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AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island
October 2000
2 October 2000
Where I Really Am
A part of my initiatory dream remains untold,
and I would like to try to tell it now. As the words of my Muse regarding
the true nature of our relationship only revealed their meaning to me over
the course of a great length of time, so the passage to follow is likewise
a revelation that unfolded very slowly.
My friend told me something more as we stood in
the underworld cavern, looking up at the moonlight that flowed in through
the upper-world lake. He told me his name, a name which was absolutely
unfamiliar to me then but which I have seen in books since then, a name closely
associated with the ocean, and he said, 'No matter where you think you are,
this is where you really are.' Nothing could have been simpler, and
yet it was very confusing. Again, I thought of all the religious teachings
that focus on the Sun as the symbol of ultimate good and its light as signifying
the illuminated soul. I could not bring these ideas together, and on
no account would I gainsay what my Muse had told me so succinctly.
He had to be right; I would stand or fall by his words. I could not
merely accept them, however. I had to understand.
He showed me his sleeping chamber in that cavern,
a small side room in which there was a bed which consisted of a heap of white
silk sheets overlaid by a scarlet or deep orange silk coverlet. The
color of that coverlet disturbed me in a way I was at a loss to define, except
that I had never liked it--I did not like red at all, and certainly not that
bright orange-red. It was warm, where I was cool; I was lunar, and
again, it was solar. I had to make sense of it, though, as I could
not reject what he himself had shown me.
He gestured to me to rest on the bed as he took
up a stringed instrument and sang a song. I brought back two lines
of its lyrics that night, and a third line several years later, after it
returned to me in a dream. They were words deeply evocative of mystery
even then, and much more so after I found my human friend and began to learn
of his history. I shall not include them here; they are not--as far
as I am yet aware--a part of the present unfolding. I sat on his bed,
on that scarlet cloth, and perhaps even wrapped it around myself as I listened
to him sing. We were naked, having lost our bathing suits somewhere
en route from the upper to the underworld, and he was beautiful and I was
young and avid, but if a love scene followed his song, it is not in my memory.
Neither has my relationship with him ever really been explicitly erotic.
He is my partner, and our songs are filled with erotic imagery, but that
is the language we find most apt. We do not seem inclined to act it
out. He sang to me, and then I awoke.
The years passed by. I thought of him always,
and steadily worked my way toward a closer bond with him sleeping and waking,
but I wondered every time I thought of that scarlet cloth on his bed.
During the course of my studies, I became intensely interested in Chinese
thought and poetry, especially Taoism. Later this led me into some
brief but haunting Buddhist studies. Religion as such had never spoken
to me; certainly not any of those systems based on revealed writings.
I had seen and heard too much from my own direct source to accept the word
of any other as final, and I could not codify my own Muse’s teachings as
even I could plainly see that their meanings shifted with my own thought
and understanding. I concerned myself with poetry, and did not dwell
overmuch on philosophy. And yet it was always there, the need to consider
my ultimate aims. Even poetry is finite, if the mind that thinks in
language evaporates beyond a certain level of enlightenment. Buddhism
dealt most satisfactorily with these questions, but it also created a moral
quandary: If the purpose of the Buddhist path is to learn to pass beyond
the transience of the phenomenal world, samsara, do I not act in conflict
with that purpose when I create new songs that have no need, according to
the Buddhist scheme of things, to exist? I struggled with this question
even as I continued to write. Finally, not more than a year or so ago,
I dreamed that a Japanese woman came to invite me to sit with her and some
fellow Buddhist friends of hers at a table in a busy dining room. She
answered my unspoken question as to whether or not I was merely creating
a larger scope for illusion. She said, 'A wider samsara, yes, but a
shallower samsara, and a prettier samsara.'
This was too direct and clear to dismiss. Even
if the dream was generated by thoughts that arose only within my own mind,
they were wiser thoughts than my usual waking ones. I decided to accept
this message as a sign that I was moving toward a reconciliation of the two
paths I was trying to walk at once. I was not altogether reassured,
but I began to feel more hopeful. A shallower samsara, even if it is
wide, is much more nearly transparent. Finally, I returned to the site
of my initiation in a very vivid waking reverie. The presence of my
friend, my Muse, was uncommonly strong. We had been working together
very well, and I had developed a stronger ability than ever before to trust
in his presence, while never allowing a literal belief in his spirit-person
as such to solidify to the point that it shut out other ideas. This
time, he spoke to me wordlessly. He stood beside me in the sleeping
chamber of the cavern, and he pointed toward the bed. I truly saw it
for the first time in all those years: the coverlet: It was scarlet,
yes, or reddish-orange, or--that color has another name, a name which instantly
calls to mind specific associations: saffron. That color is often
called 'saffron,' and when it is, it is typically being used to describe
the robes worn by Buddhist monks.
It was there all along. My initiatory dream
was created at such a deep and knowing level of my being, or sent to me from
such a powerful spirit source, that it foretold the entire course of the
paths I would walk simultaneously until at last they flowed together.
That flowing is happening now, even now. There never was any conflict;
that was a lie of the waking foremind. I have found my way onto the
single path along which I feel I can travel undiverted by needless conflict
for as long as I wish to know I am here or anywhere. For as my Muse
told me when he stood beside me and we spoke face to face, 'No matter where
you think you are, this is where you really are': within sight of the
robes of the Buddhist monk, and within the sound of the voice of the Muse,
both at once, no conflict: This is where I really am.
P.S.: [December 2000] And the stringed
instrument my Muse took up and played for me? In traditional Buddhist
iconography, the lute symbolizes the Mahayana path.
