Could it be that what the speaker was saying was merely a partial mirror of the listener’s life……..which we are calling……persona?
We are all performing. Like a role,
we customize ourselves exactly that way. So much so that no one can even imagine what our true face looks like! Our roles change, our actions change, our external appearance changes,
our persona changes too. Our persona changes with us.
As long as the speaker continued talking,
the listener kept finding some aspect of themselves in the speaker’s words,
which was part of their own existence,
that persona the listener could see becoming very clear before their eyes. In the speaker they found themselves, along with their sister or someone beloved, like whom they want to express themselves………..who is their persona. Until the very last moment of conversation and coexistence, the speaker continues to sense every word and behavior of the listener, along with the emotional spaces. No external effort or conscious mind can grasp those aspects. People love to discover their persona, especially that persona
which they hide from others, even from themselves. In the story we’re telling, the speaker is just such a comforting persona to the listener.
Confusing,
isn’t it? The real tangle begins when the speaker takes the listener’s husband to be her own former lover, and the husband too mistakes the speaker for his wife!
In fact, what the speaker is like
is a persona of the listener herself,
and what the husband is like is a persona of the speaker’s old lover. Could it be that we are, from time to time, each other’s personas?
Whatever the case,
trouble deepens when seeing the listener’s son’s photograph fills the speaker’s body and mind with wonder and fear, and her conscience questions her,
could that boy still be alive whose fetus you destroyed through abortion so long ago?
The living can indeed be the persona of the dead! That becomes clear.
Such psychological positions and counter-positions form the metaphorical canvas of Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona (1966)’. This
film’s trajectory is not linear,
though why should it need to be linear?
Time, imagination or reality, dreams,
concepts, scenes—everything becomes meaningful if we don’t try to fit it into some framework,
simply take it as cinema or consider it a free journey through certain experiences.