Wheat Dreams

Wheat at night is like cheese. It disturbs my sleep, gives me weird dreams. Dreams that I can only vaguely remember when I awaken, which pieced together make no sense at all. And the scraps aren't even all illusions, some are drawn from life. Like for instance when I dreamt on a wheat night about a door-key as large as a spade, which sounds rather Bluebeard-like – though it wasn't stained with blood – before I remembered the pub where the key to their storage shed is kept on an industrial kitchen spoon. The sighting of which happens regularly and always amuses. Why are they trying to get into their shed with a spoon? A slotted spoon. And using the handle end too. Ah, the key's on it. Now I smile knowingly if someone else is witnessing it for the first time and wondering why aloud.

So, my wheat dreams, you see, are all muddled up. Life, art, fantasy. Past, ghosts of, and sometimes ghosts to come: those I have not yet met and may not ever if instead I take a different course and so paths don't cross. They are then just a dream face who bear no resemblance to anyone I know nor anyone I've seen who will quickly fade and be forgot for there will be no life trigger.

Faces from the distant past though are unnerving. Why are you visiting me? Why now? And why not ever on a non-wheat night when my last meal hasn't been inspired by the Italians or accompanied with bread? If they came on such a night I might be able, in my sleep, to stick with the vision and not instead have many successive broken dreams. With no beginnings, no endings, just middles. Unsatisfactory middles. What? Who? Where? Abstract and cubist-like. Where my inward eye struggles to adjust to these shapes within shapes, shapes over shapes, shapes concealing, hiding what they most want me to see. Hard, sharp, no softness, no rounded edges, just distortion. The eye has entered a less friendly Mr. Men and Little Miss land. A country filled with painting upon painting by Franz Marc or August Macke. The seen and the unseen. A town of bowler hats and men raining from the skies with apples as faces. I've poured over too much Magritte. Eaten bread with my cheese and then looked some more, and seen Napoleon, standing, with his back to me, looking out to sea. I know it's Bonaparte and yet his back looks nothing like I imagined. I want to laugh at his stature.

And then I wake, I drift. I toss and turn. I mumble or cry out. The darkness has turned grey, dark grey...I'm pulled under.

I'm in a bar, there's a sparrow sipping from a glass. He flies to his master and deposits amber liquid into his mouth. Now it's night and I'm outside where a man is standing on a roof and wailing his lungs out, wails to scare those within as if he were Hamlet's father. His son does not come to meet him.

I wake...I speak, eyes shut: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' Whence has that come from? These lines are not in Lamb's prose version. I shouldn't know them. Who is speaking through my mouth? The great man himself? Is he in the room?

I peek...it's dove grey. Night has been pushed further away, but it's not time yet to welcome day. A new day. I turn over.

And in my dose see a figure I take to be a young Laurie Lee walking, walking, walking under a blazing sun. I have gone back in time, to a time when I wasn't a thought; my parents weren't either. The imagination is strong, as strong as a midday sun.

Who's this approaching? A reverend with a camera, or a nun? No, it's a woman cloaked in black and it's me that's approaching her, not her me, for she leans against a whitewashed stone villa, her gaze elsewhere and her face a wise but dry cracked mask. She puts a finger to her lips; who is she silencing? Bewildered I look away, down at my feet, where there's a pregnant black cat (her familiar?) winding, winding itself around my legs. I look up, the woman is gone, but the sun, the sun is beating.

The light is gold, a white-gold, a gold-white. Day must follow night. The wheat has been gathered in.

Picture credit: The Gleaners, 1889, Camille Pissaro (source: WikiArt).

This post was written in 2019.

Night Has Come

The workers have lain aside their work, uncompleted; they've tidied their tools and gathered their coats. They've taken leave of their colleagues in an abrupt, even gruff, or cheery manner. Some have walked off alone into the fading light, some have left together on the path that leads home or to the local tavern, where the long dark hours will be spent.

There, in the tavern, they might find the wanderer. He, who has spent the whole day and the day before that and the one before that wandering, looking for employment or simply looking at the world. If he's of the first sort: a seeker of work, he might retrace his steps when the light dims, turn back, homewards to whatever is there waiting for him; whereas if he's seeking the world: all it contains and all that he might see in it, it's more likely he will find a place to stay: an inn which might give him a bed and a meal – although one of these will suffice if the host can't offer both and be gratefully accepted – or a ditch, a place by the side of road or further off the beaten track where what's left of his dry bread and cheese can be eaten and his feet rested. He would rather have the kindness (and sometime company) of strangers, but on the road strangers or kindnesses don't often conjoin. He takes what he can when he can get it, which sometimes means bedding down in unsafe and unfamiliar places with his knapsack as a pillow. One night, that is all, and then that sort of wanderer passes through – he moves on.

