A Dream of Horses & Other Stories Read online




  First published by Roundfire Books, 2014

  Roundfire Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,

  Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

  [email protected]

  www.johnhuntpublishing.com

  www.roundfire-books.com

  For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

  Text copyright: Aashish Kaul 2013

  Introduction copyright: Scott Esposito 2013

  ISBN: 978 1 78279 536 0

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of Aashish Kaul as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design: Stuart Davies

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

  CONTENTS

  1. Introduction by Scott Esposito

  2. Parable of the Archer

  3. The Passage (A Scenario)

  4. The Light Ascending

  5. A Dream of Horses

  6. Phantom Days

  7. Tahiti

  8. Two Travellers

  9. Acknowledgements

  Aashish Kaul was born in New Delhi and now lives in Sydney. He read law in India, and is currently completing a doctorate in arts at the University of Sydney. His work has previously appeared in publications in Australia and the United States.

  Scott Esposito is the co-author of The End of Oulipo? (Zero Books, 2013). His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, Bookforum, The Washington Post, The Believer, Tin House, The American Reader, Music & Literature, and numerous others. He edits The Quarterly Conversation and is a Senior Editor with TWO LINES.

  Introduction

  Buried deep within A Dream of Horses we find a library alongside a church, both perched out over an abyss. It is just the thing, one realizes suddenly, exactly the thing we should expect to see tucked among these seven dreams that Aashish Kaul has persuaded us to take for reality: literature has always impinged on spirituality’s turf, and in this book we are in the presence of an intelligence that can make from this overlap truth’s hard diamonds. The caretaker of this library knows his books so well that he can tell them by the sound of their pages as they turn. I picture him as a hunched, solid man who will spend a day in the medieval work of turning out a page of fair copy in some ancient script, as indifferent to the changing of the seasons as a mammoth granite. His library on the edge of a void is not, like Borges’s Library of Babel, infinite; quite the opposite, it is all too finite, not having acquired a new piece in a decade. Yet within this modest chunk of the eternal, Kaul is capable of uttering that which is unceasing about literature: “Countless unread stories awaited me to set them free of the very words that held them captive. If only I would read them and allow them refuge in my head where, free of a form or structure, they could float at leisure. I was tempted to liberate them, to read them, one after the other, till I had set the very last one free. How ephemeral, I thought, is the process of creation, of writing books, of lending random words to equally random thoughts merely to grant another the privilege of release.” This task, it seems, humanity will never tire of. How blessed to make the acquaintance of one of our kind who does it with such immense faculty.

  Can it possibly be a coincidence that the seven protagonists of these seven tales are all lone individuals, half-wandering, half-questing through the abyss? That balm of release that the man finds in the library is what they all seek, consciously or not. They are drawn toward it, powered by it, done and undone through it.

  I believe it is meaningful that the library hangs out over emptiness, because Kaul clearly belongs to that band of writers whom one of their number has termed “explorers of the abyss.” These are people who take it for granted that reality is obscure, befogged, and impenetrable, and they do not write literature toward the real so much as against our foolish, too-widespread assumption that we can easily know it. They began, perhaps, with the likes of Goethe, Whitman, Emerson, and Melville, they continue up through Proust, Woolf, Nabokov, and Sartre, and then come all the cherished B’s—Beckett, Borges, Bernhard, Bolaño—to say nothing of the other 25 letters.

  Who carries the torch today? Here’s one. Kaul has done a very necessary thing in A Dream of Horses, which is to mount a passionate and sensual defense of what literature can do for us explorers of the abyss in these anti-literate, imagistic times. He has not done it in the common way but rather in the best possible. Without drawing a circle between those who find their eyes brightened by the printed word and all the rest of humanity, without fetishizing books and the lifestyle that accompanies them, and, above all, without dwelling on that singularly boring individual known as the author, he has nonetheless penned a very sensitive and intricate investigation of the literary sensibility. “The Light Ascending” begins by describing a man who walks the same path in the mountains over and over again—not a description of a writer, although a description of writer’s block if ever there was one. So we are not surprised to find that he is a writer, one, in fact, who has received commendation from the great “JC,” yet who has not been able to find his way forward. He continues walking his path, until, one night, the path is filled with the music of a flute. Our blocked scribe travels deeper and deeper into the woods until all is lost, and at this moment “I realize I am in a dream, mine or another’s, I can’t tell.” The block has lifted. He finds a cottage bearing JC within and a curious chess game where the knights and bishops have become Beckett, Borges, Faulkner, and Joyce, surrounding the white queen (the muse), the squares around them “the chequered world of art, of joy and despair chasing each other.” He and JC continue this game of giving new names to the common symbols surrounding us until the fog lifts “and it feels like I am fast falling into a bottomless pit of darkness.” What else can this story be but an elaborate rendition of that sublime sensation conferred when deeply immersed within a dream or a book?

