A Dreamer of the Other World by Prakash Kona	Table of Contents Part 2 appeared in issue 155.
part 3 of 4

The passion for victimization was lodged in the brain. The body is a subtle responder. I outgrew the dark in me to become a person. The person carries loneliness of the rainbow in her. She dreams of colors standing outside the world of beings. I broke the cord that connects me to the tomb. It was dark in there and I sought colors to keep my spirit in a trance. The tomb mattered and the dark I retained within the brain out to torture the invisible warder of an invisible prison. A dead person speaks to you about death.

Life is an error in logic. My sagging head restrains the body from coming out of shadows. In the night of my thoughts I made a bed from which I’m yet to wake. I wrote with love when I wrote for no reason. Compassion is the universal poem that brought together opposites. I did not fear the vacuum of aloneness.

In compassion I felt the joy of nothing. The compassion for the oppressed I attributed to nature and the historic debt that I as an individual owed to labors of the suffering many. The fear of the victim abets the lust of the victimizer. A fire that consumes itself is real. It does spare the ashes. It burns them to nothing. There are no ashes to celebrate. The future suffers the same fate as the past. Both are victims to the present. Lust is trying to be what you always were: nothing.

Those who dedicate their lives to journeys are incapable of anything else. They choose to be the way waters of the deep flow without movement. The spin in my head made me seek peace with objects. I was seeing visions. I lay with objects as if they were real. They held me to the vacuum until I decided to leave for a future in which I would be the breeze with no sense of being. Words had given form to vacuum. I rejected that form to find the dark of the brain that drove me against the persuasions of my will.

* * *

Artists celebrated the death of the word. I speak of the murder of the word. The word does not die. That would be far too natural for a performer. The word is killed as all performers fate their fall with impunity. The process of murder gave me a sense of history. I filled the vacuum of being with illusions. I was consumed with pity for my own death. I gave a gentle twist to the plot. I murdered the word ready to die. Death is my expression of love.

Others choose nature for symbols. I remain with bare essentials. One of them is the mood I am in. Another is the blazing noon of my gestures that reduce all interpretations to the size of a single hair on my body. I am turbulent as a turbine in delivering lines on empty stages. That is the style of the solipsist. Did I attempt to save myself? Never. Sometimes the expression was missing. I was sad about that. Was I sad without thinking about the expression? I am beyond answering that. Such knowledge is far too profound for an imagination used to languishing in colors. I might have been sad. I don’t want to entirely discredit myself on that count. Since there is no way to learn about sadness I relied on the expression.

I never felt that I had ever lied about anything. I don’t think that anybody ever utters a lie. You can change the face of truth in diverse ways. You can lie as if you were not telling the truth. You can believe in those lies. But in effect you are only repeating the truth. Truth is the living reality of language. If I promised you that I visited the planet Mars last night it is a truth that a child would gladly accept for a fact. If I told you that I was a Siberian tiger in a previous incarnation there is no reason to assume that I am any further from the truth.

What makes language the truth of truths is that anything can be said with equal consequentiality since it functions within the framework of performers. Between the person that went to prison and the one that studied prisons I prefer the former, as most people would instinctively do. The body of the prisoner is a repository of details unlike the researcher of prisons whose mind is bloating with generalizations.

Here it is no question of truth. I dismiss language and truth as two unnecessary points on the same board. Homelessness is homelessness. Children dying of loneliness and neglect are in fact dying. Women and the poor must be given the privilege of choosing their lives. Old people deserve the right to human dignity. While all other truths are interchangeable the sufferings of the oppressed are not. They make an absolute statement and the response to the statement is revolution.

* * *

It wasn’t the experience of prisons that made me a lover. It was the experience of love that made me a prisoner. I loved those who did not think words were essential to the act of love. I loved them the more for letting me give myself to them body and soul. I loved them when they perceived my body as being no different from any other. I loved them because my name was nowhere in their minds. I loved them because I was inside them but not as memory. I was the essence of forgetfulness in the body of the other. Nothing could replace the lover’s nothingness. It was pure compassion that eyes released into world of eyes. Dark is the light of day. I laughed for the same reason that I mourned the loss of the moment.

The dancer could not renounce time. She fell into the arms of the street for solace. But the street was indifferent. Stones the dancer danced upon. The dancer viewed the world in its finality. The world had no purpose. The dancer subscribed to one. The purpose of the dancer was at variance with the street. In essence the dancer was purposeless.

I came to my senses in the dark. The lovers I imagined were real in the dark. They flew away like ghosts when daylight crept in through the ventilator. I could not utter a word. I wanted time to disappear that I may be free to will the world of fantasies. I am devoid of individuality. I revolve with revolutions of planets. I move with people of the streets. Revolutions and movements are directed to one purpose which is to fill the terrain of the heart with thoughts with no intent. The body I never took seriously even for a joke happened to be mine. I made a scene out of it. I gave everything I could imagine to that scene. The one thing I could not give was my death. I had to live it.

* * *

Something was below the mark in the kingdom of roses. Roses meant nothing to the poor. The aesthetic that surrounds roses is false. The rose disguises the bloody knife hidden in the heart of the rose. The aesthetics of the dead is not about roses. The rose of sunlight eclipsed colors of the sky. I saw red in labors of the poor. I imagined a red heaven born out of the blood of working classes. I knew I was outside that heaven in the hell of thoughts.

