Day 38

In hotels I tend to doze off in front of the telly while it’s on. I then wake up in the middle of the night (mostly) and grope in vain all over the bed to find the remote control, and finally get up to clumsily pull the TV plug out of its socket in the wall. Before the image on the screen flickers out my brain registers the last few seconds of the program that was on. The night before we set sail a Sitcom starring terribly beautiful people was showing on the screen – probably an American evening serial. Two female students, a blonde and an Indian, sat in an art course. The lecturer, an Indian with a Bollywood face, stood in front of them between two coconut palms. Everything looked bright and clean. With arms spread out, the lecturer explained something about a particular folk community or, perhaps, a religious order: «The Vadevades view the moment of death as the strongest moment of being in the present, as the absolute here and now.» So the gentleman declared, and at that very instant the two women began to quarrel before him. With an electronic sizzle the picture vanished, and I fell asleep shortly afterwards. When I woke up the following morning, I had to take my mind back to the final seconds of that program. Had I really seen this scene? Or had I in my nebulous condition misunderstood something? I decided to search for and replay the sitcom and test my remembered perception of those moments. The Internet is a great facilitator in such situations. I searched for the evening serial during which I had dozed off, only to come up with zilch – there was simply no program that matched the pictures in my head. 

For sure, all this was a misunderstanding – something that remains inexplicable. And so that experience took on something of the character of a night vision. I searched the Net for Vadevades – to no avail. Nothing of the kind existed on www. I tried all possible permutations and versions – nothing. What still vexes my mind in connection with this sitcom is the thought that one can consider life to be the “past” of death, the run-up, as it were, to the Grand Finale. The idea holds something radically new for me – though the idea that one reaches the here and now only at the moment of death could well belong to the school of thought of a very extant Indian sect, too.

The concept that death is not an end but an arrival plays a role in many religions – but it is, as a rule, entangled with the concept of a beyond. In my TV-vision, it is just the opposite: the stress is on the thesis that death is the ultimate meeting with the present and not on the belief that it is an arrival in reality. The idea that life is the past of death is, oddly enough, not oppressive – on the contrary, it frees us from the stress of having to constantly seek after the experience of the here and now, of «simply being» or of «true existence», as all contemporary gurus and guides demand of their followers. The liberation from such existential nervousness provokes a light, dreamlike sense of relaxation and arouses the wonderful feeling that such somewhat unreal spaces ought to be designed in a more free-flowing way. 

Nevertheless, had Oskar been present at the time, I would have done everything in my command to extract from him the truth about what happened that night.

Next day (39)