Where Seas and Fables Meet (9 page)

Letters written on the wall that faded before I could read them.

Letters written on the wall that appeared to be beamed in from outside, but when you looked – there didn't seem to be a source.

The trees rustle in the wind, the trees whispering what seems to be the word, “yes.” The trees have letters, too.

I take signs from many places. A tree, the forest, the rivers, the creeks, the waterfalls, the feel of the wind on my cheek, the clouds and the sky, the communication towers, the stadiums, the domes, the bank buildings, the neon, books, CDs, Blu-rays, radios, cinema, YouTube – from wherever they come, from wherever I read them or sense them or think them through or simply receive them.

If we were placed in a cosmos created by love, if nature is part of the language of the universal soul, then we honour that creation by acknowledging that, when we make languages (buildings, alphabets, numbers, and

digits), love and wisdom are potentially present in them, too. They're part of the speech of the greater cosmos.

The communiqués of the stars. The communions of cities. Everything speaking.

The Story-Seller
: the gift-shop where a storyteller sells stories to people who need a tale to tell. Parables for sale, anecdotes on bargain tables. He mail-orders plots. Fables are 10% off, if you purchase two or more.

Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's Wife
: a novel on the robust woman and her young poet lover. It would be the story of the mother of Shakespeare's twins, and of the fading of a marriage. What happened to her when the bard returned from London, during his retirement from the stage? Did she welcome the errant Will back?

Shakespeare Out of Love
: the women in
King Lear, Othello, Macbeth

A History of the Angels: the Fallen and Unfallen

Investigations of the Wind
: A History of the Forms of the Wind

The Conversations of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman

Roulin: The Story of the Postman Who Cared for Vincent van Gogh

Illuminating 1860: Imagined Encounters in New England between Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conversations in Père Lachaise: What the Ghosts Say
. Dialogues between Jim Morrison, Paul Éluard, Sarah Bernhardt, Max Ernst, Molière, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Yves Montand, Proust and the Members of the Paris Commune.

Fearful Symphony: Heart of Darkness
told from a native's point of view, from Kurtz's point of view, from the Harlequin's point of view, from Kurtz's fiancée's point of view. Joseph Conrad's story told again in multiple perspectives.

Lou: A Novel about Lou Andreas-Salomé
. A story told about the gifted woman who loved Nietzsche and Rilke.

Children of Fire
: a novella about the child of Jane Eyre and Rochester. What did their son become? Speculation: perhaps he grew up to be Dorian Gray. Premise: Bertha (the madwoman in the attic) gave birth to a child, a daughter (another of Rochester's secrets). What happened to her? Did she eventually meet Jane's son? Perhaps together they become the gamekeeper and the governess, the uncanny duo who haunt Henry James'
The Turn of the Screw
, the greatest ghost story ever written.

To Kill Céline
: a novella about an Allied plot during World War Two to assassinate Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the novelist who collaborated with the Vichy government. What happens when the allied officer who is parachuted into France confronts the gifted writer who was a vicious anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer? Later: Céline wandering lost, in the ruins of France after the allied invasion and the fall of Vichy. Céline adrift with his cat: monologues to an animal.

Cassady
: a montage-collage stringing together depictions of Neal Cassady from Kerouac's
On the Road
and
Big Sur
to Robert Stone's
Dog Soldiers
, to Tom Wolfe's
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
.

Madness
: the meetings of James Joyce and Carl Jung, their arguments concerning the schizophrenia of Lucia Joyce (Joyce's daughter). The cross-purpose dialogues about fiction and the interpretation of dreams – and ultimately, the rejection by Joyce of Jungian psychiatry.

