Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (13 page)

The scene of my dream was a broad meadow beyond that tunnel that led away from the constraints of the real world. In a spot that was not visible from inside the tunnel stands a young but robust holly tree. Ah, I realize, dreaming, so the place I have been imagining until now is this broad meadow. In that case, the tunnel from my son's dream must lead here too. Sure enough, as though endowed with the power to see for the first time by the very thought, I behold Eeyore having just emerged from his own tunnel, radiant in the nakedness with which he was born. He stood as in Blake's early painting
Glad Day,
bathed in sunlight with his arms flung wide and balancing on one leg. I not only accepted my son's nakedness as natural, I was persuaded that this powerfully muscled body was his true essence (a fear of food poisoning had caused him to cut down on his eating recently and he had lost weight but was still flabby in the chest and belly), that a man's body, in Blake's words, “does not exist distinct from his soul.”

Eeyore's naked, quintessential body was a revelation to me. I described it, its whereabouts in my dream, in a note I scribbled on an index card at my bedside the minute I woke up:
My son presented to me the most beautiful body of his life. The tempered muscles of a youth ripple beneath the radiant skin of an infant. The sensitivity and spirit revealed in this body are unmistakably symbolic. They are the lucid expression of a certain spiritual essence. Dreaming, I understand perfectly that this essence, in the universe of my dream, defined by spiritual symbols only, is known as “Eeyore.” My son has fallen to earth in order to reveal to me the spiritual essence “Eeyore.” Had he not existed, I would certainly have perished without ever discovering the spiritual essence “Eeyore.” Presently, I become aware that to my son in my dream, I, too, appear as a symbol manifesting a certain spiritual essence. I notice that I have assumed the form of the birds whose voices were the only sounds he took plea-sure in hearing as an infant. “Wren” is the spiritual essence my life conveys. If I could see its shape, invisible to me, the meaning of my life, having been born into the universe to labor, sorrow, learn, and forget, would be revealed. With the quiet beating of wrens wings I fly toward my son's gleaming head, trying to see my own form reflected in his eyes.

But a dark whirlpool drew me down, blissful at having touched the kernel of the universal meaning of my life and just as terrified, to awakeness on this side of the tunnel. But, even awake, as I described the dream on the index card, I felt that the spiritual essence “Eeyore” was still firmly in my grasp and that all I had to do to capture it was write it down.

The specifics of my dream made it clear that it was rooted in my memory of Blake's painting,
Glad Day.
In the world of Blake's mythological epics, the gorgeous young man who is the naked figure in the painting is called Orc and symbolizes the passion of fire. On another symbolic level, he also stands for the kinetic energy of the French Revolution, a subject of urgent interest to Blake. In the sense in which I used the expression in my dream as though it were familiar to me, Orc embodied in the world of man and in the universe of demigods which overarched that world the
spiritual essence
of the passion of fire. Twenty years after he had painted
Glad Day,
Blake attached a commentary to it which began, “Albion rose from where he labored at the mill with slaves.” In Blake's mythological universe, Albion represents Everyman. The Albion who laments, in the poem in
Songs of Experience
in which a youth is burned to death, “Are such things done on Albion's shore?,” is at the same time the old word for England, the country of “white land.” As I studied a reproduction of
Glad Day,
it occurred to me that in my dream I had superimposed the figure of my son, the manifestation in the mythological universe of the
spiritual essence
"Eeyore,” on the radiantly joyful figure of Albion, liberated from his labors everywhere on earth, that most good and beautiful form of humankind itself.

I had another dream, also influenced by a painting of Blake's but largely painful, in which the essence of body-and-spirit Eeyore revealed itself as baleful. In this dream, the opposite of the earlier, Eeyore laid bare a spirit so base and mean that I lowered my eyes when I came face-to-face with him the following morning. Once again he is naked, but this time his nakedness as he stands in a darkened kitchen is ugly and malevolent. Having come in through a rear door he stands with his legs spread, and I am squatting with my face against his lower belly as though rubbing it, the reptilian odor so strong it remained in my nostrils even after I awoke. I have bared his penis to examine it, it remains rigid even though he has ejaculated, and I recall that this is the condition the young men in our village called “fool's bone.” Plainly, even in the darkness, Eeyore's penis, like a kneadable mass encased in a leather bag, was bloody. I was seized by the deepest despair, and by a bizarre jubilation entangled in it that threatened to burst from me in a hoarse scream. I sensed the agitated presence outside the house of the respectable citizens who had followed Eeyore and who must not be harmed, and said, in a voice that might have been despair or a whoop of joy, “Eeyore, so you finally did it!” Looking down at me, Eeyore's face was swollen to twice its size. Eyes like the eyeballs of a cow. The upward arc of his tongue extended to its full length between his thinly opened lips. And, above all, the abnormal massiveness of his shoulders and upper arms, and, covering the skin all over them, the scales.

