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HiT MoteL Press |
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from A Blue Moon in
August |
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Table of Contents Good-bye Bachelor Days 1
The next trip to the hospital was the real thing. They had taken the advice in the old wives’ tale about having a big Mexican food dinner and sure enough, the next day the birth was ON. Sam had her bags packed and it was a GO when the contractions started. The intake examinations began slowly, the nurse asking her questions, filling out forms, finding out how far apart the contractions were, telling her to relax. They got Sam into a gown and into a room. They hooked the monitors up to her stomach, to measure how close and regular the birth rhythm contractions were. Pretty soon they were certain that this was it—the baby was coming. Walker stood, bending over her, looking aware and intent at the side of her bed, holding her hand, looking into her panicked face and holding onto her tight when the contractions came. She would clutch Walker’s arm and contort her face in pain, clutching him tight, while he was in a panic—trying to remember the Lamaze breathing. He, He, He. HAAAAA. . . He would be trying to sigh out the air, loud, trying to get her to synch her breathing up with his, but the contractions were so severe that she would double up and forget to breath at all! The coaching nurse was on the other side of the bed and she tried to help get the Lamaze started too. Breathe! Breath. He, He, He. HAAAAA. . . Aahh!! Oooo! “You just go ahead and howl all you want to, honey,” the attending nurse said as she closed the door. It was show time at the main focus on the high hospital bed, like they were participants at some kind of mass. The bed was the altar, and the host of acolytes were the white-robed attendants. Walker held her wrists in a strong but gentle grip. He got down into her face trying to pace her breathing but she would have none of it. “I know we had a birth plan,” the mother-to-be joked, “but it’s changed. I just want drugs! I WANT DRUGS!” There was no room for male power trip here, Walker thought. This is the realm of the female, I must go along. God this is it. I am trying to reach her but she is just so far away. She is going through all this pain, like a virgin being sacrificed at the life-altering initiation of motherhood. Behind them, shadows came and went—people and the high priests and priestesses of life and science in white vestments hovering over the well from which new life was trying to burst onto the scene. They were looking up Sam’s vagina with a bright flashlight. One of the robed acolytes got down there with a set of calipers to measure the progress of dilation. Walker felt like some dumb animal howling at the hole. Like Lamaze was some kind of strange incantatory language or ritual necessary to have the transubstantiation of matter into man occur. “God, he’s coming! Drugs! DRUGS. Bring me Drugs,” moaned Sam. Seeing her lying there, all hooked up to the machines, Walker had a kind of vision that she was held in some form of spider web and that they were being drawn in, falling through the tunnel. They kept the lights of the hospital room cool. The room is changing from being the high contrast of hard edged instruments connected to the soft woman. It’s like stepping off into space. I’m the kind of person who does that—takes chances, makes huge leaps of faith—have done that all my life, but she isn’t. The space was not some kind of special effects deal like out of a Frankenstein movie (though it might have been with the vital significance of the event) where there is electricity running up and down the outside of his wife’s body traveling out into the machines, or anything like that. There was no big spark of lighting arcing across the towers of a Tesla coil zotting into the earth and heralding the vivification of the creature. I wasn’t going to suddenly go wild and start shouting “It’s alive!” when the new being was born. It was more like characters morphing, faces dissolving, time dilation and relativity. Who are the relatives that make up this extended family? It was family tree diagrams, fanning out and bending with the breeze in the shadows of the background, rising up and out through the ceiling and out of the building. And it was more like there were colors mixing, the mixing of races, going back and back through anthropology and archeology, back to the caves, to watching the archetypes—through the shadows they projected onto the cave walls. The trees of heredity go off in all directions, cross over and overlap, and these are people who have known each other in past lives. For a moment Walker could feel the room dissolving in her screams of pain; something’s coming in the relentless contractions, in the pull and push. An undulating water thing. It is flowing out to her, and pulling back, an undulating thing running through this human flesh. Pain was part of it too, pain undulating