The Dream Animal
“It is a commonplace of all religious thought,
even the most primitive,
that the man seeking visions and insight must
go apart from
his fellows and live for a time in the
wilderness.”
Loren Eiseley
I’m asleep, laying on my right side, curled loosely like a
semi made fist, my face rolled mostly sideways, turned a bit down towards the
mattress, when she comes to me. The heat and the feather smoothness of her face
nestles closer as I begin to become just a bit more aware, still caught in the
gossamer net of sleep. I turn my head up to my left, moving my chin across my
shoulder and into her, the realization of the immediate presence of her in the
dusky half light coming more fully now into me. The camera eye of my dream is
about twenty four inches away from me on the surface of the bed, shooting up at
a slight angle towards me, the scene almost entirely in muted grey tones, soft
sheens of light from another room or maybe it is the shadows of the pale blue
of first light. She has moved over me and down into me for one purpose. My face
continues its slow turn as she moves her mouth down and around until it makes
contact with mine.
Every movement and every manner of hers is perfectly aligned
with mine. It is in my place of somnamulance that this kiss occurs. There is
nothing not perfect about it.A hypnogogic connection, a silent meeting, and I
am lost, not yet having found myself, in the warmth and in the perfection of
this night visitor come to awaken me from my winter sleep. Her eyes are gently
closed, her short cropped hair a tiara upon her head and now, in this short
moment, we have known each other across uncountable time.
We are in a large room and it is filled with other people.
My previous wife is one of the others there and she is making art with two
other women, bent down low over a short, square table, colored markers moving
across paper, intently buried in their craft. I have taken the hand of my companion
and we now share a warm bond that needs no words, a great and simple knowing.
We wait patiently together, her sitting across my lap, speaking ever so often in
quiet tones to each other, for this passage, this room that somehow perhaps is
also a train, to arrive at its destination, or for some other happening whose eventuality
conjures neither excitement nor fear, but only the calm and the peace of the
match with the spirit of the other.
“For the first time in four billion years a
living creature had contemplated
himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper
of the
wind in the night reeds.”
Again I am here in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a modern and
still largely medieval state. My return here at summer’s end turned out to be a
fairly anti-climactic affair. After a frenetic summer filled with four months
of activity stuffed into two, too much sausage for that casing as a friend once
said, all I found myself thinking of was how peaceful it would be to return to
my little home away from home, my writing cabin on the lake, as I like to think
of it, my concrete studio apartment here in the Eastern Province of the land
known as Aljazeera Alarabiya-the Arabian Peninsula. Couldn’t have been more
than twenty-four hours after touchdown that I plummeted down some figurative,
emotional mine shaft. What on God’s green earth was I thinking? The desert as
metaphor. Emptiness. Desolation. Loneliness. Madness.
I panicked. My three plus months spent here at the end of
the previous academic year was made easy by the ever present understanding that
I would be going home soon, that it was but a small bump in time. Now, staring
down the barrel of a nine-month stretch, it seemed almost unendurable,
torturous, some form of solitary confinement designed to rob sanity and
optimism. Finding others near me to share consciousness with, to spend time
with, to connect with, would be some Herculean task. Anxiety resonated through
me like distortion through the chamber of an electric guitar. Suddenly, less
than twenty hours into my return, alone in my flat, I am sitting naked on the
edge of my twin bed rocking back and forth with my hands knotted into the
blanket next to each thigh, the figure from the painting The Shriek reposting
itself endlessly in the holographic screen in my head. I told myself repeatedly,
“just breathe, just breathe.” It not only sounds overly dramatic to retell, it
felt that way to me at the time too. Yet there I was, having a really difficult
time imagining myself spending the next couple of years here, meaning, of
course Saudia, not on the edge of my bed, let alone the five years that I have
been planning.
The moment, as it always does, passes. Just let the emotion
in, a guest in my house, right? Honor it, engage it, bring it tea. Sit with it.
Just sit with it and experience it. This is just what I did. While it seemed
touch and go for a short time, the night came, and soon after sleep with it.
Creativity, writing, music, laughter, although admittedly these came a bit
later.
“I had drowsed with reptiles and moved
with the century long pulse of trees; now,
lethargically, I was climbing back
up some invisible ladder of quickening hours.”
