02 - I Have Longed To Move Away

(1094 words.) (Short-story by Arvind Passey.) I HAVE LONGED TO MOVE AWAY. I don't like being where I am. I don't like aak2 priming me for the MMT (Maximal Mnemonic Trials) by drumming some regimented piece on 'Linguistics and the Native Speaker'. I call MMT a 'Maximal Mahem Twaddle', because for me they are all forcibly acquired traits. All turning points of technology are turn-offs for me. In place of robots that move, I would rather be creating rhymes that move. That is why I like you Dylan Thomas, whom I meet so often on my virtual-reality network, and like you I too wish to hum : 'I have longed to move away but am afraid; Some life, yet unspent, might explode Out of the cold lie burning on the ground, And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.' I know that Dylan lived in rather abnormal times. He took walks in parks and heard passionate squeals of laughter. He went in cars, jostled in buses, queued for tickets, swayed on steamers, and even watched tree-tops from the window of some airplane. Those were slow times indeed. We travel, making easy conversation with thoughts, at times even leaving them behind. But I'd rather be with Dylan, dissecting meandering thoughts, moulding inflexible ones, and making them valuable assets by fixing words at the right spots. Why can't I go back in time, just a hundred years back, to be with 'Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,...' But it is really a dream -- even for us who have advanced to wherever forever is. Let me tell you Dylan, if you can hear me through the retrogrades of time, that we live in lighted times. O, how I wish these were enlightened times instead. But let me not digress -- we live here, where no skies are felt; no seas, no birds, no winds ever sing; no floods, no earthquakes, nor tidal-waves come and frighten; no horizon, no sunset, no dawn to make love to. We live below all these transitory happenings....we have discarded their permanent perils. But a few like me say that time and technology never could win the battle with nature and we sunk ourselves lower and lower into the bowels of the earth where we advanced higher and higher to create the very things we had run away from. You called them illusions. For us they are icons. So now we simply watch life. If that means anything at all. There is this reality all around, Dylan, this dark reality that changes to whatever we wish, by a mere touch......and yet a reality we cannot touch, nor feel. There is no one around me to talk to -- not the way you did with your friends. All those hearty backslaps, secret snoggings, deliberate hugs,......even tickilish glances. We have forgotten to torture ourselves like you did, simply to write such wonderful verses. How I wish I were 'Eating bread from a newspaper Drinking water from the chained cup...' Whenever I stroll with aak2, my robot valet (he is actually my master, I sometimes feel -- O misery ! misery ! ), into any of our Past-Mist-Freeze-Vaults, I look at the painful expressions of people walking sloppily through the slush of melting snow, the baleful looks directed at the heap of fallen autumn leaves, the irritation-wrinkles on sweat-lined brows during hot summer noons -- and I want to reach out and tell them they are hitting the wrong targets. It is their future generations that are going to be 1

the real victims......they will suffer subliminal damages because they will not be doing these very things. I would love to trade my present with their present. With your present, Dylan. 'I would not fear the muscling-in of love If I were tickled by the urchin hungers Reharsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.' We who skate on MCTs (Mnemonic Control Tracks) and watch the very cauldron where knowledge is parboiled, we are actually, poor. We are 'deaf to spring and summer' and we know 'not sun nor moon by name', we are the new race of super humans. Our themes are not as simple as the fusion of sex, birth and death. We never smell flowers, nor are we stung by bees ; we never kiss a lover's lips, nor are there tearful partings ; we never smile in rhymes, nor are we able to drown in prosaic depths. I must be strange one even for aak2. You know Dylan, I had once quoted these lines of yours : 'Out of your sighs a little comes, But not of grief, for I have knocked down that Before the agony; the spirit grows, Forgets, and cries; A little comes, is tasted and found good.....' Before I could even finish, aak2 quizzed me instead with these statements : "Searching for 'little' in recipe section." "Wait." "Command not found." "Check from following options : ....." ....and then there was a list of recipe options and I had a truly tough time transposing sanity to his circuits gone haywire. I envy your evasive way of life, the seductive pleasures of friends, the parasites called loafing and goofing that you all so readily adopt...believe me, when I say, that our destroyers are the same. Its the same 'force that through the green fuse drives the flower' that drives the chariots of destruction. Though its equally true that your destruction leads to a fresh beginning, maybe a crossroad. You get started again and spend your years destroying and rebuilding anew. But me, I have entered an indestructible mental life and so I only have a start and an end. Is this the truth that you had dreamt of, Dylan ? Just one life with no life in between. No options. My life is one big crystal that reflects smiles that have no tangible existence. Even my name is a reflected convenience of aak2 : Gubaar. He says that in a dialect once spoken in what used to be Central Asia, it meant 'trapped feelings and emotions within a life-form'. Thats probably the reason why I am what I have become. That must be the cause for so many images being born and dying in another, that must be the foundation for this sequence of creations, re-creations, destructions, and contradictions ......all yet unable to destroy my indestructible mental armour. That must be the start of my search for the end of dreams. Your futuristic fantasies, my dungeon inherited. That must be why I have always longed to move away. (NOTE : All quotes in italics are written by Dylan Thomas. ) # 2