through his bride, pain undulating through their lives. At times she didn’t know where she was or who she was. In the middle of the night getting on toward morning the darkness turned into a kind of blueness with this tunnel vision. It is shuddering and undulating through, throwing up its wings every 3 to 4 minutes then subsiding. Sometimes it starts batting its wings faster and faster. Then subsides. A man feels out of place, shamed at what his biology has brought him to, they are probing into her well, legs open to the world, spelunkers of the ovarian trolley, for there is a hatchling kicking—trying to break off the last hold of the old and free itself to something new. Walker understood: This is someplace I definitely cannot go or cannot even know. He felt the light cone glowing around the now. It was like the monstrance, the life force showing itself. Walker looked longingly at his wife’s face, her lovely model’s face with the high cheekbones, all sweaty now and freaked out. She looked lovely even so. A person was like a kind of menorah, a candelabra of lights, a tree of hereditary going back. Oh, we have the illusion that we are individuals with choice, but really love is the illusion that life creates so it will continue fanning out like a tree with its branches stretching their twig tips up into the collective unconscious, back and back into the genetic intelligence of the races, going back into the unfolding of the universe and the uphill struggle of order against entropy. Fiery trees. It was a picture of speeded up life passages, primogenitors before him, being born and leaping up and running, copulating, and dying all in a quick dance, going back—going back. It made him wonder what was it all for. It was all happening so fast whole lifetimes lived in an instant, so that you could see only the individual arc from birth to death left hanging in the air like a solar flare, a promontory coming out of the earth and going back before quickly vaporizing. So that you only saw this surface of holes, these turbulent sphincters, and beneath that something like a flame, the flame of life, a fire burning in the core of the planet, connected to the core of the universe, the flame looking for a way to leap out high before it came down and found another opening in which to return. And it filled his imagination with gratitude to have been given this vision. He was just a part of it all.
Walker tried to imagine the life force as some kind of ubiquitous Selector, ranging over all the dominant and recessive genes flowing down the river of bloodlines and flowing down from generations, swerving past traits. And this Selector was both within and without us; it has already been at work composing the genetic makeup of this new human being. Trouble was, he knew the stories of only a couple of the closest branches, he could see only a couple of generations. He knew the story of his parents meeting in Montreal where his father was stationed a sailor during the war. And Sam’s parents meeting on a cross-country train, her father a sailor too, during the war. His mother escaping from a large, close, family of Scots in the sticks of Ontario; her mother escaping a large Italian family from Chicago. One tries not to feel like a pop-up in these moments, a mutt born from fate. One might try astrology to understand the configuration of the moon and stars at the moment of birth to check out the gravitation influence. But why not try to understand it through some kind of biological potential influence, having to do with mind and physics? What if we could do some kind of reverse time travel, some kind of metempsychosis time travel. What is the now anyway. The now is a moving point in time, and around that point there is a cone opening up toward the future before it like a scoop funneling in the future. It is the collection of possibilities coming in from all directions. And coming off the back side of the now is another cone like a bow wave, in a mirror image of the forward looking cone. The now is at the intersection of two cones like positive and negative numbers going off in opposite directions from the zero of now—the backward looking cone being the force of what has happened in the past impacting others in the now and driving forward the future from the past.
