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| Title: Delhi, artwork by author |
Before his wife was sent to the prison, they often sat on the terrace of their apartment in the evenings. The sun would sink further and further into the smoggy horizon, illuminating the greasy fumes with a brilliant tangerine glow. Although evidently in the foreground, the rapid transit would accentuate the sunset with its constant movement and occasional screeches. This would also play into making the general bustle of the streets seem like a distant hum from their vantage point at the top of the fifteen-storied building. Chai, samosa, and sutta provided an unwavering atmosphere of conversation, and they would begin by telling each other of their day’s chores. Like a single gentle cool breeze in the searing heat of the evening, their conversations would provide for a moment of respite before dinner. But, they would continue to talk after dinner, and late into the night they would be back on the rooftop, imagining stars and constellations beyond the glut of factory-made clouds. Despite her forced departure, he makes it to the rooftop alone, sitting, sipping, smoking, eating, reflecting, and penning monologues to send to her new address. Although he has been writing to her for two and a half years now, he has yet to receive a single reply from her, which would perhaps steam his damp eyes. Allegedly, his letters contain sensitive information that could shatter a nation's dream of restoring its land to the unbridled glory of the bygone ages. Love was murdered thus - in the heat of an administrative maneuver for inland security.
Come home to mourn, / streets splattered with blotches of self./ What discovery shall enlighten?/ The unbearable rants/ scattered meticulously in verse./ Death, his lonesome tragedy/ eyes of the crew/ jibes from handsome laughs / of the stillborn behavior,/ broken on semiotic terms / with drunken reality of your age. / Underwear and shades, / contesting points of view, / lost forever in eternal jungle of semantics, / before she found the tree / and men from the womb/ sickle and godless hammer / through and through. / Practical beauty of your rage / shall forget uncertain love. / The holy purpose of sanity / down the bores to eternal stench. / Absolute purge in Greek antiquity / where you'd call things by name / dissecting thought and endless hair. / Come mourn some more! / The lies / stricken poverty of rain / wouldn't wash any sins. / For you killed the tree / nail in his heart / and coffin sustain life indeed. / Goodbye maggots! They’ve sold their dreams / to queues waiting at the / end of the hall/ for a last kiss, / soaked in utmost conformity / of words and numbers alike. / The distance is well made. / Categories are slaughterhouses for souls / the opium of the head. / Come fulfil another one of your roles, /Death! / The Love is dead!
Dreams that occur during sleep are flickers observed in pitch darkness. Since sleeping and waking is a cycle that repeats itself in living, dreams have been mostly described as revelatory, imaginative, spiritual, horrific, or digestive instances of consciousness. However, all these associations are unfounded because by virtue of their interpretative exercises they bridge the realms of waking and of sleeping, attributing a symbolic value to dreams in general. No, the interpretation of symbols has never divulged any truths! For utter darkness shrouds symbols and reveals them only for a split-second eternity. Therefore, the truth of a dream is to be found in the moments of its occurrence and not in the inertial stances of either the future or the past. Again, there is no tool for distinguishing between a sleeping dream and the waking reality. The experience of a dream is as virtual as the experience of waking. Even a distinction between concrete reality and abstract virtuality is of little help in the case of the sleeping dream. For any virtuality that touches the body with its intensity is as concrete as reality itself. Apart from the modality of the individual, all the characteristics of experience that apply to the waking also apply to the sleeping - a dreamer has to sleep in order to dream.
She has not seen a sunset for the last two and a half years, but she spends most of her day reliving those moments with him on the rooftop. She knows that the charge against her as being an enemy of the state is untrue, so she no longer thinks about the reasons for her arrest. Instead, she has developed a certain life routine with the other inmates here. All common meals are shared with her new acquaintances, and the labor goes unnoticed in their company. It is only in the evenings, when she is left to rot in her cell, that she feels the need for a heart-to-heart conversation. His letters grew even more mysterious, when one of her new friends leaked the news that they were locked up in the jailer's office. Still, she had a gut feeling about the content of these letters, so she began to write her answers to the imaginary letters. It was unalloyed luck that the wind brought her some sheets of paper and polythene bags the other year. A few months ago, a pen was stolen from Chowkidar's attendance register during the morning roll call. All these letters are hidden under the unfixed stone below the door hinge of her cell door. If she were to be executed, she would tell some of her friends about these letters. Until she learns of her fate, they would remain a secret. Like the dreams in her sleep, they remain visibly hidden to her alone.
A moonless night in perpetual fade. / Hunger set aside, for a heart asunder / beats lowly as an ageless song. / Insignificant visions damp on the eyes / settle behind the lids wide shut. / As if seeing from within / a universe in it its flaw: / Falling down absolutely from nowhere / or floating in general compliance / beckons a wordless mystery / of naked bodies walking the streets at dawn. / Shattered prison gates, / cops chase hastily from all directions / concentric to the mouth of a river, / opens up into the orgies of water, / where you lose teeth, one at a time, / to every bite, that leaves its trace / on the bare mountain back. / An uprooted tree, fallen from memory, / in the childhood closet of uniform, / worn to the apt school-time craze, / where morals were etched. / The fabric of conversations grows weary / looking for a toilet, yet unable to mutter, / for the teacher might lose it all / to the car crash on the way to morning prayers. / No deities have ever slept, / in a human sorrow / that opens into another room, / unknown, yet belonged to someone. / Dismantled toys on the ground / and a kiss marking the sunset on the rooftop / evolves unnoticed as the hair on his head / fall out from water contamination / that made him cheat on her. / Is it alcohol or the elixir of life?/ Nether, for the whole mattress drenched / and saturated eyes on waking / erode the sand down the sagging cheeks. / A pulsating heart in the cage thus creaks.
