And for one who never dreams…
Tumbling. Suffocation, then air. Light, then the deepest darkness. The salt water felt hard, for water, as she was thrown and twisted in the brackish abyss.
And for one who never dreams, this might seem all like a dream or at least a feeling that nothing exists outside of the mind besides that bird about to sing. And then it sings. And in these spaces, these well-thought-out nightmares, let the healing begin. Words like dust from a hundred shuffling feet, or just two, hanging in the air like medicine on your tongue, forming a paste in your mouth, if you let it under canvas flaps. The warming rays filtered through like light through skin. Words so moving it’s impossible to believe they’re just lies slowly covering the ground, unfolding like bed sheets. Each time told new growth. The base thickens, stretching twisting knotted timber clawing deep hollows so dense heavy caustic, corrupting everything below. Manufactured boundaries between reality and the existence you believe to be true, the one memory crafts, repeated backwards and filled in, stored in palaces guarded by hubris. As Borges’ King would soon realize, the map his cartographers created, a map so detailed that it ended up fully covering his territory, would, as his Empire became frayed and, finally, ruined, leave just a few shreds still recognizable in the most distant outreaches of the territory. Underneath what was once rich and untouched, began to disappear until the lie became real. Pride rotting like carcasses, returning to the earth. Leaving only the map. Didn’t the King realize that the map would include a King and when the Empire eroded to nothing, so would he?
About palaces. Well, abandoned ones. Memory is a palace; a pattern of ideas, art mentioned in fragments. So much so that the reality of this conversation is no longer true. I am not here, nor was I a second ago nor will I be just now. A sign that represents what you see of me, created by your mind, responds. What you expect me to be. A child is flawless, waiting to be written on and defined. “You’re gonna be a heartbreaker when you grow up” So that’s what I did. I broke hearts. Why couldn't they say, “you’re going to be a _____” instead?
So we rise, we all do simultaneously and begin to slowly move from our seats, through the aisles, and to the front of the tent where on the dais he stands, arms outstretched waiting to embrace who we desire to be; allopathic, belonging to another like staining with silver, until you’ve become someone’s ideal, your cracks filled in; reazione nera, not following with blind eyes but mind. “Look, there He is, can you not see Him? Making His way cautiously, not to avoid stumbling, but to avoid trampling us in the dust.“
* *
Alone in her room, day by day, everything began to fade away until one day all that was left was the book and her orgonite stone. Still, she continued to read. The stone held in her trembling hand, its layers of metal wood cotton suspended in resin, emitting a low frequency hum. Esoteric energy, an unmeasurable force yet somehow restorative. Life. When the stones disappeared, she continued to read. The words, too, would vanish before the next one was absorbed and eventually even the book disappeared leaving an empty room. Soon after, the walls too began to crumble yet underneath revealed an identical version of the room. There she continued to live day to day repeating the same motions as if repetition were even possible. She awakens, or just becomes aware of the moment, picks up her stone and continues to read. Groundwave energy from electrical grids and towers, like satellites beaming down, its antennas shooting powerful and heating radio waves straight up into the atmosphere in incoherent auroral frequencies. “People are sicker now. Not just physically. There’s a malaise, an uneasiness. I don’t know. I feel it, this Weltschmerz. And it grows like a throbbing ball of vines.” Holding with diamond hands and paper heart and you feel the weight there, this helpless, fragile thing. Fear. Let it fall, drop. It’s getting closer and everyone is terrified, but no one says a word.
Three o’clock. You expired, Jesus, but the source of life gushed forth for souls, and the ocean of mercy opened up for the whole world. “Come in,” she whispers. The door opens with a whoosh against the carpet, letting the afternoon light in, revealing just how dusty the room is. She puts the book down. Sleep. Deep slumber, turning, no, thrashing among silken ribbons of sinew. Limbs in friction enveloped in pink folds. Their jaw aches, a clenched mouthful of plastic and metal. That cold aching, such a subtle difference between pleasure and pain, the consequence is the same. The collapsed tower becomes a pathway, crags and cornices, overhanging masses of hardened sorrow clinging to the edge of the precipice; below, a torrent of tumbling water with intoxicating force. “That sense of being watched, you know? It’s always here. Burning in my bones.”
Back to dreams. Scapes and otherwise. She wakes to find the creature sitting on her chest, its foaming mouth smelling of sour milk and bile. ”What will become of me?” “Don’t ask me,” the creature replies. “It is your dream.” Smells, tied so deeply to memory, bring me back to other worlds; worlds embedded under thick, dark blankets taut at the ends by hospital corners. There was a time when, maybe the first time, that I carved out quivering flesh, my own, the words spelling MORE, where I am now. And the saucer on the floor has not been lapped at in weeks and the silence is mine.
