Jorge: The dream of freedom

*

So in my dream I was in a bar and hey I hate bars, haven't been in one for, no but there I was, I can't pretend otherwise. I was sober but the room swirled.

The caretaker's son was across the room, a hopeless person, but what do I mean? He was full of hope, he was smiling. It was other people who looked at him and felt no hope. That is, they felt sorry for him but not he for himself, he was free of that. So why feel sorry for someone who is not intrinsically a sorry sight? Well, because that was what people did.

In my dream he held a bottle of beer, wet and cold, better to touch than to drink. He peeled the label off the bottle, over and over. It was as though it continuously came off and never came off. Then he looked up and me and smiled. You're that kid I rescued from Satan. That kid. But I was forty years old.

X and Y were waltzing across Texas on the dance floor. The help was gathering the drinks the second a patron would put them down. Predators stood around the dance floor but no -- just would be predators, potential bad guys that were condemned to being good. The caretaker's son walked through them as though they weren't even there.

He walked out the front door and almost toppled into the ocean. He, or was it I, was it I who was he, I don't know, but one of us stood on the edge of the deck of the cruise ship, though a moment ago I had been in the middle of dry land, or was it he who had somehow gotten unmoored? The other ship came dead on and was ready to butt us but the street, bar and all, swerved at the last minute and averted a crash. And men in droopy t shirts walked unafraid up and down the dark.

I come in peace, said the alien or the person dressed as an alien. Mrs Scott had prepared her famous lasagne and it was not possible to pass the table without taking some, taking it in her sight so she would be pleased. And the array of foods was marvelous. We were all eating like crazy. Jorge looked across the room (was it the alley in front of the bar? was it the deck of a ship?) and saw the blonde who looked so much like his sister. But the lady looked away, now it's true she looked away but in the conversation between sexual beings looking away can be a form of looking at. The way she looked was to look away but everyone knew that -- well, what? Well, that scorn could really be something else.

The odd thing is that our bodies have lives that are different from our lives. They have already fused and separated before the idea even occurs to us. Do you think? Do you think that happens?

I think you're totally nuts, Jorge. Does it matter to me? No it doesn't.

Her dress was damp and no one seemed to notice her as she moved through the crowd. Dear Una always had this shimmer like those little curves in a soprano's voice.

When she moved down the alleyway he followed her into an old fashioned drugstore like a stage set, a place for starlets to sit and be discovered, and he did indeed sit down -- he ordered a hamburger, watching her movement in the mirror but there was none, she wasn't there, only this sort of uneven man who came into the frame of the rectangle unequally, one shoulder first, oh that's me, that freak is me. And the woman didn't register on the surface but when he looked behind him she was outside and the boats were all tilting in the water. I don't believe in that water! I believe I have made it up! Nixon's face was on the cover of the Newsweek by the door and the water sashayed, it moved like a human. Guys were jogging around the periphery not worrying about a dip suddenly throwing them into the water, hungry water! You go down into that you don't come back up at least not as yourself.

And when he looked into it his image changed and changed. Was this the way to shed your personality and become someone else?

The ships kept rushing in the face of the land but the land kept shifting its direction -- in order not to be hit, why was it afraid of being hit? What happens when we are hit?

Disaster disaster. On the other side of the water was the two towers, although we were many miles away from New York. Frightened he looked down, okay there was his image again. A Mexican, an immigrant without papers looked up and quickly looked away. But looking away is a way of looking in and looking back. The labels from the beerbottles floated semaphorically, and Mrs Scott grabbed my arm, pulled me back. Never get so close to something that wants you like that. But Mrs Scott, you have been dead for 20 years.

And the Mexican no Guatemaltecan, oh he came from Huehuetenango, he looked up at me maybe thinking I was immigration or else thinking I was himself, we are human and we just can't not look.

The water was dead, a great well of death and what could interest us more? No no no. I like gardens, not mountains and seas. But what I like is always different from what likes me. It is the second that really gets things going and flowing and sticking to the hands. There was a little box in the water that had been considerately labelled Logic so that you could know, if not what it was, then at least what someone wanted you to think it was but wait -- logic? logic??? Didn't that rule the world? Wasn't everything a mode of logic? If so, then how could it be -- how could it be... simply there?

