Outside the wind has risen, and here away from town, and near the sea, it seems to have risen with no uncertain fury, so the joints and timbers of the old converted barn that I call home creak and crack (again) like a frail ship on a muscular sea. Was it the louder-than-howling air as it raked the corners of my home… ? Or was it the bold report of an old nail, as it lost its hold and ceded ground in the invisible current’s grip, that shook me and took me out of my dreams? The first assault just brushed the fog of sleep; the second rush illuminated it, a shock of lightning, or the flash of a harbor-light; while the last, most recent, burned it quite away, and left me standing, slightly muddled, softly cursing, wrapping cloth around to warm me at the very deepest bottom of the night.
When we are not awake, the world seems all of what we are, and we all of the world; there’s no distinction. The wind outside would be the wind of me, its railing and rattling intent to have me turned out of my home, or buried in it. Turned out of my thoughts, or bound to them. I shook my head as the building shook, to clear it of the clouds. My daughter, sleeping easily on the sofa in my room, breathed lightly (… would the storm not touch her? I must have granted her some child’s faith, some intangible security, that she should sleep so deeply), but the thought still worries the edges of what is reasonable, that with the next hurl of the gale, the home’s collapse must crush the two of us: so as I turned my mind right-side out again, my bow into the wind, the outside became suddenly, temporarily inside. Then with a force of inner will I set the submerged world skyward once again: of course, of course, this old barn has stood two hundred seasons and Nor’easters: this little blow makes no effect. (So the question is diminished, yet does not entirely disappear from sight).
My dreams no better. Once, I wake with lions in my mind. A second time half-believing that I am in fact, at sea, until the warmth of my bed convinces me, rightly or wrongly, otherwise. I doze between the wind’s large thrusts, only to be stirred awake to yet another vision, lifting from the shadows like a Dickens-ghost, not of a Christmas past or future, but somehow of a present I live but do not live:
FEELING (a real feeling, even if the façade is false?): the Régime has throttled liberty and love like (what I imagine to be) a cement-bunkered Eastern Bloc Metropole; uneasy even to walk the street, restraint can be seen in every step;
IMAGE (unreal, but seen): a close acquaintance is strong-armed onto his apartment-ledge, high above the street, face bloodied, by a military inquisition; and do I not suppose that is happening as I write, in five, in fifty places around the globe? He cannot hold his tongue, I know he can’t.
FEELING (real, and felt): he cannot prevail, he will talk, I am found out (oh, no! his face: he is dead); gathering my few belongings on the fly (a feeling? a fact?), among a hunded gray faces who cannot fly, cannot try; dropping bits and pieces of importance, realizing then their unimportance, leaving them behind: the train I know is set to roll and will not wait; I am running, on the edge of failure and of escape!
IMAGE (seen, not real now, but has been): the platform, the end of the train’s slight jerk as the couplings catch from the engine’s first suggestion, quick jerk, and the diesel’s cough, my passage inching forward and away from me; then arms suddenly beckoning from a last, opened door… my speed! My speed!
Like papers torn from several novels scattered on the floor, the floor of my imagined wind-thrown boat heaving back and pitching forth, the stories’ happenings interleaved as their pages mix and flutter; and there, me, in the midst of them, trying to gather sense, with all the storm within without, and all the storm without whirling within.
Until at last…
I take a breath; with one hand hold close my mind.
~
The world has calmed while I have written — what did I calm? was it wind, or me? — still enough at least so that, if weather raises fist, it can’t be but a parting one, a last small curse with smaller violence left to spend… At last my house and sleep seem safe again. I am cold. I will return to bed.
I wonder at the veracity of Dream, where everything I’ve seen or have been told or taught is poured together into one hallucinatory pot, then stirred up by a snip of wind. How much of what I witness have I lived, not knowing I have lived it? Only offered glimpses, when some outer wildness meets another, inner one, when night is split, when I find myself thrown into it, blinking to clear these dazzled inner eyes.
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