Ami
had developed a kind of bodily relation with the books, which was both gradual
and incessant, and just after that, problems arose. They survive now by eating
each other’s flesh.
Violets are blue,
because another body emerges from the body and walks in front of mute Grushenka
,
in the vicinity of Khalasitola
. As
it is the girl was beautiful, colleagues flatter her calling her a ‘paragon of
beauty’, right from her college days she had been seeing only entrancement in
men’s eyes. Perhaps it was this girl who came to meet Ami. He said
spontaneously: Come, come in, I was just thinking about you. But the girl has interpreted
this in a different way, the eighth colour of the rainbow was about to be
discovered. Girls are extremely
possessive,
for sure, but he was of the opinion that boys were even more
possessive than girls. Now Ami says he
is very tired, an infinitude of tiredness. He had been tired for the last three
decades, it had gone on for even longer than he had been alive. And just then,
after talking about this and that for about an hour, as he’s leaving, he hugs
Grushenka. She does not resist, releasing herself slowly she says: You’re a
rogue. He laughs: And you’re a treasure trove. What rubbish – Grushenka says –
Tell me, why do you come so late – don’t I suffer?
Good and evil are one,
evil is merely the wrong choice at the moment of truth. If the life I used to lead
is a dream then this is a nightmare, until it’s transformed into complete
insanity the nightmare isn’t concluded. Ami had just turned forty then. Double
the girl’s age. A face covered over by a red beard, two weak legs, a short, fat
body. His female friends smirk, they say: the kind of appearance that’s eager
to establish bodily relations. When he has no other work he makes models of
bones. Doing that on and on he had made a complete human skeleton. And just the
same way, whatever he wrote, over an entire year, page after page, one night
something got into his head and he tore everything into shreds and let it blow
away in the wind. Even before an incident is prepared one must reach another
incident, and from there to yet another incident, perhaps with diametrically
opposite thinking, all of which would be made with another arrangement,
unconnected, hence ambiguity is created, is bound to be. Because, perhaps, Ami,
in a particular sense, was a writer, just like some other writers, but also the
end-writer. He began to lose touch with the external world, he was also
steadily losing his mental balance. He stopped meeting his friends, he used to
say that he didn’t have clothes to go out in, didn’t have shoes. And when he did
get some money he called all the people from the streets and organized a grand festive
feast of food and drink. Towards the end Ami lived all alone in a
one-and-a-half-room flat. His body had come to resemble that of an old man,
although he was only forty his face bore the stamp of age. And when idle, immersed
in dreams, he could see Theodore
staring fixedly at him through the darkness. He had sent people to kill him.
Theodore was passing off the pages of writing stolen from him in his own name,
one day he said that a maidservant had mixed a sleeping potion in his tea and
stolen some pages from his new work in order to sell it to Theodore. But the
funny thing is that the man who is visible has almost reached the flyover by
now. The boy is consoling the girl, just you wait and see – everything will be
alright. The car waits. The girl says: You must help me, I beg you, Alyosha,
help me. Ami leaves. The girl stands gazing at the door. And then she goes and
lies down on the bed that’s wrapped in darkness. The sound of a motorcycle starting
and then going away can be heard. Who was it that had said that life was full
of surprises – who used to say that, Theodore or Alyosha – or was it both of
them? Grandma used to say that when I was a little boy I apparently used to run
around with my arms spread on two sides like a bird’s wings. People say, when
you dream about flying it means you’re growing up. Ami used to fly even when he
was awake and yet he could never grow up. Leaping off a mountain – flying along
over the ocean – Ami sees such dreams even now. Snatching his words, Theodore
says – How amazing, I too was thinking of exactly the same thing at this moment.
At one time, here, on this bed, there used to be a youth, whose name was also Theodore.
Everyone used to call him Alyosha in jest. When he was asked he used to reply: I’m
floating over the clouds. That was quite normal for those who had a problem in
the head, as soon as they wished they could lie beside clouds. Many people ask
questions about sending Ami to hospital and the subsequent incident. Was it at
all necessary to send him to hospital? Even if he was sent to the hospital
once, was it correct to keep him there for the rest of his life? Erasing the
difference between the selfness of future and present, I constantly reconstruct
myself anew. How can I become what I have not yet become – all my hopes and
desires are only a ceaseless attempt at this rearrangement. This circle will
never be complete. My separation is eternal, Ami’s nothingness-like unbridgeable
distance. Within my existence there is always a distressed scream of nothingness,
but this void is the kind of force, the force within one’s existence – which makes
man dream of being elevated to a certain and well-knit future from an
incompatible and uncertain condition. Many of Ami’s friends used to declare
that Ami did not behave like a lunatic at all. Yes, he was
paranoid, but one often comes across people suffering from
persecution mania who live with their
families without causing any damage, leading regular lives. Maybe his
neighbours had raised objections about him because he was not like other
people. Ordinary people are bound to express their doubts about a man who only goes
out at night, just scribbles something all day long and then tears it up, who doesn’t
talk to anyone. It is love for people that makes Ami anti-human. Perhaps because
of this, Ami exacted a great revenge on himself.
