A Dreamer of the Other World by Prakash Kona

Table of Contents Part 3 appeared in issue 156.

conclusion

Revolution without death is life without love and joy with no peace. The bourgeois are betrayers of life. The betrayal is in the robbery of working class labor done with a human face. Performance strikes at the heart of the face. Night trembles in my arms like a baby. Revolution is the dark angel of moonless heavens. My imagined attachments have always been toward strangers and exiles. Anybody who writes about the past is contriving a tale. The past does not exist. Absolute liars turn the past into a text. Biographers fall into this category.

Freedom is the space of sudden transformation. I never loved for love's sake. I loved for the sake of a body that felt pain. I felt the pain of the body in loving. Pain remained after the body left. I experienced momentariness of love in pain. I experienced momentariness of pain in attachment. I experienced momentariness of attachment in love. The instant the body left I felt the immense pressure of images crowding into my body. I suffered thinking of beautiful eyes until I was convinced that suffering is written into the fate of body. I feared the division of body. I created stages with imaginary performers that could transform the illusion of real lives. I respected the poor and oppressed. I did not play word games with their feelings. I gave a patient ear to their cries. I never pretended to identify myself with them. I knew I couldn't. The comfort of writing was bourgeois luxury. I despised the luxury. I wrote to express my displeasure. When I spoke of the poor I could only mention their attempts to retain bits of dignity with the violence and injustice of wealth thrust in their faces.

I lived the poetry of antinomies. I was obliged to respond to the feelings of imaginary performers out of a sense of occupation. I was pounded by the reality of lives whom I attempted to accommodate in my performances. I failed in my attempts because their lives were far too real to be able to perform in my world. In those moments I was gripped by failure. No matter how mentally prepared one is the hurt of attachment refuses to go away into the blue.

The blueness of pain is shown in the body. I revolted to create new settings all over with new actors and new stories. I presumed there were no gaps for the past to return as past. It mattered little in comparison to the fact that for every recreation my power to transform reality suffered a blow from which there was no recovery. In the name of death I continued to write. That was the only way I could postpone an impending thought. I lived with the pleasure of a stream in the hills that was not to pass that way again. Perhaps I wrote with the same pleasure.

* * *

I acknowledge the linearity of time that puts the rich and the powerful in the same wavelength as the poor and the powerless. Both experience the same time external to their bodies. The rich pursue illusions in the same nights that sleep is heavy on the eyes of the poor. When night passes, the rich and poor wake into the same day. External time is a sinister equalizer. I don't pay great attention to it except as a detail that sometimes catches the indifferent eye.

I move from place to place faced with the prospect of facing the eyes of love. That was one way of keeping the language of impersonation alive in me. I copied faces of people I met. When there was no one I looked in the mirror to impersonate a gaze that seemed all too familiar for some strange reason that I could never figure out. When mirrors failed I ran to the dark. No one fails in the dark. It is one place where time is completely irrelevant. Moments seem timeless in dark. Time was internal to body and the world was passing before my eyes. This time it was my feelings that caused a sense of terror in me. I was surrounded by stages and on no one stage was I present. I was there but only to go intolerably unnoticed. The person in me felt like a fool that does not evoke humor.

The poor suffer the times of their bodies dedicated to make the rich richer. The rich suffer the falsity of their position. What makes human suffering human is that it can be changed. I willed to love that which cannot be loved with eyes. I loved where feet refused to enter out of fear that they might bleed. I loved despite my hands searching furiously for some hope of finding a lamp in the dark. I loved the body's nature in the intense kindness of youth that gives its gentle gaze to the world. I loved the body of age that lived the foresight of youth.

The revolution began for me at a personal level when the body had to fight its battles with death pointedly looking into my eyes. Memories were the mind's toys that were useless with death sniffing around like a dog sure for the bone somewhere in the vicinity. I had to confuse the dog as long as possible. Sooner or later the dog is bound to find the bone. Until that moment I could create the stage for another performance a rather brief one.

