Jorge: Dreams of pollution and chance

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1. So Father Sam and I sat in analysis, or he in analysis and I in meltdown. Saturated, marinated, untranscended. My esteem for him deepened by the second, and so I had none left over for myself.  I hated myself. "You hate yourself but God does not seem to have that option, God loves you to the core. What does that do to your own petty perspective? Jorge, tell me."

2. My dreams were founded in injustice. They were truer than true. They were filled with knocking like a heart beating, not I think my own.  Was that someone knocking on my door? Did I even have a door in the porous corridors of dreamland? Maybe no.  The dream always grew assertive, it would demand to be heard. I tried not to listen, that was just another aspect of the dream.

3. The dream began when I stole someone's shell. So obviously we were animals here -- I suppose I mean "dumb" animals.  I climbed inside the shell and hunkered down, I would have closed it if only I could have.  Ah! The shell is a door that you can lock, so there's the door I dreamt about, anything to keep strangers out. And if the door weren't there then there wouldn't even be strangers -- one would be by definition exposed. I see (the priest said). This tender chitin-less abdomen would be exposed to everyone's forks and teeth. I would be delivered. I would be dead. And I know this because I have had time to reflect on it, and here is the most gruesome part: this reflection itself, couldn't have happened if I hadn't already had the space of reflection, which is what the shell is, the shell separates me from the sort of Darwinian chaos that I dream about, whether that chaos ultimately exists or not.  I mean that its nonexistence is as scary as its existence.  So it followed that I had to have the shell even to regret having it. So why must I feel so bad about something so inevitably necessary?  

The knocking (Sam said) is your conscience rattling around, and did you really think dreamland suspended such things? Oh (I said) but this too is a luxury and a gift, this having a conscience and feeling bad. This proves that I have won, whatever the game is that we're playing. The one whose shell I stole doesn't have guilt or anything because she is crushed and squished by the side of the road, like that poor indecisive squirrel.

4. I took what she had -- now that was disgusting.

5. I cannot live with myself -- but I do. So obviously I can.  I believe this dream guilt is largely cosmetic, something one must apply to the face as protection against the real thing.  Real guilt eats the soul raw, it is like a Darwinian predator, only I do not see how it benefits or has any fight to survive of its own to talk about.  It's as mindless as a shark.

6. In dreamland I am like one of those animals that nests inside another animal and eats it while it is still alive. The taste is better, is fresher that way, not that my victim is alive but that I am so appalled and horrified as I eat. The horror is like a spice.  God, how disgusting we humans are.  And yet they talk of innocence! And they talk of righteousness! Humans! They discuss the imitation of Christ, the ignorant fools -- we are so infinitely far from being able to imitate -- or even recognize -- those beings we pretend to be the images of -- and that we don't begin to understand.

7. So, Father Sam said, holiness would be like Groucho's country club that wouldn't be worth joining if they let such as you join. I don't think so. Now the 2 of them, Sam and the other one, the protagonist, walked through the hot mud puddles, ignoring the bar television that every dream has. The 2 men stepped into the whirlpool. It was impossibly hot -- J sank down -- looked over, accidentally saw his mentor's privacy, his groincurls, looked away quickly. And image as hot as an iron pressed against the brain.  Probably the amygdala was involved, that mass of "feelers".  I slid down into the bubbles to hide my -- what? to hide my feelings? Was my throat swollen? Heart throbbing? Was it just that I was so happy to be next to him? To have a friend and a ladder to God? It wasn't just that God had given me existence but that this existence was sometimes too happy to bear. An existence multiplied by itself, an abundance. Stolen from oblivion, not even mine really. Just handed to me (as opposed to someone else) by chance? What was chance? Did I even believe in chance?

