A Dreamer of the Other World by Prakash Kona

Table of Contents

part 1 of 4

The blood wrote and it refused to be objective. Blood was fascinated with redness. Blood in the eye did most of the speaking. Blood in body responded to the eye. Blood in brain produced ideas. Blood in hands performed. Fear and boredom infiltrated the blood cells. Blood responded by producing antibodies. Fear became passion to reproduce and boredom the impetus to write. Ideas reproduced themselves and words reproduced ideas.

What is a bloodless performance but the cynicism of the bourgeoisie that arrests the movement of spaces in ritualizing the most natural of acts? Rituals are for the remorseless. Remorse is an ethical feeling. How to perform without ritual is the objective of drama. Drama that observes ritual is amoral in character because it plays with the fatuous distinction between life and art.

An actor is one thing that anyone can be. In the closing and opening of the eye the actor dreams her reality. In fluttering eyelids of the blind, actors pose the most vociferous of questions pouring out of empty sockets. In the dark the actor is best defined. In death the actor comes to the life of music. Murder is the weapon of anarchist and betrayer. The actor is the lover of void. Saint nothing. Blood flows through veins of nothingness. The actor is the blood of the stage. The stage is a bloodless metaphor without the actor. Actor and stage are nothing without blood.

The lover spills her blood to translate the action of body into mind. Mind is another word for memory that feeds on unreality. The breast! The blood of the breast is the most real of all blood. In the breast is nothing that preys upon memories. The breast of nothing. The will to suffer in the breast of the lover. The anger of youth and the painful generosity. Memory is sixteen when the mind is sixteen. The jealousy of the lover who is bound to an image. The unforgiving lover. Occupied lands and people with no homes.

Sleep has mercy on oppressors as well as oppressed. The lover is bound as sleep to bodies of the oppressed. The greater love toward those who suffer overwhelms the lover’s breast. The lover’s body is given to memory that belongs to the future. The capacity to suffer is the youth in the lover. The lover’s youth is a dream. One night she escapes into the neighbor’s garden. She dances to magic of the night. She dances to the impression that the morning will not arrive. Nothing is sweeter than the lover’s jealousy. Dedicated to spirit the tremors of body bring sadness. Tender as stalks of blooming flowers are the lover’s thoughts.

The performer’s body provokes analysis. The ugliness of the lover is the beauty of the performer. They coexist as opposites. The performer relies on disfiguration as style. In disfiguring familiar expectations the lover is born. The drama is the capacity to disfigure the real. The feudal society that is in the process of breaking up with the fragments dissolving and resurging into another order is ideal for the drama of disfiguration.

Wherever eyes meet a stage is born. Stories are constructed and reconstructed. Fiction is denounced as the poem and poetry is paraded naked on streets of midnight to appease false gods. The lover chooses her ugliness. The performer is born beautiful in the lover’s ugliness. Mutually reinforced oppressions constitute the order. Like power and beauty, evil is a composition of elements. The restlessness of childhood breaks the elements of composition.

The ideal teacher is the oppressor. The ideal learner is the performer that mimics the gestures of the oppressor. The colonized parody the language of the colonizer. The writers of parodies are neither lovers nor performers. They are hermaphrodites of a fiction that they constructed. They write about love and performance and imagine connections where there are none.

The perfection of parody is achieved in ritual obedience to grammar and convention. Social and class positions are vital for love and performance. Parodies precisely need nothing. Street plays play on the principle of parody. The landlord and corporate bosses are defrocked from the vantage point of possessing nothing. How do closed eyes know that they are not dead? Eyes that cannot possess are dead for all purposes. Dreams parody open eyes.

The language of parody is a transitional state as the dream is between waking and sleeping. To recognize parody as an instrument of power is the first step to decolonization. The postcolonial writer is a dreamer that writes about dreams as if they were real. To assume to write in the same breath as the colonizer is to entirely miss the point. The parody remains. It is essentially there for the colonizer if not for the colonized.

The postcolonial writer that uses English without sensing any ambivalence in the usage is a mad clown. Clown he is because he is funny without choosing to be so. Mad he is because he thinks he is sane. The postcolonial writer deals with a legacy of pre-established conventions. No writer is independent in that sense. If readers are pigs then writers are butchers leading pigs to slaughterhouses. The colonial situation is where pigs lead butchers.

Decolonization is in understanding the languages of the oppressor as histories of oppression. To learn without falling into the trap of believing the past is passé. Nothing is passé. The present accounts for the past. Struggles are revealed as struggles. The same language is used with a difference.

Innocence is an impossible term and neither oppressor nor the oppressed is cursed with the devil of innocence. The liberator of streets might be an oppressor at home. Moral questions elude politics in private spaces. Political questions are moral ones. Period. Decolonization is moral and in effect a political process. The morality of decolonization is to reconcile extreme forms of individualism such as the need for privacy and the right to choose one’s loves and hates with the need for social consensus in economic spheres. The artist is the individual par excellence. The politician is a communard without exception. Morality reconciles the irreconcilable, the communard becomes the artist and art embraces the politics of communes where individual variations are not treated with displeasure.

