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thick-as-thieves-forever · 4 months

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Dream Eater - an essay

“The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.��

– Roald Dahl, The BFG

“Dream logic seems to proceed on associations. One thing is associated with another, for example, a “Paris Restaurant” could lead you to Paris, France according to dream logic, which is also literal use of words. And I suppose you all know that to me one of the most important new facts about dreams is that they are a biologic necessity.”

- William S. Burroughs, Excerpts from a lecture recorded at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics on August 11, 1980

The Fine Lines Archive

I was seven years old when I first thought about memory as a place. My father and I were driving down the highway in southern New Hampshire, and I asked him why it was that when I remembered things, I would see an image in my mind. He described at some length that memory was often associative: the mind is always taking in information, but that information is not just thoughts or sounds, it is also sights, smells, tastes. All of the senses were involved in painting the picture that our memory constructs for us, that it calls up from the depths. When he told me this, we passed by Fine Lines Auto Body, a repair shop and car dealership outside Brookline, and when I recall memory itself this is the first image that I conjure: a red sports car mocked up in plaster crashing through the wall of the second story of the store front. The tie-dye painted Volkswagen Bus, a true hippie wagon, that sits unmoving in the woods down the road that we would always pass afterward. While the exact words that he said are lost, this image is burned into the back of my eyes, and it comes through as clear as if I was still sitting in the passenger seat listening to him speak. Memory is associative, and my memory of associative memory is branded into me through the image of its very association. It is so clear that it is seared in brilliant, blistering sunlight.

It is also fuzzy. There is an imprecision to my recall that makes a drive through my own memories into a hazy road trip. Was the tie-dye van really in that part of the road? Or was it closer to Mason? Was I really seven, or was I a good bit older? The farther that I draw from these moments in my life the more the waves wash away my certainty. The more my memory is filled with salt-water, gritty and flushed, cloudy with the sediment of accumulating time. I can’t be certain anymore that all of these things were as close together as I think they were, that memories aren’t tripping over each other and becoming entangled like distant electrons. But I know that there was a plaster façade of a red car. I know that it burst through the second story of Fine Lines, that my father in that moment bound it in the image of a tesseract, and that the archive of my memories was erected on the foundation of an auto body shop in the woods of New Hampshire.

I have never read Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher, but I saw the movie as a kid, sitting on my couch in the upstairs living room late one night. The plot is a bit blurry, but there is a scene that is stuck in the foyer of the archive, playing on a loop behind armored glass. A group of friends are sitting around a table in a cabin in Maine, drinking and playing games. One character mentions that he’ll file away a piece of information in the “Who Gives a Shit” section of his memory warehouse. The scene cuts to a man pulling a box labeled “Rock and Roll Lyrics” off a shelf and replacing it with a box dedicated to how to use his new MacBook: “How the Damn Thing Works.” A friend asks what he does with all the discarded files, and he claims that he burns them. If he can’t stand to burn them, he sneaks his favorite files away to a back office where he keeps all his secret stuff. I pictured myself keeping a library. Carting around old boxes full of manilla folders, Rubbermaid tubs filled with expand-o files, shelves lined with books. I wondered if I ever burned them. Or if the stacks had just become a wild menagerie of disorganization. Where do memories go when they die? What happens to them if we don’t cremate them? Do they rise from the dead, necrotic and oozing flesh? Do they lurk beneath the surface of a cold lake, waiting to grab your leg? Do they skulk the stacks, waiting for me to turn a corner? There are cracks in the glass, one thousand atmospheres of water pressure forcing their way in: an ocean of forgetting always threatens to spill inward, to flood the Archive, to sweep away the shelves and the boxes and the dreams kept in sealed jars. To make an ocean of my mind.

