Montage of Subliminal Visuals

I had a dream that I jotted down how I saw her in the 87th sequence of my Venus de Edappally dreams. This is two years after I decided to make acrylic studies of Thevara college not only to document my emotional attachment towards the architectural forms and surroundings but also to throw an air of mystery around and impress people. Now I feel that making a virtual sculptural model of the college in 3D Studio Max can almost be equally monumental, creatively and feelingly, for which, as a beginning I took the preliminary sketches of ‘Bhoothanathan ’ by Jayram Sir. In this episode of duplicating the architectural forms, half the glory is to be shared by Intel Pentium Processor and the digital art software so that the artist’s ego-satisfaction is marginally diminished. But is it terribly wrong to say “I’m the one who did this” looking at a painting, whether others appreciate it or not; is it so shameful to leaf through the pages of ‘Ecce Homo’, Christ, my Lord…isn’t it really good to have a penetrating knowledge about oneself? Anyhow, the era of self propaganda comes to an inevitable end. Venus de Edappally is far off somewhere and she didn’t give me her e-mail address.

The 87th sequence faded out to the visuals of a harbour. Ships were being built near-by; ship-building seems to be so simple now-a-days compared to the unlike the puzzling naval architecture of wooden vessels and steamers. Take a large pipe and cut it into two pieces, one for fo’c’sle and the other for the quarter-deck. Slice them along, to make two hulls all at once. Do required tapering for each piece and connect them using Boolean techniques. Draw a line along the gunwale and extrude it to get the deck-head. Use the standard primitive modeling objects to build the superstructure and funnel. The hull-work is done and in stead of painting, wrap a bit-map image onto it. We don’t have to worry about the installation of the rudder, propeller and the turbo engines because the industry is not short of skilled mechanical engineers thanks to the privatization of engineering colleges.

My woman and I went up the deck through the slippery metallic planks of the gang-way. Like Jose Saramago’s ship ‘The Unknown Island’ set out to the sea in search of itself, we cruised in a very rusty antique-looking vessel, whose crew I never saw, but she lines the ocean creakingly, the old iron parts rubbing each other and we coasted along unheard-of islands of the world, through unchartered waters, some other part of the globe ; the message came that the ship was approaching a land-strip which has close resemblances to our native state of Kerala; I ran onto the deck, my soles turning rusty red as it disturbed the iron flakes, to have a look at the landscape, Wow!....alien, yet homely! Full of huts and all, totally unvisualizable architectural forms, unrecognizable building materials…the plantains, mango trees and the bio-diversity.

I jumped into the sea; slowly immersed into the unknown depths of this visually stunning space in our planet; slowly swam but was washed ashore. After an hour, I found myself in the city square, where I pushed my way through some Negro army officers to reach Jayram Sir who stood in front of the marble relief of Holy Mary, lost in thoughts, his finger-tips keenly exploring the chisel-marks. I hesitated for a moment, whether to interrupt or not; he turned his head, a sudden smile filtered through the moustache and he stretched out his hands. Jayram Sir started to speak to me, seriously making heavy references; as the on-looking girls were of some other racial origin, I was less self-conscious. All of a sudden, I realized that I was standing in front of Holy Mary and made an apologetic gesture and astonishingly Jayram Sir followed suit impulsively.

Some socialite ladies came over to meet Jayram Sir as they were passing by. Jayram Sir shared jokes with them and tactfully holding me by my hands, he narrated to them some recent events in art circles. I secluded into a tiny room, near by, a small gallery in which one of the paintings was that of C.N.Karunakaran, a city-scape of Cochin, done in Monet-like strokes, so unlikely of Karunakaran master.

Jayram Sir asked me to join a group of boys and girls, who were being given behavioural training to participate in the Youth Festival. Seeing me, some dancers giggled. I too laughed loudly to share their feelings, whatever it be. Those who are not-so-interested may leave, please, the psychologist said. Immediately I got up and started to leave bur learning that no one else had got up and as it may hurt the crowd, I hesitated for a moment but pushed off…walked along the corridors of Sacred Heart College, briskly, my eyes to the floor and went straight to the lake-view.

