Today I’m going to divulge a secret, that I’ve protected for over half a century. I wasn’t supposed to do this. But I can feel death’s warm breath on my forehead. I don’t dare to think of what’ll happen to the secret after that. Death for me would leave a memory, but for a secret it is oblivion. No, It can not detain anymore. Bodilano is going to die.
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I’d Just finished reading the last of Bodilano. I was not going to re-read the works, simply because re-reading could mar the spontaneous effect. For Bodliano, moments are as important as the words and thoughts.
But that didn't stop my craving for more of Bodilano. Not the finite person, who walked the earth in early part of the bygone century, but the boundless being in my mind, created as a collage of words and phrases. Boundless, because not only I have read whatever he had written, but I also know what else he could've written.
That Bodilano, whom I know by heart, who has answers to all my confusions and queries, who has seen the world as I have seen, who has thought quite the same way as I've done, who has used the words as I'd've liked to, I started to miss. He was an experience I wanted to last for my lifetime.
But, ironically, the infinite also ended with the finite.I mused, and became sad. In 1940, his last work was published. Coincidentally, this piece of work, named
The Twilight also dwells upon art as an extension of identity. It is this queer idea of individuals being mere projection of universal that drives the narration. Projections die and projections are born as the light passes on from angle to angle.
I have positively felt, at certain points in the text, that I know what comes next. As Platonism suggests (knowing is remembering), I've felt that this has been written by me in a time, far away, and abandoned. There are so much more, that I'd like to add to it, now.
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The vague inspiration took three days to form as a clear idea in my mind. On 20th October, evening at around 7, I went to the Library Central . My purpose was to study the forms and styles of Bodilano over his long, illustrious career. My destination was 2nd floor, shelf no. 7.
By then, I'd decided that the only way to appease my hunger for Bodilano, is to re-create him. And if anybody could do that, it has to be me. Can I fit into his role as an author?
To do that, I need to know him even better. Unfortunately, his personal life has left no trace over the media. In his prolonged literary career spanning over 60 years, he has made no public appearances. No biography of his has ever been published. No photograph, No Interviews. A solitary identity expressed in pure words of his texts only.
The only way to know him was to study his words, then.
Shelf no. 7 is in a dimly lit corner of the floor. Not too many hands has touched the bindings recently. It came as no surprise, as the genre of Bodilano has died a long time back. I took out the most fresh-looking copy of
The Queer Fall, the first ever published text by the magical author. The date of first edition : 19th July, 1881.
I won't go into the content of the story, as it has no relevance to my present narration, and as always I have been allotted limited time. But when I tried to list down the most frequent nouns (motivated by another Italian) in the text, I found out :
light, reform, decay, metaphor, nobility, maitre, chain, moon, sky, sea... This indicates a clear presence of romanticism in this novel. But he is not getting carried away by the romantic ideas. Every now and then the text pauses and analyzes itself. Can this taken as an early form of self-referencing, the technique used extensively by the author in latter works.
The narrative is a conventional linear one. Yet, here and there, a sentence or two are there to find, where dreams have been attempted to be described. Accordingly, the nature of the narrative has been distorted there. Overall, Bodliano, that we came to know later, is trying to come out in the open with hesitant footsteps, in this piece of work.
For next 5 years, Bodilano published similar such stories with few experimentation, although the style remained virtually unaltered. The main point of focus for him in this period was dreams and imaginations. From 1887 onwards, there was silence from the pen of the great author, for another six years. What he did or had undergone, nobody knows.
But when he returned in 1893, with
The Gray Nightmare, he instantly drew attention of the critics once again. This particular book has been centre of controversy for a long time. And that is more due to the controversial content rather than the form.
I took out the copy, cautiously : it's easily the most referenced and worn out entry in the shelf. The beginning of the novel, is marked ( I observed) by unusual expression of joy ( relief would be a better word), which has never been properly explained later in the text. As if that emotion was not meant for this particular writing, but an unintentional outburst of another chain of emotions outside the story. This rather intrigued me.
Are we missing something? A secret plot, ( that I've dreamt for long), has been hatched, by somebody somehow. The answer is lying very close to me, but in the darkness, proximity is coming to no aid.
Anyway, my original intent of knowing the author through his texts, took a blow, as I went through the pages. It seemed that the author has completely transformed in his period of inactivity. The style is hardly romantic anymore. It’s dark. It’s gloomy. And it’s calculative.
