Excerpt from
©KOSTAS E. TSIROPOULOS’S
Athens 1993
Translation by © Mauro Giachetti
I. DREAMS – DREAMING
He was in the prime of life when, once, in the very middle of the night, he had a dream: in the darkness he was talking towards heaven and asked God to reveal him when he would die. And from the mysterious ether a majestic voice answered specifying precisely the year, the month and the day of the end of his earthly life.
In the course of his
childhood dreams had often upset and frightened him in his cradle. Then came a
period when sleeping was for him like a chilly sea he felt himself plunged into
to find some warmth. Later he lived his sleep like a totally lascivious love,
in which his body, his mind and soul sank so that one of man’s mysteries could
be carried out. (Who knows if animals, birds, trees, plants dream too?) Lastly,
he had taken to approach night that was falling with a slight shivering, and
lived his sleep as an abyss of obscure reminiscences of his soul, a menace he
exposed his body to. We’re made of the same stuff dreams are made of, says the
Poet. But what an unusual stuff are our dreams made of? They emerge sibylline
from our entrails where a strange alchemist is secretly working to break off
and reassemble the fragments of our life into different circumstances, uncommon
characters who penetrate into us from the crevices of sleep, barely skim over
our memory and disappear, powerful shadows, bitter allusions to the fugacity of
our human nature.
He had asked himself many
times whether dreams reveal or conceal appalling realities capable of
disaggregating life and the integrity/responsibility of his being. Whether the
capability of dreaming constituted a blessing of divine wisdom or a violent, insidious malediction that
raises the surface of everyday reality so that we may catch a glimpse of the semi-concealed realities that blossom
beyond logic, on the brink of the structure of the world, corresponding to the
structure of his own body.
Would he ever be able to free
himself from the capability of dreaming, to keep away the contents of his
sleep, to rise up and finally put an end to his oneireutical/oneiropoetical
capability? No. We are compelled to dream by our very human nature.
He was thinking of how much
more alluring sleep could have been without dreams. But he acknowledged their
particular favor when, sometimes, through the plot of a dream, his beloved dead
were able to contact him, sketched out peculiar, symbolic gestures in the air,
told him very few oracular words, rarely smiled at him, ethereal figures of
sadness and solitudes that emanated from them…
From time to time, roused by
an obscure carnal impetus, sensual naked bodies came to brandish his sleep and
forced dreams to penetrate into his hardened body… As he awoke he suffered from
the mysterious seal that unexpected fire had left on him. A atrociously
hylomorphic reality had loosened his joints and imposed itself on him,
confusing him.
When he woke up, everything
had disappeared. Where? How? Why? He did not know. «Man is the dream of a
shadow» (Pind.., P., II, 8, 136). But later, when he was wide awake,
those entities demanded an interpretation. They were domineering, revealing,
allusive dreams, inexplicable extensions of conscious life. (Like the dreams in
Homer, in the tragic Poets, in the Old Testament; and the dream of Saint Joseph
in the New Testament, the dream of Pilate’s wife, light-shadowed woman who
thanks to a dream remained engraved in our Sacred History...).
Although those dreams were
anonymous they were key-dreams.
Fatherless children Night had given birth to (Hes., Th., 212),
produced in him realities it was not easy to throw light upon, episodes of a
serial whose origin he ignored, wharfs, piers, scaffoldings hanging in midair
from where he fell, but survived…
In the prime of life he had a dream that revealed to him, that
specified to him the precise date of his death.
That day was getting near. it
was skimming over time’s trajectory. Lately he had been thinking of that day
incessantly, me meditated about it, he investigated it with an oracular frame
of mind. He was aware he was on the point to depart from the world, but maybe even the world was only a dream’s
figment …
One night he heard the verdict
with the accuracy and the deadly clearness of a date. The time of death was
about to come. It was better not to ignore that message.