The big crowd of fisher-men and others was being hushed up by the Naval police. Four or five helicopters were flying up and down above the Venduruthy channel and a SCUBA diver hanging down from a helicopter showed some kind of remote-sensing detector on the water. Some by-stander told me, an Admiral is drowning. I laughed as if a belated justification for a much hyped protest and said, No wonder! I’ve been expecting this. Navy personnel, irrespective of ranks, got offended. When the choppers came down nearer the surface, the water wore an unauthentic rippling pattern.

Meanwhile, the batch of American students came to college. I saw a procession which escorted them along the corridors, with on-lookers on either side. The procession looked somewhat like a carnival-Rio; first of all a band-set came, then some children, some naval officers; all of them wavered fake flowers made of coloured aluminium foil. When the naval officers showed up we were supposed to salute, but I felt like yawning and I tried really hard to resist that convulsive urge to yawn.

The procession left and I sat down on the corridor. Aishwarya Rai came and sat down beside me. We played games with the children who had come for the show. The game was like this; we had to roll a pair of apples (like the bowling in Esplanade Alley atop Convent Junction) both the team-mates together and make it roll into the respective goal-posts on the other side of the corridor; we two elders were compelled to sit down whereas the kids would run around; the rules of the game and the time-to-time modifications were being made by the children. Our team trailed far behind and I decided to take the game seriously. I made a couple of points and ecstatically shook hands with Aishwarya Rai but suddenly realized that my hands were wet; I started to worry whether I turned her off and I never looked up at her face to see her reaction. She told me, See, try to cheer up the kids! Don’t try to defeat them. It is not about winning….it is all about making the kids happy and make them feel important….Oh! Yeah! It was only then that I got it.

A short-haired girl came to me and reclined, her head softly resting on my lap. I ran my finger through her silky boy-cut hair. I felt an ineffable parental fancy for this girl; it is a kind of affection a man feels for a small child keeping the Lolita-syndrome constant because the ‘femaleness’ of the small girl is not a big deal for anyone, but Sigmund Freud. Despite being one of the contenders to Frederich Nietzsche for being the fourth greatest hero, his psycho-analysis is too much. My favourite heroes are Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Leonardo da Vinci, Frederich Nietzsche and Michael Jackson of which only Nietzsche faces close contenders like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Einstein, Alfred Marshall, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Vincent van Gogh, Nikos Kazantzakis and Karl Marx. I’m carefully avoiding Indian names, even Sardar Patel because I don’t want to offend factional ideologues. Out of the numerous terrorist outfits, up and down the peninsula, almost all seems to be important to the motherland. No favouritism here. My favourite female stars are Mary of Magdalene, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriela Sabatini, Smita Sebastian and Kavya Madhavan. Anna Kournikova can replace Sabatini any moment. Samyukhta Varma does not come into the picture. Waheeda Rahman and Marilyn Monroe are given honorary mention. Aishwarya Rai is only a casual acquaintance and when I gave her my e-mail address, she laughed.

She asked me to accompany her to the library. It seemed to be a spacious room with shelves of dusty books all around. I didn’t feel like stealing any of those books because all were published in 18th or 19th century and the subject matter is, how we interact with each other to satisfy unlimited wants with scarce resources…the mathematical juggles. All of a sudden, the atmosphere and setting, even the architectural forms started to get transformed as if 3D animated in Maya software. The seismic waves set in and I found myself in another college, probably built by the Prince of Cochin, administered by some British academicians…but, starting all over again and that too, in this kind of a medieval setting, a primitive campus atmosphere…..Oh! No…all of a sudden, I realized the pain of leaving Thevara college…there is too much to sacrifice, the hitherto developed fame and reputation, if any; the image, false or otherwise. When being swept into the crowd of Thevara college, whether it is like stepping into a Heraclitean river or not, I still feel like a 16-year-old, even though the idea of ‘a 16-year-old boy or girl coming to college and getting excited’ is obsolete. It seems to me that this is the year of introspection and eventual compensation for whatever virtues I have missed in these six years, almost one-third of my life which turned out to be the years of self-exploration, theoretical confusions and elementary training in basic human activities; in this confessional mood, I tell you, “As for me, Sacred Heart college is Prof. C.S. Jayram.”

                                                                                           Fine                                                                            August, 2001.