©KOSTAS
E. TSIROPOULOS
NOTES
OF
GENERAL
REHEARSAL
From ©Kostas E. Tsiropoulos, Notes of General Rehearsal, pp. 7-9
Athens 1995
©Translated from Greek by Mauro Giachetti
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 toward heaven and asked God to reveal him when he would die. And from the mysterious ether a majestic voice answered specifying exactly 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 left himself plunge into to find some warmth.
Later he lived his sleep like total, lascivious love, in which his body, his
mind and soul sank so that one of man’s mysteries could be fulfilled. (Who
knows if animals, birds, trees, plants dream too?) Finally 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, an abyss of his soul, a
danger he exposed his body to. We’re made of the same stuff dreams are made
of, says the Poet. But what unusual stuff are our dreams made of? They emerge
sibylline from our entrails where a strange alchemist, who is secretly at
work, decomposes the fragments of our life to reassemble different circumstances,
uncommon characters who from the crevices
of sleep penetrate into us, barely graze 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 from divine wisdom or a violent, insidious malediction
that raises the surface of quotidian 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 content of his sleep, to rebel
and to 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
sleeping could have been without dreams. But he acknowledged their particular
favor when, sometimes, throughout the plot of a dream, his beloved dead were
able to get in touch with him, sketched out peculiar, symbolic gestures in
the air, told him very few oracular words, rarely smiled at him, ethereal
figures of sadness and solitude that emanated from them…
From time to time, roused by an obscure carnal
impetus, sensual naked bodies came to blandish 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 frightfully 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, wide awake, those entities required an interpretation.
They were domineering, revealing, allusive dreams, inexplicable extensions
of conscious life. (Like the dreams in Homer, the tragic Poets, the Old Testament;
and in the New Testament the dream of Saint Joseph, the dream of Pilate’s
wife, a light shadowed woman who, thanks to a dream, was engraved in our Sacred
History…).
Those dreams were anonymous and yet they
were key-dreams. Fatherless children born of Night (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 had a dream that
had revealed to him, that had specified to him the exact date of his death.
That day was getting nearer. It was grazing
time’s trajectory. Lately he thought of that day incessantly, he 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 figment of a dream…
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.