8. When the atheist Dennett debunked design in favor of chance he thought he was closing a door that in fact he was opening. Chance! What was that? Something no human could ever manage -- or understand -- or even worship blindly -- because all our supposedly free acts ended up quite obviously reducing to old banal patterns recurring, not chance at all. Not worthy of being called chance. Because nobody could even say what it was. They say that human creatures are not deep enough or broad enough to use a word like chance, to mouth it like a known quantity, because it's really just a placeholder like zero, it means not even nothing at all, not even that, not even that much, not even nul, not to us. Because no one can define chance and then see what they define. They say the word it and call it awesome, that it that isn't even there. All right. I could go on. You know how every supposedly random number turns out to have factors, is caused, how sad. Jazzmakers improvisations follow rotes in the ground, have been sung a million times before, the artists' inspirations are all borrowed. So chance. So chance, what is that? It would be profound and transcendent if it existed and were not just this meltdown, this hallucination. Chance. If you don't call it design it only goes deeper -- like a tick you refuse to pluck. Dennett's chance is in fact entirely designed -- to stop discussion for one thing. But then his own silence begins to speak. The thing exorcised comes back doubled and trebled and ready to kill. Saying design exists or doesn't resolves to a single statement. "Nothing" is so scary because it is not, that is, not not scary, but not nothing, it is the "something" there that the atheist exploits and uses and that with him or without him we still fear. And we do. Of profound things there is no shading between discerning a pattern and discerning no pattern, which would be not discerning one at all because -- why? Because the light is too bright to pick it out. And the truth is that we don't even know what chance is. Nor do we acknowledge the implications of the fact that even chaos and utter disorganization have a design to be teased out. Don't even talk to me of chance. It probably exists but way beyond our reach -- there is only one powerful enough to wield chance and live. Not a journalist, to be sure.

9. So I was sitting next to Sam for a reason. Chance was not a factor.

10. And I only pretended when, just "by chance", I climbed out of the soapy spiralling mud and reached for my towel, oops, no towel at all! The waitresses circulated with their little napkins and cold-sweating glasses, little paper parosols floating, etc. I tried to think of my naked body as a kind of clothes.  Men's bodies stood around as if without the men inside and that was eloquent: this is not really you but your carapace.  The football team stood around the talking pizza box that I have never been able to shake from my dreamworld.  Coach's eyes, they flicked around the room like black flies, I tell you.  This is veristic, nothing has been added or taken away except, well, the basic laws of reason.  in this place whenever the world tilts I immediately recognize that we're on a ship, if only because my body --  my shell -- has filtered out the very concept of an earthquake, seeing them as intellectual constructions, not possible occurrences, but there it was again, as if immune to the simplifying power of a dream.

11.  And that was the nub: that discontinuity made the truest reality -- those fissures in the ground itself.  But the moment you accept them they become continuous.  Follows from this another essential that reality comes from outside my own tidy (?) being.  And yet they say a dream is all "inside the head" -- but not so -- au contraire.   The power of the dream is one's recognition of what in it is more than oneself, in other words most of it.  

12.  I sat disconsolate at the pool's side, or was it the ocean?  Then Estelle stopped to pick me up and drive me to the suburbs to see... to see Estelle, though even at the moment I knew this made no sense.  You can be multiple people conceptually but not in space, which only meant that this wasn't space, so what could it be instead?  The casting back of one's mind into one's memory, which was only the casting of itself into itself?  Wouldn't such a casting also create 2 people and not just one?

13.  She drove with utter confidence, she drove with liking, she liked to drive.  She came from a simpler and somewhat lovelier age when the other drivers never entertained the thought of killing you.  She was polite and competent -- later they took her licence away because she turned across a double yellow line and didn't remember her name when the officer asked -- that was just temporarily flustered about it.  And he was rude to her, she didn't like that.  she cried, never really recovered from the loss of her driving power.  Enough of that, the key to a memory is that the bad thing that happens later (in its inevitable and tragic fashion) has absolutely no effect on the goodness of the good thing that was previous, the good thing always remains intact.  So that you can immerse yourself in it without necessarily at every moment recalling what came later, what indeed at this very moment must have not yet come.  And you were glad.  She chatted while the 2 of you drove, she didn't care you were in that inevitable dream cliche wearing nothing but your shell.  Then you all arrived and greeted the little dog at the front door who peed on your foot and peed and peed.  And you were somehow wearing shoes again, and they were much too nice to be ruined like that, although at the same time you weren't wearing any shoes.  And you said to yourself: this is enough, wake up now please.

14.  There seemed to be a theme of water, Father, and if only I could be sure it was cleansing.  But I left wet footprints everywhere and climbed across Los Angeles, one wing to the other, on little stone steps as unstable as lily pads, a strange recurring dream I've had for years.  Sometimes I find myself bicycling on the freeway, through the very worst neighborhoods.  And I wold ask myself not "what do these dreams mean?" but simply "where does this amazing feel come from?"  Because waking life such as it was so often lacked all these feelings.  They where there but I didn't feel them -- not when I was awake.