The quotes above are from my favorite ever essay writer. I
speak a bit further down about Eiseley’s most well-known work, but this quote
here speaks to the reawakening within me of the spirit to write. It has felt to
me a bit like what it must be like to come out of a period of hibernation after
a season of slumber. Have been nagging myself to put something down, like
trying to exercise, putting it off, feeling unempowered, slow like a sun basking
reptile. The temperature here was hitting 115-117degrees regularly for two and
a half weeks with humidity topping out at 70%. Step outside at 11 at night and
start leaking sweat more or less immediately as the temperature still hovers at
90-95, the air heavy with water. Now as we hit the third week of September we
are barely making 109 on the hot days, 105 on the cooler ones. As I am the only
one of almost seventy teachers here who walks to work, so long as I leave
before 8 am I don’t usually get temps above 90, but with the moisture, which is
considerably worse at night and thus still largely present in the morning, I
bring a handkerchief that I mop my face and neck with, becoming too wet to soak
up any more liquid up by the time I finish the 17 minute walk to work. I have
learned to bring a fresh shirt to change into upon arrival, as the first one
becomes comically wet. This time of year the rest of the instructors who don’t
own a car or find a ride with a friend, call a cab.
Perhaps one time every five to ten years I make it a point
to reread a book introduced to me by my father, a favorite of his, a tome made
memorable in his life during the time that my original nuclear family still
remained intact, during my father’s doctoral work in cultural anthropology at
the University of Minnesota, circa 1964: Loren Eiseley’s master work, The
Immense Journey. His most well known quote, you may know it, is this one, “If
there is magic in this world, it is contained in water.” Being that I am a
Capricorn, a child of water, I adore that one, being that I am here in this
water minus realm, however, it is not really on today’s fresh sheet.
The process of running my eyes over the pattern of words set
down by this anthropologist-naturalist never ceases to stir within me a deep
brew of emotions, visions, metaphysical and internal events. I have at least
three copies of this book, all older, yellowed and partially degrading editions
much read, used already when they came into my possession, all smelling like
dust motes swimming amongst the cluttered shelves in the back rooms of
oversized urban used book stores from where they were plucked. Eiseley’s prose
possesses an ineffable knack of moving up and down the scale of time and in and
out of various and well juxtaposed topics in a mesmerizing and almost magical
ride to the very edges of the definitions of what it is to be human, when that
distinction began, what it means, how it came to be.
Speaking of man, Eiseley writes in The Dream Animal,
“He was
becoming something the world had never seen before-a dream
animal-living at
least partially within a secret universe of his own head with
other, similar
heads. Symbolic communication had begun. Man had escaped
out of the
eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and
future. The
unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal
appearance, began
to stalk through his dreams….Nature was beginning to
evade its own limitations
in the shape of this strange, dreaming and observant
brain. It was a
weird multiheaded universe, going on, unseen and immaterial
save as its
thoughts smoldered in the eyes of hunters huddled by night fires
or were
translated into pictures upon cave walls, or were expressed in the
trappings of myth
or ritual. The Eden of the eternal present that the animal
world had known
for ages was shattered at last. Through the human mind,
time and
darkness, good and evil, would enter and possess the world.”
The idea that the phenomenon that sets man apart from the
other higher mammals, at least as far as is yet understood, is the ability to
think fictitiously, to organize abstract social myths and orders, to form
complex constructs in the shared cognitive maps across culture, has been
kicking around in my head a lot lately. There is a book still only in hard
cover called Sapiens that I had the distinct pleasure of absorbing this summer.
This book’s thesis is precisely this notion. It has been precisely through this
capability of creating, sharing, and organizing around very non-concrete constructs
like religion, money, philosophy, games, organizations, fraternal orders, etc.,
that homo sapiens sapiens, wise wise men, came to outpace and out last the
other five hominid species that coexisted with us on this planet at one time.
It is why sapiens extinguished the physically more imposing homo neanderthalensis,
he of the larger brain and the bigger frame, the original human settlers of
Western Europe.
While Neanderthal man reigned supreme, sapiens moved north
and by utilizing the capacity for symbolic, fictitious thought, could form
social bands of approximately 150 persons, unlike their less creative and
therefore less socially organizably capable cousins who lived in groupings of
more like 50. It was through organizing principles like religion and political
groupings that sapiens became not only better at using larger numbers of men to
perform physically aggressive maneuvers such as hunting large terrestrial
mammals but military engagements as well. It was also through such symbolic
inertia that the motivation and zeal for annexation and conquest became whipped
up into such virile states that allowed, perhaps even demanded, the spread of
early empire. Look around today and witness the foment and fratricide committed
in the name of organizing principles, the religions of Christianity and Islam, or
the newest and most formidable religion to date, capitalism.
