The Eternal Sideways-Slanting Sun

There was a night just recently when a had a series of dreams that melted into one another beautifully and seamlessly without logic, or with logic and without symmetry. There was a dream where I was rushing to correct a scheduling error. They scheduled my vacation for the wrong week! I'm not going to Tunisia next week, but the week after. I need to correct that.

I'm going to Tunisia. Next week. This is exciting.

In another dream, I moved fluidly between Jacksonville and France. In Jacksonville, I was leaning against the driver's side door of my uncle Tom's truck, telling him and my uncle Mark that there was a place in France that made me think of them and everyone back home. Then I remembered the place, and in a flash I was there. Not in a flash... There was no transition. As quickly as I could remember the spot, I was there. Even in my dream I couldn't describe it: A mountainous river-mouth, on which the sunlight shone in eternal sideways-slanted rays - a perpetual dawn, or dusk. Everyone's idea of heaven. A peaceful, meditative vantage point, which in waking life I realize was an idealized portrait of the Gironde Estuary, which is a two minutes' walk from my front door. Windy and grassless in the real world I share with others, in my dream it is a peaceful, grass-covered and breezy place, golden in the light of a perpetual sunset-sunrise.

The rush of emotion, and the strength of the memory, left me nostalgic when Rebecca stirred beside me.

"We could probably turn the heat off," she said.

We. You mean I could, I thought. I didn't say it, but chuckled inwardly, snarkily. Keeping inside the mild chauvinism that likes to dote even as it grumbles about doting. It was a little warm. It was very early in the morning, and I stumbled into the kitchen. I can't believe how strong the memory of that place was. But it doesn't exist. Not as I envisioned it in dreaming. Was I, in a dream, remembering a place I visited in another dream? Or was I wrong about remembering it; did my mind create a feeling of déjà vu ex nihilo, tailor-made for this dream?  

I thought of John Locke, whose work I read in college. I remembered that he thought that what is essential in forming an idea of personal identity is unity of consciousness over time, and that what unites my consciousness today with my consciousness yesterday is memory. I thought about that and I wondered about unity of unconsciousness. Such a strong memory of a place that I could never have been to in real life. I'm not the first person to wonder whether waking life is the dream and dreams are the waking life, but does the fact that my dreams seem connected (sometimes) by memories of other dreams mean that I have, in a Lockean sense, unity of unconsciousness?


Is there a me that goes about my days, and another who dreams, both of whom persist, endure, persevere, whatever in separate spaces in my mind: Two separate, or mostly separate entities, whose paths occasionally cross, who occasionally see through each other's eyes?

I turned off the heat and went back to bed. As I climbed into bed and the bedsprings creaked, Rebecca protested mildly at being awakened. I had a strange thought:

- Hey lady?
- Mmmmm? She hummed, half-asleep.
- Did you just ask me to turn off the heat?
- Mmm... no...
- Oh... I'm going to turn it back on, then.

It was a little cold.

In the morning, I woke up  happy to be in France; missing everyone back home.

Canta Y No Llores/A Free Association Day-in-the-Life

A strange day. In retrospect, a turning point. Don't get too excited... Times we turn just a little bit - the barest hint of a course change, or none at all. Course correction. The head-shake to shake off a three glass drunk. Today, we worry about teeth rotting from the inside, we wonder if we can pay for it; how long we can put off paying for it. We wonder whether and when we went along a path that made us into a man that needs his teeth intact. Whether one day we'll sit witless spouting obscenities by a railway station, forgetting our teeth and remembering every injustice, every blind snubbing of an indifferent... This all sounds very melodramatic. Mine's not a bad mood... it's a thoughtful and weird mood.

Here's why... This morning I woke up at 4 AM thinking about dark oily and toxic clouds bearing down on my state. I thought about the times I've run my fingers at night through the cool Gulf waters to see how the bubbles trailed, glowing, in their wake. I wondered if that will disappear soon. In a few days, I mean. I felt an impotent rush of hatred for people who think we should drill off the shores of my beloved home state. Then I felt a measure of self-loathing; Who am I? I drove a damn truck. Drove anywhere, as often as I liked. Mine was armchair activism. A trust-fund hippie's preaching, all talk no action. Now my state...

Here's also why... There was the conversation with the old lady I tutor:

I:       Tomorrow's the Cinco de Mayo!
She:  The...
I:       The Cinco de Mayo.
She:  The cinq...
- ...de mai, I finished. It's a Mexican Holiday.
-(Surprise) Why do you celebrate the Holiday?
-(Shrugs) There are a lot of Mexicans in the United States, motioning with my hands, silently placing handfuls of Mexicans into an invisible United States in front of me (Hand signals are a trick I picked up teaching foreigners English. It tends to confuse rather than enlighten.).
-(Interest) "That's insteresting, she says, slightly mispronouncing the long words. That you... searching... identify... What do you feel?" She finishes. I didn't quite follow. 
Confusion showed. 
She continued.
-What do you feel, about your nationality? Your origins?
-Oh! Southern. Confusion from her. Southern United States. Like... not SOUTH American, but... in the United States... drawing circles with curled fingers in the air... in the South.
-Ah! So the United States, of course.
-Yes, but... the South.
-Pauses... If you were to ask me... As I am not French... As I am Jewish... As I am from Poland... I would say that I am without origin. I lived in the East with Russian speakers... I can't remember everything she said... And the Germans came, and of course exasperated the problem...

The problem. Of her identity. I remember someone telling me she lost most of her family in the Holocaust. When I think about that I think about how slowly she's moving through The Snows of Kilimanjaro and how studiously she teases meaning - layers of meaning - from every sentence. The slight smirk that she wore without maliciousness when she tied an invisible scarf around her neck, rolling her eyes at the sometimes dandyish dress of French men - A moment of bemused comprehension between immigrants... I feel grateful for that moment. I think of her nimble mind, of her bright interest and the light in her eyes when she grasps a strange twist of English intuitively. I think of how she takes the stairs, asks me "See how sporty I am?", and I wonder that anyone should ever want her dead who did not know her. Then, I suppose, if they knew her it would be more mysterious still. Bigotry thrives for want of experience, and suffocates from seeing too much.

I'm Southern, but I don't know when I'll see the South again. On the first warm day of the year I sat in the park in La Rochelle and told Rebecca about a dream I had where she told me she loved me.


-And I was glad, but also sorry. Sorry that I hadn't told you first. Not because I'm competitive, but because I'd been wanting to say it for a while.


So I told her I loved her. It was a perfect day for it.

Now I'm going to Seattle.

I think I'm inclined to be more sentimental than the lady I tutor is about her past... When she tells her story, and when she tells of the effect it's had on her, it's academic. Interested, dispassionate. Another exegesis, like she's talking again about The Snows of Kiliminjaro. Not as though she doesn't care about it. It's the present that occupies her.

***

Then speaking of the present... Today ended in furious pedaling. In skies streaked in cobalt and violet, and flame-orange. In photographs of a silhouetted tree stump like the dessicated claw of a hand reaching skyward in a dying breath. A sobering memento mori at the end of the day. A day that started in worrying; that added new worries, or the same worries anew.  That ended in sobriety, not worry. That ended in me thinking I should get out more... watch for moments like these with impossible light that drenches everything in sunflower yellow. Fucking beautiful. Thinking I should figure out where my life is going, get my resumé polished.

Then there was the message from David, advising me to take part in "something both ancient and perennial: Lose [my]self in fuck." Then the half-hour trading Forgetting Sarah Marshall references. Fucking beautiful.

Happy Cinco de Mayo.