***
28 October 2000
Some Gestures Toward a Happy New Year
Halloween marks the turn of the year for many
people I know. I celebrated the New Year so resoundingly last January
1st that I feel a bit guilty doing it again now, but I cannot resist.
Here are some new Halloween verses, with enough background to provide a window
into some of their meanings.
From my dream journal, 27 October, 2000, 3:55 am:
In a modern Tibetan household. A discontented younger woman tells her
story. One night her grandmother pulls a commercial box of wine out of the
closet and says, 'It’s who we are--it was always there'. It is almost like
a winery commercial; I hear her as meaning, This represents us and our way
of life. The young woman is perplexed. Her grandmother tells her to concentrate.
They clash somehow. Grandma angrily puts on sparkle makeup, especially under
her chin? She yells at the young woman, 'Get out!'--but also 'Concentrate!',
each by turns. Her eyes turn pale and sparkly. She then goes out-of-body
to reach the young woman. At the same time, on a second level, I hear a woman
talking with regards to a song that was supposedly given by the spirits.
"Mao" is playing, and I think about it as the woman, an expert in such matters,
tells another woman that a certain song is (either real or fake? real?),
but usually they are fake. I consider how a song might be falsely passed
off as spirit work.
"Mao" is an actual song I downloaded from an interview
with a woman who is the song leader of a Santo Daime (ayahuascero) group;
their hymns are all obtained in trance, ostensibly from spirit sources. I
used to drink a lot of red wine, knowing that it might create blocks that
I would have to deal with later; I was extremely anxious, especially about
writing, and felt it was necessary to break through the blocks that already
existed then. I don't understand the closet, though; I have never been 'in
the closet' about it. Perhaps I have been failing to deal with its long-range
consequences in the present? The old woman is certainly Night Mare. She has
work for me to do, if only she can successfully help me 'OUT'. Ah--so there
is more than just an ancient winebox in that closet? My foremind is the closet,
and probably also the box that encloses the 'red wine' that is 'who we are'.
The younger woman was complaining at the beginning of the dream about feeling
trapped in an outmoded way of life, wanting to modernize, experience life
in a wider field--leave home. Surely this is no ordinary red wine!
Dream Journal, 27 October, 2000, 6:39 am: There
is a small trench, containing a power line, that runs around my house. I
notice that part of it is covered over with sand dollars and seashells. I
look further on, and find that all of it (or at least all of it on one side
of the back door) is covered likewise. I call the man with me to look. Beeber
is the one who did it, all on his own.
Beeber was a very dear pet rat I had many years
ago. My Friend was born in the Year of the Rat.
Close Listening Abides
She listens: Her will is the wind over water.
Hair sweeping the crests of the billowing waves,
she leans through the mists that obscure the dark
daughter for whom she intends deep deliverance. Grave
eerie multiple tremors turn back from the brink
of disturbing disclosure. She measures the sight
of the one she is seeing and angles her thinking
through images suited to reach her aright:
When I was a boy with a trickle of laughter that
wetted my chin, I was happily strange
in the ways that portend future sadness. Come after
the onset of all that I AM since the change,
but remain in the past by a fraction--a second--an
instant before this in which we are hung,
and permit sundry visions of horrors that beckon
to open themselves in these lines and be sung:
An aura of green; a green lamp at its center; a
very small house with a bottle of wine
red as blood in its closet--the lamp casts a tentative
wash of the rich liquid color that shines
in the vine-leaves that wreathe all the doors and
the windows of this ancient dwelling of finely-hewn stone,
even those fast within it. This house has a lintel--the
place most abundantly vine-overgrown--
that is carved with the words, ‘WE ARE DREAMING TOGETHER.’
This motto is signed with the crescent-Moon stamp
of the being who moves high above every weather that
faces the climate of Earth, the Moon-lamp
that hangs silent in seasonal darkness this evening--not
absent, but neither overtly aglow.
From our present position, view only the scene here,
permitting mysterious greenness to show
through a pall of expansive nocturnal dimensions.
Within this stone house, in its closet, the glass
that contains the strong red-as-blood wine, the
essential component that we, who have come to this pass,
both so dread and desire--that glass bottle is melting.
Its contents are leaking. A trickle of dark
highly spirited fluid, so crawling with velvety richness,
so lustrous it mirrors the sparks
that are suddenly leaping in streams from the six-paneled
emerald lamp at the heart of the hall
that is all this small house really is--that thick
fan-spreading ocean of carmine is why I shall call
and be answered. Night Mare, it is making me dizzy.
This sight I forget how to bear and not faint.
If you tend to my eyes while I struggle to listen,
the hue of this song can reveal its complaint.
The little stone house is awash in the blood of
red ether, the matter of sky come alive
with core viscid intensity. Swiftly the flood meets
the doorsills, but vine-leaves contain it--midwives
to uncountable songs, now attending this house’s
profuse red emergency. Surely it creeps
to the windows, but there more live vines form a
boundary. Never a drop of its potency seeps
to the ground outside. What if it should, though?
A cordon, a fiercely electrified cable of strong
spiraled strands of fine metal, surrounds this house.
Orders of influence allied with emerald song
and the glowing green lamp laid it under the surface
of Earth a brief distance away from the walls,
and then roofed its continuous trench with a pearl-iridescent
collection of sea-shells. Now all
is much changed, but at peace and at rest in this
vision. I sang without fainting a bloody-red scene;
the blood did not spill past the leaves; the decisions
to sing and be silent, the red and the green,
and the woman and man--the Night Mare and the angel
of powerful orders--allied themselves. I
have leaned over a billowing ocean of strangeness,
become what I AM, and seen nobody die.
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