Simultaneity is an attribute of emotional love. I flow through rivers flowing through me. Am I the river or the person in whose heart the river flows? I stretch my patience asking myself too many questions. The answers are in paradoxes. Theater is feminine. A theater of roses is a woman’s world. Roses are attributes of the poetic in which theater dissolves as an ultimate act of reparation for ashes of the earth. The reparation was constructed that one may be two and two reunite as one. Thus earth becomes the red heavens and the heavens are ashes dissolving in redness. The word disappears without a trace. What I see is my death posing as a mask. A woman’s world is labor expressed as struggle through the body of a woman.

The image in a picture frame suffers the angst of dark backgrounds threatening to pry into their essences. I always wondered what the end of the world looked like. Midnight and crows in the sleeping trees protesting their innocence. I read too much into myself. I didn’t know that I had a self to delve into. I was rummaging through a body that wore clothes to keep the skin warm or cool depending on the weather. Weather was the denominator and clothes were the denominated. Where I came in the picture was irrelevant to question of being. I came nowhere as I was careful to pronounce the word that referred to myself.

Women made theater and poetry was interwoven with theater since one cannot be imagined without the other. Women and roses marked the theater of the eye that stretched as far as the heart could perceive. My insights were prophetic. I preferred to play games with those who spoke in other discourses.

* * *

The season for simmering is gone. That was another age and I had friends merely because my skin was fresh as paint of a newly constructed house. I am a recluse of a non-entity these days. My thoughtfulness began in isolation of the blood that had time to spare. I spoke and I wrote. The grammars were different. Meanings were lost either way.

In the dusk there is so little to worry about. If it is dark and there are no candles it means I’m not looking for one. That was my way of retaining dignity in age. I was not to be put down by young skins that knew nothing of thoughts that ran through old skulls. Poetry was locked in sufferings of others. I could undo the lock when I realized that my mortality was connected to their suffering. For this one insight I waited for the darkness of age. I knew so little when I was certain I knew something.

The body begged me for a revelation and I gave it none. Not to care for things is a way of life. It is not a political strategy. The pastoral world with its multiplicities of mirrors. The pastoral is the child of prisons. The pastoral is necessary in practice. The pastoral eludes the dehumanizing side of oppression. It does not answer questions. In the pastoral is the lulling of senses. Walls become human with pictures of open lands inscribed on stones. Pity breaks through cynicism of walls. Soul writes the language of body. I simmered for old time’s sake. It did not evoke the smile I hoped it would. The mind behind mirrors saw little worth in history. One experience was real and I called that dying.

To the dreamer, the dream must pass the test of unreality. If I’m one with you my silence is a dialogue with others on all possible occasions. I’m the self that you speak to when you are surrounded by walls. The pastoral I made that up or life would be unbearable. Who knows what ties men to fear and hate? Sandy beaches with coconut trees and the blue sun of white waves. The poet of death coming out of dawn breeze. The quietness of orange. The idyllic world of humor. Deathless photographs that capture a certain mood of light. I was young once. I was old again and again. I lived once. I died again and again. One dawn but many sunsets. Betrayal has the scent of the universe coming to an end. One betrayal and many other universes reborn in the faith of deserts burning with love of flowers.

* * *

The person is caught between two halves of her soul. Finessing the body for the stage. The body’s secrets hidden from consciousness. The formations of the body and the languages in layers of being. Who am I to know all the languages? I come in the last stage of evolution. Standing in the light of consciousness how can I know the sea into which I merge each night? I become the languages that I would like to talk about. What pulls me toward illusions? Why do I need a self that is nothing? I need the body left behind in another layer of being.

The betrayed never trust themselves. In a sense they need the betrayer as proof for their distrust of themselves. The betrayer essentializes the idea of the self. This idea is passed on to the betrayed. The betrayed are endowed with the self of the betrayer making the distrust logically plausible. That’s what makes the betrayer so powerfully attractive as a symbol of life. Faith kills to the point of silence. The preordained knowledge of betrayal gives me the faith to see the weakness of a person as my own coming out of another body.

I brought things to a point where I knew I had a will to decide. I willed the abstract word called happiness. I craved the restless activity of illusion. I worked and loved with equal gusto. Both were inessential for the calmness of spirit. The strength to face another pair of eyes comes from deep faith in goodness. Without goodness the eyes must escape. The betrayer never looks straight. The betrayed look with the anticipation that the betrayer is capable of love. There is hurt in the betrayed. There is self-pity in the betrayer. The betrayer’s curse is the incapacity to be. The betrayer is stuck to the notion of a person without being. In love I am. In lovelessness I fill the world with objects. To love I must dissolve. I betray to escape the dissolution of love. I want to live as if I was present in time. I believed that there was me who could give love as if it were a thing to be given. I believed that I could take away with equal force the object of my giving. I wanted to be right without being wrong at the same time. My nerves suffered in the cold.

I was you until now and now we’re two separate worlds that seek to be connected. I stopped being you and my world is loveless as a dry twig in a barren field. You’re my humanity intrinsic to the person that I presume I am. In your absence I am a vulture haunted by its prey. I let your voice float in space. I am seduced by voices in the head. My worlds have gone in various directions. I long for your voice. I come out of the bitterness of the head to reach out to your voice. I feel the sweetness of dying as I come closer to you. In one night we exist as two bodies. Love is silence of dark. I befriend the nothing in me that I may be you. You move through time to find darkness of your self. In dark we exist as one silence among bodies of night.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2005 by Prakash Kona