Then this great big anesthesiologist came in. He was huge and had long round shoulders and a muscular build with long blond hair. He looked like Wild Bill Hickock or Kit Carson or General Custer with a long droopy handlebar moustache making him seem like he had just walked in out of the wild west, this tall cowboy, serious as a gunslinger, with the pockets of his jacket stuffed with syringes and vials of good drugs. Walker almost laughed out loud when he learned his name: Dr. Good. Walker fell into the whole western demeanor by saying to the anesthesiologist, in his southern accent, “Doc, she’s really in a lot of pain. Can’t you give her a shot of something really good. Quick.” “Oh, Noooo,” said the anesthesiologist—drawing it out real slow and concerned, “we can’t have that.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows humorously and smiled a doper’s conspiratory smile at Walker. “I’ve got something for that.” And quick as a wink with a nod on the sly, he whipped out a shot and stuck it into Sam’s backside. To Sam the anesthesiologist was an angel of mercy holding his syringe aloft like a great sword about to come down on all the pain. And the angel said unto them: Fear not! For, behold, I bring you good tidings of, if not great joy, at least no pain. And there ain’t no better feeling than to stop hurting. But what the anesthesiologist really did say was, “She ought not to be feeling any pain now.” To prove it, he raised her arm in the air, read a pulse, and dropping the arm, watched as the limb gracefully reposed itself back to her side. And then things started going into slow motion, as Walker started to see the tunnel opening up to a vortex, as her face became a kind of landscape. For it was relaxing and for a moment the pain was subsiding, and in the contours of her face, her warm, flushed, dark Italian-Hungarian face he saw her own parents and tried to imagine their parents, going back to the remotest stories from her old father in the old country, in Hungary, about mining coal, and being a poor farmer by the side of the road when the archduke drove by in his big new European car, and that was the first time he had ever heard a radio. But beyond that, there were only the stories that still lived in the mind of that old man of natural medicines and beliefs, handed down from—yes, the Gypsies! Her people came from Gypsies, Romany back to the Mongol Huns. I’m married to a gadje girl. Could their lines have crossed before? What if it is true that they had been lovers in past lives. And then while the anesthesiologist was working real fast getting some tubes hung up and then starting a dripping epidural into his wife’s back, Walker’s imagination jumped across time and space to a medieval Gypsy wagon wandering across the Austria empire. She was a young, dark-haired Hungarian woman brought to this country as a mail order bride, with porcelain smooth skin—distractingly beautiful, eighteen with long black hair. She is lying in the back of the covered wagon giving birth, eyes lively wet, dark eyes staring, piercing, ahead, in the back of a small covered wagon carrying all their possessions across the Eurasian steppes, she is giving birth. Helpless. The Selector coursing and floating in the rivers of blood pumped through the veins of the people that have gone to make up you and me. Their stories, somehow imbedded, in the genetic memory? Metempsychosis time travel—only speeded up. See her face? It is dissolving. We’ve been coursing along, like flotsam on the river of life in flood, bursting its banks for months now. This is what forms the lines on a face. It has nothing to do with the sign at the moment of birth; that is just one force—gravity. We’re floating, up-stream against the general downward turn of entropy—anti-entropy flowing up from my own childhood earliest memories: looking up at trees. In birth the life force is an undulating water thing. Sometimes it moves and you just have to be riding in it—a boat floating along. It certainly helps to have the spinal. A shadowy manta ray thing where we are all being taken down, flowing through a tunnel. We are moving. We are holding each other in the night, and coming through this tunnel together in the birthing room. And she started flowing down the river. At first she is floating past him, she is lying in the bed as he is standing by the river, she is floating down the river, the lineage of these families going back, the merging of these family lines going back, it was like a river and she is a great sea otter on her back, floating back, dissolving, Ophelia floating back down the river and he is standing on the sidelines watching her go by. They had met out on the Eurasian steppes. He had been one of the few warriors left after a battle with the Mongols and he had taken her into his hut, because a woman needs the protection of a warrior, and in the slaughter she had become separated from her family. And she knew they had loved each other before, and he knew it too. Walker thought, “I have loved you somewhere in a great forest.” He was a Celtic warrior and she a Hun’s daughter. They met under a large oak tree at the crossroads in a clearing of the forest. There was a stele stone marking the miles to Auberge at the fork in the road. She had come to have her fortune told by the Celtic sorceresses. She would throw the rune stones and have them read. The girl fortune-teller, was sister to the big Celtic warrior-priest. He was taken by her dark beauty, the young woman and the dark man of the forests stood motionless in the light and the swirling smoke of the fire, their eyes met, and he knew he must posses this dark woman. “I have loved you before in the old medieval forests of Europe,” Walker almost said out loud.