Dreamcatchers are an indigenous tradition from North America, descending from the Ojibwe word asabikeshiinh, which is apparently the inanimate form for the word ‘spider.’ They are beautiful webs decorated in beads, feathers, and sometimes painted in dyes. They are traditionally hung over a bed during sleep, however in the Ojibwe origin story they are not as explicitly connected with dreams as we have come to see them. They were meant as a guidepost for the Spider Woman, a mythological figure who took care of children. They existed to guide her to children far away from their homeland, or to ward off harm that might be caught in the air. East Asian cultures have a mythological figure that is a bit closer to our modern idea of the dreamcatcher as a ‘net for bad dreams’ – the Baku, a creature in Japanese and Chinese mythology created from the spare pieces left over when the gods had finished with creation, was a spirit said to devour the nightmares of sleeping people. The trunk, head, and tusks of an elephant. Horns. Tiger’s claws. The body of a great bear. When the witching hour strikes and the memories wake from the dead, when they become zombie dreams, the Baku stalks my archive. I call to it, and it squeezes through the narrow doors of the auto body shop. It feeds on the familiar texture of memory, which is the cousin of dream.

I am living within the winnowing of my interiority – the archive is always crumbling around me, always being rebuilt, passageways erecting themselves and collapsing inward – I am eroding from the inside out. Sometimes the archive feels more like Borges’ Library of Babel. Some endless space, one in which you can never retrace your steps perfectly, where you can wander for an eternity and never read all of the books. Sometimes it feels like the world of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi – a vast array of marble halls that dwarf human presence with the scale of their pillars, stairs, and empty spaces. Statues peer down periodically from their alcoves, mysterious labels set upon them. I struggle to recall their meaning, and I hope to stumble upon the ones that will ignite the memory that Piranesi and I have left behind. I have replaced too many of my files. I can still tell you that on pages 330-339 of Anti-Oedipus they make the argument about capitalism reterritorializing death, I can still find the “zombie schizos good for work” line. I can still tell you the chronological order of the books Baudrillard published, and what their impact was on the field. I can recite the difference between Zoe and Bios, I can talk at length about Bataille’s meditation on violence and self-laceration, I can recall the events of May ’68 in Paris, and I can conjure McQuillan and Miller’s arguments a la Derrida that Masterson and I used at the NDT in the autoimmunity affirmative. I can tell you how to drive from Oklahoma City or Boston to Lexington: all the roads you’ll take, the things you’ll see along the way, the best spots to stop and smoke. But I can’t tell you my first phone number, or the address I lived in three years ago in upstate New York. I can’t remember what I wrote in the letter I sent to my first love. I can barely remember Rose’s face. It is a softened image now, blurred at the edges, rendered behind a pixilated privacy filter. There are holes, chewing away the earth. Erupting through the floor of the library. Swallowing my dreams of the past.

In a lecture at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Bill Burroughs once delivered a lecture about dreams. I discovered this lecture not out of a particular fascination and burning desire to research his work, but through an album made by an Australian band called We Lost The Sea. This album, entitled Departure Songs, is a collection of songs dedicated to heroes who died on the frontlines of exploration, pushing for the progress of the human race. The opening track is dedicated to Lawrence Oates, one of the first humans to reach the South Pole. Lawrence developed gangrene due to frostbite at one point during the trip, and when he couldn’t take the cold anymore, he walked out of his tent into the endless cold to die. The second track, Bogatyri, is written for the Chernobyl divers who descended into the murky dark of the flooding power plant to open the sluice gates, wielding only oxygen tanks and weak lamps. The Last Dive of David Shaw is written for David Shaw, a diver who died trying to rescue the body of a fellow diver, Deon Dreyer, from the bottom of Bushman’s Hole in South Africa. But perhaps the most heartbreaking songs on this album are dedicated to the crew of the Challenger – a two-part swan song that, when I realized what it was about, dropped me down a well. When Flight begins, the first track of the Challenger pair, sections of Burroughs’ lecture are played. He talks about how dreams are a biologic necessity. How one day, dreams will take us to space. My girlfriend at the time will be so moved by this section that she will tattoo these words on her shoulder: an astronauts helmet with a skull inside, Burroughs words inscribed along the neck of the suit. We do not remember the Challenger when we hear these songs: we were too young to be alive when it exploded. But we will dream its memory, together in a sparse living room during the witching hour, clinging to the sounds that dreams make when they die.