Conformity means death,
only protest gives a hope in life. Yes, Ami saw that a man constantly gives him company
in the course of daily life, enriches him, sometimes more than a woman. Together
with this, he creates a certain madness within me as well, because I too am a
man. I had to ascertain whether I was really a man in various ways. I ascertain
that by placing myself beside a man, and not just beside a woman. Through this,
I understand his way of thinking too. Trying to know oneself without being too clever.
But, being alone, continuously, gradually, going on being solitary, did not merit
blame. After spending the night with Grushenka, the wild-mannered Ami – then,
in those days – became endowed with some human qualities. In thought and
feeling, another dimension has become manifest. And unlike in his youth, when
he used to physically win over many women, he constantly stays beside the girl.
In his earlier writings, a specific dimension of power, courage and madness
used to be expressed, he had a wild exultation regarding man’s aboriginal
tendencies. After Grushenka’s arrival, a lot of it becomes gentle. There is
restraint at the perverted presence of flesh, a self-orientation enters his thinking.
And the veiled melancholia in the later stage attains a much higher level than before.
Towards the end Ami started living with the girl. That’s why a melancholy countenance
enters his final writings, concealing everything else. The two of them lived
together then – Grushenka and Theodore. The gossip was that she bore his child
in her womb, but the girl had just not been willing to having an abortion.
Having changed into a sari, Grushenka comes and says, tell me how I look. …
Lets go, where shall we go? He suddenly holds her face with his two hands and
says: Do you know something, Grushenka – do you know … Notwithstanding her
married life with her husband for so long, these words of the man who was her
lover make Grushenka’s whole being giddy, but she says: I’m not that
great-looking. Ami looks at her and becomes serious: If you were a man, you’d
understand the fire – the fire you’re playing with, Grushenka, standing between
father and son. The other layer beyond this first layer, where he had tried to
reach, where there’s no
compromise, was
sexuality. Here you can never be successful with pretence. That means you want
to experience the worldview of that layer through your instincts. Your
instincts tell you about your ordinary experiences, which are outside the world
of the mind, through those you enter the world of the mind by means that are
bestial or anything else like that – you realize the worldview. For this, every
now and then you must sleep with other girls too. You have to sleep with them
both
actively and
positively. Only then will you find
yourself. Actually I liked this too. I liked it with utmost honesty. I stayed
back. I was trying to search for something, I’m still doing that even now. In
such matters, we either become slaves only to our joys or accept the girl’s
happiness as the final word. Both of these are a kind of lie. And lies do not
lead to any investigation of truth. I am able to take this risk. Through the very
girl you can enter another secret world. Do you know in what respect you are
different from everyone else – Grushenka says – you know how to listen. Men
never listen to what women say. They only think about going to bed. I don’t
mind going to bed, but that you heard me all this while, that’s what’s amazing.
The truth cannot be realized through words. It’s correct to say that the moment
of pure truth cannot be expressed in the language of any specific person, but
it’s also possible to create new kinds of signs, which are not used by people,
through which the individual in the moment of pure truth can be identified. It
is this that can be called, in Ami’s view, characteristics of the self –
meaning, one reflects one’s own characteristics. The characteristics of the
self, or looked at in another way, non-characteristics – whose form cannot be
expressed in any language in currency. Perhaps only that part of our logical
method of arrangement, which people cannot easily accept, is the real truth. He
lies in bed, away from Calcutta, unwell. He muttered: I want to see the girl.
His wife was beside him – his wife of twenty-five years. Those who were near
him said: There she is, right beside you. He got annoyed: No, no! Not her,
Grushenka. I want to see Grushenka. Bad times have begun for me, brother, I was
just recovering from kidney inflammation and now I’m writhing in spinal pain
all day. For over a year now I’ve been unable to sleep in bed. All day and
night, I sit with my back resting on a pillow, the hour or two that I sleep for
is by resting on the pillow. At first a lung X-ray was taken but nothing was
found. It’s a week now since the spinal X-ray was done. A collapse of the third
dorsal vertebra was detected in that. Ami comes and stands at the door. He
stands with his head raised high, towards the sky that had become dense with
darkness. Down below, the road going up and down the flank of the mountain
recedes into the distance, keeps doing so. Dogs supposedly eventually start
looking like their masters. At one time, I used to think that this referred to
a resemblance of nature or character. But later I realized it was not that –
gradually the dogs began to look as ugly as their masters – the insides of the
mouths of both were terribly filthy – a horrible, red, gaping mouth. In this
way, Ami died one day. According to the hospital records the cause of death was
an apoplectic stroke. After Ami died, when his desk was opened, a large
envelope bearing Dostoyevsky’s name was found. But it was completely empty. At
least Ami’s case was different. He was merely a trapeze artist. Dressed in
gleaming red satin, Ami floats around – swinging on one hand and then the other
– from one end to the other end – even when he frees his hand, emptiness, he is
held by an invisible bond. He does not have the capability of severing that tie,
no one has. And as he floated in that momentary emptiness, he saw his own
defeat with his own eyes. His writings condensed and took over his life at some
point, it was the blown-away pages of the writing that determined how far the
writer was there or whether at all there was anyone called a writer. Or the
term writer was actually nothing but an imaginary notion, which has no
existence in reality.
The unexamined life is not worth
living. The
only way to deny everything that was
absurd
in the world was to lead one’s life in an
absurd
way. With every new thought, Ami knows, he has to attain death again and again.
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