Sedated, stoned as a mountain, the mother-to-be heard voices as if calling her from across a great divide. Something was happening with her baby. Many hours had passed and she went in and out, and all the while the doctors had been, at least every half hour, coming in to prick the uncrowned baby’s forehead and taking blood samples. These they carried across the hall for running oxygen percentage tests and bringing right back. After the oxygen content got below a certain level they called Sam and Walker into a quick consultation. “We’re going to have to do a Cesarean,” said the doctor, “the baby’s oxygen level in the blood is getting lower than we’d like. We do them all the time. There is very little danger, and you need to do it because somehow he is not getting a high enough oxygen concentration in his blood. “Here, you must sign these consent forms.” Walker sighed them. Working real fast, within a couple of minutes, they had the gurney spun around and accelerating down a hall of lights, the lights passing swiftly overhead, going by like full moons of passing months . . . he is moving along with her, the lineage of these families merging, family lines going back, it was the river, coming from the place where two forks of a river merged. And she was lying on that hospital bed under the round lights of the sun and floating swift down that river, and she saw her husband with her paddling their canoe down that river. She just lay back into the flow and let them have their way with her. Romans with a villa, her father stationed in Jerusalem. He was a carpenter and she was the daughter of a Roman legionnaire. Her father hired him to do some work on their boat. They met at a cross roads, next to a stele stone. They had to step aside and watch a great column of soldiers pass. “Look. There goes Caesar with his legions.” And because when two lines are joined, all the people who make up the nodes on the path are also joined. The baby has all that blood and presage flowing in its veins—(not to mention all the recapitulation of phylogeny). She was taking him over the rapids, the rhythms of motherhood, down the river, whether he wanted to go or not, into a place where the soul of this woman was still merged with the undifferentiated soul of her unborn child. Down the river of no return they plunged, where the nearing soul was waiting to merge with its new body. As if he were a ghost—a person able to pass through walls—Walker, fearing for the life that was hers, saw it pass before him. He floated past some objects that were symbols of her former lives, guitar, song book, fisherman’s net, a horse she had ridden to victory. Down the hall they were rushed, doors flying open, into a room—the operation theatre. A curtain was thrown open to reveal a large staff of doctors in white and nurses in green rapidly preparing. The operating room is filled with doctors and nurses and their mentors and teachers and arranged in tiers receding into the background were their parents and their parents . . . going back into time, attending the birth. There was a curtain drawn across her middle so that they could not see the proceedings. He was close up to her face and she was holding his hand tightly, awake and aware. The new father glanced up and saw the swift movement of the surgeon’s arm, saw the gleaming scalpel come down and saw only the movement of the arm, not the cut—he did not want to see the cut, which was abrupt and sure and over in an instant. “Oh, my God, it feels so weird,” was all Sam said. But her eyes were wide with fear and amazement, and they pulled this little wriggling alien out of her, and there he was all wet and pocky and red and blotchy, and they carried him around to present him to her so she could get a quick look and then whisked him past over to a little table where they suctioned the mucus out of his nose, and he started breathing. As he went past Walker gave the freaked-out newborn a quick look, and the wrinkled little bug-eyed alien seemed to look right back at him as if he was already a punk rocker saying, “Whas’up Da.” And the two were both shocked to see each other. Then they laid the baby all clean and swaddled in soft gauze, on his mother’s breast. Shaved head, no teeth, all this spastic movement—a little junkie taken from his drip. A human expelled from the garden of paradise. “Does he have all his fingers and toes,” Sam asked, smiling, amazed. Walker answered, “Yes. He’s fine and normal. Thank God.” It was 3:13 in the morning; she had been in labor for eight hours. They sent him home where he crawled into his lonely bed. That night she awoke in the hospital with fitful machinations over who would keep an eye on the baby next to the nurses’ station. There were some great nurses in there. Walker returned to her the next day with some books for the three-day stay. “I thought you might like to clip these coupons. I know you like to clip coupons, so I brought the ones out of the paper.” It was Thanksgiving, and Walker made a pecan pie for Sam and the staff. The pecans had been soaked in Southern Comfort, an old Texas recipe.
Here is the recently created father backing his car smartly down a narrow alley to the private exit at the back of the hospital. This exit is set up just for the joyous occasion when the new parents would walk out into the light of day with their tiny newborn human for the first time. Walker and Sam were like Joseph and Mary being thrust out of the garden of paradise—like Adam and Eve. Joseph and Mary had purchased the requisite, proper, government-required baby carrier seat. Under the watchful eye of the matronly head nurse, Joseph tests the security of the car seat by yanking on it with a force equal to stopping the car at 43 mph in 20 feet. The nurse—with a sobering look, as though she had the authority not to—hands off the new baby to Joseph, like a football pro doing the quarterback sneak. The new dad started running directions at the bottom of his attention. Consider the weight of the baby. Exactly how much force is needed to get the object from here to there. Consider its angle of repose and the receptacle toward which you are moving it. They should come with a manual, one that begins, “CONGRATULATIONS! You have just obtained one of this season’s people.” But they don’t. Walker wonders how Joseph must have felt picking up the son of God. Be extra careful where ever you are carrying the baby, learn to pick your route carefully. Concentrate on doing nothing but carrying your young ward through space as though you were carrying a prince to a coronation (pomp and circumstance playing in the background) as you move stately and evenly through doors, and set him down gently in the back seat of the car to be strapped in. How will you get your arms around him to dig him out of his car carrier when you get him home. Use slow force. Don’t fumble, jerk or grab the baby. Let competent supportive fingers alight around your baby like the gentle parent you now are. Take him into your arms and be sure to support his neck as you don’t want his head to fall off. When you pick up your kid up, you are picking up an extension of yourself. Handle your kid with consideration and they will smile at you.