* * *

What I've already given to loneliness how can I give to a person? I'm in exile like all colonized people attempting to live in the language of the colonizer. Death does not end exile because death is a theme for the exile. The colonized perform with their backs facing the walls of nothing. The colonizer wills to perform. He has an existential reality outside the range of performance.

The shadow of conspiracy permeates every word I use. I'm not sure if a person can ever tell the truth in another language. I wrote not to tell the truth but to show that truth is a lie possible in the language I use. If I say that my body is bound to yours as reader is to writer I could be lying to you in a truthful tone. In telling the tone matters. The colonized in the language of the colonizer are born betrayers.

Death was an actor before the colonizer was born. My passion for a cheek began in a thought that suffered to become a word. The word came empty and pointless as the sun. I produced words without the justification of thoughts. My thoughts were random but words fixed me to a sense of being. I freed myself from words to return to thoughts that collided with one another like molecules in a gaseous state.

Love is a set of nervous reactions to particular stimuli. I reacted with the nervousness of floundering thoughts to words that never appeared on lips. I am colonized by sensations. Language is a sensational activity. Poetry is action without any basis in truth. Because I decried reality I never felt that I am less than real. I never lied to myself. I convinced myself that some motives and not others guided me. I never went to the extent of loving the soul of a person. That meant I loved nothing. That also meant I loved everything. Nature loves nothing like nothing. Nature is incomprehensible and requires that it be felt with something other than the senses.

My darkness came from a pressure to say something rather than be silent. Silence had the coldness of the walls of a tunnel. After a long search I apprehended that no one has anything new to say. Either it was sand or sunshine. Loneliness is an artifact of the spirit. It is what a foreigner suffers in a foreign language.

The tedium of joy is insufferable. Perhaps that is why I exist in a state of pain. My body is incapable of relating to anything outside the dark. That is how it was willed for me. I stayed in the awkward position of wanting to know why forms change. I knew that no matter how many words are spent in the process to resolve the changing nature of forms the question is akin to asking why people die.

I perfected the art of twisting my body to suit the narrowest of spaces. My body developed flexibility to stages where actors were also the audience. Was I one of the actors or the audience? I was the stage on which things happened. The whole world made itself present in my spectacular view. I gave loneliness to myself. It felt like I'm in a sea and thinking of water. I am in space and thinking of the dark. I am in the void and thinking of silence. I am at the farthest point in time and thinking of timelessness. I am dying and thinking of death.

* * *

The ultimate rebuttal of one's dreams comes from oneself. The strategy of devising one's own failure is consciously achieved with death in mind. One regresses into past ways of behaving with a euphoria that is amazing. The past looks completely made up like cardboard backgrounds with trees and paths leading to hills and horizons on a wooden stage.

The destruction of psychological threads that bind the order is the first step to madness. The next step is when you stop believing that you had a past. The stage is bared of essentials excepting the empty space. There is light all around. The empty space is consumed by darkness. I lived ahead of my times. I thought I was moving into the future as I put one step forward. With proverbial keenness I put two steps backward and tried to get hold of the past. The wounds lost their flavor. I was gripped with fear of watching my consciousness being obliterated at an impossibly slow pace by an imperceptible fire.

If there are no other worlds there are dreams tinged with otherworldliness. The dreamer corresponds with a language formulated in the void. Consciousness is a replay of the language of dreams. Reality is a dreamer's world redrawn on the map of time. The cartographer of spaces is a dreamer of certainties. Dreams offer nothing to the dreamer except a longing for beauty. Isolation, imprisonment and a sense of futility are real to the dreamer. The constant waiting for slight human affection makes the dreamer a spit image of the sea.

The performer is a hypochondriac if not a really sick person. She brings the feeling of sickness into her work that is real and shows itself in the slight gap when one mask falls and another takes the place of the fallen mask. Sickness shows between aging and youth. Sickness carries no mask. It is a state of the body and soul two roommates bound together in a compulsive dialectic that is a haunted marriage of a kind we view in science fiction movies. The shadow lingered despite the person not being there. The shadow left and the vacuum entered with a force matched by death.

