fiction chapter 2B

I carried the dream with my living hands. Oh, fallen angel, change my dreams. I made the work of choices with my living hands. No better than my works, I am. I am cleansed of my times. How can I be better than my hands?

The Prince became a wizard, but the wizards, believing backwards, burned The Prince into the floor.

about imagining

I peek outside, then I am drawn through a French door onto the patio. My eyes pull left to the neighbor's house. Through its large bay window I find the eyes of an obese killer, more monster than man. He is a horrifying blob stationed at a breakfast table. He wears women's lingerie—a black teddy. He wants to take my life now.

I briefly lose sight of him as he rushes out the back of his house and exits his garage. But, then, he is all I can see. Because he gushes into my yard and is closing in at a paralyzing speed. The impulse to run takes me.

Roaring nearer, he warns me that he will now begin asking questions, and if I answer correctly, I can live a few seconds more. Here's how it will go. First he will sing, and I must finish the lyrics. So he begins singing "Hallelujah."

I scramble onto a trampoline in the yard, and he corners me there. He is singing, and I think, "She tied you to her kitchen chair, and she broke your throne, and she cut your hair." He is at the edge of the trampoline now. I jump left, he moves left; I jump right, he is there. He is unbelievably fast, and he is singing, and his voice grows incredibly loud. I am in the air, and his singing comes out now in two voices—a high, loud shriek and a low moan. He disappears under the trampoline as I begin coming down, and he is right under me. I try to will my body forward, a lunge unpropelled, an attempt made weak with terror. I wake, bolting upright in bed, hearing my own pitiful, last groan.

about having no communication

Sitting on the front porch in the middle of the night and debating whether a tree needs trimming. I wish I could make those limbs disappear. I wish I could make other things happen. I would start with that tree. But I should think bigger. Surround myself with a giant wall? Bring lots of people over here? Go somewhere else? No. Would I want to just lie on the couch at my parents', watching a movie with mom and dad? Would I want to live forever? Be young forever? Have billions of dollars just to live and die comfortably? Maybe there is nothing else anymore.

about another dumb dream

The President was riding a missile that he ordered launched, like Major T. J. "King" Kong in Dr. Strangelove. With nothing to lose but this life, I hopped on. We soared the skies, and I looked down in fascination at the goings on below--ships sailing seas, wars being waged, people busying beaches and boardwalks. The Earth was a map. I considered our inevitable descent, and how my sense of wonder would shrink into terror and grief. The missile wavered; it would soon begin to sink, then turn slightly this way and that in a gentle turbulence. Finally, we began our approach. At 15,000 feet I bailed, foolishly thinking I might somehow escape. Pushing to the end of the map, the missile, with the President aboard, dropped sharply to Earth; but I fell off, beyond the map page. I tucked and rolled across ground, scratched to a stop, and rose to my knees. A buddy from work was there. I hugged him tearfully, tightly, sobbing, destroyed.


Note: I know that people do not generally like to hear about other people's dreams.

(posts) rhetoric

After the space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986, President Ronald Reagan remarked, "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

High Flight
   by John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God

 

about an interplanetary low

This is a test. In a few minutes the siren will trail off and the bullhorn will thank us for participating. Tests, drills: these occur every other day now. Strap on the oxygen mask, help mask others, duck, preferably under something sturdy.

What good will it do? None. Life here will end. Hard to imagine a time not so long ago when we rocketed ourselves to this place in hopes of making a life together.

the closing passage of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I know a seagull

I know a seagull. He watches me uncaringly. Sometimes when he flies the sky warms from a restless midnight ink to a delicate warm peach speckled heaven blue. He is overhead now. Hello again, Seagull.

I see only his silhouette. He sees me old, yellow papery skin against starched, white hospital sheets, brain turning watery, back aching. He sees me standing atop the neighbor's woodpile, dressed in Superman pajamas, hands on hips and chest puffed out. Seagull and I, we are lifetime companions now.

The greater suffering is the better suffering

Maybe twice a year for most of his adult life, Samuel Clemens met a mysterious but familiar girlfriend in his dreams, according to some notes of his published in Harper's. Of the first time he lost her in a dream, he wrote, "I turned around, and the log house was gone. I ran here and there and yonder down the lanes between the rows of tombs, calling Alice; and presently the night closed down, and I could not find my way. Then I woke, in deep distress over my loss, and was in my bed in Philadelphia". The published notes close with a final comment on her death in a later dream:

That was a terrible thing to me at the time. It was preternaturally vivid; and the pain and the grief and the misery of it to me transcended many sufferings that I have known in waking life. For everything in a dream is more deep and strong and sharp and real than is ever its pale imitation in the unreal life which is ours when we go about awake and clothed with our artificial selves in this vague and dull-tinted artificial world. When we die we shall slough off this cheap intellect, perhaps, and go abroad into Dreamland clothed in our real selves, and aggrandized and enriched by the command over the mysterious mental magician who is here not our slave, but only our guest.

I like this. The dream life is real because the sense of loss and misery felt there, and felt upon waking, is complete; none of our expressions, including feelings and imagination, are compromised by reason and its accounting for competing obligations and practical concerns; such so-called harsh realities make life "unreal" because they make us "artificial"; and they make us artificial because they make us check our impulses, make us plan and act in strategic interests that are foreign to our nature, so to speak, and that feed into life's complex network of power relationships, the ultimate game of pretend. In dreams, imagination and feeling reign, and they are felt and exercised honestly and fully. The very vividness of their creation is the character of the real.

Notes:

• How amazing to me that he felt such a sense of loss over a dreamed of girl. Grief dreams about real persons, understandable.
• People wake and interpret dreams, introducing the artificial into the real, dressing themselves in reason.

only in dreams

Sneaking into a series of small, connected utility rooms built between the high school and the track, you seemed to know the way, and led me into what seemed like a large maintenance closet, oddly furnished with only a bed. After awhile, we heard people moving somewhere in the complex, coming our way. We started dressing and I was mad at you, thinking, "How careless, to not prepare!" But in a hurry it was forgiven and we started plotting our getaway, having fun, and you looked more beautiful than ever.