A Dreamer of the Other World by Prakash Kona

Table of Contents Part 1 appeared in issue 154.

part 2 of 4

How the world looks without one’s presence is a paradox no person has ever resolved. We like to play with the favorite possibility that our absence will shut the lights of the world. The amusing certainty is that a world outside me continues to run mindlessly like a centipede despite one’s absence. If it is not one it has to be an other in whose world I am a ghost and whose happiness contains the sweetness of death in life.

Faces keep changing but the railway platform is the same. Sometimes I would return after months or years. I searched for the smells that excited me as a child that dreamt of journeying to other worlds. With age every day has the smell of a journey to me. Platforms rock my worlds.

I am not sad anymore when I think that everything is fated to perish. The absence of this cynicism made me long for early youth the period in a person’s life when sadness is interchangeable with beauty. The rest of life is mimicry of that one short phase of late adolescence when beauty is without need for definition. I outgrew that beauty to come into the stage of parallel lines. The divergent look made me look toward spaces of the universe. I returned no matter how long the journey.

I made it a point to return to faces I loved. The face transformed me whenever I looked into the eyes. I thought I could escape eyes. The escape was a path to another return. Coming to eyes I loved in youth was a solitary experience. I entered with the same trepidation a child feels when entering a tunnel. My worlds were internal to being. I recorded moments of divergence when struck with the presence of eyes. The sadness of youth flew toward me as a bird circling over a pool. I felt beauty of fire in my veins as wings of the bird came close to the waters.

The youth of the mind is a curse to the sensitive body. The doubt occupied me: was I playing and replaying one single scene of eyes deep within eyes peering outside the primitive consciousness into the soul’s universe without changing details of the vision in a spectacular fashion? I might be a caricature of the past. It was chosen for me.

When I look at the world of the deprived I come out of my reveries. I become more myself than I could possibly be. That is the real person I acknowledge as the root of my being. The person that identifies herself with the lost of the world. The person who chooses not to have a name. The person not trapped in illusions of bourgeois life. The person that moves from place to place as if every place was her own self. The little person in my heart is not completely me. In moments I come to that little one that is myself. It is for that little one’s sake that I never repeat a performance. I’m afraid of offending that child inside me with boredom and anxiety. The little one wants the love that comes from deep familiarity and freedom of silence at nights. I work myself to death for that one’s sake. If she lives, I live too. If she suffocates, I die before her.

* * *

I am an impression etched on dark spaces. I separated being from longing. My longings were metaphoric while my being was the dark cloud of a dark night. Tired of myself I sought another. There was no other to be tired of but the vast emptiness of being. I saw death for what it is: life.

Fighting colonialism is fighting a battle with the unreality of oneself. The spiritual battles of the oppressed revolve around fighting the oppressor concealed in the language we use. Such a language can be freed of the history of murder by tracing the roots of the discourse in sufferings of working classes and women that made the language in the first place. A language that resists the essential dispossession that the language stands for is the beginning of decolonization. To speak of their dispossession is the language of the dispossessed.

I wrote for no other but to fight my own battles. In my failures I left a legacy of answers. The anecdotes of my life I connected with the thread of despair and the constant attempt to overcome despair by challenging my self to a duel. I suffered guilt of despair that seemed meaningless in the face of human suffering that resulted from oppression of the many by the few. The losses of my private life I compensated with joys of sharing my spirit with the suffering many.

I threw romanticism into the garbage basket when I realized it served no purpose but to obfuscate the truth of oppression whether it was colonial, racist or gender. What is the world that I would like to live in? A world without armies and bureaucracies. What is the greatest of all oppressions? Class. What is the oppression that I would like to see coming to an end in my lifetime? Gender. The person I would like to change: myself. Life after death: nothing like that.

* * *

The thing that is symptomatic of oppression: the wall. Walls that must be broken with music or silence. With music comes the revolution of the masses. With silence the transformation of the individual. Immigrants made cities. Countries are born out of the experience of marginal groups.

There are no journeys without transits. Creation is an outcome of those moments in transit. Bourgeois order is putrid stasis. It steals the creation and sentences the creators. It polices transits and closes the doors of genuine artistic experience without realizing that it is tying the noose of its demise. Thus women and artists are condemned to marginality.

To empower marginality with language is the aim of art as politics. The dynamics of change is what brings art and politics together. We cannot have an art that talks of red roses in Antarctica. We cannot perpetuate a politics with the untruthfulness of snows in the Sahara. We acknowledge reality and truth as two possibly useful words derived from the vocabulary of power. In effect we see the reality of oppression and the truth of resistance at all costs.

I could teach my language to forgive the oppression of my oppressed brothers. My brothers fight for the men they are. They fight to uphold the dignity of man. They see the home as a private domain where they lodge themselves in the hope of securing that minimum peace that life dares to offer anyone and everyone. I speak to my brothers to free the language of their dreams of themselves. Let others fill their spaces. Let their peace not come from a need for security but from within themselves in a language that shows men a way out of their masculinity. Let their dignity come from unfettering those who depend on them for their lives. Let weakness be my strength and home the world of people with faces unlike my own and thoughts and words so different from mine.

