The Lord's Gyre

Gustave Dore's depection of Dante's Paradisio, Canto 31

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Last night I dreamt that I was standing on a sidewalk in an empty night. 

From the impenetrable darkness I heard a child's voice begin the Lord's Prayer. Each word seemed to gather whispers off the sidewalk, and these whispers, speaking in time with the child, multiplied and magnified as the prayer continued, entwining my feet in a vortex of sound. The air around me quickened as the ever-widening spiral of voices gained a stormy momentum, and it seemed the whole of humanity was aiding and assisting this one child's words. In a moment the prayer had wrapped about my knees, and then it encompassed my sternum, until the tempest of voices, in ever expanding numbers and circles, rose over my head and into the darkness above.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Here then, is my confession: I never once looked up in the dream to witness the prayer's trajectory. My eyes remained rooted to where my feet contacted the Earth; at that spot where the first murmurings of prayers voiced for twenty centuries rose to support a lone child in the dark. My cells were expanding and my lungs no longer supported me. My heart felt like an organ pumping life down a million passages into the surrounding dark. But I never looked up. 

And so I remain tethered; to be greeted by another grey dawn.

The Company Shoots

My weekend consisted of three days filming with The Company in the foothills of the Oregon coastal range. Thus far, The Company consists of only four diverse dreamers harboring the vision of a full length movie. Nevertheless, I suspect it will bloom into many more folks than that by the time we’re through. Grandiose labors of love tend to attract other dreamers. The various trials and tribulations, from the screenwriter’s perspective, can be followed at I’m Not Arguing That With You.

For my part I was asked to get lost. I lay down in spider webs and organic detritus. Dirt was kicked upon me by those closest to me. I was made to cry.

And this was just the test footage.

Storm

The storm came to me in a dream. In this dream I was at my teenage home again and the whole world had dropped into black and white. The house was dramatically lit from above but all around it was a great expanse of darkness. I wished to tell my father that I was going to walk a friend home but, for some undecipherable reason, felt slightly afraid of doing so. I opened the screen door to call into the house but then shut it. Working up my nerve I opened it again, and promptly shut it. The air was warm and damp outside. From far off in the darkness I could hear claps of thunder closing in on the house. A third time I pulled on the screen and my father, alerted to some noise at the door and perhaps suspecting one of the cats wished to be let in, appeared in the kitchen with an inquisitive look. I told him that I would walk my friend home and be right back. He nodded ascent and went back to work on his project.

I do not know which friend it was that waited for me on the lawn; her head up watching the sky as it flashed intermittently around us. The thunder came closer. She was familiar and yet unidentifiable as any person from my past or present. I walked this woman into the dark and out of the light illuminating my house. After some time I returned from the darkness alone. Somewhere in the darkness my friend had returned home safe just as I now was.

I entered the house and my father beckoned me to sit down on the sofa. He had made something for me— fashioned it out of clay. It would be an aid to me in the days to come. Whatever it was glowed brightly in his cupped hands, and he told me a brief recounting of the creation of the world as he held this strange light. It wasn’t a creation myth from any culture I recognized but, somehow, it seemed plausible. My father is an unfailingly honest man and I knew that this story must have been something he’d encountered in his studies.

He walked carefully with his gift over to the sofa and set it down on the cushion next to me. It seemed to glow from an inner light as it lay on the couch: a living light that flickered in strength. Here was a tiny sculpted baby such as you might see in a seasonal creche with closed eyes and rounded terra cotta form. But unlike those static devotional sculptures this one held its own light within it. I looked closer. There was something else. . .

It seemed that the storm was on top of us now. The thunder rattled the branches of trees and shook the windows of the house. The muggy air had become a conduit of electrical current.

It was breathing.

In the flash and snap of lightning I could see the little chest rise up and down. What sort of gift was this that my father had fashioned? I could hear the wall of rain coming out of the darkness, moving across the neighborhood roofs towards our house; carried on a wave of sound and energy.

I woke with that dream rattling about my mind and the old Victorian house I call home creaking and popping under the power of a summer storm breaking the night.

The Second Vision

Bri had already left for school and I was running about trying to gather all of my things in time to catch the bus. As I was closing the door to the apartment, the click of the lock catching to wish me goodbye, I had a sudden premonition that if I turned around and rang the doorbell then I would be inside the answer the door and let myself back in. Ridiculous as it seems, at that moment in time I believed it whole-heartedly, and so I faced my door and rang the bell.

And waited.

And during the wait all sorts of thoughts crept through my head— What does it mean if I do answer the door? Will there then be two of me with the same ambitions, capable of completing double the amount of work in the same quantity of time? Can one of me lead another life completely, separate from the ambition of the one I'm currently living? Would our lives be interchangeable: each of us waking up from time to time wherever the other one laid his head down— unaware of where we are and what brought us there?

I fully believed that I would answer the door and let myself in. But after five minutes it hadn't happened and so I shrugged the thought off and went to catch the bus.

All of this and I was entirely awake.