Guardian
: Samuel Beckett's care for Lucia Joyce in a Zurich asylum. It's been said that Lucia fell in love with Beckett when he became her father's secretary while he worked on Finnegans Wake. And it's been said Beckett's rebuff provoked Lucia's descent into madness. Yet Beckett became the executor of her estate and visited her in the asylum after James Joyce died. Monologues by Lucia and by Beckett. Moment: Beckett and James Joyce sitting in silence during their work together. Madness in love, obsessive art: fragments from Beckett's last plays hint that he was remembering Lucia's voice, Joyce's silence.

(A free translation from Baudelaire's
Paris Spleen
.)

“I can resist everything except for temptation.” – Oscar Wilde

Paul was a devout young man. Every day he went to the church in his neighbourhood to pray. He was in his last year of university where he specialized in theology. He'd spent the majority of his time studying. His grades were excellent, and he was preparing to go on to graduate school. He was thinking about becoming a minister. When he went to church he obeyed the injunction that was written in the plaque on the wall:
The greatest place to be is on your knees
.

He prayed passionately. It was his solace, his inspiration. He was known for his piety on his street. Even his parents, who weren't religious, were impressed.

In all his actions he tried to be righteous and obedient. One day when he was about to enter his church he encountered a man slouching by the door, smoking a Gitane cigarette. He wore a stylish fedora, and his clothes were dark and immaculate. Curiously, the man looked like Johnny Depp in the Roman Polanski movie
The Ninth Gate
.

Paul knew who it was right away.

The man was the devil.

He said: “Young man, if you follow me, I'll make you a promise.”

“What is that?” Paul asked.

“I promise all the sex you can handle, all the drugs your system can take, all the money your bank account can hold, all the power in the world that you can use in any way you see fit. You can party non-stop without sleep. You can attract beautiful women from every race and culture. You can hold onto your youth. You can be an advisor to presidents and prime ministers. Travelling will become second nature to you. You will have beautiful homes in exotic locations, apartments in the great cities of the world. Your image will appear on the front of magazines and on billboards. You will be called for your opinion. You will go to the head of every line-up. Pictures of you will hang in the rooms of women and men who crave pleasures that they have yet to experience. You will be in every Who's Who. Your Wikipedia biographical entry will scroll down and down and down and down. You will be world-renowned and notorious.”

“What do I have to do for all this?”

“Do?”

“Yes, what would I owe you?”

“Why your soul, of course... your obedience to me.”

Paul was terrified. He tore away from the devil and lunged for home. There he barricaded himself in his room behind a wall of books (all commentaries on the Gospels). He stayed away from the church for days. He fasted and slept very little.

One Friday he cautiously emerged from his room and went to church.

The devil wasn't lingering at the door. There was no sign of him anywhere.

Paul opened the door and entered. He walked uneasily, hesitantly, down the aisle towards the altar, nervously glancing from left to right, carefully listening for other steps and voices. The church was empty. He couldn't see a priest.

Paul came to the communion rail. He sank down to his knees on the red carpeting and bowed his head. He was trembling when he began to pray.

He said: “Lord, I beseech you. Hear my prayer. Protect my soul. Open my heart. Hear my prayer.
Lord, please make sure that the devil will keep his promises...”

“Be careful about getting rid of your demon. It may be the best part of you.” – Nietzsche

The difference between love and fiction is that fiction makes sense.

Explorations without maps mean falling upwards – and downwards – and sideways – and inwards.

Is an excess of theories a compensation for an absence of new ideas?

I asked my friend Joseph Amar, a gifted painter: “Where do you get your inspirations?”

He replied: “From walls and meat.”

I asked him: “How do you keep focused on the present moment?”

He replied: “Because I can't remember what happened yesterday.”

The asylum where the doctors and nurses are crazy: the ones who knew how to laugh ran away long ago. They went out searching for water and air.

The doctors and nurses looked out between the bars of the asylum windows. They saw the inmates scampering off, smiling.

“What are they smiling about?” The doctors and nurses asked. “There's nothing funny here.”

The inmates knew their keepers were crazy because they'd forgotten how to play.

Only ideologues and preachers think that reality is settled.

