Monday, August 27, 2007

Solitude

This is what Bitan wrote today, in his leafmade pages of diary.

I feel loneliness today. I feel it in my dead white bones. I feel it in my relentless breaths. Not only that there is nobody around. But, nobody was even supposed to be here. I am the only existence. Now, I know, how Adam might have felt.

I withdrew from the pages, and spread my gaze across the landscape creeping through my window on the East.

No, Bitan. I'm there.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Bodilano

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…

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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.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

A Failed Experiment

The story that I heard today or lived, must be written down somewhere. Otherwise it'll keep transforming itself beyond recognition, using my mind as an alibi. With a historian's inspiration, I am starting this narration.


Already I am not quite sure, whether the events took place in my life or somebody else's. The details are still vaguely discernible : afloat in the wake following a dream. The profiles and genders are gone from the memory, forever. But number of characters (this I remember) in the story were 3.


While expressing my confidence in the last line itself, I am again shrouded in confusion. Is my conviction due to an illusive belief in the sanctity of the number 3 ? May be, I have worshipped it all my life. And now, in this twilight of being, my symbol of deity, has touched me with conviction and inspiration.


The three unknowing victims of my indecent gaze, shapeless hence identical, like three bubbles, changed positions, dialogues, motives between themselves. Were they aware of their identities? I can't tell. It was getting dark and confusing.


It's best to describe the story through a running commentary on thoughts and words without aligning them with certain characters.


If anyone could see me now ( no one does, I know), he/she would see a man of approximate age 28-30 (I look older than I am), walking down a lonely Franklin St. at 1 in the morning. The yellow shirt (untucked, unbuttoned, wrinkled) would draw attention away from other details. Lights. For example, the traffic lights, blinking tirelessly over a deserted road. The empty dishevelled ground after the fair was over. The fairwell day in college and a scattered pack of friends.



Of course, the imaginary observer won't be able to read my thoughts. For that matter, nobody can. And there's the cold. I need some shelter, and lights. The ususal metallic symbols hanging from the doorways, wooing the wind with clinking sounds. The wind is carrying death tonight. Somebody's gonna die.



If only I could ask somebody. Bloody hell! No one's out tonight. Where's 'verybody? Need to distract the pain in my legs ( caused by severe cold). A few more steps and then the warmth of home. This garbage bin, black and tilted. The sudden bend of the road. A man approaches.

A man approaches. A shadowy figure. May be, he can help. His steps are lousy in this dead night. The reason, the indefinite observer can not describe any sound, is that there are no sounds. A girl's memory in my mind. She won't ever know or be in this place, in this night. The tall, unnamed trees paving my way through mosses and nightly uncertainties.

Silent night. Holy night. All is calm, All is bright. Hmmmhmmm....

The figure is humming something, indistinct. The slope of the road between us is downward from my side. Over the landscape drunken darkness lies like a bridge : gullible, soothing. I know somebody faraway is remembering me. His reflection I can see in my glass of liqour. The image, I see, is not a clear one. It may be, because I never saw Him. Or, it may be, because I've forgotten Him.

It's not hard to imagine a listener, like my psychiatrist, who'd patiently hear my version of the story. And then he'd paint me. I'd ask him : How are you going to sketch me, Unknown portrayer of human mind? A rage inside me. A futility. A flame can depict me. A denouncer of true love? A directionless vagabond? A foolish girl? Is there any symbol for irrationality? In a distant country, I live as a memory. A girl's memory is etched in my mind.

Hey, man! have got some light?

In this dark island, I had forgotten how voices sound like. The distinct words and tones came dangling down the rope, hung over bottomless void. Can't see the face. I don't have any light.

Sorry! Don't have a light!

Damn it! Now how do I drive off the chill? Who was that voice? Roaming the desolate streets of a little known country in search of light? Whose face was that in the mourning liquid? A few words just came to mind and after a little arrangement they were :

I have travelled that road many times after that night. But never did I encounter that voice anymore.

May be that is how I'll end a story based on the events of this sinking night. May be that voice will relate it to a vagabond in another way. May be, the girl in my mind, will remember this night when she's old : devoid of anxiety and fear. (But memories don't grow old. They're already ancient. ) Or, we will all grow used to it so much that the details will fade; there'll be nothing to tell, write or remember.

Though this is where my narration ends, the events, heedless of our insignificant storytelling, had flown. The characters passed from one story to another, across time : as Borges once said, unknowing of their roles in replaying history, they acted until they were withdrawn.

About my narration, obviously it's plagued with failure and deviations. Thoughts can never be expressed through words. The pattern of words in the text is characteristically mine, not of the characters. And this pattern brings with it my own past into the text. Though, I tried hard to make it as impersonal as possible.