And so the days pass. You are up and down so much in shifts that you shift from day phases into night phases and you get to study sleep deprivation. In a few months the new parents come to know it as the poor man’s virtual reality. After a while Walker actually got into it. He thought of it as a discovery. It was like being in his own sleep lab. Where you are awakened several times in the night to face your dreams. He had always wanted to do research into lucid dreaming and somnambulistic peregrination. God forbid that you should ever put him down with his eyes open. He will wake up screaming like something out of a horror movie with that high hue-ee whee wee sound track of violins being attacked in the background. He has to be carried with a smooth even motion. When Walker turns, or stops too quickly, or if he gets the baby’s foot or his own foot caught in the bed clothes, as he is trying to get the baby into the bassinet, the little micro-hellion wakes up. A middle of the night change turns into bedlam because Walker has unceremoniously dumped the little bundle of joy back into the bassinet without making sure he was asleep. Another time Walker snatched and jerked him too fast out of the bath water and the banshee did begin to wail. Careful when you round a corner don’t bump his head. But you learn. Within a few days, the new father has perfected the art of “flying” the baby, which is lofting him through space along his most natural trajectory, the one with the least resistance. They will teach you patience. They will force you to question habits of mind you have been carrying for years, because you thought that’s just the way things are. Here is the new dad fumbling with the snaps of the undershirt. Here he has put the arms in first before putting the onesie on over the head—that is the way he dresses himself, that is the way he has always dressed. But more and more he has to learn new ways. In a way, the father has to become himself like a child, putting himself into the position of a child for whom all this is new. Remember, they are just trying out their new nervous system, they will gyrate and will jump out of your hands one way or just as easily bang their heads into your teeth the other. They will kick their legs when you are trying to put their pants on, and splay out their hands and clutch at the inside of the sleeve as you put a shirt on. Be careful the thumb does not get jammed. Babies come from the world where they don’t clearly distinguish themselves from these objects. When you dress the baby pull the body of the tunic over the trunk first. Then put your hand down the sleeve, get a hold of his little hand like you were holding the petals of a flower from opening and gently pull it back up through the sleeve. Don’t try to pull the sleeve up over the hand for they will inevitable splay the fingers out and catch up the sleeve in it. Don’t get frustrated with all the snaps. They are much easier than buttons. It was the cutest thing in the world when the proud parents took their new baby out in the stroller for the first time. Here are mom and pop teasing, arguing like brother and sister: “It’s my turn to push the stroller.” “No it’s my turn.” “Nuh, uh, it’s my turn. You pushed it the last time.” Even the simple motion of sitting up, and tracking something with the eyes calls for a lot of motor and neural activity to be coordinated. Baby is able to do things over and over and over, because the rhythm is inherently good in toning and entraining their nervous systems. The baby with patience will practice the same thing over and over. As such the baby becomes like the guru of Joy.