There, in the domestic home, which the householder is returning to, fires are beginning to be lit, and preparations made for supper. There's a fire to cook by, to warm by, to see and read by; its first lighting says daylight is departing, and then later on, much later on, shows daylight has gone. The day is over, night has come. Darkness has banished light.

But in present time, the sun has not yet set. It's still drawing the sky down, like a curtain, and readying itself for an twilight chorus of 'More! More! Bravo!' with the dying of these notes as it fades from sight. Night and the moon pushing him aside, as dawn will push night.

The setting sun makes the boy hungry. The boy being idle, sitting on a hill, sitting in a field, against a tree or in the branches of a tree. The tree until the sun sets a place for birds and boys.

The sun dips and dips until the earth seems to be consuming it; his stomach growls. He spies his father trudging home and runs to meet him. Both hear the mother call.

They arrive, laughing and panting.

Inside, hats and outer garments are discarded. Chairs are scraped back from the table. Father and son take up their customary seats. The mother ladles stew onto plates and slices bread. Her men will be fed and fed well.

The boy attacks his plate, as does the father. The mother's cheeks are rosy from the heat of the kitchen; she has served herself less and eats slowly, ever-watchful, primed to ladle or slice or pour tea.

The father finishes and retires to his chair by the hearth, where he'll smoke a pipe and rub and warm his weary feet, and where the son will sit by his side on the rug, like a devoted dog, and take in the flickering flames until his eyes are heavy with sleep and he has to be carried to his cot.

The mother sets about the kitchen, washing plates with a rag, and straightens everything up for the morrow. Then she, too, takes her chair by the glowing fire, and sets about other tasks: patching holes in clothes or cleaning shoes, and observes her husband and assesses his mood from his silence or chatter and the way in which he sucks on his pipe as a child might suck his thumb.

Outside, where there's only a glimmer of light from a few stars and the moon, full or crescent in shape, uncovered or covered by cloud, every bird and beast has gone to his nest or pen. The trees belong to birds now, as does the dry land to beasts and water to those decreed to live in water. Even in barns the beasts that work for and alongside man have settled on their straw beds. Every creature has a proper place to rest its head.

Night has come. Its command to sleep is not disobeyed.

Until dawn pushes night away and the wanderer in the field wakes soaked with dew. 

Picture credit: The Attack, 1834, William Henry Hunt (source: Fine Art America).

This post was written in 2019.

Imagine...

Imagine being given a plaster cast of your teeth as a present. Imagine being ecstatic about it. A very personal present from your dentist lover, the courtship conducted over a surgical chair, you with your mouth stretched wide and him peering into it instead of your eyes.

Can you imagine that? I can't. I can imagine feeling horrified, revolted even. Though I don't have a fear of that profession or of the instruments they use or of the chair you lay back in, but a cast of my not-so-pearly-whites presented to me in a pretty box would suggest to me that something was a little off. In my love for you I give you a model of your teeth. Seriously, who does that?

But presumably in the imagined scenario you'd willingly submitted yourself to it: this courtship and the cast being taken, for love, for art rather than correction. Still, I'm not convinced anyone would welcome their own teeth as a gift, no matter how finely executed. It's a bit weird, isn't it? The girl in this case was happy. This was love, reciprocal love. If Laurie Lee is to be believed and I do believe him. Perhaps this is how they used to do things in Andalusia?

My conclusion however is this: Dentists should date dentists or nurses, or those with perfect teeth or teeth fetishes. They may like problem cases but they shouldn't date one.

Now, imagine a room of anger. Imagine being in a bad mood and having a room you could retire to to work it off. In that room you could do whatever you want: roll around on the floor, pound it with your fists and feet; hurl yourself at the walls; rant, yell, sob; run, jump, stamp; and if there were cushions to throw, throw them. That's my kind of room. I want one. But to have one I'd need a palace, or a wing of, like the king's favourite wife (she's one of three) in the Ramayana, or at the very least a two-bedroomed apartment. But if I imagine a second bedroom I see a study-cum-library – that's the dream, always the dream – and so then I'd need a third room in which to exercise my brain and body in anger, where darts couldn't be made of pens, pencils and rubbers, and birds from books. Have I ever in anger flung a book? Almost, in anger with it and its author, but not quite.