* * *

With paper and pen I remade the world of thoughts. My relation to power is an ambiguous one. I maintain the horror of authority I felt as a child. I am empowered to believe that love is a voluntary renunciation of the claims of power. I deny power its ability to impose logic in logically indefensible situations. I turn power into a toothless tiger. The subconscious minority complex turns me toward the powerlessness of love. The miasma of disgust surrounds lives of the oppressed. All actions are conditioned and one is caught in the seeming treachery that characterizes the behavior of oppressed peoples. Paradigms are inert to explain the tendency of oppressed to ruthlessly manipulate slight situations that serve no visible benefit.

The unhappy results of do-goodism rise from situations where the oppressor is forced to confront the failure of ideals in dealing with people as individuals. Revolutionary art rejects identification as a political strategy to fight for the oppressed. The attempt to identify oneself with the poor and the oppressed is false. I never slept a night in biting winters at the railway station or outside closed shutters of a shop. How can I dare assume that I identify myself with the homeless? I never went through the shame of using the street as a public toilet. I never begged in my life. I never was completely neglected and left to my fate in times of terrible sickness. How do I know what the poor have to go through each day hurt and humiliated by injustice?

The treachery of the oppressed toward themselves is the greater treachery of the bourgeoisie manifested in the lives of the poor. A particular condition is created through violence. The effects of violence are evaluated as if they were self-explanatory causes that do not require to be tested against reality. In other words the poor are responsible for their poverty. The oppressed are the cause of their oppression. The colonized deserve or rather desire to be colonized. The dishonesty and lack of morality among the oppressed is something that is outside the purview of oppression. It is connected to individual natures and above all beyond any hope of change.

The capacity of bourgeoisie to deceive the ones it oppresses is complemented by the capacity to deceive itself. The oppressor believes is his lies and perpetuates them as if it were the truth. In that sense oppression as an activity shares the naiveté of children.

Revolutionary art declares revolution as the goal of art. It does not imply that art has to subscribe to political programs. It means that art cannot pretend that it is outside politics. Artists cannot isolate themselves from suffering inflicted by power. Every voice uses the strength of its tenor to join the voices of resistance. Art in itself is an independent activity that originates in the creative spirit. But the independence is something acquired through wealth of labor. To say I owe nothing to others for the pen and paper that I use to write or to imply that creativity is a possession is to ignore the connectedness of the organic world.

Social life is real to the extent that life as phenomena is not. The dreamer's dream is at heart the reality of social life that shares in nature's mysticism. I am no more alone than a star among stars and no less alone than a person that shares her labor with others around. Aloneness is a surface condition. Work connects the star with the person that views the star after a day's labor. I flood streets with arguments to the effect that oppression is no more natural than the sky falling on our heads. The connection between oppression and nature is non-existent.

Oppression is social and economic just as resistance is political and moral. The time that I wasn't dreaming was in observing the sufferings of people who were barely responsible for the situation they were in. Their responsibility perhaps lies in the fact that they must rise to the consciousness of changing their situation through organized resistance.

Morality places the demand that I must see others as themselves with no pretence of forging an identity. I use my position to subvert what I stand for. I use subversion to fight against the class that I belong to: the bourgeoisie. I do everything in my will to boycott power and enter the premises of powerlessness. If love is the word, I choose to love the powerless. I resist with those who resist in the event of powerlessness. It is the anger and decisiveness of the powerless to act with the intent of transforming their lives that will change the course of societies. What I say and write are mere appendixes to the main body of text that stands for what the oppressed feel about their situation.

* * *

Twinkle, twinkle little eye. How I wonder why you are? I sought the titillation of following the private lives of strangers. I sought the clarity of the dying. I sought the diffusion of space. The bread of my body comes from imagination that bridges the world outside with my inner self. Bitter and self-hating to the core I break bridges made across clouds. It's easy. All I do is to shut my eyes tired of human disaffections.