Burroughs, in that lecture, speculated that dreams would one day take us to space. He ruminates on the “human artifact” being unfit for the environment of space, saying that dreams allow us to go places unburdened by our bodies. He concludes this section of the lecture, after a long rambling few minutes by musing to himself, “but we’re not there yet.”

Where Am I?

As the witching hour draws to a close and the sun threatens to rise over the mountains, I drive through the winding fog that clings to the roads that dot Vermont. I am sitting at the bottom of the ocean. It is pitch dark, and the fog is so thick that I can barely see one car length in front of me. The taillights of cars are the only signposts you can use driving here at night. The roads are a single lane, and they hug the mountains that I’m traversing so closely they could easily be mistaken for a child attached to a parent’s pantleg. 18-wheeler trucks scream through these roads, much faster than I would imagine they should, and the force of the winds coming off their sides are enough to jostle the Yukon on its chassis. Hours before, I had departed my grandparents house in New Hampshire, said goodbye to my father, and left to return to Oklahoma for the start of classes in the fall. I used to relish road trips like these: 2000 miles of open road in front of me, a cigarette-lighter-powered auxiliary cord that could hijack the radio frequencies with my own music, a center console full of cigarettes and wraps, late night stops at Waffle House. In my younger years I had found a great deal of freedom on the road: the ability to be alone, to travel anywhere at my own speed, to do so to the blast beats of my own soundtrack. This drive in particular did not have the same brightness – it was not a manic, grinning flight into the next sunrise. It was not long, happy nights spent grooving and planning my next victory at a debate tournament. This was, instead, the night that I truly heard and understood Shed for the first time.

Title Fight, a foundationally important shoegaze and post-punk band in the American scene, plays a critical role in my youth. It is a cornerstone to this day of my music tastes, and a relic passed to me by one of my closest friends. I had always treated them as a high-energy band, and their first EP reflects this buzzing sad-boy young energy: The Last Thing You Forget screams, it is unafraid of making unseemly sounds, it does not shy away from minor keys or somber flat notes, and it pairs a head-spinning combination of pop-punk blast beats with the shredding, driving tones of a punk band. They are a band built around juxtaposition. I had heard their debut album, Shed, a handful of times before but never paid too much attention to it. It was not as energetic as their EP, it didn’t have the bubbling explosiveness that songs like Symmetry or Anaconda Sniper did, and it didn’t call to a feeling beneath my surface that needed music to feel at home. Until that morning. Now, anytime I hear Shed I am instantly sucked into the dream: I am in the fog again. I am driving through Vermont, listening to Crescent Shaped Depression or Where Am I. I am lost in the pitch pines, dead walking through the rises in the road, and my soul is screaming alongside Ned again. I am shedding my skin again.

In these early years of college, when I was 20, I was in love with a woman who lived in Kentucky. Rose and I had met during my senior year of high school, and the relationship that followed was deeply unstable: it burned at both ends. We were obsessed, infatuated with each other, and talked so constantly that it was as if we were never apart. We knew that we loved each other even if we had no idea what that meant, and a part of us also knew that the 1000 miles between us was a burning bridge. The fire had to either be put out or allowed to rage until the space itself collapsed. One night in October of my sophomore year, around 2 in the morning, she called me in my dorm room and told me that she had taken all of the pills that were left. I could hear the rain hitting the lawn around her, and she said she was sitting outside. She was bleeding. She was waiting for it to end. There are many things I don’t remember clearly about the events that followed; much of it has become a slurry of mental sediment, a scramble of memory and dream. But that moment is held inside of a diamond. It is immune to the erosion, too large to be swallowed by the holes. I jumped in my car and drove to her, not a thought spent on the consequences. On the why. On the costs. When the archive floods this moment will be buried, at the bottom of the lake, still trapped in perfect crystallization. It will catch the sunlight that penetrates the cloudy saltwater. It will shine the color of blood.