Conclusion: A room reserved for black moods stripped of objects that could be launched as weapons would be less dangerous and maybe even fun. The door to that room, though, would have to be kept shut to prevent the anger released from permeating other areas, or windows opened to allow that energy to disperse. That would be a sensible precaution and yet in thinking of it I've gone right off the idea; I'm too sensitive to draughts.

So, imagine that same spare room – no longer an anger room but a bedroom decorated red - filled with monkeys feasting from a fruit platter on the bed and arguments breaking out as grapes are snatched and run off with and stuffed in mouths. There are the elders, there are the young, there are the cunning ones, with typical monkey ways, there are the wise ones who watch and wait. There are the ones that deal in cuffs, there are the ones that deal in cries. And there again there are the wise. But, yes, think of the noise. Think of the mess. Think of the smell.

Conclusion: A room such as this is conceivable, but a monkey's rightful, no, natural place is not a chamber in which one sleeps. Where would any guests go? I guess they wouldn't come or would make some excuse not to stay. No sleep would be had if they did, not with monkeys swinging from overhead lamps or squabbling amongst themselves, and even if quiet there'd be all those pairs of eyes, blinking in the dark.

Then, imagine a creator. Imagine a sculptor fashioning an egg out of clay or a weaver weaving a cloth on which there's a tree heavy with fruit, or a painter dabbing at a canvas on which there's a giant man. Imagine each and choose, without too much thinking or hesitating, which to examine. Pick which intrigues you most, as to how the world might have come about, as that is what these creators are depicting. My choice is the painter and his giant man, from which the three realms that today exist were once all said to come from.

I chose the painter because painters, like translators, make mistakes.

Picture credit: Monkeys Feasting, 1620, Jan Brueghel the Elder.

For the story of the plaster cast see A Rose for Winter, Laurie Lee

Telling Tales

I am a teller of tales. I speak the truth. My truth on me.

Other people – those who don't know me very well or say they are trying to, they'd like to get to know me – will distort me. Create their own versions of me, to suit their needs or what they want me to be.

Where memory fails, they rely on their notes or imagination. And dream up a fictional persona, with which I'm meant to agree: Yes, that's me.

It has my name, it has my features. The same eye and hair colour, the same date of birth. The likeness can't be disputed. The thoughts, the statements they've attributed to this person can.

I do not know her; I have never known her. Never, not as she's mirrored back to me.

The mirror held up is a circus mirror. The looker, looking at me through it, has a distorted eye.

The mirror is cracked from side to side: a crooked line across, a crooked line from the top to the bottom.

The looker has a story and I've been fitted to it, in it. Me to it, not it to me. Because had it been it to me I wouldn't fit. The story would have had to be changed. But as the story offers no alternative beginnings, middles and endings, I have to be changed.

You can't do to a real person what you can in a story. It's unethical. Especially if that story is based on life and the living of it. Especially if it becomes so contorted the person no longer recognises their own image when they look in a mirror. If what they see instead is nothing. As no version of them exists. There's a blankness; they have been wiped out. Cancelled. Deleted.

Their Truth obliterated.

The truth given to the fictional persona a lie, that they couldn't, they wouldn't live. Yet nobody would believe otherwise.

Their mind, their knowingness of self taken from them, almost destroyed but not quite. Although they feel powerless in the face of it. The mind, the knowingness the last to go.

Already the slippage has begun....

For they cannot talk of themselves as 'me' or 'I' any longer. They are 'it'. A thing with a mind and body that's not their own. If they do use 'I' or 'me' it's because they imagine someone else is saying it. There is a narrator: someone who speaks of them through them.

Me is now She. Behavioural traits belong to Her. The place the me inhabited grows smaller, the size of a point of a needle. She fills the heart.

She is now the Captain of the ship. Me is a lowly member of the crew. The parrot that sits on her shoulder and nibbles at her ear, and doesn't try to escape because there's nowhere to go. Me may not be in charge but this is Home.

