Authors: C. K. Williams
IV
A DREAM OF MIND
for Adam Zagajewski
The Method
A dream of method first, in which mind is malleable, its products as revisable as sentences,
in which I’ll be able to extract and then illuminate the themes of being as I never have.
I’m intrigued — how not be? — but I soon realize that though so much flexibility is tempting —
whole zones of consciousness wouldn’t only be reflected or referred to, but embodied, as themselves,
before the sense-stuff of the world is attached to them, adulterating and misrepresenting them —
I have only the sketchiest notion of how to incorporate this exotic and complicated methodology,
and when I try, something in my character resists manipulating elements of mind so radically.
Imagine being offered an instrument to play that violated all your previous aesthetic norms,
with a fleshy, tender, sensitive component, crudely sewn or soldered to an innocently inorganic,
and a shape that hinted at the most contradictory techniques — brute force, a delicate dexterity.
You know you’re supposed to draw this hybrid to your breast, to try to coax from it its music,
but under the tension of so many formal contradictions, what actually would you bring forth?
Isn’t this like that? I’d be dreaming dreams of dreams, hammering out ideas of dreams:
wouldn’t anything I’d come up with have to be a monstrous mix of substance and intention?
Making something out of nothing; surely more than matters of order or proportion are at stake.
I feel myself go cold now, taken by a clarity that makes me ask if I’m not already in the dream,
if I’m not merely being tempted by it, in the sense that one is tempted by an ill desire.
What if all this theory’s the equivalent of nightmare, its menace masquerading as philosophy?
Can mind contort itself so recklessly and not endanger its most basic links to common sense?
I dream a dream of method, comprehending little of the real forces or necessities of dream,
and find myself entangled in the dream, entrapped, already caught in what the dream contrived,
in what it made, of my ambitions, or of what it itself aspired to for its darker dreaming.
Shadows
They drift unobtrusively into the dream, they linger, then they depart, but they emanate, always,
an essence of themselves, an aura, of just the frequency my mind needs to grasp and contain them.
Sometimes, though, the identity that I sense there, the person I feel intimated or implied,
is so fluid and changes so rapidly and dramatically that often I hardly know who I’m with.
Someone is there, then they’re someone from another moment of my life, or even a stranger.
At first I find such volatile mutability surprisingly less agitating than I’d have thought,
probably because these others brought and taken away by the dream manifest such careless unconcern.
Before long, though, I feel apprehensive: I find that whenever someone in the dream changes,
I subtly alter who I am as well, so as to stay in a proper relation with this new arrival
who may already be somebody else, someone for whom the self I’ve come up with is obsolete.
Suddenly I’m never quite who I should be; beset by all this tenuous veering and blurring,
my character has become the function of its own revisions; I’m a bystander in my own dream.
Even my response to such flux is growing unstable; until now I’ve considered it speculatively,
but what says I’m not going to stay in this epistemologically tremulous state forever?
I find I’m trying to think how to stop this, but trying to think in dream means, as always,
trying to
do,
and what do now with this presence moving towards me, wavering, shifting,
now being itself, now another, webbed now in the shadows of memory, now brilliant, burning?
Am I to try to engage it, or turn back to myself to steel myself in a more pure concentration?
Even as I watch, it transfigures again; I see it, if it is it, as through ice, or a lens.
I feel a breath touch me now, but is it this breath I feel or someone’s I haven’t met yet,
is it a whisper I hear or the murmur of multitudes sensing each other closer within me?
How even tell who I am now, how know if I’ll ever be more than the field of these interchangings?
Vocations
Blocks of time fall upon me, adhere for a moment, then move astonishingly away, fleeting, dissolving,
but still I believe that these parcels of experience have a significance beyond their accumulation,
that though they bear no evident relation besides being occasionally adjacent to each other,
they can be considered in a way that implies consequence, what I come to call the dream’s “meaning.”
Although I can’t quite specify how this ostensible meaning differs from the sum of its states,
it holds an allure,
solutions
are implied, so I keep winding the dream’s filaments onto its core.
The problem is that trying to make the recalcitrant segments of the dream cohere is distracting;
my mind is always half following what happens while it’s half involved in this other procedure.
Also, my ideas about meaning keep sending directives into the dream’s already crowded circuits,
and soon I’m hard put keeping the whole intractable mechanism moving along smoothly enough
to allow me to believe that at least I’m making a not overly wasteful use of my raw materials.
Although, doesn’t the notion of “use” seem questionable, too? Use how, and to what end?
To proliferate more complexities when I haven’t come to terms with those I’ve already proposed?
Mightn’t all of this be only a part of the mind’s longing to be other or more than it is?
Sometimes I think I’d be better off letting the dream make its own way without butting in so,
but no, I understand the chaos I might wreak if I left off these indispensable cohesions.
How depressing dream can feel now, nothing in it can move, everything is suspended, waiting,
or, worse, not waiting, going on as it’s always gone on but with such fearful, timid resolve
that I begin to wonder if all that keeps me going is my fear of randomness, regression, chance.
It doesn’t matter anymore: whatever dream meant once, whatever it might come to mean,
I know the only way I’ll ever finish with this anguish is to understand it, and to understand
was what the dream promised, and what, with all its blundering hopes, it promises still.
The Solid
Although I’m apparently alone, with a pleasant but unextraordinary feeling of self-sufficiency,
I know I’m actually a part of a group of people who for reasons the dream never makes clear
are unavailable to any of my senses, though I’m always aware of the pressure of their presence.
No matter what else I’m doing, no matter how scant the attention I pay, I know they’re there,
only my response to being in relation with beings I can only imagine alters now and again.