Years later I will have a dream. To be more precise, I will have the same dream every night for 3 years. It will never differ, and it will come back with the certainty of a sunrise. It will be simultaneously impossible and perfectly reasonable unto itself, a closed loop in dream logic. I am in a hotel that never ends. It is an amalgam, a construct pieced together from every hotel that I’ve ever stayed in. This dream never begins in precisely the same place, but it is always the same place, and there is always a new path through it. Some nights I begin in the Dallas Wyndham that we liked to call “The Hive” because of its reminiscence of Bentham’s panopticon. Some nights I begin in a dingy La Quinta, others in the lobby of the hotel in downtown Pittsburgh we stayed in for the round robin tournament. Once it began in the tiny hallways of our Dartmouth Marriot. No matter where it begins, I am always wandering through the images of my associative past, past ice machines and bare light bulbs on sconces. The hallways are connected, countless in number, always winding their way towards a room that doesn’t exist. I will spend an entire night that feels like years walking through them, tracing my hand along the wallpaper, the plaster, the railings, the doors. I will encounter a myriad of faces here; I will have one thousand unique experiences here that are never the same. But they are always the same. When she appears in the hotel she is standing on a balustrade, her hands resting on the railing, overlooking a winding grand staircase that leads to her landing. When I walk into the room, I know that it’s her before I even see her. This room is always the same, and it has never existed. When Rose looks down to see me enter, she is faceless.

When I think of her now all I can see are places. I see Vermont bathed in fog. I see the winding, mined-out valleys that connect her to Lexington cut from the Appalachians, dripped green with foliage. I see wind turbines at night, and the standing grain silos in Dumas that call me friend when I go walking late at night to call her. I see my grandmother’s old swing in the backyard, I see Evan’s dorm room at the University of Kentucky. I see the hills overlooking an intersection somewhere outside her hometown, beneath the shadow of Mt. Sterling crowding out the sunrise’s pink-orange light. I hear Title Fight. I think of sinkholes.

“She is behind you now. You are leaving.” And the moments that feel the longest are the quiet ones, the ones where the silence screams like Ned. She will marry and have children. She will send you a nice message every now and then, just to see how you’ve been. And eventually, the line will go dark. Maybe there’s nothing. Only this moment.

Acid Rain Noumena

A few years after dropping out of the University of Oklahoma I moved to Massachusetts to live with my father. I took a night job working in a warehouse at UPS and became a loader: 5 nights a week I would wake up at 9pm, have coffee and a bit of breakfast, and then leave my apartment to walk through the city to a bus stop where the company would pick up workers who couldn’t drive. I had long lost my car by this time, and so every week I would trudge through the cold night air swaddled in a winter coat to the bus stop, board an old yellow school bus, and ride 20 minutes to the warehouse where I would spend 6 hours loading packages into the trucks at 20 Door. During this period of my life I became closely acquainted with dysfunctional sleep patterns. I befriended stuporous exhaustion, the delirium that running from dreams brings. I rarely saw the sun, and when I did it was an unwelcome intruder. My eyes softened to its brightness, and the walls of my apartment were painted black. I drew curtains around myself, I lived in the dark when the light shone, and I became a denizen of the night. The witching hour became my home.

Like the hotel, which I had left behind years before, I walked in closed loops. Each day felt like a repetition of the previous, a return of the same that dulled my senses into a fugue. I listened to Philip Glass and J Dilla. I sank into the slow-building minimalism of difference as repetition. The night owl perch, I told myself, suited me well and allowed me to retreat into a hollow that only I could claim. It was a space in which I could truly be alone – I could sit with myself, I could ruminate and wander through my archive, I could find the placid sounds that would put my mind and soul at ease, and I could disconnect from all of the specters that lingered around the jars and files lining the shelves. It was there, floating in that flooded cave system, that I met Sophia.

