Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (26 page)

'In the middle of the dark wood, in order to avoid suicide, I gave myself over to temporary death, or sleep. There are times when we who aren't loved must do this. There are times when we who aren't loved must be celibate and frigid.

'The realms of dreams are that of death because the dreamer doesn't expect,' the night mused. 'The dreamer knows what is happening and the world. Dreams which resemble death heal the wounds from living.

'So having no expectations, when I least expected it - as always happens - , I was unexpectedly thrown again into waking reality which I'm unable to know. To my surprise, I found myself in paradise.

'Awake.

'I rubbed my eyes almost out to see if I was really awake. It was morning's beginning: the sun was slowly but steadily rising with the stars that were with it when this world was and is wholeness. My heart, exalted, quivered.

'How could I know whether my heart had any right to be so exalted: to dance, prance, and glance in play? How could I know if what I was seeing was real? How could I know if I was real? How could I know? I know that I saw because seeing is knowing. Necessarily I knew then as I know now. If I was dreaming, I am dreaming,' concluded the night.

'I saw the most beautiful castle that has ever appeared to any seer. Mirrors made up all its surfaces. Since it reflected everything, it must have been invisible.

'This is what I saw:

'Two mirrors, beings doors, opened. I saw an old male creep.

'"Old male creep," I would have said if I hadn't been dreaming.

'This old male creep had no arms. Medals of literary honor hung down from his armless school tweed. In the midst of this jacket, a salt-and-pepper beard made out of snot reached down to its bottom edge. As is the case with Oxford intellectuals who aren't artists, a rosary lay around a red pimply neck. The rosary's beads were large, as befit them. This appearance, this inner confidence, and this great dignity filled me with the utmost respect. 'Old male creep,' I said.

'Upon hearing these words, he walked up to me and hugged me. 'Don Quixote. I have been waiting for you for a long time in this paradise which is England. Finally you have come here. For you are the one, oh valiant knight, who can make me giggle.

' "How can I make you giggle? How can anyone make all of you giggle?" I asked while I looked around paradise or England. I was a tourist. 'You seem perfect.'

'"No," he reprimanded me in his kind schoolmasterly way. "The more our ruling classes, who have knowledge, have, the more they want. This is the nature of paradise, but this is besides the point.'

'"What is the point?" I asked. Being a female, I'm not used to points.

'"The point is just what you've been trying to avoid all your adult life. The point is that you're the one who can show us how to be pointless or dream. For you, night, live in the clouds."

'At this point, I asked him if he was the one who had carved out his friend Duranduran's heart with a tiny dagger, then carved up the material and carried the carved-up bits off to Belerma, who was a beautiful girl. He said yes, loudly. It was in his ancestral blood, for his ancestors had had an empire. I

told him it was a great pleasure for me to meet him: just as my former country, the United States of America, had been his country's colony and pupil' may I be his sevant and student.

'Thereupon he took me around his castle of mirrors. Inside one morror: a stone-like man lay horizontally on a rock slab. His right hand lay over his heart.

'"This is Duranduran," the old creep said, proudly. "As he was dying, he told me to cut out his heart. For he loved.'

'I didn't understand how any man could want to be cut up and lose his heart.

'"The point, which you still haven't gotten," my teacher taught me, "is that all of us are enchanted.

We can't dream. But we don't know who our evil enchanters are."

'"I know who the evil enchanters are."

'Not hearing his pupil, "we don't know why they commit the atrocities they commit. Even though my friend's dead, you can still hear him screaming. Don't you hear his screams? Can't you hear the screams of all the people who're dead?"

'"I hear their screams."

'At this point, Duranduran screamed, Old male creep. You said you were my friend. Then you murdered me.

Is this why I'm hurting so much? If I were dead, my pain wouldn't be such. Rather than enchanted I want to be dead, for now I can feel this cold stone, my bed. This life is bad.

'As soon as the old male creep heard his friend's poem, he kissed his feet. 'Oh my friend, my friend. You can't really be dead! I didn't really kill you! This world must be reasonless.

'"In such a reasonless world, isms such as capitalism, rationalism, imperialism, socialism, communism can't make sense!

'"In such a world, time which is measured therfore rational can't exist. Time is now annihilated, annihilation: for us the future doesn't exist.

'"Since no one believes in cause and effect anymore, - why else would rich people be polluting their own home? - any one does anything. Such freedom is what we name
paradise.

'"The political mirror of this individual simultaneity of freedom and imprisonment is a state of fascism and democracy: the United States of America.

'"What is your choice?'

'I was stunned. "I have a choice?' I asked, though I had no idea what I meant byvwhat I was saying, for I was stunned.

'"Since you have no choice and you must choose," the old creep answered, 'this is what being
enchanted
means - tell me: who are you?"

'"Who can I be?" I looked at the victimizer and his victim, who were tied to each other by friendship. I have started to cry and I cannot stop crying,

for those who, having nothing, homeless, would flee,

but there is nowhere to flee; so we travel like pirates on shifting mixtures of something and nothing. For those who in the face of this mixture act with total responsibility:

I cried so much I bothered everyone around me.

'"She-"'

Upon hearing this, all the dogs barked.

'"She
who can tell us who victimizers are,
She
who can see and tell us because
She's
loony because
She
has become the ancient art of madness, or literature.
She
is in front of us right now." The old fart and his corpse stared at me.

'I stared back.

'"Because by killing the enchanters
She'll
disenchant us, great deeds are done by great women."