  One does not frequently see such a concentration of dreams in a single volume, of characters dropping off to sleep, then coming to with a bolt, murmuring words in the twilight between these states of being, wondering which state they are in. Perhaps we should not be so surprised to see a writer taking stock of that other third of our lives: as Kaul paraphrases Schopenhauer, “dreams and reality are but different chapters of the same book.” This preoccupation with the most common liminal experience of them all is, I think, symptomatic of Kaul’s fascination with another kind of liminality: the spaces between those names we give to things in this world and the reality they fail to possess. “You can taste the success on your lips,” he writes, “but it is only a word spiralling in your head.” What a joy it is to discover another of those few writers who really seem to grasp by pure instinct that, for all our righteous mystification of it, language is really just an insufficient means to gutter the flood of sensations assaulting us by the minute. Make no mistake: awareness of language’s limits, does not mean diminished ambitions for its use. This is also an author who is steadfastly determined to scrape out a few more feet of consciousness for language to call its turf.

  It is a testament to his skill with this clumsy medium of exchange for how often he makes us “taste the success.” Though
I have never met Kaul, his fiction compels me to believe that he is a person who enjoys the sensual side of life, because he so aptly drizzles throughout these pieces exactly the small pleasures with which the senses persevere between those feasts we arrange for them as a matter of luxury. For instance, the unexpected delight of this salaryman: “The firm was a boutique practice, whatever that means, though it almost always means that you come into money, but not without its dark side—the work filled dark nights. Only when you took a taxi late at night, how you enjoyed the wind making a mess of your hair.” Whenever I read that I see a man with the perfectly strict coif mandated by office etiquette closing his eyes in release as it is all undone on some empty highway in a lonely taxi. The hair’s loosening becomes his own, his lips part in a silent ahhhhh, and for a moment he is a boy again. In short, he lives. Images such as these are the product of a writer for whom words constitute a universe of their own; he has dedicated himself to discovering which ones best defy the black and white of print, which combinations of them will produce the most wonder.

  Indeed, it is wonder that guides these seven seekers. One of them says with resignation that “we reach the absurd through different ways,” confident, as are all, that we will discover this lackluster prize whether or not we aspire to it. It is not the absurd that these characters fear—for you cannot fear a thing that has grown so wearisome in its commonness—they rather fear that even where absurdity gives way to wonder, wonder will not resolve into truth. A lot to ask, you might say, but then that should give you some idea of the stakes these tales are playing for. To wit: momentarily inhabiting the mind of Beckett, Kaul writes that “the eye cannot truly see until the last tear has been expunged”; if that Irishman who plumbed the absurd so much deeper than we are capable, if he himself finds truth so hard to grasp, then what chance do we stand? Do not despair. Read on. We may not be granted the Truth in A Dream of Horses, but we do find some truths: with each story’s last word their truths are manifest, all at once we realize that the many points in the sinuous path we have just traced out are not stars but a constellation.

  Lastly, it must be said that even though this is not a book that only shares its charms with those who live and breathe for literature, there are particular delights for those who do. In a lovely duet twinning Borges and Beckett into an everlasting stream of recollection, Kaul pauses to linger over their mutual love of Dante:

  Speaking now for the first time since he rowed them out here, he tells of his school copy of Dante with his notes scribbled in the margins from fifty years ago to which he returns whenever he reaches a stasis in his work. Superstitiously, perhaps, he feels he will find there something new to begin. After all, he says in a voice barely perceptible, it was with Dante that it all began. The motion in stasis, and stasis in motion. The moving unmover.

  The Comedy, says his companion eagerly, is, of course, the greatest work in all the literatures of the world. In its cosmology, I don’t believe for a minute, and yet it is the book I love the most. As for the moving unmover, one may look also at Zeno or the sophist, Gorgias of Lentini, who could well have been behind Kafka.

  Look at the movement of these words. From Beckett’s discovery of Dante as a schoolboy, to the personal superstition this love grew into, to his sense of the revelation it unleashed, which gives over to Borges’s peculiar love for Dante, to his superstition of it, to his own revelation past it. Each time I read these two short paragraphs I laugh in delight at how the laces pull so tightly together and how Kaul has managed to fashion something new from the triangulation of three immortals.

  There are many, many other books in A Dream of Horses. In fact, we see here a writer brave enough to openly wrestle with his influences, not only in the splendid epigraphs borne at the front of each tale like a torch to light the way, but also in the content of the stories themselves, rife with allusion, name-naming, sidelong glances, and whispered words of thanks. Their enumeration is in keeping with the spirit of openness, of camaraderie, that is so much in evidence throughout this collection. A mention of a few here will perhaps give a better sense of the author than anything else I could say: they include the aforementioned greats, plus John Hawkes, Stendhal, Proust, Carlyle, De Quincey, Novalis, Valéry, Artaud, Schopenhauer…There are more, many more, I leave it to you to find them. Your search will be a most joyous one. Turn the page, take a breath, plunge into the delights that await.