And it is this self same ability to conjure internal worlds
within that, while propelling sapiens to dominate this world and to now begin
the search for other globes to inhabit, has become at the same time each
person’s greatest curse. It is precisely this phenomenon that walks through the
corridors of our mind as we sleep each night, or as we lay awake striving for
sleep, striving for an unfettered realm free from torment, free from the wholly
nonexistent future and the surely non-present past that saunters on unholy
hooves through the corridors of our overly developed cerebral cortexes.
It is this tendency for imagination, for self-created
anxieties and wholly fictitious dilemmas that funds pharmaceutical empires,
that causes us the greatest pains, that wrecks for us the most fecund and
healthy kingdoms of our inner selves. For me here today it is a very present
and familiar companion. This hiatus for me in my life, this relocation to a
very foreign land, into a culture and a language, and a physical environment
that is quite akin to taking a cold shower, is largely an attempt to regain
control over this mind contamination, this ideation run amok. Ten years spent
in a relationship that challenged my every idea of what really is, of how to
separate the real from the shape shifting, smoky forms of the nether places,
has worn away the mechanisms inside of me that have in past times served to
distinguish the one from the other. For me this getaway to the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia is a recalibration par excellance. It is a way to stop the inertia, to
put on the brakes, to give time to allow the detritus and the anti-life flotsam
and jetsam covering the once clear pool of my inner self a time to clear.
I still find her in my mind’s eye at all hours of the day.
Walking to work she smiles at me that infectious grin, her eyes ever green and
gleaming, asks me how it is for me here. As I sit behind my desk. In my bed at
night. All of it. The unrepeatedly grand adventures, the unspeakably sordid
images of betrayal, the easy mornings of coffee and life planning. It is, all
of it, every neuronal firing of it, becoming less provocative, less emotionally
radioactive. Though these types of things have long half-lives, time is working
its wholly dispassionate erosion. My rehabilitation center is effective, it is
all encompassing, and it is spelled in my life today in swirling, hypnotic Arabic
script.
As the girl of my dreams continues to tumble off and away
like some spinning craft in the vacuum of space, silent, getting smaller, lost
now amongst the myriad points of distant light, the girl from my dream pours
in. She was incredible. She was in every manner and appearance smooth like a
surf-tumbled shell. We hadn’t need much for talking, as gesture and thought substituted
for communication and worked more than plenty well. I could no more understand why
she came to me while I was still inside that dream, than I can fathom it now, sitting
here still caught up in the mournful afterglow of the passing of it. She
awakened me. Both there in that space between time and here in my waking life. Perhaps
that was the purpose of her appearing over me, of her gently tugging me from
the sleep within my sleep. Somehow she knew to come to me and that knowing,
that knowing I shall likely never decipher. In some way she knew that in her
coming to me I would change. That change has been brought with me through the
veil of sleep, across the gulf which separates Morpheus’s realm from the other.
Perforce it has been brought with me as a reminder to live my life more fully,
to seek connection here in this one also, to remember that this life here on
this side of the membrane, is only another form of dream,
Eiseley has planted an interesting bud in my brain, one
reinforced by the tendency which my father has for uttering it again and again,
as it has obviously formed a garden inside of his skull as well. It is the idea
that when life first emerged out of the pools of warm proteins and chemicals in
the vast geologic past, when the first single cell split, along with the
capacity for companionship and for belonging, as the Garden was first created,
came concomitantly the knowledge of self separation, and of loneliness.
Being in the Kingdom here is just that. I have split from my
old self. I have relocated to a far world, a desert planet twelve thousand
miles distant, and I have come to know separation. I have also experienced the
process of mitosis in my private world with the pulling apart and division of
my relationship with my best friend and wife and as one half separated from my
other half I have come to know loneliness. My children have grown and have
pulled themselves apart from the nucleus of our small familial world, have
grown from embryo to living on their own. In many, many ways my life today is
one of stark contrast to my former self, as though within my own
psycho-physical self I have divided as well. The motivations and the goals, the
daily procedures and the friendship group, the strong smell of sage, of hay
being cut, and the brown hills that ring my valley, they are all no longer with
me. It is some new and distant land that I inhabit now, a dream world, a world
of symbolic significance, of monetary gain and of fabricated reality, a
Hollywood set peopled with actors. People who act like they teach. People who
act as though they study. People who pretend to rule and others who make a credible
case that they allow themselves to be ruled.
“In a
universe whose size is beyond human imagining where our world
floats like a
dust mote in the void of night, men have grown inconceivably
lonely. We scan
the time scale and the mechanisms of life itself for portents
and signs of the
invisible. As the only thinking mammals on the planet—perhaps
the only thinking
animals in the entire sidereal universe—the burden of
consciousness has
grown heavy on us. We watch the stars,
but the signs are uncertain.”