A few days after the flight back from a family vacation, Walker wrote a letter about it to his brother Roux. Walker and Sam and their wild child, Shredder the Micro-hellion, had spent a week at a Club Med in Ixtapa, Mexico. (On the return trip, Walker had thrown out his back carrying Shredder in a backpack on the long walk through and around the airport corridors to Los Angeles customs—oddly a radio in their backpack had turned on from the jostling and began playing “Everybody is a dancing machine.” And, Walker had started a new job, with all the stress that brings.) It had been good to get away. Walker was not the type to take vacations, but Sam was. She required them. And even though Walker ate some wrong food at the sumptuous spread Club Med puts out and got tourista, and in spite of the fact that they were too incapacitated by the heat to get around much, (the rooms had air-conditioning) and even though it rained almost every day, the trip had been enlightening. The disappointments were minor compared to the blue moon dream he had on the night of the second full moon in August. And on the next night after that, just walking around the place and recording the jungle sounds, he had one of those transcendental moments you get in life. In the letter, he wrote:
Dear Roux, Sorry to have been so long getting back to you. Tried to call a couple of times. I started a new contract job at Visa doing a model of their network. It is all interactive on the computer, no paper. It is a great project, I can’t believe I am so lucky. Been hanging out all year getting a little unemployment waiting for the right gig to come along. I have made it part of my work to learn something about 3D perspective drawing, too, because it is a good way to visualize, and it solves the problems of where to click on the interactive model. Yay! Me and Sam and the Wild Child made a trip to Ixtapa Mexico. Sam is so good at saving money, made me save even out of the unemployment checks—which, believe me my brother, are small. Man, I needed the change. I’ve really become a very boring, stay-at-home guy, writing all the time, trying to save some of my art from oblivion. (Having a kid makes you want to have something to say to them.) My greatest expense is this little studio office I’m in, writing you this letter. (I got out of the cubicle box into an office box). In a house 3 blocks from home. Home, it feels funny to say that, can’t quite believe it; I’m always on the verge of bolting, but I’m hanging in. Anyway, it was one of these charter deals, to a Club Med with day care. All travel, housing, and food provided. Couldn’t put together a more attractive (cheaper) package. It was beautiful down there, right on the ocean. I love swimming in the ocean. Sam is a pool person—I didn’t go in the pool once—but Ahhh, the warm Pacific. All that bright color during the day; and I loved listening to the crickets and cicadas at night. Went out and taped them on the August blue moon. It rained almost every day, and I ate the wrong food, so I was barfing and shitting myself all one night, but that purge was part of the experience, too, and I might have seen God in the bottom of the toilet bowl and didn’t die, but laid around for several days. Besides that, somehow being on the cramped plane on the way back and lifting luggage and Shredder threw my back out, but it wasn’t a bad vacation. I’d go again. It’s a real frontier down there. Ixtapa is near Zihuatanejo. I was down there 20 years ago with a woman I was living with at the time. Back then we were following in the steps of Timothy Leary. Man, it has really changed. What a frontier town. There are swarms of workers building all this federally developed tourist mecca: high rise condos, new roads, marinas and shopping malls, in that labor-intensive, stone and earth moving way the Mexicans do things. But we mostly stayed at the Club Med village of condos which were air-conditioned as we were too bunged up to move much and too incapacitated by the heat to get around; but it was beautiful. If I was a young man with a big hammer and a truck, I’d go down there and take on that land. Grab a piece of it, for it is wild—all that bright light and color, swarming with life. As it is up here sometimes, I think, in this computer world, I feel like I have become a geek. All the time up in my head. All the time sitting in front of a computer. I’ve never had back trouble, and it scares me. You are smart to be doing physical work, it has lots of benefits. This office I have now, there are just paths between the piles of books and papers. I have accumulated tickets which are rapidly maturing in value because I haven’t been keeping up with the mail. I had this amazing experience down in Mexico, man. It came after this weird dream I had on the night of the Blue Moon. I think it has to do with what I was working on in my own writing lately. And with this family I am in. I have been thinking/working on this story called Church of the Coincidental Metaphor for a long time. It is about these guys in Austin who buy Mexican radio time for a religious parody show that they broadcast on those million-watt border bandit stations all the way up through the American bread basket. Part of the story is, the guys get a wild hair and make a trip down to Mexico to actually see the station, whose call letters are XAOS, outside of Guernalavaca. So on this journey to Ixtapa, I got a lot of imagery for the story. The boys drive down dirt roads past white-washed buildings some of which have eroded corners. A sign painted on a Farmacia is eroding, and the adobe lath behind it starts to appear. They come to the radio station outside of town. It is ochre-colored with a red tile roof and orange Satillo tiles on the patio. There are little inlaid green and blue tiles in the top and bottom corners. Anyway, on the night of the Blue Moon, Wed. Aug. 