Modern Day and Night

 The paradox under our noses in our waking, hectic days

A jalousied shutter through the interstices of which I thought I could have a glimpse of something, a familiar face, like of my late mother. As we all must have experienced the same phenomenon, the same buoyant lightness yet tiresomely hefty, namely being unable to go to sleep and the wallowing over on to one side to the other associated with it, when as one is on the threshold of betaking oneself to that state of submersion of one’s gross sensory consciousnesses by any wiles, one finds once again before the shattering cul-de-sac, a disturbing tumbling sound like a huge sponge sucking in all the thread of fluid relaxing sense of submersion from its thin point to the gross level, all in vain. And to start over again. 

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A novel reading one aboard of a train, and his or her sense of being taken interest in what he or she is reading by a neighbor, a stark illiterate one, a philistine, or a reader. One doesn’t care so, the neighbor’s own taste, but one’s being recognized as so or not, as a reader, a civilized one. As I have found on several occasions, such a reader, once found taken interest of, usually raises the book to the other’s notice by revealing the glossy cover with its title and the writer’s name in bold, sometimes in gold, like taken that much care about image.  

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And one another small event aboard can be of eye-contacting that picks one out of many across an aisle or files of heads yoked to smart phones screens. Not like hurling a peek at the cover of a book with the awareness that the reader may be delighted, such an eye contact has its own frequency of nervous impulses being exchanged and interpreted into a skein of romantic idealisms that can sometimes romp to such a fanciful extent, like taking there being only this passage of transmission, like this being the beginning of a new world, and so on. And for me, when in tryst with a vicarious venture to see and feel as the other, I find such fusses about my own vanity but all innocence of those immobile heads among which the other head and face that steals my interest as someone to be pitied over as well being aware, at the same time, that it can be one among innumerable faces that I can see once in my lifetime. No way to venture to that extent of how the interested one spends his life in the walled, roofed domain on a daily basis, that monotony. 

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To foot up, the limited energy matters and so the need of enough sleep. No matter how you look or you have such an attention or not, reading does matter and, why not, being self-reliant in a language both its spoken and written form, the only medium that can make you, at the desperate point of your life, be able to live alone forever by delving into yourself to the ultimate nature of everything that we tend to take as there being in its own absolute, inherent way… But such notion tainted with some findings of essentialism there is itself a great hoax, taking that it stands as it presents. No, never. And such notion of ‘certain specific objects prevail’, namely in its absolute entity, by way of sounding off, taken as the boldest of all, nominalism and its rubbish is itself a colossal sign of our instinctive insecurity, we the blind devotees of ‘being so as it presents’, not of the otherwise, the great inverse way--the tandem of not being there as it presents to us but there as our own projections like a dream.  

The familiar reverie at that level of semi-subconsciousness known as when dreaming: a deja-vu

A dream is what it is like we could sometimes happen to internalize ourselves into thinking what we had done yesterday. And so I had, however, a complex dream. It’s still fresh on my mental screen, so tentative, so alluring prompting me to indite it thus: 

Two women came into the scene. They were strangers to me; I couldn’t cull up anything as to supply myself to give some hues to their bodily outlines and clothing. I just saw one handed over something to the other, like a piece of paper or something of some value. I just observed them like with an invisible spirit-body, without any idea about my own bodily existence and its attributes but with an expanse of view before me, while I kept myself bothering with the pestering question what the thing was and while seeing the women were turning blurrier and blurrier. I couldn’t come up with a settling idea. I wanted to rewind the scene, to observe it from the beginning. And so it happened. 

The woman turning her back to me was older in a faded saree, who was the receiver of the thing from the other who was in a kurta with a floral pattern. The latter, with a bright round face, was saying something with some ease and anxiety expressed by the movements of her facial muscles. It was like she was proving herself innocent of the sort. Then, in no time, I was behind the older woman, her buttock in my hands that were running over the curves and dents of it. She didn’t seem to have any feeling, but I had a tactile feeling of coarseness as of her age. And, so out of the blue, the other young woman was in my arms, her back to me. I was fondling all over her front. I could feel the flatness of her stomach and abdomen, when, while running my hand over her genital covered by panties, I found her sort of deaf and dumb. But a friend of mine now in the states, a former monk, happened to be her proxy in communicating to me. He was all for being my instructor. While my genital and hers, now revealed, were on the point of meeting, I could hear his muffled words cautioning me to think well before the penetration. And I woke up.