Tag: dreams

The deer

There was a show in the summer of 2019 at the National Gallery of Art, called “The Life of Animals in Japanese Art.” There were several deer, and one of them—not this particular deer—snuck into my work. Whether it stays or not, who knows? For now, here:

As he thought about truth—perhaps the most slippery but indelible of ideas—he became aware of a murmur from among the host of the gathered djinn. He, the dark djinn, and Jabari turned to locate the cause and center of this gentle disruption.

A blue deer walked through the assembled djinn. From its sides and back rose thick shards of white crystal. It could have been quartz or moonstone. Perhaps salt. Its paws pressed deep prints into the earth, revealing the weight of the animal was. As it neared, the gold djinn could tell that it was made of lapis lazuli. And yet it walked. It was tall, almost as large as a horse, and around its legs two cloud colored foxes romped and played. The stone and crystal deer was walking through the crowd and toward them. It was regal.

When it reached them, it lowered its head, and gently—but coldly, since it was stone—nuzzled the dark djinn and gold djinn in turn. It was strangely soft, belying its nature—it was cold stone—but remaining true to its essential nature—it was a deer. The foxes moved around Jabari, who stumbled over them, thrown off by their play. They were like smoke but firm, and this unnerved the ‘Ifrit. They were unnatural.

All the djinn had turned their attention to the scene: the blue and white deer, tame and regal, and the two cloud foxes, playful and disruptive. The three djinn at the center were not aware of the attention given to them, because the animals before them had entranced them. Blue, and white, and silver smoke.

A crack began to form along the deer’s supple neck, and another at its hind quarter. Then a dozen others, opening its body and dividing the crystals ridged along its back. Bits of crystal fell to the ground. Blue stone chipped away from its body. Then it collapsed into rubble, beautiful rubble, but no longer alive. The foxes dissipated.

The djinn were struck silent. The deer had been beautiful and impossible. It had come through them and to them. It was a message and a messenger. Quietly, each member of the throng walked to the pile of stone and crystal and each took a piece of what had been sublime. There was enough for each of the assembled djinn—no more and no less. The remaining wisps of fox-smoke drifted over their heads.

“What was it?” Jabari broke the silence when the taking had finished.

The white haired goddess stood with them. “It was him.”

The Books

Almost fifteen years ago, I put my books in the attic. They were out, in shelves, but tucked beneath a sloping ceiling and packed behind all manner of family detritus. When my ex-wife and I separated, I moved them into my main living space, where they sang back to me after their—or my—sojourn.  My books matter to me, and I felt their absence. Getting them back onto tall shelves, walking past them every day, reminded me of what I had done, what I had learned, and what I wanted to do with my life and mind.

I have books about writing, books about religion, books about education, history books, philosophy (what we called theory in graduate school), fiction, poetry, books full of art and art history, and even books about sports—mainly baseball. I have a hard cover edition of Dickens published by Chapman and Hall with pages that requires a pocket knife to cut open.  I own a set of Andrew Lang’s color-coded Fairy Tale books.

The books reflect my preoccupations over the past thirty years.  Much of what is on my shelves I first read while I was in graduate school. Some I acquired afterward to keep me in touch with what I spent six years studying. Some comes from undergraduate college—books about gothic art and architecture, an old edition of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There are some newer books that reflect my current interests: a collection of Sumerian mythology, a book about Djinn.

As much as I love my books, as much as they tell a story of my past, as much as they feel like an external manifestation of my mind, I think it may be time to lose them.

How long can one hold onto the past—a past that weighs an actual ton—without moving into the future? Yes, there are some things that I would keep, and this is true of more than my books, but they possess so much gravity. What is the past to me? Of course it is, was, everything. However, the future beckons, and requires a kind of lightness to which things do not lend themselves. Even memorable things.

There are other presences in my life—deep and profound connections. This time last year, I started unraveling the two jobs I had in Norfolk, Virginia. I moved away from those jobs and in the process also moved away from my daughters, who continue to live with their mother in Norfolk. Of course, I separated from and divorced their mother. It may seem inconsequential, but over 30 years ago, I picked a cat off the street, and have had cats ever since. I have never been more than three weeks away from them. This year I considered giving up a long standing fantasy baseball game that I have played for nearly 30 years with friends.

I wonder about what I have given up, but also what I have stayed with over the years. I have been a teacher for over 20 years—including my work as a TA in graduate school, over 25 years. What would it be like to not teach? I wrote for years, and then, if I didn’t stop, I slowed considerably—at what hazard, I cannot guess. I am writing again now, and have been, but can’t help wonder why my work slowed to a trickle.