Eeyore's expression and body in this dream, unquestionably him while not resembling him in the slightest, also had their origins in a painting by William Blake. The Blake series known as Visionary Heads includes a famous work titled
The Ghost of a Flea,
During a certain period in his later years, at the urging of the watercolorist John Varley, who was also an astrologer, Blake sketched portraits of mythological and historical characters who had appeared to him in visions. He always asserted that his art was based on apparitions and even that he copied down his verse just as he had heard it spoken.

Late one night, alongside portraits of imaginary and historical characters from David and Solomon to Edward the First who had appeared as visitations in Blake's studio, Varley discovered the painting
The Ghost of a Flea.
According to Varley's account to his friends, which was recorded, the story of the painting's creation was as follows. The previous night, when he had visited Blake as was his custom, he had found him even more agitated than usual. This was because Blake had just beheld something wonderful, the “ghost of a flea.” Blake was however not able to capture it in a painting. As Varley pressed his friend to paint what he had seen, Blake, who had begun to stare into a corner of the room, declared, “It's here—
reach me my things
—I must keep an eye on it!” Describing the monster's tongue dart, expressing its malevolent appetite, from between its lips, the bowl for catching blood in its hand, the green and gold scales which covered its body, Blake proceeded to paint a portrait exactly as he described it, according to Varley.

In the horrifying image of
The Ghost of a Flea,
my dream had revealed a different Eeyore to me. But the malevolence of that image, no less than my bizarre scream, had its origin in me and no one else. This had nothing to do with my son. On the contrary, I felt like turning to myself and saying, “I see! So these are the twisted thoughts that occur at the outer limits of your consciousness when you consider the issue of your son's sexuality now that he's nineteen!”

Eeyore didn't tell dirty jokes or clown around about sex; when folio-sized monthly magazines full of nude photographs arrived at the house, he would throw them in the trash unopened as he helped sort the mail, and even assuming that his prudish-ness was an expression of the dilemma posed by sex at his age, I don't believe the incident in my dream could have occurred in reality. Finally, the images in my dream must have had to do with sexual issues of my own.

Nevertheless, I found myself unable to look my son in the eye the following morning and, for the same reason, I began avoiding
The Ghost of a Flea
in art books. But my son's reaction to M's severed head, which I described at the beginning of the chapter, led to an opportunity to refashion my relationship to Blake's painting. It came in the form of a letter from Martha Crowley in which she directed my attention to an essay on
The Ghost of a Flea
in a recent edition
of Blake Studies.
Her letter was as follows: “Thank you so much, Professor, for the wonderful time at your house. The food was delicious. I am ashamed of the position I took about Eeyore. I felt as if he were touching the head of M's phantom with his hand, and I was terrified. When I got home, I talked about you with my mother, whose field is European art history. We discussed Eeyore, and Blake. Mother pulled off the bookshelf a copy of
Blake Studies
that Geoffrey Keynes himself had sent her when she was young. Needless to say, she wanted me to see Blake's Visionary Heads and ‘The Ghost of a Flea.’ I'm sure you must have read this. Don't you think that Eeyore probably had his ‘tongue in his cheek’ when he pretended to be seeing a vision of M, just as Lord Keynes said Blake had? Wasn't he enjoying this huge joke on us? If that was the case, it was wrong of me to criticize you as if it were a serious problem. I'm sure you must have it already, but I'm sending the second edition
of Blake Studies
under separate cover.”