  SCOTT ESPOSITO

  A DREAM OF HORSES

  & OTHER STORIES

  Parable of the Archer

  Gravity is the root of lightness;

  stillness, the ruler of movement

  Lao-Tzu

  The story was told to me by a friend who was leaving for Lhasa the next day. I hadn’t heard from him in nearly a year, and here we were, taking shelter in a coffeehouse from the sudden rain that was falling in gusts over the empty streets, making the trees shine like chenille and choking the drains and gutters with muddy water. A spell of silence had come over us, a silence in which thought either collects itself or swiftly melts away. He took a sip from his cup, glanced at the mirror on the far side in which was reflected the blow-up of a girl in an alley between yellow walls, and said, haven’t I told you about the parable? It’s an old Tao fable. At any rate, I’ll tell you again. I can never tire of it. And he spoke thus:

  In China of ancient times, there lived an archer who was the ablest among the emperor’s great warriors, having won many a battle for the sovereign, annexing one province upon another, and extending the empire to hitherto unknown lands. During a prolonged spell of peace, and for want of a better distraction, he made a formal declaration that any subject of the empire who could prove himself the more skillful in a direct contest could take his place in the royal court and enjoy all the emperor’s favours that were earlier his. The contest, the archer announced, would remain open for ten days. Now the archer’s fame had travelled far and wide and, as was expected, no match took place. The archer waited in the arena each day only to return at sundown to his palatial quarters and his many wives, filled with a mixed sense of pride and boredom. However, the dawn of the last day brought a visitor who wanted to briefly confer with him. At last a challenger, thought the archer, dressing hurriedly. But what was this, it couldn’t be: this submissive, pale-faced, poor villager – empty-handed too!

  The villager bowed with unusual grace. When he looked up, a smile flickered on his lip. This troubled the archer. He asked his guest after the purpose of his visit: surely, he wasn’t here to take the challenge? Oh, no! Certainly not, sire, answered the villager. There is, however, one who can, he continued, one who is beyond contest, and from what I know I will advise you to not confront him as he will not confront you, for you are no match for him, you will be defeated before you lift your bow. The visitor’s words filled the archer with rage, though a curious suspicion was beginning to gnaw at him. Tell me at once who he is, and where will I find him, the archer demanded.

  Astride his favourite horse that very morning, the archer headed towards the forest which lay at a two-day trot from the capital. Silence gradually came to fill his hours, and the unending clickety-clack of the horse’s hooves made him soporific. Nights were cold and dark and full of falling stars. He ate frugally and slept huddled close to the small fire he had built with his own hands. For the first time in life, he came to feel the magic of simple things. Yet his resolve remained unshaken.

  On the third day his eyes saw the ebony mass of the forest covering the horizon and beyond it rising, distant and elemental, the mist-draped mountains. He gave a tug to the horse’s reins and dug his heels deeper into its belly, forcing the beast into a gallop. His pride was starting to run in his blood with a renewed vigour and, momentarily, his grip tightened on his bow. Once inside, he forded first a broad and in time a narrow river to find a trail leading to a hut at some distance. The villager had been exact with directions. The archer secured his horse to a tree and continued on foot. Near the hut a man was busy chopp
ing wood. The archer quickly hid behind a tree to observe. Could he be the one? It was inconceivable! Yet there was a certain grace in the axe’s movement that betrayed a skilled hand. The archer decided to take a small test. Still concealed from the woodcutter’s view, he released an arrow with a gentle pull on the bowstring. But just as the arrow was about to graze the woodcutter’s shoulder, it somehow turned back on its course and in the next instant pierced the tree-trunk behind which the archer stood hiding. The woodcutter’s movements had been so swift as to be invisible, indeed he was no match to this man’s skill. Without even being aware of his adversary, he had defeated him. Free of any desire for a contest, the archer emerged into the clearing and begged the woodcutter to take him as a disciple. The other informed him that whatever he knew about archery he had long since forgotten. The archer was persistent, and at last the woodcutter acquiesced.

  For many months the archer remained the woodcutter’s pupil, and for many months he did not touch his bow. There were other things he learnt instead: to chop wood free of all effort, aided by the wind, and to catch fish with bare hands, without looking. And little by little awareness of life’s movement grew in him. Then one day the woodcutter bade him near and told him he was free to leave, there was nothing more he could offer as a teacher. The archer was astonished to hear this. He had learnt nothing of the only skill that mattered to him. The woodcutter read his thoughts and said, you learn most when you do not learn at all. An arrow is but an arrow, now if you so wish, time itself will turn back on its course. The archer understood, and in that same instant he was aware of the movement of every leaf of every tree, of every bird in the sky, of the fish in water, of earth itself. He knelt before the woodcutter and answered, O Master, your wisdom flows to me, and through your blessing I have become the greatest archer of all.