* * *

I plan a journey without return. But it should not be an escape either. The motion is slight but the movement is heavy. It means that I go to another part of the town but I go as a swimmer moves from the sea to a lake. In the end it is water and swim I must in order to stay above water. The experience is different and my wet face shows no sign of fear. True passion is reality of a moment. In the moment words make sense and every gesture is connected to every other. The performance is complete. Institutions are built to serve that one moment. The one moment is what it is: a moment in time destined to pass away and never return.

Nostalgia has bungled the world by forcing memory into the trap of one moment. Freeing the moment of the fetters of nostalgia is the goal of art and revolution. Desperation and wanting the lust that sprang from boredom. The lust that gave birth to outcasted words. I committed myself to the absence of legitimacy.

There are no legitimate days and nights. Day slips under covers of night. Nights are whores and we are sons of night. Days are gentlemen who maintain a high profile in the light of persistent eyes. I kept turning from one side to another. From one darkness I leapt into another. I had to compensate one humiliation with another. Ancient wounds were just preliminaries of a performance that was not supposed to end any time soon. I played the whore to spice days with nights. It was one way of being true to myself. I colonized worlds I built within myself. That way I could fit into a type. I was worn out being myself.

In sensual hopes I regained the possible energies of my soul. What lay in store was the emptiness of sensuality. I dared the devil. Now it was the devil’s turn to dare me to destroy myself. Bedeviled I grew in lust. Lust that drove me into the stage of self-destruction. The drama. I could not miss the drama for anything in the world. Lust drove me berserk. How could I abandon what I always was! What was the journey I dreamt of where I did not have to be myself anymore!

I want to love and I can’t. I want to stop thinking of loving and I can’t again. I want to submit the body to emptiness that can make splinters of the soul. I am afraid to die and my body carries the stolidity of dying in every gesture I make. Extraordinarily simple are my reasons for destroying myself. Complex are manifestations of beauty that come with destruction of the self.

* * *

The disconnections I feel are perfectly natural. The signs of weakness are self-evident. The body is a revelation of time playing against space. I jump through the same ring of fire time after time. I give a sense of novelty to repetition. I am emotionally connected to what I love. I love nothing outside the imagination. Sensual fires danced in my belly. I felt images cropping up where I looked askance at closed doors. I wanted to be inside at any cost a body within another body. A soul eternally outside body loitering among cages where people groveled as animals within iron bars of fate.

I saw perfection in images. I was a hopeless adolescent then. My body woke out of another body. I left the body that was sleeping to find another with which I could travel across spaces. I forgot that there was a dreaming body within the one that woke up to the singular possibility of encountering death. All those eyes that my eyes experienced were doomed to perdition as I was.

I had to be happy especially now that I knew the meaning of the word. It meant that I could dramatize with awareness of an actor who played the role a long time ago. So long it was that the actor would gladly die to remember a scene from that ghastly night when alone she created the world of others. I dreamt and acted out the same dreamy gestures. The mind moved toward its predilections when the body seemed detached. It showed in gestures felt in the breeze. It was cool for a moment and then nothing followed by warmth of water and coldness of the ground.

The world that I was not made for — I wrote for that world. I was acting on a stage to which I did not belong. Secretly I was manifesting my presence elsewhere. This sinister element in my character came from multiple lives I learnt to portray in my adolescence. I had nothing to hide for an actor that could be notoriously private. My feelings were straw. As an expression of discomfort I burnt them on all possible occasions. I judge the world as if it were a stone. That was nothing more than a feeling.

* * *

I apologize for my intricacies. They point to one end. That I can barely write about myself. Writers who furnish chronicles of the world’s past are impossible to exonerate. They separate language from philosophy and both from history. I wrote as if I had already been written about. To write any other way was to cut the flesh of the dreamer in the hope of finding the dream.

The voice was enough in a broken time. I was roused to dream of endless performances. I dreamt of worlds coming to an end. They did each time I fell into smoke of reveries. Other worlds were born producing a note of finality to the despair I experienced. It is that sense of letting words pass into spaces that gave a poetic touch to unreality.

From the life of a wooden chair I learnt what books could never teach me. I acknowledged love though it did not have the form of a word. I did not acknowledge words. They had to be shuffled at all costs. I dined on streets and came home sick. I renounced dualities to make performance seem logical without being so. I measured all events that occurred simultaneously at one point in time. I was thinking of a body. I was dreaming of a body. I was speaking of a body. I was writing about a body. I was in love with the body that was on its way moving through other spaces. I desired body. I renounced body. I punished the body that desired. I renounced the body that suffered punishment. I fell back into desiring. I wanted to be free. I did not want to be lonely. I felt like crying. I laughed all the same. I broke into pieces. I seemed as if I was one body within one soul. I was neither. I was nor. There was one moment. There were others.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2005 by Prakash Kona