Why does logic seldom convert anyone to principles? Logic rarely convinces you if your feelings or intuitions emphasize other ways of knowing.

“Principles are felt, propositions proved.” – Pascal

If you were to find yourself alone and aroused – craving intimacy – would you read abstruse verse – abstractions – or go to Sappho's fragments, to Pablo Neruda's collection called
The
Captain's Verses
, or to Anaïs Nin's journals or Henry Miller's novels? Yet for them sex is still a sacred act – secular and yet at times transcendent – ecstatic, joyful, a key to flowing into the other.

Now sex becomes for some mere exercise. Sex means the necessary release of serotonin. You feel better, now you can go back to the office.

Paradoxes: Sappho was invisible to her lover; Henry Miller wanted ecstasy with Mona; both of them wanted to be alone with their haunted souls to write their lyrics and prose. Miller went to the sea's edge to maintain his wilderness, his wildness. Sappho went to the cliff's edge, summoning the whirl-up of the sea.

Sex is an expression of spirit. Prayer that lifts us entirely from flesh may take us away from the kisses we need to summon the spirit into ourselves.

Prayer, reverie, Eros, and music, give us access to magical concentration. Then to return to your deepest self after ecstasy, going deeply back into you...

Sex is every person's religious ecstasy.

Religious ecstasy is every person's poetry.

Poetry is every person's cosmology and mysticism.

Love stories are every person's version of the soul-quest for complete being.

Erotic hieroglyphs: in a repressed age – sold to wage bondage – one of the last vestiges of revelation is sex. The search for touch and orgasm... Eros to satisfy unlimited dissatisfaction... Eros becoming equivalent to illumination... Eros a portion of exaltation... Pleasure a way to regain awakenings.

And the search for the lost other?... the awakening of the self through union?...

Where do these people that I don't know come from in my dreams? Who are the dream-figures that speak and show me lightning and moonscapes and chapels and teeming cities that are amalgams of my home and of Paris and Córdoba and Barcelona and Toronto? Did I make them up? Are they figures that I spotted on a street corner or in Metro Grocery store or on TV or at the movies? Why her face over some other? And why do these figures seldom recur in my dreams?

Maybe the people who appear in dreams and are unknown to me are visitations, maybe projections of faces that I've made up from my imagination.

“A transmigration of faces...” – Elias Canetti

I've spoken to friends and colleagues about this phenomenon. They've agreed that they have met people in dreams who were strangers to them, too. We seem to share the ability to make souls and personalities. Maybe this makes every person an implicit Shakespeare. On the stage of our dreams, in our sleep reveries, we conjure enigmatic characters. (This may be another explanation for our fascination with Shakespeare: he presented in the theatre what we do seamlessly, effortlessly, at night.) Maybe these dream children are conjurations of a mingled DNA of encounters, people we've given birth to ourselves, by mixing the faces and personalities of

the ones we've met. The dream people may be made of the ones we didn't really notice – the girl at the restaurant counter, that cashier, that taxi driver, that policeman, that bus driver.

The dream children came out of the forests of the night and dissolved into morning light.

But what if I were to meet one of the figures from my dreams? What if I met someone who resembled one I'd talked to or who had led me on a dream journey?

My dreams emerge, not to replace reality or to deny it, but to parallel reality or counter it. Dreams are additions and extensions. They're a sign that many worlds exist simultaneously. My dreams – and yours – show there's more going on than meets the physical eye. They urge us to know that creation is endless: it continues in our sleep.

What did the ancients invoke before they began dreaming?

They called on the muses or to the daimons of inspiration. Imagine: millions of people dreaming the same dream. Over the surface of the world, in the geography of waking lives, the envelope of this dream spreads. The dream-figures begin to interpenetrate with the day- to-day so that people begin to meet them. The dream-

children appear: “Look, we've come again and we're saying, creation is eternal.”

Thus Gaston Bachelard's admonition: “Dream well.”