The ship is nothing like it used to be, is nothing like it used to look. A sentence has been handed down and it's for life. The fictionalised truth on record now, and referred to regularly. Brought up in discussions or the mind's filing cabinet opened up and checked against. Everybody does it, everybody that must be engaged with: from friends and family to civil servants. That is their Truth. That Truth was authorised, weighed and judged to be right, therefore it must be right.

Me lost. It was too hard to fight Truth versus Truth. Me resigned the self to that Fate. The fate mapped out: the path to a 'normal' self. To a self that was acceptable. That didn't know anything. That had no enthusiastic interest in anything. To enthuse was wrong. To have likes and dislikes was wrong also. To be invested in anything was too irregular. To know Self was too unusual. Self had to be shut up, locked away, hidden from view. Or be so tortured with mind games and by questioning tones that Self agreed to the coup: She was the only hope, She was for the best. Anything to be left alone.

Else the old Self would be banished. Vanquished. Laid on a pyre in their old ship, set aflame and pushed out to sea. Given the funeral of a Viking: go down in flames.

Me didn't trust that She would furnish that honourable death; all the world is a prison now. 

Picture credit: The Funeral of a Viking, 1893, Frank Dicksee (source: WikiArt). 

This post was written in 2019.

Nine Gates

Know, friend, that the City of Nine Gates lies within you. You are it. You are the city: its gates, its walls, its defences. There are nine ways to admit strangers and nine ways to bar them, or through which to expel them should they have gained entry.

A city of one, sometimes two, three, four or five, even six on rare occasions. Two, three, four, five and six will leave after a duration, and the city will return to its post-visitor size, or almost. And happy to no longer have to play host, maybe, but unhappy, maybe, at the changes playing host brought. Like the gate that swelled with their stay; like the damage done to the precious gate on their departure.

A female city of one.

We need a language like French to tell a female from a male city. They are the same; there are differences. Differences in how they might swell or fall to ruin; differences in the width and height of gates and how they're used, although they number the same. Always nine; a city of nine.

However, sometimes a new gate might be made, by force or design, or by accident, and then it won't be a city of nine.

And sometimes a gate might be blocked, again by force or design, or by accident, and then, too, it won't be a city of nine but a city of fewer gates, perhaps eight or seven.

Some boast of a castle, with eleven gates, within their walls.

Some lament their ruinous state: they are nothing but broken gates and toppled walls.

Some say gates made or blocked, by force or design, or by accident shouldn't be spoken of, shouldn't be counted or discounted.

They say: Those with new gates want to be more than a nine; whereas those with obstructed gates should still have them acknowledged.

They say: No city should have more or less.

And that new gates, within the city, aren't true gates, they're holes. Gaping spaces. Unnatural hollows. The city, according to them, is, then, in a permanent state of openness. Vulnerable. To the outer world. For it cannot flee from it when it wants peace. Peace is harder to attain.

That is their argument.

Though they don't say the same if a gate is closed, permanently. Peace, then, supposedly easier, to obtain and to keep. Since an unused or a newly obstructed gate makes the city inward rather than outward-looking.

Whereas others say: eleven is permissible, if one or two gates are impermanent; if one or other of them at some point closes, never to open again or to only open every now and then.

That is their argument.

What is the Truth?

The Truth is: All are gated cities, with rulers; the ruler of nine controlled by nine gates. But over a tenth or eleventh gate, the ruler has control. The ruler sits in his castle, cross-legged, and has forgotten his desires.

Those that are of nine, and only nine, gates have the following:

Four gates that lie side by side, functioning together and independently. Another two, level with these four, that sit across from each other, unseen by the other yet invisibly linked; a secret passage, a tunnel running between them. One, below all of them, operates like a drawbridge: open, shut; open, shut; yawns wide, wide, wide, then bars the way, with teeth clamps shut. All day in permanent action (and non-action): admit and deny, admit and deny. Whereas at the far end of the city, one gate acts as the front and one as the back, through which there is creation, through which there is release.

Openings and exits. That's all the city is; that's all these cities are. In very basic terms. For there are many, and yet none like each other. The same gate in another acts differently though visibly it may look similar i.e. recognisable by position what its function is, but its efficiency in its duty undetermined. This can only be felt, by the city itself, or by any admitted within. 

Loosely taken from the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.

Picture credit: Simultaneous Visions, 1912, Umberto Boccoioni (source: WikiArt)