The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (14 page)

Perfectly Ordinary Dream #254 (February 20,1981)

How sad the depression was. Yet, throughout it all, the 1930s were the light sparks of excitement rattling in his bones. All those decades riding the rails he never saw the poverty leave this world, and it was his conclusion that no one could survive it. He spent much of his time alone, speakeasy style, slipping from shadow to shadow along the night. His mind ready for anything, distracted by nothing, he was wearing the skirts of the past. The night so black it couldn't possibly exist. On the other side of the alley there is an invisible               wearing a brown down fill'd jacket and tie scrawling childlike words across a wall: ‘Mr P. Cob_ /
BEWARE
'. The word BEWARE written in such a delicate calligraphy that it looks indecipherable, but our hero is ready to imagine it says any-thing, anything at all. How sad it is, he thinks, that throughout this dark hull of a city people are covering up each other's tracks. Painting over every artifact they can find in a quick attempt to claim it, to make it new and suitable to their own states of being. It all layers itself naturally, without any effort, and origin has no voice here. It is 1934 (it has been here for so long) and everyone is deep in the heart of a depression. Why does the rest of the world insist on becoming invisible at moments like these? Shaking his head at the invisible        who is still writing, he cannot believe the mind could shut down on itself, cannot believe there is anything worth saying about meeting exactly where our darkness covers up the tracks. In an instant he is ten feet back, and the invisible has sketched a square which is, he decides, the same size as the building on which it has been drawn. It is all very shocking. In an instant he is thirty feet back and the building is the same size as the sketch it is drawn on. And inside the square, he has noticed, is says nothing at all. In an instant he is seventy feet back and the man, still writing, is gone. And nothing happened.

Perfectly Ordinary Dream #1860
¹
(July 9,1969)

We might as well be dead, and happy, and alive. It was the greatest reading he would ever give and as a blessing she was present. O the beauty of a single red head! This, too, would come to be an historic occasion, for it was the only time she would see William Blake read to an audience. At least she thought it was him up there on the stage. It was hard to tell, the way he hunched over himself, not even bothering to face the audience (of which she was the only member), his long wispy hair falling like curtains over his face, as though they might rise at any moment and the play would begin again. A
single table, centre stage, at which a man sits. A waitress appears (as though from nowhere) and takes the man's order. When she turns, the man watches her hum swaying away to the bar, and smiles to himself (for there is no one else in the bar). He pulls a revolver from his coat pocket. At the exact moment she begins to pull his beer, he shoots himself in the head.
The curtain falls. And William Blake remains hunch'd over his beer on the stage, reading his poems in the most clear, booming voice imaginable. It echoes around the empty room. There is not even a microphone. It is almost as though he does not wish his body to be present, only his voice. And she slowly begins to realize a most amazing sadness, she feels it bubbling up around the front of her skull: What sadness to have something to say, and no one who will listen. How sad and how beautiful the persistence, the sheer will to believe absolutely in what your mind can do. Another frothy beer appears on the table before her. No matter what brand she orders this same milky broth appears. Soap. Soap Milk. How strange, she thinks. Drunk out of her mind in the middle of the afternoon.

Perfectly Ordinary Dream # 1867 (January 21,1932)

Rimbaud was not only surprised that the man standing before him wanted to publish his writing so adamantly, but that he didn't even recognize him as the author. ‘This is the finest writing I have
EVER
laid my eyes upon', the man was saying (although he was of course speaking in French which is difficult to translate offhandedly). ‘I have arrived as quickly as I could in order to publish it'And he handed Rimbaud his favorite pieces of writing, one sheet at a time. Such were the many twists of fate he had experienced since he began working at the photocopy shop, and it was not the last. The author noticed that his publisher's tastes did not exactly coincide with his own, as he chose to publish work that was more flowery and wigged-out (as he had referred to it in his journal) than the outrageously violent pieces Rimbaud preferred. ‘I wish to give copies of these to each one of my friends'said the man. ‘Please, if you are to help me'Rimbaud placed the pages into the machine and printed fifteen thousand copies on recycled paper, each one stapled at the top left hand corner, as the man requested. He did not bother to say anything, but thought to himself how ridiculous it is to print fifteen thousand copies of anything, let alone some rambling scraps of writing done in fits of loneliness or exultation. But it was all in a day's work, he thought, and one must earn one's living at the expense of 'les feux de la monde'. He wasn't even pissed off that he had never given his consent to this man (was it a man? he wondered) to make free copies of his work to give to just anybody ('who knows who will read it?' said his excited publisher several times over the hum of the machine) but then again, Rimbaud hadn't bothered to get permission to write them either. At last the razor-sharp sound of the photocopier came to an end. In the dead silence that followed, Rimbaud handed the man his printing, took his money, and accepted one copy of his new book, for, as the man said, since they had done business together, they were now friends.

Perfectly Ordinary Dream #1922 (December 12,1954)

As a young man, Cravan worked in the hippest libraries

in town, both serving drinks and as a kind of mental

co-ordinator. He was quite there in the sense that he

had become accustomed to his own happiness, content

to be earning a living doing something he rather enjoyed

for a change. Hiding in the dark corners of rooms fill'd

with books and journals, he could read telepathically

what and as he pleased, his feet resting upon a shelf, a

pen scrawling leisurely across one page or another. It all

depended upon who he felt like BEING at any given moment,

Miles Davis or Ezra Pound, Patrick Cobain or Drum Nick

the sailor. Just then, the fat man sitting behind a large

wooden desk began to complain loudly. Cravan was

apparently not doing his job satisfactorily, and, well,

admitted the clerk with a certain flabbiness, was simply

not very good at doing anything at all. ‘Fine!' shouted

Cravan at the top of his bowel'd lungs, at first thinking he

would simply quit the job altogether, then thought the

better of it, for what else could there be to do with one's

life? ‘Here, sir, are your Maps!' He slammed the rolls of

paper onto the sweating man's desk, scattering his charts

and graphs, his pages and pages of accounted figures,

everything flying into the air like so much dust. Throwing

the lightest blow of his life to the man's face. Not even

capable of denting the grin, Cravan turned on his heel

and disappeared into the darkness forever.

Perfectly Ordinary Dream #1962 (September 17, 1985)

The fall couldn't even wake him up. Luckily,

the movie followed him down… in Slow

Motion. Easiest thing he ever done, ever.

Imagine waking up so deep in the gut, cover'd with

snow from the inside out but finding it warm. Then             [
JOHN

imagine not waking up at all. There were so                          
BERRYMAN
…]

many windows in the place when we moved there

it was no wonder that he fell, no wonder he couldn't

revive at that last possible second. And they say if you

die in a dream…

The dull angles of that

particular city were only dull, and grey, though

often bright and tempting at that time of the year.

We knew it as the slow motion of Hollywood and

football games what wore them out. I mean everyone,

not just the addicts. We could quite easily live in

this room forever now. There is such a nice view.

Only a little blood on the ankle, sticking out of the

broken windshield. And that's downstairs. It's so

fucking wonderful to follow the angels through an

open window, man, you float about three feet above them

all the way down. Facing the dopey expression

on these poets' faces can only be a parody of the great

literature of the world; it's just a little joke. Just

look at the great literature of the world. And at his hair

rustling in the wind, so vain in its attempt to be the air.

And the stillness of which is the world's greatest

poetry waiting patiently to be discovered.

Then imagine not waking up.

Perfectly Ordinary Dream #1979 (May 4, 1996)