In this way I came to read immediately the one essay I had skipped in the book by Lord Keynes, editor of the standard edition of Blake's verse, and was impressed by the elegance of his argument and by the manner in which Martha had applied it to Eeyore's case. No less than its prose style, the wonderful illustrations in this large, unhurried book reveal a man of culture and broad learning and reinforce its thesis, which is developed in the informal style of a journal. As Keynes's iconographic analysis is unique, I would like to summarize it here, avoiding repetition of the episode I have already described.

Keynes introduces the account by Varley, and includes as illustrations all the pictures related to
The Ghost of a Flea,
The tempera painting is overwhelmed by the virulent presence of the Ghost striding past stars and a comet, which are visible through a dark window. There are also two sketches; one is used as an illustration in what might be called Varley's “Zodiac Guide to the Stars.” His description of how the flea painting illustrates the connection between human personality and the planets is also introduced. It appears that Blake's painting supports this astrologer's theories. The other sketch, in tempera, is an exercise focused on the upper body, and includes a detail of the area around the lips. These sketches convey a certain jocundity very different from the macabre mood of the tempera painting. Yet another of Blake's many sides as a painter.

After detailing the history of these paintings in a meticulous, unhurried narrative from the moment of their creation to their current whereabouts, Keynes develops the position, supported step-by-step with references to the two sketches in particular, that the painting supposed to be a sketch of
The Ghost of a Flea
as it had appeared in a vision was in fact based on the miniature of a flea in a book of “Micrographia” that had been published in the mid-seventeenth century, a copy of which Blake was bound to have seen. Apparently, Keynes had been a surgeon for many years: his approach was definitely that of a scientist. He suggests that Varley was motivated to accept Blake's explanation so eagerly because, if it were true, the painting would serve as an invaluable substantiation of his own astrological thinking. But there was evidence to suggest, Keynes continued, that Blake had been speaking
with his own tongue in his cheek
when he declared that the “ghost of a flea” had appeared before him as he moved his painter's brush.

Keynes's analysis showed me a new face of William Blake and gave me another way to think about Eeyore behaving as though he were face-to-face with M's phantom. Just as Martha had suggested. The liberating effect of this allowed me to look at
The Ghost of a Flea
without a tightening in my chest. Not that I was any better able to dispel my anxiety about a moment in the future when I might reveal the “ghost of a flea” inside myself—it was I, after all, who had dreamed that grotesque dream.

That autumn, my wife and I made plans to take the children to our cabin in the mountains of Izu. Ten years ago we had seen a photograph—flocks of starlings exploding into the sunset sky from the zelkova trees on a tiny cape jutting into the sea—and had begun visiting the spot to enjoy that stirring sight with our own eyes. The land I eventually bought there was on a small hill back from a cliff covered in laurel and beyond a woods where the thin layer of earth covering the rocks was crisscrossed by the roots of old trees. There was a single bayberry tree on the hill; basically, I bought a small square of the slope that surrounded it.

The purchase of this land was in itself, considering the state of our finances, a reckless act, but I was drawn to it, above all, by the bayberry tree and also by the variety of the other trees and especially the giant zelkovas in the surrounding woods. Yet if that had been all, I should have been content to own a single bayberry, to approach it from time to time to examine the trunk and admire the foliage, to gaze up at the branches near the top and to survey the thick stands of trees in the near vicinity. Instead, I built a cabin on the property, adding to our financial burden, a step I took because of a premonition that some day before long my son and I would end up living together in Izu. I can recall a number of moments that led me to this feeling.

The year Eeyore entered his second year of special classes in middle school, as an experiment designed to cure his bed wetting, I began waking him up once in the middle of the night and taking him to the bathroom. In those days I was up until dawn anyway, working or reading, so this was easy enough for me to do; besides, the chance to see Eeyore again after he had gone to sleep felt rather like an added bonus for the day. Except for the following point of difficulty. As Eeyore lay in bed still half asleep, I would remove his diaper—if it was dry it was a simple thing to fasten the diaper again—exposing his lower belly. At that moment, reminding me of the animated film I had seen as a child in which the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi bares its fangs to strike, Eeyore's penis sprang upward from its confinement. Every night, this terrible sight struck a blow at my heart. As it happened, Eeyore was at just that age when his penis seemed to be enlarging right before my eyes.