31, 1992—the second full moon in August—I had this dream. The dream had our family when we were growing up in San Antonio. I guess this was right around the time you were born ‘cause we, the sisters and I, were still real little. Somehow we got this gas station to live in. It was mostly wall-to-wall, roll-up, glass doors across the front of it. It was well off the highway, a big wide highway in Texas. (Actually, I recognized the gas station as part of all the gas stations I have worked in around San Antonio and part of the Dairy Queen on Bandera Road.) Anyway, in the dream, people didn’t always recognize that the gas station had been converted to housing, and they would drive up with the lights of their car peering in like eyes. And we were in there! Being looked at! It was such a weird place to live. The hoses, and racks, and the hydraulic lift platform were still there. Our father mounted a little platform on the lift and put a baby grand piano he got from his mother on top of it. And he would make himself rise up into the air while playing the piano and singing Summertime from Porgy and Bess. Next door to the gas station home was a huge warehouse. A big white building with no windows on any sides except for the front; it took up the whole block. (I recognized later it was Randy’s Rodeo, and it was side by side with the Dairy Queen, although in reality they are on opposite sides of the street). There was something awfully peculiar about that warehouse. There was a constant sputter and poof of energy about it. To say straight out what I think it was? The building was some kind of inter-regional exchange of a vampire expressway. In which strange beings went in and out of the corners of things. And you could observe it . . . like, it was projected on the inside of the wall. Like it was a billowing electronic pinball video game. At least I could see it. I know it sounds weird. First thing, maybe they weren’t vampires, I don’t think they actually had such a malicious intent. But the people in the building had these awful pasty-faced looks about them, and they all had a 5-o’clock shadow. Some of the men had dirty pony tails and looked untrustworthy. And I say pinball machine or video game, there was all this running around and movement of light and color. Like driving through Las Vegas fast in an open car. Only it was on a screen and pushing off the edges of the screen because the screen was wrapped around the corners of something. Well basically, there were just faces that zoomed up and disappeared around a corner, like they were goin’ down a drain. Then another face, or maybe it was the same face—altered—would take its place. I got the sense that when I was a kid I had spent a lot of time sitting out there at the gas station and watching the comings and goings-on inside the building, it was like I could kind of see through the wall. One day, in the dream, I decided to investigate this building. It was like a cochlea, and there were these rings of beads of beings circling around it. People were being converted and sent out—hammered out—into the world. “I’m not supposed to see this!” I heard my inner voice screaming inside my head. Anyway, that’s all I remembered. But now as I start trying to interpret it for you, I have to go back to the context in which it occurred. A dream is like a box within a box. A story that is aware of itself, that comments on itself. So, anyway, the context. What has coincidental metaphors got to do with it you might ask. Coincidental metaphors are like name freaks: the fact that Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. And both presidents were assassinated! Coincidental metaphors are paranoid schizophrenic insights into the way the world works. Probably totally wrong-headed. (Why am interested in this?) I think it has great potential for humor. And the radio thing, it is about voice moving at the speed of light through the air and touching down on anybody who has a receiver. Lot of poetry in that. Radio is like the Soul emanating, expanding out — invisible and touching everyone at the speed of light. I’d like to get this story right someday. There is so much to learn. But the dream; I’m trying to analyze it. A dream presents a person’s concerns in a landscape where an experience is just at the edge of human understanding. I ‘know’ where the imagery comes from. It was like when we were kids being in the Bandera drive-in movie in our pajamas, running around the car. Dad would let me and the sisters out of the car, (you must have been a babe in arms, about the age of my kid now) and I was the oldest so I was in charge. On those warm Texas nights, you could run up to the front where they had some of those steel lawn chairs, and there were swings and a merry-go-round, and it was really something to be on the merry-go-round, goin’ round and round and to look up onto the huge drive-in screen at the skewed angle, or to be swinging low and letting your feet get sucked up high into the starry sky overhead, (this was back in the 50s when there wasn’t so much pollution) and looking back up the drive-in screen at the strange black and white images upside down. One aspect of the Church of the Coincidental Metaphor is that is seeks to use parody, satire, and even blasphemy to push aside the other religions and make a place for itself. It also believes humor is at the bottom of the spiritual. Its symbol is a picture of a closed finite universe from mathematics called the Klein bottle. This is a bottle whose neck rises up out of itself, then curves back and flows back inside itself. Thus what gets poured out comes back in. It is a symbol made to supplant the cross, that dolorous image of a man who tried to help people love each other hung out to dry; or more abstractly of the way our rational mind is always having to cleave space into the horizontal and vertical (the