'His words made me so nervy I looked behind me. I saw a beautiful woman about whom they had been speaking.

'"My love," the corpse screamed.

'The most beautiful woman in the world was white. In my vision I asked my guide why the most beautiful woman in the world has white skin.

'"Because black people lived in Africa." He further explained so I had to understand. "The lands comprising Nigeria were the most magnificent of the human realm due to the power of Ogun who wields the tool of war.

'"It is the beginning of day.

'"At the beginning of day, Ogun, robed in his bloody garment, gleaming oranges and reds and pinks which are light, leaves his home which is at the top of a hill. With machetes like rays he clears his way through the unmappable tangles. Finally, in glory, he reaches the surrounding waters. In the waters all the hidden monsters, fish that liquid gravity has flattened into steel-like weapons, crocodiles whose teeth burn more than the rays of light, whales materially or actually beyond human perception, our monsters hold Ogun as their king.

'"Nigeria was the most powerful nation in the world.

'"One day, Ogun, the Holder of Power and Decisions, met the most beautiful woman in the world. She was white. Since beauty is the fount and the human creation, she was the mother of all people.

' "Of course she walked right into Ogun's heart and he into hers, and they walked, around and around while morning burst into gleaming and into the light of day, and their creative sources their love and hatred which is love blazed for three years.

'"Because for three years the white woman kept Ogun, black Power, in her bed, and so almost decimated Nigeria, black people out of hatred fear white people. Black people think white people're able to do anything."

'I laughed at the white male creep who had just told me this story.'

The dogs started barking.

'"Blacks don't fear white people."

'"You should have respect for your elders," the old creep reprimanded me.

'"Why? If there's no time, there's neither age nor old age anymore. If you were an elder, you'd at least have old age, but, as far as I can tell, you've so few brains in your head, you have nothing. How, then, can you have visions?"

'"Don Quixote. Here none of us can see truly anymore because we're enchanted."'

At this point the dogs, who had been eagerly listening to Don Quixote's tail, asked the knight what it's like to be

enchanted and enslaved. 'Do those who're enchanted eat, shit, and fuck just like we do?' asked the dogs.

'In my vision, those who're enchanted, since they're no longer in touch with their own bodies, have no ideas what their needs are. Therefore they don't need to to eat, shit, or fuck, and they don't care who they elect as their political leaders.

'Since Jesus Christ made his disciples sleep on beds of thorns, religion is enchantment.'

'Don't the enchanted sleep?' asked a young hound who had read
ENDYMION.

'The enchanted, as all prisoners know well, don't sleep because all through my vision, no one I saw shut an eye and neither did I.'

'It isn't possible for people not to sleep,' a bitch yapped. 'You're just putting us on.'

'How can I not see what I see? How is a lie possible - for a seer?'

'If we can't trust you,' the dogs barked, 'we can't trust anything in this world, even ourselves.'

'I saw Queen Guinevere and Sir Launcelot.' Don Quixote continued her vision.

'Where's this leading, night? Where're you leading us?'

'I'm not leading you anywhere because I'm not leading you.

'I addressed our Queen, but She didn't reply to me. Thus I recognized English royalty.'

'Is Queen Guinevere enchanted?'

'Right when I saw Queen Guinevere,' Don Quixote explained, 'two of my girlfriends who had OD'd about four years ago so were now enchanted asked me for forty quid for a shitted-up black rag they were holding to my nose. Enchanted, they thought this was a skirt. Since I highly value friendship, I never lend money to friends, especially dead ones and more especially junkies.

'But I was upset about my friends. "Do enchanted or dead people live in poverty all the time?" I asked my guide.

'"Of course they do. Do you think that only living humans are poor? Do you think that people who have endless power, which is wealth, and so can do whatever they want, elect to

control a limited realm? The powerful of this world can control everyone: living and dead.

'"Know this, Don Quixote," my guide taught: "Those who control political and social power are determined on total annihilation. Poverty and want are everywhere, all the time, in the imagination, in all living and dead being."

'I was so scared of being poor, I refused to give my friends the forty pounds they wanted. Thereupon,' the night explained, 'my vision ended.'

'Is it possible,' all the dogs cried, 'is it possible that all the enchantments - poverty, alienation, fear, inability to act on desire, inability to feel - have made you unable to see and feel visions?'

'Yes. I am a failure.'

Intrusion Of A Badly Written Section

A real vision: There's no longer nature: trees bushes, mainly: unboxed space and time. There're only rooms. Whatever you do, whether you're successful or unsuccessful, you only are in some room.

The vision is: there's no joy.

TV's sit in most of the rooms. While I was watching TV, my TV moved away from the wall. The TV became blacker and the wall became whiter until the blackness was completely divorced from the whiteness.

No thing in this world or room had anything to do with any other thing. Each thing by itself was beautiful. Each thing had no meaning other than itself, or meant nothing. The room was existing surfaces, as TV.

There's no way out of any appearance because an appearance is only what it is. The room was my nightmare or jail. I, a night, want to escape: I want to stop being a knight, the night. I want to escape myself.

How can I escape being? How can I do myself in?

Suicide's no answer, is no way of getting rid of the night, for my mother accomplished nothing by suiciding except a legacy of anger and fear. The self must be more complicated than life and death, more complicated than duality.

If I can't escape from the room by kiling myself, I must be

able to escape, if I can, by being happy. By embracing and believing myself, just appearances, the night. By embracing, and believing, my deepest being which is not knowing. Therefore my vision has ended.