The Imaginary Bus: Khalo Who Foresaw His Own Death in a Dream — Volume One
The woman in red closed the book, but left her hand resting on its cover.
— You left something unfinished, she said.
— What was that?
— You said dialectical materialism had two parts. You touched on dialectics, but I want to understand that part better.
— You’re right. Apparently I’ve done what some governments do: delivered half my promise and hoped nobody would remember the other half.
The donkey brayed from the back seat.
— Yes, comrade. You remembered. But since you didn’t take the minutes, no objection has been recorded.
The woman smiled.
— So what is dialectics?
For a few moments I watched the street. The rain had eased, but water still ran down the windows. London’s lights broke apart in the droplets, each one becoming several lights.
— Dialectics means not seeing the world as a collection of fixed things, each separate from the others. Everything comes into being in relation to other things, changes, and eventually gives way to something else. Nothing remains exactly what it was: not nature, not society, not people, and not even this bus.
She looked around.
— The bus is still the same bus.
— It looks the same. But it’s used up petrol, its tyres have worn down, its passengers have changed, and its driver has aged a few years since sitting down at the wheel.
— A few years? We haven’t been here that long.
— You can’t trust a clock in a dream, especially when the Department of Death is in charge of the timetable.
— Does dialectics just mean everything changes, then?
— No. Change is the easy part. Dialectics asks where change comes from. Its answer is that everything contains relationships, struggles and contradictions that set it in motion.
— Does contradiction mean war?
— Not always. It can be a struggle between opposing forces: old and new, need and possibility, labour and capital, freedom and repression, what exists and what might exist. There are contradictions inside people too. You can want to leave and want to stay at the same time. You can want to forget the past, yet spend your whole life writing about it.
She studied me for a while.
— Was that last bit about you?
— I’m only the driver. The passengers are responsible for interpreting anything the driver says.
Coco had laid his head on his paws and was watching us.
— Take Coco. On the one hand, he wants to stay beside me. On the other, one whiff of food from the pavement and all his philosophical loyalty goes out of the window. The contradiction between affection and appetite is one of the oldest in history.
She laughed.
— So contradiction isn’t always bad?
— No. Without it, there would be no movement or change. A seed has to lose its old form to become a plant. A child cannot stay a child for ever if they are to grow up. And if a society is to change, it must come up against the forces keeping it in the past.
— Is every change an improvement?
— No. That’s another common mistake. History isn’t a straight line always climbing upwards. Sometimes a society moves forwards; sometimes it retreats. Sometimes it wins something and then loses it. There is no guarantee that tomorrow will be better than today. Making the world better depends on what people do, not on any promise history has made us.
— So when you say things evolve, you don’t mean progress is inevitable?
— Exactly. Evolution means new forms emerging from earlier conditions and contradictions, but the outcome isn’t guaranteed in advance. We can use science to cure disease or use that same science to build a bomb that kills thousands. The tool alone doesn’t decide what people will do with it. Social relationships and the interests of those in power have a part to play too.
The woman slipped a finger between the pages to keep her place.
— So we still haven’t reached history?
— We have, but history has a very large door. If we open it all at once, the living and the dead might climb aboard together, and there won’t even be a seat left for the donkey.
The donkey brayed behind us.
— Don’t worry, comrade. On this bus, you’re the only passenger who has kept the same class position from the beginning.
The woman smiled and looked back at her book.
The words on the page read:
‘Historical Materialism’.
The bus continued along the rain-soaked street, and I knew the real conversation was only just beginning.
To be continued…
Naser Kamali
London, around 3.17 in the morning, in my small, cosy room. Undated.
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