The professor in his long black frock coat screamed and wrung his hands and jumped into the water to save the box as it receded into. Into the "into" really -- then the little man sank into the water and was gone.

And the box was gone. Were we better off without it? Or would we go back into our staterooms and find it sitting calmly on our pillow?

Jorge looked down. And down and down. That would be the next part.

The sea was like a mirror, was then wasn't then was -- a mirror of realism then, churning like the world around it. And he both couldn't look away and couldn't look out. Looking away was another form of looking in, yes? That was the logicians may they rest in peace, may they be okay but irrevocably elsewhere, that was what they hadn't understood about perception, how dirty it was, how contagious -- you looked and then you fused at what you looked at, no. You fused, and called the fusion merely looking. So the mirror moved when he turned his head.

He saw a face embossed in the water. What a sad face it was. It tried to radiate power and command but it was just a little boy's face, looking for inclusion. Always inclusion, do you accept me, monster as I am? The eyes -- they darted or they tried to dart but the web held them in awareness. Oh liquid it was inside there. It was like a sea churning. That meant that someone else could reach from behind and make that face what it was but what was it?

There was a giant triangular grid, Father -- Father Sam -- and the eyeballs were placed on it but unstably. They rolled around in it -- in perception, I guess? I chased them as though they were little balls rolling around on the deck -- of the ship? Other people too. We stepped through each other, hoping to find our own.

The caretaker's son held them in his palms, reached up, said here you go and put them back in my face. Why was he always so kind to me? What did he himself gain, Father? Father Sam.

Such was the power of the dream's undertow that invoking you brought you there. An overweight, Latino, 30ish man on the deck of the street. And if he was there, did that mean God was not too far away? Or were you more in the way of blocking him? I looked over to the table but Mrs Scott was busy putting away her utensils and wouldn't look at me, wouldn't speak. It wasn't her turn apparently. So the person whose face had gotten stuck in the mirror -- the "I" like a variable in a very complex equation -- that person shifted weight back to itself but not wanting to. The mirror turned when he turned his head so that he couldn't get out of looking. The surface was damaged, as if molten -- the objects in it bent in a liquid horrible way that made one sick.

You you you. You were stuck with you.

Then they turned their heads away from the window with the stormy rain, Father Sam and the young man, who seemed to be synchronizing his head with the other. Why does it feel so good to be standing next to him, to be synchronizing? The flesh warm and sunny and a little fat. Father Sam, not a priestly type at all. Do you bring me closer to God? Or do you block the way? The way. They walked along the strand -- in the alley some wild things were happening and Jorge tried rather timidly to block the other person's view. Don't bother, Sam said. I know all about that. Do you think I stepped out of a box? I've been a really bad man.

I was thrown out of my profession for drinking, did you know that? I have climbed back but not all the way, I mean, they don't let you get back all the way nor should they, not at all -- how can low creatures like us pretend we're Christ? What could be wronger than that? Wrong wrong wrong -- sounds like a bell. A bell? And the strand moved and made the percipient seasick. The image, the sense of self, it was not a sense but a perception from way outside. Father, father. That's something I never had, he said. The road like a snake, everything dark. Do you want to come home with me? Do you live on the street? Are these your congregation?

We are all brothers -- isn't that sad somehow? No it's okay.

When you turn your back to the window you're still on it, in it -- it's like a screen projecting you. Sometimes the film is so vivid it starts to burn.

There was an asylum on the corner. Once it was a warehouse of kissing and trade. Now there were beds for the sick and nurses to tend them. Father Sam slept here in a corner, you wouldn't really call it a home, would you? I mean it shifts every night. The deaths are appalling, good man. You go inside and you feel your skin crawl as though it were loose, shifting, ready to come off. Stomach and bowels just won't hold still. But as one dies, the sound of the sea, the murmur of the imaginary boats, and a priest to act perhaps as a mirror you can look into. No no, don't come in. But Father Sam, when will I see you again?