15.  There was a drought of dreaming in my life, Father, and I knew I could see Estelle in no other way -- because death is a most importunate presence here, in waking as in sleeping.  It doesn't let us visit them, it tells us time's up before the time has even gotten under way.  I pressed the liquid doorbell and looked down.  The little dog had covered me in liquid waste from the shins on down -- and the little thing himself was covered, poor thing -- and no one would ever come to answer the door -- because this door was as if exorcised, de-haunted irreversibly -- no one was there or would ever be there.  And as I leaned, was it to take off my shoes or put on my shoes?  was it to put on or take off the pants?  And then I said to myself, this is enough -- I want to wake up.  Easily said, more easily done.  I lay panting on the bed.

16.  There was a streak of light on the wall, humble in the way it didn't go anywhere.  You could see it splitting the wall in two.   I felt a space around my heart, a feeling of God's being between -- as for instance, in begin between the light and what it rested on.  The essence of waking was to be able to hold onto this thought for some time.  Birds were singing in a dissheveled way on the trellis.  Suppressed activities could be heard beyond the shell of not having to act in which I lay but even less than that, a sort of virtual rocking.  I prayed in my clumsy way -- for some of the internal squabbling to get tired and desist so that the morning could come unblocked.  Between things lay spread not extension but presence.  I lay in a place of truths too deep to prove or almost even to share, even with oneself.  Did it exist?  Somet mes it was  a melancholy place, too thoughtful to impress itself on neighbors, on colleagues.

17.  The sun was not a sign.  The sun was not a blemish.  The sun was not a pointing hand.  The sun was not a clue or a puzzle.  The sun was not a person.  The sun was not a calibrated substance.  The sun was not a ploy.  The sun was neither this nor that.  But between the sun and the wall lay reality itself.

18.  I walked into the living room and the rug crackled.  Whenever I touched a doorknob I got a shock.  There was Estelle in that special hospital bed they'd set up so she could be in the swing of things -- but instead she lay as if below the mattress, sunk more deeply than a body ought to go.  Was I wanting her death?  No no, but only closure -- yet only one kind of closure seemed possible.  So every thought was pollution and time was fraught, literally freighted with equivocation.  I try to pray but everything seems to have left me, she said.  Oh Estelle. I answered.  It isn't that, it's just -- but I have to go, I'm late for work.  And she looked at me, dismissing me from her thoughts already, but not exactly.  The sun fell on her collection of little animals and circulated between them -- they splashed in it.   But I felt dirty getting into my car.  And somehow it was once again Estelle driving the car, with that calm competence that had always eluded me, was unavailable to a walking mess like myself.  She drove us into town -- through the dusk.  Dusk!  Well, it felt real if nothing else did.

19.  May you hear a sign tonight, she said as I closed the door.  I walked into the windowy building with a heavy bag in my hand -- books? gym clothes?  The dreamland abridged all the business of ID cards etc.  That left me time to wonder where I was.  A recovery center?  Well, I had just enough time to wonder, was able to wonder, while the men all moved like a slow fluid to the back room.  Since I was a man, I of course followed.  Father Sam was sitting in a battered cardtable chair, a battered Episcopal priest.  Being who he was, he didn't say to me: you're late, you missed the service.  No.  He said: I'm so happy to see you!

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Jorge: Bricks

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In this dream love was required. We all love here. The chaste kiss of peace.

The center of the Eucharist had become the moment of peace. This "moment" lasted for some minutes.

J began to panic. Did he love enough? Probably not. So would they notice?

Would they expel him from the sanctuary for the inadequate quantity of his love? Would everybody horribly try to repair him?

Was the love nothing but a disguised form of fear?

At the Thanksgiving dinner he'd attended a few weeks before, every single person in the act of expressing thanks had broken down into tears, except for himself. He had spoken but tears had not come.

A certain joy for him had been present but it had been dry.

I felt my mind wandering during the group prayers so I went into the parish hall bathroom. My absence so to speak wasn't alone -- there were lots of people in the hall. Preparing food. Acting out in the youth group. A few of the homeless lingering around the buffet and so they well might. I at least understood them. I understood a thing like need but love had me baffled. At least in dreamland it did.

Like a legalist trying to earn points I opened the closet to put out the necessary chairs for hospitality, but the closet had been bricked over by the new rector. The bricks wouldn't move. Then I heard the organ behind me and it seemed so far away, also somehow bricked off.

