On the Borderland of Dream

Prelude of desire leading to genuine experience. A week of both heavens & hells, not to be documented exactly as it happened for life is no chronology, no matter what History tries on for size, & even though the dream first presented smokestacks burning every bridge of childhood, that land & time are not irrelevant, nor walls upon which were engraved the word: INNOCENCE, where I marveled at the change of perspective, realizing upon waking that it was simply the dream doing what it wants, the dream does what it wants. I got up early on what was a Tuesday, picking up the convertible for speed & aesthetics.

Interruption of inspiration is essential.

What pose was she in on her yoga mat? What height reached in her entrechat on the dance floor, when I yelled up, “Who wants to go see the sunrise?” If I’d known at that time The White Mountains loomed in our immediate future... While I peered behind clouds she spotted the burnt-orange arc lift up from the island itself, a mathematics of joy beyond any geometry.

Where was I going, which direction, what was my mind on other than the road, when I saw her on the street oozing a sensuality greater than her parts? Too young to know what it meant, she sensed its power, more powerful than a man-made internal combustion engine, in her virginity & by her example the earth followed suit for the rest of the week: it oozed, becoming a music for language to bloom, bear fruit, move on.

Sun rose slowly, we held on to Time keeping suffering at bay, but not forgotten, nor fully mourned.

Oozed up into music. Drove north to the library for the book, Men in Dark Times, where the author is sure no experience is worthy until put into language, & that men in dark times will cohere into action. The road was bright & sunny in the convertible with the man-made internal combustion engine. It was as good as a boat, as a plane, as goodness itself.

I already had the book on Goya with the drawing, “The Garter,” prelude to the Capricho etching, “It fits well,” in which André Malraux asks, “What genius has not transfigured his childhood?” noting that in his work Goya resided on the borderland of dream.

Sun rolled right into us, as if it were all four wheels of the convertible oozing into music.

Let’s not forget, however, that when the alloy wheel of conscience scrapes against the granite curb of superego the temptation to salve scratches of shame marking acts of hubris & stupidity cannot be erased by quick fixes in mud & paint. While the wound is open, a look inside, especially revelatory not liking what is seen, then drive on.

The White Mountains loomed in our immediate future oozing into our lives like a music. Friends welcomed us along the way drawing out stories, cohering subversively away from the sad, excruciating, economically bad, historically impudent, out of control, hegemonic, & idiotic signs of present times oozing into a cacophony.

As I write this on the edge of the Atlantic the chatter of younger contemporaries have already referred to, “One hundred & twenty-five thousand dollars,” the other later nattering “Twenty-five hundred.” I’m not much for figures, except that when we marched in DC the death toll was less than two thousand Americans. Now, close to three thousand seven hundred Americans. Accountants are not much for statistics involving lives of others: three-quarters of a million Iraqis? Oozing into the deathly realm of cacophony?

No snow on Mount Washington as we sped by in fifth & sixth gear past Boise Rock & Crawford Notch. My passenger in her peasant kerchief was so pure of spirit, as if her virginity returned, & her voice in awe of nature evolved as slowly as sunrise oozing into music. In Franconia we saw Frank O’Hara in his raspberry sweater, black boulders painted through green eyes of Marsden Hartley, unable to escape & fully erase our mourning of childhood, Goya’s woman in “Wine would have been better,” got down on all fours before us & drank nothing but light, instead of a puddle of dirty, bitter water, & suddenly the hills were not far away from the geography of Sils Maria photographed by Gerhard Richter in 2006 for his Atlas, or where Nietzsche exclaimed in August of 1888, “Today an incredibly beautiful day, all the colors of the south!”

I don’t know how much more valuable an afterlife is than life itself, though language goes a long way investing in the glorification of what is. We drove the burnt-orange convertible home, where I dreamt I would show my new translation of Mallarmé’s prose poem, “The White Waterlily” to him, as if he were a neighbor.