diachronic and synchronic) and analyzing everything and itself out of the picture. The recirculating universe model instead of the analytical cross. The cochlea is a representation of this as well as the heart and lungs. Man, this is wild. Here I am talking to my brother about a dream that included our family, a dream that came about from an artistic quest for a symbol of a religion that poured back in upon itself through the languages of imagery. And it comes to me, the Klein bottle is about the dream’s desire to be perfectly fulfilling, like the way nature pours what comes out of itself back into itself. It’s a picture of natural fractal feedback across dimensions, a dance before your eyes, a subliminal opera among one’s conscious, subconscious, and superconscious folding and rotating and sliding into and out of one human form into another and into your own true animal identity, even into and out of spirit and matter. But as it was, down in Mexico on this family trip me and Sam and Wild Bill were on, getting sick those couple of days, where I got purged, and it’s raining a lot, and being as I quit drinking coffee making me really sensitive, except I slept a lot which is great because I stayed with the wee lad, and we took naps together in the afternoons while Sam went to her aerobic classes, and I stayed with him at night while Sam went out to shows because I don’t really care to watch a bunch of actors jumping around. I just didn’t feel all that good until near the end, when I did some body surfing and took a sailing lesson. I learned a great move from the locals: when playing in the surf, standing with your back to an incoming wave, when the wave comes in, leap up in the air, and let it take your legs out from under you and you just slide backwards down the back-side of the wave as it moves on through. It is like doing an arching pole vaulting maneuver. Really fun. The little local Mexican kids at the beach loved it when I started doing this backover maneuver with them. Well, I’m just rambling on now, better get this off. Love, Walker
On the last night before they were to leave Ixtapa and after the dream, Walker strolled around the grounds making an audio tape of the sounds and the space. He had a way of curling up a tiny microphone back on its lead and inserting one in each of his ears! So then the recording used the acoustics of his headspace to give a binaural rendering of the 3D locations of the sounds in the space. He now put on the earphones and played the tape recording. He listened to the recording he had made and the memory of the idea of home, of being part of family, flooded in. Walking around the grounds of the Club Med on the hot tropical full moon night had been one of those moments when your life comes into focus, and you just kind of know that this is where you are supposed to be. He was walking by himself, with the DAT. Marveling at the headroom of the Digital Analog Tape recorder. He was picking up the waves coming ashore on the beach below. And when the waves receded, he could hear the wall of cricket and cicada song rising. He could hear people beyond normal hearing range in the night clubs and bars talking and glasses tinkling. Then, when the waves rolled in below, these sounds were drowned out in the sucking-slide sound of receding ocean white noise over shore stones. Everywhere the bushes on the well-kept grounds were swaying in a dance, doing that white-noise shhh-shee-tittlescree that they do in the wind. The gaslight torches with warm flames were flickering against peach and pink and ochre colored walls. These were the inverse of the day’s green jungle fan against the blazing blue sky and earth colors in a bright clime. The place was like the Alamo. Except the thick adobe ivy-draped walls were warm colored. The Spanish effect was enhanced by lighting alcoves and niches and arches. Huge ceramic urns stood silently beside portals like fat guards. Lights strung through trees focused the attention on what is being illuminated, magnolia trees lit from below made them look like gothic or rococo altars at a medieval Church of Natural Philosophy with openings and mouths for a cathedral effect. The walkway beneath his feet was dappled in a leafy pattern from being lit from above. You could see luminaire itself because the lanterns from which the light was emitted had frosted, sandblasted glazing. And when Walker looked back at the little bright-colored green door of their condo room, the velvety, soft, diffused, off-white rays of luminous moon-glow coming down from a perfectly round full moon magnified in the tropical sky pierced the layers of the space like it was a glass box, to illuminate boxes within the box. Inside the outside box was one man, walking ‘neath the full moon out away, past the edge of the complex to the slide of the sea. Inside the inside box was one woman and a child (who was the union of the man and woman). The man himself was of such a union. And he imagined the two of them in there, his wife and his child, in a tender light, mother and child together, locked in each other’s loving gaze. And he thought: Yes, this is the definition of good. He continued, moving slowly at the pace of the regular slow sea. He felt as perceptive as water seeking its own level. Moving down the hill, he felt like a falling wave, crashing in on the shore from beyond. And looking the other way you could see beyond: past the ramparts of the hotel, to the indistinct mountains, making up the edge of things. The clouds in the distant night sky were illuminated from behind by the moon which had gone over the horizon. It made the clouds look like mushrooming shadows cast up by the trees, as if the trees were standing in the way of a light that came from below, from within the earth. This was the night side of things, where the trees had learned how to be from the ancient clouds. |