But, waking dreams are different from the dreams in sleep. Waking dreams originate in the everyday life and imagine ideal types of realities that do not yet exist. Such dreams are accompanied by an impotence of the will, for in order for the proposed reality of the imagination to be translated into the everyday living, it must be forced into existence by the faculty of relentless perseverance. Most dreamers of the waking resign themselves to the ineffectiveness of their will, and thus ascribe to their dreams the character of 'wishful thinking’. Other dreamers of the waking are hell-bent on overcoming their powerlessness, and so they adopt aggression in shaping their versions of reality. These dreamers are never seen alone. Gangs, guilds, associations, and cliques are their common dwellings, held together by a shared belief in the imagined reality. The groups of waking dreamers are usually groups of hostility and violence, with tyrants and aggressors forming a leadership in order to sledgehammer their version of reality into the living. Therefore, waking dreams usually lead to absolutism and control over the routines of everyday life.
For dreamers in sleep, insisting on an imagined reality is as futile as a mirror to blindness. For the dreams in sleep are not imagined realities, but manifest imaginations. As such, the dreamer is not aware of any other realities beyond the dream itself. Hence, a dream is real in its own right of occurrence. The will sleeps soundly in the luxury of a warm bed and the dream acknowledges all desires for immediate fulfilment. Sometimes, these desires are exaggerated, for the dream grows in intensity with the depth of sleep. The dream may broadcast recurrences of waking life, but it never reveals knowledge of waking. A dream is not aware of anything else other than itself while it is dreaming. A dream is similar to the situation of being possessed, but differs specifically in the modality of the dreamer. The dreamer of the waking tries to design realities according to the imagination. The dreamer of the sleeping stands still while the world around him creates its own realities in accordance to the dreamer’s desires. The dreamer of the waking walks in the world, but the world implodes in the dreamer of the sleeping.
Whether sleeping or waking, all dreams are doomed to break. In the case of the waking dream, imagined realities are strongly opposed by other imagined realities. This develops into a contest of viewpoints. Furthermore, the totality of all imagined realities is too ephemeral to sustain a living eternity. In time, every imagined reality reveals itself as a process of change or entropy. Every imagined reality either will dissolve by itself or be annihilated by other realities. Moreover, no waking dream is fully translated into the life - either life changes or the dream itself, and living thus is an amorphous substrate of the both. A sleeping dream breaks when the dreamer falls out of sleeping. Therefore, the sleeping dream last only for a few moments before waking. There is no meaning to dreams beyond inspiration for daily life. A sleeping dream breaks from waking up, and a waking dream dissolves into the entropy of the dreamscape. Know, this to be the exposition: All dreams are doomed to breaking. It is only through breaking that you know of the definite occurrence of dreams.
Not that they are no longer friends, but he has not attended the monthly meetings since she left. They surely have made efforts to get her out of the prison on bail. The latest developments are that she may be released for a month to put things in order before the death sentence is executed. They have been eagerly awaiting this month's release, as they have plans to secure a sanctuary for him in the remoteness of the Himalayas. They have waited at least twenty four months of for his release, and as they meet today, they reflect again on her prison-time and his aloofness:
"In all cases, the question is one of future action. What is to be done?"
"I agree. We can work out the logistics of their transport for when she is released."
"Yes, that is important. But we cannot concentrate on her alone. Countless women and men meet her fate every single day. We must engage with the structure of the system."
"But structures can be deconstructed by shaking the base."
"Yes, but it is the base that they modified first. Don't you see how the entire administrative staff has been replaced in the universities?"
"They may be hooligans, but they are not stupid."
"Yes, but we can focus on individual cases and support them!"
"What about the dream? The dream of the revolution?"
"That was the American dream, sucking up the oil fields by waging wars."
"But there was also Lenon's dream."
"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."
"Yes, yes, whatever the case, all dreamers find an excuse out of the present situation of the world!"
"There is no promised land and no hereafter beyond the earth."
"Please stop being so pessimistic! If dream or revolution is not the right word, we can talk about the future course of action."
"This is the point. Dreams overwhelm the course of action."
"What? How so?"
"Nah, you have a certain idea of the future and you work towards achieving that idea in your lifetime."
"Like saying that you want to be a doctor and then becoming one in reality?"
"Yes, precisely."
"But that is how life works in the minutest of engagements. If you want to make chai, you put tea, milk, water, ginger, cardamom and sugar together and boil it on the stove. When the chai is ready, you drink it. There is work involved in transforming a desire into fulfilment. And work is all that we want to concentrate on."
"No. Only a Bildungsroman works that way. You do not go from one place to another in your head, when you think. You have arrived and been there since you were born. There is no place you come from and no place that you have to reach."
“This is absurd!! What about past and future?"
"Past is only conceivable after you have arrived, and future is your present continuous of having arrived."
"Simply: You do not work, but you are working."
"Or: you do not live, but you are living."
"Right, so dreams are for those who are lost, who want to get somewhere and insist on their version of reality?"
"So much for that! But what do you suggest in the structural scheme of things?"
"Just live, without broadcasting your way of life."
"But what about those who broadcast?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe unite?"
“Yeah, unite to gain power."
"I don't know. You can try. If it works, I will be happy."
"So no dreams, no propaganda, but living."
"Have it as you wish it then."
"I'll will help them to the mountains, when she's out"
"I'll will come with you, I know some remote places."
"Yes, it suits their dream of living in the mountains."
"No, not their dreams! Dreams are condemned to break."
"We are not presenting them to doom, but we are arranging a place for them to live in peace."
"Yes. Perhaps one day they will finish writing their book of stories."
"Maybe, let's see!"