I wonder would it would be like to be free of obligation and free of the gravity of myself—that ton of books, the closet full of clothes, my job, my family, my cats, even my friends. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had just chased words—the stories that I had declared as my purpose when I went away to and then stayed in graduate school. When I went away to graduate school, I traveled in a single car, with a mattress tied to the roof, and a single cat riding in the passenger seats. What would it be like to travel to what’s next with even less?

I do not regret the life I led, nor the life I lead; regret possesses a gravity greater than all the books own own, and I have no time for that. Not now. Nonetheless, I am aware of another life that exists, not over the horizon, not over the rainbow, but buried deep within me. I don’t know how I have kept it buried for so long, or at what cost—or even at what gain. Still. It is there.

I wonder, and wonder hard, and the wondering stirs something in me, something alive and insistent. What will I carry into the future? What must I carry? And what must I leave?

The Center of the Universe—words from a Graduation

I tell my students lots of things. There is the teaching, of course, but there are certain phrases that have become, well, worn. I repeated a story with my ninth graders just a couple of weeks ago. I think that’s a sign.

One of my sayings, usually delivered in class, when a student has interrupted everyone else to declare something like, “There are clouds in the sky,” or “I have a cat”—something that has floated in over the transom of their mind—is this:

“If you have lost the center of the universe, I think I have found it.”

Except, I haven’t told you, there is a secret, and the secret: you are the center of the universe.

Science backs that up—in an infinite universe, everywhere is the center. It’s one of those paradoxes that makes teaching science so much fun. Or like this one from math: which is longer, a ray, which starts at a fixed point and goes on for infinity, or a line, which is infinite in both directions? Something cannot be half as infinite.

That’s why I stick to teaching English.

Take Shakespeare’s universe. In his plays, there is almost—and I’m going to say almost, because unlike math, in English there are always exceptions—almost never anyone more important than the King. The King is always the center of the secular universe.

And you might think, “I’m the king? Cool! I’m the center! I have arrived!” I also tell my students how my daughter thinks that being principal is the best because I get to give out detentions. This is the worst part of the job, and not just because I get to sit on detentions. An authority that gleefully metes out punishments, is truly limited vision of authority. Henry wants—no, needs—his band of brothers to thrive, and they do, because he elevates them. He may be the center, but he is also the first peer, the first equal.

And here’s the trick, In Shakespeare there are only a few truly happy and successful kings. I think he leaves high school principals out altogether. He doesn’t leave students out. And that’s because students can learn. Kings, for the most part, do not. They are, as Caesar claims, as constant than the Northern Star. Once the have become the king they are who they will be. They will not change. And who would wish for an inconstant king? Shakespeare’s tragedies are littered with them: Macbeth, Richard III, even Henry’s father, who mutters, “Uneasy rests the head that wears a crown.” Be a king, indeed.

But, what does it mean to be a center? My juniors and seniors have seen the list of king-becoming graces that Malcolm provides to Macduff: justice, verity, temperance, stableness, bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, devotion, patience, courage, fortitude. It’s quite a list, and like any list we would quibble over each term a bit too much. My students can quibble.

Perhaps it is better to remember that in an infinite universe, if you are the center, so is the person sitting next to you, and so is some person sitting on the other side of the world. We are all centers, and must learn to live and live well with each other. And what better way to live than to live as brothers. Because if we are as brothers, then we shall share a cause—perhaps not so clear as that as faced by Henry at Agincourt, but a cause nonetheless.

And because today is father’s day, again, I am reminded by this:

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be rememberèd—

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

And so, today, find your cause, but be sure to make it large enough so that you can be brothers with each other, and with all the other centers that are spinning around you.

And now, I have some diplomas to bestow…

Dreamscapes

I had that dream again.

I grew up at a time when nuclear annihilation was more imminently possible.  It was an ongoing theme of movies, television shows, and books. My favorite movie Dr. Strangelove is, at its heart, a move about nuclear annihilation caused by a series of preposterous missteps. The main gist of Strangelove, or Fail Safe, or On the Beach, or The Planet of the Apes was not just how easily self-inflicted catastrophe could occur—there was no complex multi-layered process that led to disaster, because what’s more important in an emergency: expedience or caution? Expedience and doom always win the battle—but how ill-conceived the consequences of nuclear war were, how little those in power understood the horror they could unleash.

That was the background noise of my childhood. My parents insulated me from the tumult of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and the spirit of protest in the late 1960’s (news did not become a facet of our conversations until we reached late adolescence); and yet the horror of nuclear war was omnipresent. It permeated my dreams.

I dreamed of fireballs and explosions, desolate plains and skeletal cities. I was incinerated, eviscerated, desiccated, mutilated. I knew early on that “If you die in your sleep, then you die in real life,” was a lie. I died. Lots. What began as nightmares turned into storyscapes—choose your own post-apocalyptic adventures of the subconscious.  My journeys through strange charred landscapes became a nightly feature of my dreams. As I grew older and the threat of Nuclear War lessened, my dreamscape spread to other, less spare territory. My dreams flowered and matured until they included quantum physics, white rabbits, and characters that would inhabit my writing.