* * *

Memory presses the performer to act. Love derives its inventiveness in the power to occupy fantasies. That’s what makes love an inspiring emotion in the masturbatory mode of writing. Ethics takes writing outside the mode to questions of spirit. Ethical writing is problematic as it disturbs patterns of conformity. It rejects the purely psychological analyses as deterministic and brings the role of will into play in making choices. The kinds that tempt fate and succeed in making a point choose their morality from love and performance. In spirit the devil is dared.

Drama is ethics and has nothing to do with the mind. Ethics is external to mind. Actions betray the person. Men betray for sex and women for security. Drama is the ethics of betrayal. That Judas the betrayer the ultimate criminal of the Western-Christian bourgeois world is a lover in fact I learnt that from Genet who endowed betrayal with beauty and turned it into art. Betrayal is love. The truest expression of love is manifested in betrayal. I betray in order that the raw self in the remotest corner of my soul’s universe might come into being. Betrayal is the act of birth. Love is born in betrayal. I betray that I may love. I love the one that betrays me though it is only a face and one that time will betray with the passage of spaces.

* * *

In bourgeois homes beauty is a value. Like money beauty is carefully applied to suit requirements of the situation. Beauty has the advantage of power. Beauty is bartered or sold accordingly. Beauty is possession to be cherished by the possessor. The order exists to protect the coveted face of beauty. Art disfigures the face. The accident the million possibilities that can change the configurations of the face; art befriends every possibility as its own territory. In the most useless possibility the artist contrives the drama of being. The artifice drama is built around a series of artifices.

Bourgeois reality is complacent and unredeeming. Bourgeois pity is a lie that comes from fear. Bourgeois love is betrayal. Bourgeois humor is a joke on others that is so terribly funny to those who can afford to laugh when it is not their faces that are reflected in mirrors. How do you define the bourgeoisie those possessors of faces? The bourgeoisie is the class that believes in its own lies.

The connection of beauty to nature, the connection of anything to nature has to be systematically undone. Nature is a parameter impossible to define. Unnatural as well. Pitiless as the bourgeoisie is, it stands on the edifice of self-pity eternally begging its victims to feel sorry for it. Popular culture expressed through cinema brings out the poverty of the bourgeoisie where heroes are trying their best to reconcile the possession of property with sinister feelings such as love for victims of property that include women, children and working classes.

What passes of for beauty among bourgeoisie is an idea petrified to the point of disgust. The bourgeoisie is petrified as a class built upon interests. In becoming what you seek of others is the morality of art. The lover is a fantastic object. She becomes one person when she leaves the secure halls of wealth and power and finds the beloved among the downtrodden of the earth. Not in a name or an idea. But people among people. Fortuitous and classless.

* * *

Eyes synchronize with lips and the person is born. The person comes out of utter similarities of earth, sky, eye and lip. Naked, mandatory and ruleless is the person. Among those forced into choicelessness and offer their bodies on a daily basis to serve the minority of rich and powerful there are persons each one infinitely one as no other. Words do not celebrate words. Words celebrate power of the powerless. Words wake them out of a sleeping condition to revolt against cages that imprison the person from comprehending the earth of her eyes. No words are given to the person. The person is the maker of words. The creator of heaven and earth.

Oppression silences words. The same oppression that turns property into a value and sends the working classes to meet their fate in fields of death where the lips of my skies do not send rain. The poor fight the poor everywhere to serve the interests of those that perpetuate their poverty.

At the sight of poverty the lips go silent. Privilege fills us with a sense of shame because we’ve not worked for that privilege. To eat more than once a day is privilege where children die of hunger and malnutrition. Eyes look with anger and lips conspire to destroy. Eyes were bare in the light of truth. Lips were dry for short of words. By deliberately ignoring the sufferings of the poor we pass the sentence of solitude upon ourselves.

The breathtaking scenarios that bourgeois art likes to display on its shelves elicit spite from mouths that tasted bitterness of poverty and violence of the order that keeps the poor in their place. Thoughts I gave to eyes and words to lips that we change the apparently unchangeable. That the person comes into this world as a person! That love is not a word nor truth a lie!

* * *

I will listen to you forever. But, tell me stories of others. I am tired of my own voice. I’m tired of stories where there are no others. I am an other to someone else. But I cannot will it for them to be myself. I can will myself to be them. I can declare my oneness with you. But you’re free not to choose me. You’re free to see nothing in me. You’re free to not even acknowledge my existence.

You may be in Palestine or Iraq or a prisoner in Guantánamo Bay. Or struggling with fetters of poverty and oppression without hope. Woman, man or child. What you are is not the point. Where you are is immaterial. You’re in my mind. You’re on my lips. You’re in my heart. Nothing is dearer to my life than knowing you. The day I realized what your presence meant to my body and soul I had nothing more to ponder about. I knew that I owed you whatever I was and would ever aspire to be. This time I wasn’t in love with you. I didn’t want to tell the world your story. I wanted to clear the way that you may arrive. There is nothing for me to give you except the joy I feel at your arrival. I have taken everything for you. Poor, crippled and diseased you may be. But, I would be soulless without you. In your body I discover that I’ve a soul. Outside your body I’m not a body either. Your pain brought me to myself. Without your pain my body would be a shell. My words are unfit to judge myself. You touch me within and words pour out of dark silences.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2005 by Prakash Kona