Last night I dreamed that I was back in my niche in the old graveyard on the steppe. It had become a shed, or merely one wall made of rough planks. Hanging on the wall was a mirror, a splendid one, looking freshly polished. When I stepped up to it, I wasn’t merely startled; I was overcome with horror: a stranger stared out at me, bearing not the slightest resemblance to me, as unfamiliar as is possible only in a dream. But with my first blink the horror changed to astonishment, and the astonishment gave way to trust. No trace of burning eyes, hair on end, flared nostrils. A man both weary and gentle gazed out at me, from whose lips I read, “Be not afraid.” Behind him in the mirror I saw a glow like that of unknown stellar and planetary systems in the universe.
For a dream interval neither of us spoke, the only sound the wind whistling in a lone tree on the steppe, like whispering. Then came lip-reading, which felt to me like being poked, sentence after sentence, poke after poke, as I had been poked one time, while swimming in a mountain river, by the lips, the mouth of a trout, poked in the backs of my knees, ever so delicately, a project for peace if ever there was one: “A creature of society, that’s all well and good. But aren’t you also a fundamentally different creature, at once poorer and much richer? And well and good, too, your harmoniousness, your harmonies when it comes to ‘snuggling into the curve of being,’ ‘letting existence bubble,’ in ‘being, joy materialized.’ But where’s the oppositional element, what have you done with the resistance that’s integral to your nature, the nonsociable part that resists being socialized and is occasionally even hostile to society? Yes, what’s happened to the resistance that’s not just integral to your nature but forms its very core, and fortunately so, and not for you alone!? It may be that this resistance, the ineradicable oppositional element in you, is a sickness, but that sickness is also healthful and has curative powers, and, also fortunately, not for you alone. Without resistance, without that sickness, and without that good fortune, nothing can take shape. Without them nothing but ordinary being, being there, and eternally soulless existence. Taking shape! Taking shape! Something’s going on with me, with you! Exciting things are happening with you and me—let them happen! Yes, you exist, and fortunately for us again, ‘the two of us,’ and on this foundation, whether we’re chosen or condemned to it, we’ll build our castles in the air. We, you as well as me, will build those castles to the end of our days. We, you as well as me, never wanted to build anything, certainly nothing solid, nothing massive. Nothing that would add mass to our poor planet, already being built up to death! But those castles in the air of ours: they’re different. A mixed-up mess? Yes, back to the mixed-up mess with us. And write that on a slip of paper and sew it into your garment, or stick it up your ass. Maelstrom of beats, caravan route from a different time. Salt sprinkled into the book of our lives, the lives of us all!”
And then the face of the stranger in the mirror revealed something familiar, something with which I was intimately acquainted: amid all the gray, brown, and already white hairs in his beard were two or three that were red and had remained that way, as red as on the first day, red with a touch of hornet’s yellow, sticking out at me from the mirror like quills, dangerous, poisonous ones. But that was deceptive: with those reddish-yellow beard tips, multiplied as if specifically for the dream, what I had before me was a human face, plain and simple.
Involuntarily, as if whisked away from the mirror, I gave myself a hug, wrapped my arms around myself in the far corner of the abandoned graveyard, which felt as though it had sunk beneath the waves. It was a moonlit night, and atop the gravestones, likewise multiplied as if specifically for the dream and rendered much taller, without inscriptions, wiped clean of inscriptions, perched birds, sleeping in migratory thousands and forming a skyline. Rejoicing filled me; and a lust for adventure.
I looked over my shoulder into a blackness to end all blackness, blackness such as occurs only in dreams, and uttered a war cry—not meant as such—or perhaps meant as such after all?—which I heard in my sleep as inarticulate squawking, and then I called into the void, clearly this time: “Are you there, all of you?”
—Summer and fall 2020