Two nights ago I dreamed that my daughter and I were outside when an ICBM was launched. It was launched from a silo in our city. It rose into the sky. I don’t know why I felt this way, but in the dream I knew that it was not intended for any target. I knew it was meant to explode in the air above us. I turned away, but my daughter could not help but watch. The blast seared the sky, it turned the blue cloudless sky into the white hot center of the sun. I knew she would be blinded. I knew the radiation would turn her skin—she wore an open backed dress—to a mass of burns. I knew we were all going to die, if not immediately, then soon from the awful lingering effects of the blast.

We walked into a destroyed structure. We walked through dust that washed over our shoes. Another man was in the structure. All our shoes began to disintegrate; the radioactive detritus eroded the leather of our shoes almost instantly.

I could not conceive why the bomb was detonated over the city. Why would our generals, our president, decide to destroy a part of our country?

I had that dream again.

The Man in the Basement

Francis crept back into the basement. It was not his basement. It belonged to a woman he had courted in his youth, or in his middle age; he could not remember which. He had been creeping into the basement every night for as long as he could remember, but there must have been a time when he had not. He could not remember such a time.

The basement was simple and stark. He had entered through the steps that opened onto the driveway at the side of the house. In the far corner of the space a wooden staircase proceeded up into the house with a series of three short flights of steps, joined by right angles; his bed was under those stairs. It was a small bed, and the bedding was the brightly colored sheets of a child’s bed, but faded with time and use. He looked at the bed and tonight it seemed smaller than it ever had before. Had the bed been larger once, he thought? Had it occupied some other place in the basement? Perhaps, but he could not imagine that place.

As he got into the bed, he began to wonder what he was doing there. He did, after all, have his own home. His daughters had retired to their own beds. His pets: one large dog–a cross between an Irish Wolfhound and a Great Dane–and three small cats; would wait for him to return in the morning. His bed was made, and he dutifully washed the sheets every week, even though he had not slept there for longer than he could remember. “Shouldn’t I be at home?” He wondered. 

He tried to roll over in the small bed. Nothing he did seemed to make sense anymore. He thought of his daughters, at home alone. He knew there was a family living in the rooms above where he slept each night, but they were not his family, no matter what fantasy he had once had about them. Perhaps it had been more than a fantasy. Perhaps he had once imagined a place in that home with a bevy of beautiful daughters and handsome suitors, and a place permanently set for him at the head of the table. He tried to recall when he had started slinking into the basement late at night, and his memory was a wash of grays and browns. This, he thought, is not where I should be.

He got out of the bed and gathered his things. He tried to do it without switching on the light. He could not find his glasses. Maybe they had fallen between the mattress and the wall. He tried to make no noise, cognizant of the people who lived in the house above him. I must not disturb them, he thought.

Then a light flicked on, and one young woman bounded down the stairs. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” Francis offered.

“It’s okay,” answered the young woman, “we knew you were here.” 

“I hope I didn’t bother you,” said Francis.

“No. You’re fine,” answered the young woman, “just don’t try to get to mom.”

“No, of course not.” Francis held up his bag, “it’s time for me to go home.”

“Wait,” declared the young woman, who then ushered her sisters down the stairs. “He’s going,” she told them.

The basement now seemed full of beautiful young women. They were dressed in sweat pants and t-shirts, dressed for bed in the house above the basement. “Don’t leave yet,” one of them said, “we have something for you.”

They brought down large baking sheets covered with food. There were cookies and candied fruits. One of the younger women knew that Francis loved their candied strawberries, and offered them to him. “Take as much as you like,” she said.

One of the young women wept. He was going; he had been there so long.

As the women gathered, more lights were turned on in the basement, which no longer seemed as cramped and contained to Francis. Rooms upon rooms seemed to open up. There were men in brown tweed jackets and loafers, and the family he had imagined all these years teemed throughout the rooms. There were daughters and granddaughters, and young men for each as they were wished. Only one thing was missing, and he knew not to look for her.

Two floors above the gathering, the mother got out of her shower, toweled off, and clapped powder over her arms and legs. “Surely this must be over,” she thought. She listened to the quiet commotion, and grew mildly annoyed. But she was tired. She had, after all, raised her family and prepared them for what came next. She fell asleep. She dreamed of a house–some nights it was in the desert, some nights it was in the mountains, other nights it was on an island surrounded by the green northern sea. It was a house without a basement, into which men might come to fix the water heater or garbage disposal, and then leave. She dreamed on through the night and into morning, and when the sun rise and she woke, she stripped the little bed in the basement for the last time.