Dear, we are talking about transition. As it says in scripture, do not put a lot of your talk into the idea of tomorrow. Think. Where are you now, right now? But I don't know where I am. When will I see you again?

When you are missing someone have you ever tried to see their face in another person? Have you considered how one person might be as it were hiding inside another? Oh that's not good enough. Words words words. Need something tangible. Now later now. Don't know why always so needy but there it is.

In the morning J woke in such joy and desolation. The joy was desolate but the desolation a form of joy. Allthis was a dream!

Yes!

I am well and awake.

There was a giant moth resting on his tipped up toes. Moth or mouth? Through the belly of the... moth -- the belly a sort of fretted caterpillar mouth pulsing in the wind (with its little parts disintegrating), J watched the dream suck away into the waste place where all the untrue things go and have always gone. Freedom! Yes! Its dirty wings torn and hanging, the mouth flapped and looked away. The holes in the moth could be seen through. They were the soft guts of a man. It was there, not there then there. The not there was there.

Okay. You blinked and the dream was just motes of dust. They crinkled and collapsed without speaking. Only reality was left, this hard cold thing everyone "agrees about", with puckered holes in its sides. Breathing. The hesitations that everything has, even reality.

Then the longing J felt for Father Sam became -- infinite. It had no edge. Simply was. Be with me -- nothing more but just be.

You were the clew that led to God. But I, I was still my clumsy self tangled hopelessly in that same clew. I was idolatrous. But I hungered for God even then.

Did a moth have a mouth really? Did they really eat a man like that?

No. Wake up. You dismissed the thought and it broken into a billion motes (again?) and dissipated into reality, which was basically whatever was left. A bit depressing. Yet the dream remained, untrue but obscurely present, fuelling the wakefulness of day. So I got up and made my bed and myself most presentable. Walked to the stop. Sam of course was nowhere but the glory of God everywhere. The one thing that was sustained from "there" to "here" was that one thing. Humble faceless men were gathering up the red gold air to sell to museums. A giant billboard of a burnt dress hung in the sky. There was a lovely invigorating sea breeze but the sea was a hundred miles away. And the joy was desolate and the desolation a form of joy.

The glory of God was so everywhere that J had to look away. But the truth was that looking away was just a form of simply looking. It was the deepest version, the sunkest look, it was that form of looking that looked back. That looked at you. And what indeed did it see?

*

Poem: Uncle at Wednesday testimony

*

Uncle, when you said
your "words can't express"
the reach of God-
's goodness,

it was not only true
when you said what they couldn't
do but all the more true
the more they couldn't.

They were
more powerful somehow
the weaker
they were and so were you

as you spoke to me
and I listened distractedly.

*

Sir Twitch

(thanks to Karl Swedberg and englishrules.com)
*

WERE reincarnation
true, I would
have been a SPIDER
in a former life,
so deep and so negative is my affinity with them.

I've said before how the sight of one evokes in me a taste of flies -- and how nothing but scale seems to protect my life from their oversized hunger.

So... are they just Darwinism with all the atheist curlicues removed? Very blunt spoken creatures they are.

I have a rule that prevents me from either killing one or touching one -- except perhaps the former by an accident I may not always be sufficiently careful to prevent. This week there was an orange beauty -- carrying a tortoise shell tint like the one on the curved tines of a lady's comb -- blocking with its slanted web all access to the dog's hutch. This should have been prime real estate for such as him, given that it is home to hundreds of flies. But each day the monster looked more disconsolate -- and I didn't see any paralyzed bags hanging there either, though on the other hand, why would he have wanted to show them off to me especially? In any case, I began to wonder if he might be dead (in which case, I could enter and clean up).

Blowing on the web was oddly unproductive. Sleepy, are we? Finally, one hideous back leg twitched and swung. Was I happy to see signs of life? Good Lord, not at all really!

I kept on. No doubt what I wanted to see die was the affinity. Today the web has deflated. It is there but lacks buoyancy or sweep. And the flies continue to fly around and over and they seem to pierce and pass through.

And as for me I didn't like the life of it but I hate the death of it. I think I would revive it if I could, just as I am not a bit sorry that I can't.

We will
CALL you
sweet Sir TWITCH.

*