We met at coffee shops, at Marxist meetings, on the staircase of her apartment in the January snow. We met in the cramped line of my kitchen, where I would bake her bread to warm her through the biting wind. We smoked cigarettes on the stoop together, her always taking care to handroll them from a bag of tobacco that she would carry. I listened to her play guitar, and we ate Czech food from a local eatery, talking politics and music and art and nothing until our eyes couldn’t stand to be open any longer. Never before had I known someone whose idea of a great date was meeting in a coffee shop with printed copies of a short essay on post-modern theory to do a comparative reading. She tapped into something that existed in the sealed halls of the archive, and entered rooms that I had always imagined would remain secluded – meant only for myself. I had hidden from the sun for a long time, but when I got off work some days I would hold my exhaustion in my hands, knead it into dough, and walk it across the wind-shorn streets of Worcester to spend time with her during her daytime. It can be difficult to date a day-walker when you work the graveyard shift. And while it was, by all means, difficult to match our schedules in moments it was ultimately one of the warmest seasons of my 20’s. The winter cold melted when her hand clasped mine. When she smiled. There is a section of the archive where her room is filed. Where I’ve sketched the windows that overlooked rain-filled streets, where her guitar leans in the corner. Where her books are neatly lined on a shelf against the far wall. Where her kitchen resides, a cup of coffee steaming alongside a cup of tea. We did not have the guts to call it love yet, but maybe we knew.

It was her idea to drop acid that night. She had never tried it, and I had tried it a few too many times in college, but not for years. Maybe that means she didn’t know better. Maybe that means she couldn’t imagine that it was a bad time. But two hours into our trip, in the living room of her small off-campus apartment, she couldn’t look at me. And when she finally did her eyes were wet, filled with ocean water, and the only words she could manage became a wall of painted noise. I never filed away what she said. The words themselves, in exactitude, are lost to time. But when she had finished speaking, I could feel them in my bones. She was sorry. She had made a mistake. It was just one time, and it wouldn’t happen again. He didn’t matter to her. It had meant nothing. The words echoed through flooding halls cast in the light of a kaleidoscopic fracturing. They sloshed over boxes, through pages, and pressed against the doors of my deepest rooms. I had already, at that moment, withdrawn to the interior. I had sealed away the most sacred chambers, but water was seeping beneath the doors. She was breaking the seals. I don’t remember what I said, those words were washed away in the tsunami. They are lost to a flurry of intensity, to breathing walls, to the pale eyes of the moon.

I barely remember leaving her apartment. The only image left of the flood is one of my shoes, a pair of worn Timberlands, padding carefully down her ice-covered stairs. Too far to fall. I am flying down Fruit Street, in a night saturated with moonlight and moisture – the light imitation of rain that a mist-shrouded city produces when the pressure is not quite high enough for a downpour. I walked home, and the moon glared. It pulsed, it gave off a pale ringing, it stared down over my shoulder and dripped down the back of my coat in the witching hour’s hands. It was dark and silent, and the streets contained no cars, no people, no animals – only garbage, singing gutters, blinking streetlights, and a wall of wetness that would soak you to the bone without becoming a driving torrent. It was the dampness of still, quiet air that I swam through. It was the clutching arms of drowned stars that heard my whispers to the sidewalk. It was the painted murals on school walls that stretched towards my hunger.

The climb up the stairs of my own building that certainly happened are no longer on file. Nor are the remnants of that night, which could not end until the sun rose far later in the day. My father, sleeping across the hall, did not tell me that he heard me return if he did stir from sleep. He didn’t cross the hall to ask me why I had come home early. He was not friends with the night, he did not belong to the moon. He needed sleep when the sun was down, and did not hear my boots clomping across the wooden landing at the top of the stairs. But I know that when I returned, I sat in the crook of the window, on a long, flat couch. I know that two cats, one orange and the other black, settled against my legs and slept to the tones I played. I know that I stared at the moon in silence, and listened for the sound of pale colors.

When I was a boy, my father gave me a CD during one of my summer visits with some music on it for me to take home and play when I missed him. My musical life, in many ways, begins with him. On that CD was a rendition of Just the Two of Us. It is playing in the windowsill, as I stare at the moon over Worcester. It is playing but it is not playing. There is no stereo, and the apartment is sunken into deep stillness and quiet. But I am humming along to the tune. I am perched between two cats on the edge of a leather couch watching clouds pass over the rooftops of buildings. I am staring out over the distant treetops of the park, drawing my eyes through the squat houses jammed against each other from the hilltop. I am licking my wounds. My head is unspooling, and the rain is gathering in thick, heavy clouds over the city. He is asleep across the hall of our shared top-floor apartments, but he is there. He is here because he is there. There has never been a question, in his mind, of whether or not to be there – to pick me up from the airport with only a handful of bags to my name, to take me in, to help me start anew. To pick up my pieces. To make a pot of coffee and sit with me in the grey of a long afternoon, mending the broken things that I have scattered across a table.