The words that dominate the text, are like :
But, door, dark, now, why, night, room, silent, breeze, chair, window, roads, lamp…I remembered the first time when I read the novel. I was shocked and relieved, at the same time. I was shocked by the haunting details of solitude. It was hard to believe that the writer who has given pen to
The Queer Fall and
The Morning Hues has also created something like this one.
But at the same time, I was relieved from my own solitude at that time by the presence of another solitude. What makes solitude so unbearably painful is its uniqueness or self-importance. Once you realize, that you are not the only one suffering, pain recedes. I remember, after I read the book, how I spent long hours fighting with myself to take a new grip on life.
May be, that is why it didn’t occur to me. But now, the more I am going through the piece, the more I am convinced that Bodilano of 80’s and Bodilano of 90’s and onwards can not be same. As if the latter one is everything the former is not. As if younger Bodilano has picked up the pen as a response to the elder one : to nullify all that he has said. No person can change that much.
This mesmerizing idea left me dazed for a while. I thought I was in a dream. Or in a game whose rules I don’t know. The inevitable and determined moves of my unknown opponent are binding me in a very small room…
To break out of the claustrophobic trance, I hurried to the shelf again to look for more clues. ( My conviction at this point was supreme. I needed proofs to validate it only. Although now, while writing it down, I can not see much logic behind my conviction.)
For 20 long years after that, Bodilano had concentrated as a topic on reality, absoluteness, wretchedness, intoxication, cruelty, rage, vengeance, revolution, pangs of despair and solitude. A very sharp, brilliant yet cruel pen defines his works in these years. Some of the techniques that he used are wit, sarcasm, symbolism, use of a single first person narrative and a stream of short disconnected sentences.
Towards the end of this era, in 1929, he wrote a novel called
The Knight of the Night. It caught my attention. I know, it is a story of a knight who roamed the city streets after dark and who is in his deathbed casting a glance back at his illusive past. But I wanted to re-read it and scrutinize it.
On page 57, I found what I was looking for. A letter in the form of a poem, or a poem in the form of a letter. It is penned by the Knight. It is addressed to the night.
…While everyone thought I was combating you, protecting them from you, all I was doing is nursing you inside my vacant mind. I roared at you; you roared from inside. I galloped toward you; you filled the space left behind. I thought I gave you wounds; but it was me writhing in pain.
I have grown old, and I have grown tired. I wish I hadn’t picked up the mantle. I chose my way and now I am lost. Surely, someone will pick it up again. I wonder what he’ll do with it? I wonder; because it has the strength of the universe. Only if you know how to use it…
There, it was all the time. The clue to a wonderfully hidden secret. And I thought, I was the first one with the idea! I knew, there won’t be single publication in next 3-4 years, and I was right.
God is a Circle got published in 1933. And the words there were of different hues.
God is a circle, claimed to be the best work by the author, deals with circularity that we find everywhere we look at. It doesn’t have any story to tell as such. Bodilano, in this monumental work, is comparing stories with lives, author with God. He wants to give stories a platform independent of life and reality. And he tries to depict how one law of circularity governs the worlds of lives and stories.
It is a really difficult story to analyze. But I was thrilled at how the style of writing has changed over a period of 4-5 years. This Bodilano, has abandoned looking at positives and negatives, goods and bads, morality and corruption, optimism and pessimism as two opposing walls. He’s looking at it from above. He’s trying adopt the view of God.
By now, sarcasm is gone from his pen. There are very few dialogues. The different parts of the text is written from different first person perspectives. In many parts, the text has become more mathematical, although in earlier works no inclination toward mathematics can be discernible.
This preoccupation with mathematics, abstraction and specially infinity is present in his subsequent works also. The story he is telling is the story of symbols, words, images, sentences and stories. In
The Lost Grounds (1938) he sets out to travel through the realm of identities.
In that particular text, he writes :
…I marveled at the bronze statues. They were all my own replica. Yet in some unfathomable way, they were different. Different from me. Each one different from the other.
I was having a odd feeling, like vertigo..
I was falling down a bottomless hollow with glass-walls. I counted my reflections : it was infinite. I closed my eyes. And then there were none…
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------When I came out of the library, full moon was playing with clouds. Deserted roads invited me to the indefinite. I took a while to decide. But my excitement of finding out the truth and importance of finding myself within a secret chain of history, made the decision for me. Bodilano, was going to live again.