The attrition of the will is physical before it is psychological. Young I was ready to endure the world's indifference. Older I felt the need of imaginary loves. Empty are the graves of history. I suffered perceptual delusions. I stayed alive for nothing. I wield an extraordinary influence on the dreams of those I love. The peacock in the eye of the dancer compensates the wizening blue of the setting sun.

I want to die before it is too late. I want to die on a stage meant for the lights. I don't want to leave the stage for fear that I die with no witnesses to a life lived in the agony of waiting for nothingness. I loathe this stage filled with contempt. To the saint the stage is an illusion. To the artist the stage is an effect of a cause that cannot be rationally explained. The stage is a meaningless idiom of meaninglessness. How I spend my days explaining to my nerves the plausible reasons for my being! Ruthless are reason's fantasies. Of no pedagogic value are claims of orderliness.

I keep returning to the sea for a life of imagined otherness. Twist the argument any way you like:
there is one way to look at it:
the world is made of poses:
one of them is a standing ovation to the stage within a stage where stands a persona within persona:
everything seems so unreal except pain:
everyone seems so dispensable except the face you love:
the bed on which I lie is not worth a second thought:
I encounter sleep on the same bed each night without ever getting past that moment when the mind is closed to the darkness outside and enters the freedom of another dark:
my freedom is a dream as my dreams are free to negotiate with symbols that escape the language of consciousness:
call me an artist or a revolutionary:
the fact remains that I'm dying:
break the sentence into as many words as you like:
break words into letters:
break letters into dots on a page:
the fact remains that you've always been dealing with nothing:
there are no facts if nothing is a fact of life:
the word for dawn is a fragment made from another set of broken words from the sunset in a small village along the coast:
I don't recollect being to any such village:
I've no idea if it is far or close:
I'm not sure if such a village exists at all:
if it does I'm blighted:
if not I'm blighted:
if the village does exist what blights me is the fact that only a part of the dawn can be seen:
I cannot conceive the whole:
wholeness implies that I'm dreaming:
the real world is a partial one:
and must be respected at all times for its partiality:
I've to cross the bridge that separates sleep from waking:
I must enter sleep as myself:
I must transcend sleep as the word sleep transcends the sleeper:
in other words I must be able to watch my body mimic the idea of itself as it lies on a thoughtless bed:
what is the point of watching:
why should I return from the sea of nothing to watch the castaway treading along plains and mountain passes to find a space called home in the heart of love:
home and love:
two antithetical ways of occupying one's time:
home is the embodiment of desire:
love, the fragmentation of desire:
into so many pieces that it does not look like desire anymore:
the destruction of desire is love:
I lost my home to find my love:
I found nothing:
I searched for fragments to restore memory:
memory is a fool's paradise:
I stayed in fantasies as long as fantasies permit the body to remain wakeful:
when fantasies got tired and put the body to sleep they extinguished themselves:
that's when I became a dreamer:
a condition that was chosen for me in a partial sense:
I could easily have died for a name's sake:
I chose the face instead:
the eyes of the face:
the look in the eyes:
the pity in the look:
the love in the pity:
those inexplicable depths of compassion in love:
I misread gestures:
that was the only way I could retain my faith in madness:
the humor of misreading with death watching me from every nook and cranny of the universe:
death the handmaiden of the stage:
I convulse with laughter as I'm dragged on stage by dreamy characters:
I'm certain that I'm wide awake as I put these letters together:
if not I should be dreaming and who can control motions of a language that comes from spirit:
the word for a state that is not meant for words:
the spirit:
whether art or revolution:
in spirit I know sleep and the dream that begot the sleeper who leaves her slippers on feet:
the spirit that brought time into language in the shapeless shadows of death:
unreal are those screeching clocks trying to make me forget the time of death:
the preponderant lightness of spirit in the lover's body:
antiquities are forced to reconcile with childhood of the present:
in the distances of nothing every other distance that imagination produces must perish:
in timeless deaths I perished as spirit with the native intelligence of eternity slowly finding its way out of a beaten body:
nothing are those other worlds that I dream of in the consuming realization that I dream nothing.

Copyright © 2005 by Prakash Kona