Tomorrow he will wake up and make coffee. He will come across the hall and put a box of Entenmann’s on the ottoman. We will smoke cigarettes and we won’t talk about what happened the night before – it will be locked away by then, kept in a room far from his in Fine Lines. Instead, we will chat about anything else. He will smile, and the sun will rise again over the scattered pieces of my life that lie on the floor of the apartment, littered among the crumbs from a raspberry Danish. I will forget that I haven’t slept. I will warm myself in the sunlight, and I will begin writing the scene down so that it can be filed away in his section of the archive. I will note that we are listening to Vince Guaraldi. I will be sure to remember that he is wearing his favorite blue robe, that his hair is standing in curly salt and pepper wisps again from the night’s sleep. I will tell him about the new job offer I received from Binghamton University. I will ask him about his work, and if he wants to grab dinner tonight. I will laugh with him at the absurdity of news headlines. I will conquer sleep with the brightness of his presence. His love is breakfast, coffee, conversation – it is a sunrise that does not grind my teeth behind the wheel of a Yukon, but warms the skin and smokes Marlboro Reds. His section of the archive lies at the very center, it is the seed. His face is the very face of memory itself. It is the sanctuary and the kitchen and the reading room. His books are kept safe there, his chicken cutlet recipe, his coffee, his smile. There is a bed for the Baku there. There is a boombox playing Just the Two of Us in its center.

I can’t know what’s in the contents of another man’s mind, but if I had to hazard a guess, I’d like to think that the sound of my father’s thoughts was like Cezanne’s locusts. I’d like to imagine his head like mine in the dire hours of restless waking life fueled by an unending march toward the next sunrise, filled with the buzzing chords and harmonies of brushstrokes that let you see the sound of wind whispering through wheatgrass - when I am wishful and dreams enter my eyes through gates kept closed, I imagine that he, too, can see the thundering plink of hail, the pitter-patter rhythms of rain on a sheet metal roof, the yawning of a cat. In these moments of suspended desire we are floating above a resonating plateau, ground that seethes with vibration and fills our vision with tendrils of cacophony, strings that reach through and past the eyes to tap straight into our tympanic membranes, a cochlear vision; the rustling of pines under the sheer weight of fresh snow captured in stillness, a stillness that is not entirely still but which hums upon the canvas.

What does a smell look like? A feeling? How about a taste? What is the sound of a cloud drifting slowly beneath a glaring sun on the Texas plains? What does happiness taste like when it leaves the body? I like to imagine that it all converges at the sundown of consciousness, when we wander amongst the ruins of our own senses at the door of slumber, traipsing through the boundaries that separate our perceptions into their rigid selves, locking them in discrete prison cells with neat labels pressed upon the doors in ticker tape. It is in this moment of suspension before our feet cross the threshold of sleep, perhaps, in that cosmos that lives and dies in the smallest flash while we step into sleep and trawl the texture of dream, that the wires of our sensation are released and become crossed, spilling outward upon the world from our open mouths. It is in the nature of trances and stupors to submerge us in a milky haze, to flood the memory with clouds of ink and fog - which is to say that I cannot remember precisely what memory tastes like, nor the sensation of roughness as it cries out to my ears from the surfaces of Beech leaves. But in moments of reflection I often like to pause and conjure a feeling I know must, by its very definition, escape the vocabulary of my senses: a specter from beyond language itself whose very absence becomes for me a pressing, weighty presence that stands atop, behind, beneath my waking thoughts. A specter that asks impossible questions about the smell of love, the sounds of colors, the taste of dreams. I look at him and I wonder if he also hears the pale ringing, the moonlight that falls upon a barren clearing in the deep pelagic hush of a winter’s night. There are days when I don’t leave the archive. Days when I drink memories and eat dreams. And in all my years of dreaming I have never slept.

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