Yet I knew there was a way through those bricks if I could only figure it out. Most likely there was a breath of air reaching me through the impasse, like a winding clew. If I thus were to narrow my shoulder, and subsequently stand sideways, I might well squeeze myself through as if by a thought. And on the other side of the bricks, down a ramp of musty stairs, I did find a few of the chairs in a circle with men (only men) sitting in them. It was the other church, the secret church inside. These were 2 churches that did not so much share a building as in some arcane way hold a common interest in the space intervening between them, which I at least was finding irreversible -- that is, I could not back up. And the secret minister ordered me to sit down and so I did.

Who are you guys? I asked and they said: the men's group. J shifted with all the more discomfort in his chair for considering that he hadn't even sat there long enough to feel comfortable or not. The truth was that he detested and feared groups of men ("gangs!"). . And these guys were uglier than was possible, their ugliness was even multiplied by quantity and proximity. Not the sort to cry at a meal.

Oh give it up, J, give them a break. Soften your heart, it's the Eucharist. I needed to relax and soften. This was feeling like my dream of last night (? was it last night?) I think last night (?) when I found myself walking by the park on a windy night and watching the shadows of the walnut leaves -- just barely hanging on -- as they shook under the electric light -- and wherever a shadow touched the ground a bit of a pothole would open up -- so that walking became impossible, you had to dance and shimmy just to get down the street. And that was the way the women walked as they brought the bread in. Each one mincing like a waitress in the 50s or a reformed cabaret dancer. When they set the gifts down the men dug in. I held my own morsel like an idiot. Ever wanting to feel. To feel to feel. To be a part of reality, not a show. Then came the wine, maybe juice, and the girls danced right in, faces frozen in scowls. Oddly fetching or retching. I felt my stomach turn over and thought of the dancing walnuts. No that wasn't last night. I was mistaken, that was tonight -- had happened tonight. So this was the clew I had been craving: this very moment was constructed of dream, was not real. Oh, thank heaven.

Lord, you said that your gifts were given to "many" and you probably meant to "all" -- which is one reason we follow you, because in fact we feel compelled to be that "all" -- but the gifts must remain gifts, after all -- desired -- not just slabs of bread -- or no one will even take the trouble to receive them -- and it doesn't matter what people should do, since ultimately they will do what they will do, not what they should -- and the "many" will turn into "few" or "none" if no gift is there. But also what happens if it seems the gift has no one to receive? No one worthy?

So J stood up and walked into the kitchen where the women were working. Somehow it was steps taken down into the kitchen. He felt like a character in the Jules Verne novel, moving deeper and deeper, together with James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker and Pat Boone. Since it was a dream, he didn't worry about this.

Behind him the minister was intoning the prayers of the people and his voice was made of "nose". It was a voice with a lot of nose. The spirit was buried in a fussiness like tissue. Then the room rocked like a boat and you could hear engines turn on. The women all looked up from their kitchen work and said: you can't be in here. The head of the kitchen crew pointed to a staircase leading down into daylight. Meanwhile J saw with astonishment the chairs. There were at least a million chairs, waiting for someone to come in and sit down. But no doubt people were too scared to enter this place where after all they were not allowed.

I had had enough of this dream. It seemed to me that I was dreaming a dream that had no place for me and that that would be the meaning of the dream when it eventually crystallized in the following day's fresh air. Because outside in the daylight I saw the people from my own church now leaving -- and they greeted me with love -- with that love that was so overwhelming for me -- but at the same time they hadn't noticed that I'd been absent. So the love was real but the object of the love -- myself -- had been placed off-station or misprinted with a smear or was not answering the phone. If this love had been thrown like a brick no one had been able to catch it even as a concussion. Did that matter? I felt the way I so often felt after "church" -- that I had nodded off and missed my exit. I hadn't been paying attention! I had just been dreaming!

But when I woke up it wasn't even Sunday. I was on a pier that was separated from its marshland train-tracks by some unexplained gap. The trick was to get my suitcase off the pier and onto the train without getting either it or myself wet. This would be enough to take my mind off the strange and unsatisfying topic of human worship. Behind me a woman's voice continually scolded me to hurry up. Her voice was notably bereft of love. She didn't care if I lived or died. So this was more like the sort of reality in which, for better or worse, our lives actually occur. At least within this indifference I would be able to spend a little time figuring out just what my dreaming offered in the way of prophecy -- just what it was it sensed was coming for me. Because I have noticed -- and hope that you too will ponder -- how insistently dreams present themselves not (as people once mistakenly thought) as interpretations of the past but as most entirely -- in every detail really -- about the things that are to come, which they play as great a part in being as in speaking. And this is the source of their insistence and their fear.

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