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trickery or magic, a diplomatic feat’ (Zimmer, 1969, 122), maya is delusion, yet it is the
foundation of all creation, and therefore is very closely associated with prakrti, or ‘nature’. In
a passage which seems key to C. J. Koch’s use of the concepts of maya, sakti and time, as well
as of the wayang kulit, Krishna says:
God dwells in the heart of all beings, Arjuna: thy God dwells in thy heart. And
his power of wonder moves all things—puppets in a play of shadows—
whirling them onwards on the stream of time. (BG, 18.61)
Koch’s application of this concept is closely pinned to his leitmotif of ‘doubleness’ in human
personality, and corresponds to the eternally creative flowing and mixing of opposites in the
erotic Brahmanic life-philosophy vision of the world.
There is a continuous circuit of metabolism, an unending transformation of
opposites into each other. And this reality of becoming is what is mirrored in
the Brahmanic monist conception of maya. The perpetual motion of things
turning into each other is the reality denoted by the icon of the Goddess. The
female conceives by the male and transforms his seed into their common
offspring, a new formation of their substance. Such is the miracle of the
enigma, Maya-Sakti. (Zimmer, 1969, 599-600)
In this dualistic, perpetually renewing concept of a universe created of Brahman, ‘the
world illusion’ reaffirms the fundamental Brahmanic thought which has always asserted, from
the ancient Vedas to modern Tantrism, that the ‘One is both at once’. The illusion is then
equal to the reality, and ‘is not to be rejected but embraced’ (Zimmer, 1969, 575). For Koch’s
protagonists, embracing the illusion as reality proves to be their only adequate strategy for
survival.
12.4.2. The View from ‘The Other Side of the River’
This Eastern concept of ‘the other side of the river’, nirvana, being unknowable and
indescribable, Koch resorts to the more concrete lines of Alice’s Wonderland or Rip Van
Winkle’s Sleepy Hollow to develop his illusory yet real ‘Otherworld’. The NVA and their
captives make a long forced march, enduring hardships where even nature seems determined to
annihilate them. Finally the cataclysm of a B-52 bombing raid, whose mere shock waves
deafen and nearly kill them, opens the next world up for them. They arrive at the NVA
compound, entered through a trapdoor to underground safety, but have left the world of space
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