What a Cast
Djibouti, February 24, 2012
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Good movies have a few elements that make them so. A good plot, a good director, good leading actors, and a good cameraman are just a few essential ones. Then there's the editing, the scenario, the wardrobe, the music and, of course, the rest of the cast.

The cast of extras can often be essential to keep the general character of a movie steady. A plot set in Brazil in the early 1950's, for example, would require a cast that act as Brazilians used to act during that period. Then the wardrobe and the music would also have to fit the times and the culture in question.

Living in different parts of the world can sometimes feel like watching a movie, particularly when visiting remote areas not yet too absorbed into the globalizing trends incessantly spread through almost any possible media. For better or worse, though, there don't seem to be too many such places left in the world today.

But real life movies don't have a specific plot or a specific pre-assigned director. There's no pre-determined storyline to follow and there's nobody allocating roles to each and everyone of us. There's nobody handing us scripts and telling us when or how to perform.

There are laws, rules and regulations of different kinds everywhere, as well as social mores, religions, customs and cultures, but no one has pre-assigned to anyone the role of a dumb or an intelligent guy, or the role of a handicapped or an athletic person. Those were roles that circumstances, combined with our own abilities or inabilities, determined for us.

Many people look for possible real-life directors when they're mesmerized by some extraordinary scenes unfolding on their own mental screens. "Someone has to have organized all this", they say, so they invent directors, or "gods", in their own image to whom they ascribe personalities and passions, also in their own image. Some others even claim to hear instructions from their directors, or "gods", as to the way they and everybody else should perform.

Our life's movie, however, doesn't have a designated narrator, just as it doesn't have a pre-established ending to it. The narrative unfolds as it does and no one has the script for it. We're pretty much aware that each actor has to exit the stage sooner or later, but nobody knows exactly when. Do we have any say in the unfolding of the plot?

Everyone is the sole architect of their own destiny, says a saying, and there's more than a bit of truth to it, but, in many ways, the applicability of that saying has up to now depended largely on the country that you were born in or the country that you had the luck to migrate to.

For example, we cannot expect that someone born in a small village in the desert province of Tadjoura, in Djibouti, will grow up to be the next Albert Einstein. For starters, such person wouldn't have been raised in an environment with the necessary cultural and educational infrastructure to achieve such feat. That is to say that such person wouldn't be able to apply much architecture to design his own destiny. And if such person ever became a genius scientist the whole world would consider it an outright miracle.

Luck, therefore, plays a very important role in assigning roles to the different living actors. Some are born and raised in environments that are conducive to their full intellectual development, others enjoy the advantages of environments that facilitate the development of their own physical or spiritual potential, and others just seem to have been dealt a very unfortunate hand, conducive only for living a sorry existence.

In any case, life continues looking like a movie to many of us, with characters that come and go and a variety of plots to keep everyone involved busy, particularly if you travel. The living movie I saw in Hanoi, Vietnam, for example, was not the same as the one I saw in Matsuyama, Japan, and quite unlike the one I saw in Geneva, Switzerland. The cameraman was the same, yours truly, but the actors performed in a few different ways and often reacted differently, even to the presence of this living camera.

The living movie I'm presently viewing has its own particular plot, scenario, wardrobe, cast, etc. As the living cameraman filming it, I'm aware of the plot mostly as it unfolds. I have plenty to say in the scenes I have to perform in, but I'm not the movie director and neither is anyone around me. We have all come to be part of the same picture by accepting or rejecting other alternatives, in other words, by chance.

And so it is that as I walk on a daily basis down the same streets of Djibouti I become increasingly familiar with the rest of the cast and I'm able to discern to a good extent the plot that has been unfolding in this theater for a long time now. Street vendors, beggars, shop keepers, bakers, bartenders, restaurant owners, computer store attendants, I already know a good number of them and many of them seem to know me too.

Everything becomes a routine until the unexpected happens. You're walking down the same streets, going past the usual people, when after turning a corner you see a poor Djiboutian woman coming towards you with a baby girl wrapped around her back in the typical Djiboutian way. You assume she's going to ask for money, so you don't pay too much attention to them.

But when you're walking right beside them in the opposite direction, the pretty-looking baby girl looks straight into your eyes with her wide-open big brown eyes and, as a broad smile brightens up her face, she raises her left arm and happily waves her hand at you.

At first you stop and respond with a spontaneous smile of your own, but then you notice that the little girl has some kind of infection in her eyes. There's something wrong with that picture. The immediate knowledge that such infection might eventually blind the girl doesn't correspond to the beauty in her smile and you're stricken by the contrast.

"The bliss of innocence", you think, which is the same as saying "the bliss of ignorance". There's no innocence without ignorance. Where there's no ignorance there's no innocence. Once you know about the hard realities of life you can never regain your innocence. To be innocent is not to know. Once you know, the best you can do is be compassionate, but that's all.

With that in mind and with a broken heart I put my hand into my left pocket and take out a one hundred-franc coin and put it in the little girl's hand, which is now stretched wide open towards me. The coin is about the size of her tiny hand, but she holds on tight to it. With a couple of small tears in my eyes I just turn around and walk away.

"What a cast!", I think. "And what inhumane kind of real-life director could have ever assigned such miserable role to such beautiful, innocent little actor?" Overtaken by a sense of total powerlessness I look for a culprit, but there's none. Had I believed in any of the personal "gods" proposed by any of the religions of the book, I would have cursed that "god" with all my heart, but I don't, so I can't find anyone to blame.

Some steps later I make an effort to regain my composure and I partially manage to do so, but I've been deeply moved and it takes me many more minutes to fully do it. Later on I tell myself that I shouldn't try to look at the little girl's condition using lenses that I don't use when looking at mine. We all have our own paths to walk in this life. We all have our own roles to play in this movie. Some roles are happier than some others, but they're all just that: Roles that we're all called on to perform.

The ultimate purpose of our existence is to bring our most intimate consciousness in a pristine state back to its original source. But along the way back home we're often subjected to the whims of luck and the caprices of chance. The role we're supposed to perform in each of our lives is often determined by forces similar to the roll of a dice. Once we enter the stage, however, there's no way to exit but at the drop of the final curtain.

No single movie can ever fully capture the wonders of this life. The same goes for its miseries. No single movie will ever fully capture them all either. And the same goes for all the little things in between as well. This world can at once be a marvel and a horror, and we're all here to witness it and participate in it. But once the cast is cast there's not much we can do about anyone or anything that is not for the character we're assigned to play to do. My role is mine to play, and the little girl's is hers to play as well. In the end, though, this will all turn out to be just like an illusory movie for both of us.

The movie I saw in Turkey was notable, the one I saw in Thailand was exciting, the one I saw in California was unforgettable, and the ones I saw in the rest of the countries where I've been all had their own distinct peculiarities. But unlike the movie I'm watching here in Djibouti, none of them had such an impressive cast.

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