Usually I’m comforted: this intuition seems to impart to the dream such stability as it has.
Immersed with my mysterious companions in an enormous, benign, somehow consoling solid,
all that’s required is that I not carelessly set jolts out into that sensitive bulk of otherness.
At other, nearly simultaneous moments, I feel signals sent, intentionally or not, I can’t tell,
which arrive to my consciousness as an irritation, almost an abrasion of the material of thought.
In some far corner of dream, someone wants, needs, with such vehement, unreasonable fervor,
that even from here I’m afflicted with what I can only believe is an equivalent chagrin.
I try to think of ways to send back if not reassurance then an acknowledgment of my concern,
but I realize this would require not only energy and determination but a discernment, a delicacy,
the mere thought of which intimidates me, reinforcing the sense I have of my ineffectiveness.
I begin to be afraid then, the dream is deteriorating; how vulnerable I am in my very connections.
Don’t my worst anxieties rise out of just such ambiguous feelings of communion and debt?
I’m suddenly swamped, overwhelmed in these tangles of unasked-for sympathies and alliances.
Always then, though, through an operation whose workings I’m never forced to explain to myself,
I’m released, the limits of my selfhood are reestablished, the nascent nightmare subsides,
and I’m able to reassume the not-incongruous sense of being alone and with so many others,
with nothing asked of me more than what any reasonable dream needs for its reasonable dreaming,
and the most minor qualms as to what I may have traded for my peace of mind, and what lost.
The Charge
An insistence in dream on a succession of seemingly urgent but possibly purposeless tasks
to be executed for no evident reason beyond the tautological one that dream says they must.
The nature of these undertakings is unclear, imprecise, they can even change definition,
I can never find more than the most ambiguous grounds to justify my obsession with them.
It seems sometimes that far away in the past of the dream a shameful error was committed,
and that these obligations are only my share of a more general rectification or atonement.
Often I can’t tell if what I’m doing is by any sane measure what I’m supposed to be doing,
or whether all my efforts are the groundwork for yet another, still more illogical dream.
I’m never unaware either that I’m squandering time; this undermines my self-assurance still more,
so, the dream still driving me through it, me still helplessly driving myself through the dream,
I begin to think that persisting in this will put me into a state of such unmanageable consternation
that everything in me will simply go awry, leaving me tearing at myself in rages of frustration.
How long this has been under way, I can’t tell; forever, it seems, all the time of the dream,
but maybe because I’ve looked back now, it comes to me that even should these needs be satisfied,
their compulsions slaked, it won’t have been my doing: dream will just have pitied me,
given me surcease, not the satisfaction I’d anticipated despite all, but deflection and distraction.
All I’m left to hope for is that something other than nostalgia or regret awaits me,
that I won’t end up longing for my labors, yearning for the solaces of goals I’d never grasped,
trying to remember when the dream of finishing what can’t be finished ended, or if it did.
The Crime
Violence in the dream, violation of body and spirit; torment, mutilation, butchery, debasement.
At first it hardly feels real, there’s something ceremonial in it, something of the dance.
The barbarisms seem formulaic, restrained, they cast a stillness about them, even a calm.
Then it comes once again, the torment, the debasement, and I have to accept that it’s real.
Human beings are tearing each other to pieces, their rancor is real, and so is their pain.
Violence in the dream, but I still think — something wants me to think — there are
reasons:
ideas are referred to, ideals, propositions of order, hierarchies, mores, structures of value.
Even in dream, though, I know it’s not true, I know that if reasons there are, they’re ill reasons.
Even in dream, I’m ashamed, and then, though I’m frightened, I steel myself and protest.
I protest, but the violence goes on, I cry out, but the pain, the rage, the rancor continue.
Then I suddenly realize I’ve said nothing at all, what I dreamed was spoken wasn’t at all.
I dreamed I protested, I dreamed I cried out: I was mute, there was only an inarticulate moan.
What deceived me to think I’d objected when really I’d only cowered, embraced myself, moaned?
My incompetent courage deceived me, my too-timid hopes for the human, my qualms, my doubts.
Besides the suspicion perhaps that the dream doesn’t reveal the horror but draws it from itself,
that dream’s truth is its violence, that its pity masks something I don’t want to find there.
What I hear now in the dream is the dream lamenting, its sorrow, its fear, its cry.
Caught in the reasons of dream, I call out; caught in its sorrow, I know who I hear cry.
Shells
Shells of fearful insensitivity that I keep having to disadhere from my heart, how dream you?
How dream away these tireless reflexes of self-protection that almost define heart
and these sick startles of shame at confronting again the forms of fear the heart weaves,
the certitudes and the hatreds, the thoughtless fortifications of scarred, fearful self?
How dream you, heart hiding, how dream the products of heart foul with egotism and fear?
Heart’s dream, the spaces holding you are so indistinct and the hurt place you lurk so tender,
that even in dream membranes veil and distort you, only fancy and falsehood hint where you are.
How can I dream the stripping away of the petrified membranes muffling the tremulous heart?
I reach towards the heart and attain only heart’s stores of timidity, self-hatred, and blame;
the heart I don’t dare bring to my zone of knowledge for fear it will shame me again,
afflict me again with its pettiness, coyness, its sham zeal, false pity, and false pride.
Dream of my heart, am I only able to dream illusions of you that touch me with pity or pride?
How dream the heart’s sorrow to redeem what it contains beyond its self-defense and disdain?
How forgive heart when the part of me that beholds heart swells so in its pride and contempt?
Trying to dream the dream of the heart, I hide myself from it, I veil my failures and shame.