Ageless Age with Edge

Ageless Age with Edge
welcomes you twofold

Wednesday 23 November 2011

Hart-Crown and the Victory


Hart-Crown and the Victory


 I was alone on the American plains. It was autumn now – the bladetips of grass were white in the mornings. The stems brushed my thighs up to my ears. I walked with untense arms, letting them drag over the frosted stalks of big bluestem, little bluestem and indian grass. I walked eastward where the grass blew more lowly along the wide lakes. I did not halt till I came to the Onandaga, the keepers of the Central Fire of Longhouse Nations. A White Woman fled out from them on a white horse, riding over sunset grass, their icy husks glowing red. She did not stop until her steed was motionless in front of me. I got up behind her on her horse, and we fled over streams and long rows of grass bowing over brooks. We dismounted in a grassland of oaks as I looked back east and saw a sea of horsemen filling the plain. I heard a pounding echo of their hooves, and their voices whooped like trumpets. They called with surround-sound and closed any distance with their gait of long practise.
          I turned to face their baritone voices, and my eyes shot camera like close to their cheeks. Their heads were like spiked towers above their mounts. Gnarled horns grew high out of each shoulder. The Iroquois leader, blood of my blood, tongue of my tongue, took up their rear, then circled to the front. He had a tall upright crown of hazel and hickory growing out of his shoulderblades and collarbones. The veins and bones of his chest were tissued with the wood. The limbs rose upward like forked spears, fingerlimbed and intertwined like wicker. His eyes glowed hazelbrown in the setting sun, and suddenly I was afraid. Around him echoed a growing crescendo of horn-voices: ‘Hiyen watha, Hiyen WATHA Hiyen WATHA, HIYEN WATHA! H I Y E N W A T H A.’
          The lens of my eyes trembled. I zoomed in to an army of thousands. And the man at their head could turn them with one motion of hand or foot or head. He dismounted and cleared the nearest stream, stepped over the bent-grass and came at us under our tree. I climbed up the oak with the White Bride, her garments silken and soft, her limbs round and alabaster. Once up the tree, we met a rival moiety, the people of the Bear. They told me that when this chief of Deerfolk – Deganawida of the Hadinioñgwaiiu – came at me up the tree, I must stab him through the throat and not be soft or hesitant in my thrust. ‘Do not be cruel as those slow to deeds are wont to be – be swift, or we shall kill you ourselves. Death is a mercy in both cases.’
          I looked into his eyes to read their gravity. No levity or cruelty shone in them. But he hunkered in the oaklimbs like a crouched cougar, eyes unfocused in scattervision. He continued, ‘Death is a mercy in both cases, as those with bare feet held under Long House coals know too well. Keep your White Bride, or we shall take her for ourselves. Take your knife. Here he comes beneath you – your friend and foe – Hart-Crown of the Stag.’  
          Hart-Crown’s copper arms grasped the tree-limbs like hard wire, and he slung himself up with ease. His people saw fight as holy rite more than enmity. This made him climb at me calmly – then he smiled, and reached a hand toward me to hail me. I took it, pulling him up, and his grip was terrible in its strength. Up thrust his head, and his crown of horns grew out of the sinews of his breastbones, taller than elk-antlers.
          And when I saw him, I loved him. I spoke to him ‘Friend!’ I wanted to worship him. He was the Great Peacemaker – Deganawida. That is their Immanuel, a Meshiach, heralding reign upon reign of peace.
          ‘If you are not brave enough to kill him, we are brave enough to kill you,’ the Bear men told me. I drew my long knife and thrust it downwards with a twist into Hart-Crown’s neck above his collarbone. The blood fell on my hand and red all over the White Bride.
          The White Bride trotted slowly beside me. I’d not given her the sanctuary she chased after, and I’d slain a leader I loved. But when I looked back, I saw the sun set over his high horns of hickory. I saw him hanging limp from the tree boughs. Then on the ground beneath the tree walked a man, and he circled the tree nine times. When done, he picked up a hazel fiddle and a willow bow strung with golden hairs, and he played my victory.
          I retreated. I retreated west from Longhouse Lands, and I did not see the White Bride again. I walked alone. Dusk fell deep on Lakota Savannah. I quickened my pace and began to lope on two legs, then on four. I bounded on my paws. Spent, I threw myself down and slept in a prairie oak-grove, and I dreamt. Rhythms of canines lolled over me:

Blacksky on frost field,
Shadowtree on slumber-den,
dusk over lakota savannah. 

I watched and I waited
under oak tree
on hunger-hill.
Lolled for bloodtooth and bloodcheek,
reddened with life.
So a big black wolf, a she-wolf, brought me food. 
Piece by piece, she fed me.
Loping, she-lupus came and went. 
Tossle-mane, raven-fell, tangle-thick, she lay near me. 
Side by side, we tore and ate.
She sought me, warmed me, braved me, outloped me. 
In dark of night, she shifted –
stood up wolven
and woman.
Thick black hair on whitesky skin.
Do not know her,
Never saw her awake.
With her I’ll share
and share alike
the carcass.

Tuesday 25 October 2011

Slacktrack

Slacktrack


Slowly
stalling,
neigh calling,
horse-sighing
nay.

Stallion heaving
breast-swollen breath.
Hot throat, clammy neck,
hoarse.

Sinews welter,
withers twitch
with weather sweat
on lather neck.

Dimlight dawn fondles
his fetlocks,
wet-clung with frost,
wreathed in white dew,
snowhair damp on hazel-locks.

Muzzle heat,
Nostril mist,
he missed the pounding herd
on horse-mate steppe.
Now footcuffed,
he coughs.

Sacked,
he bows,
sag-eared.

I prick my ears, pry my eyes,
feel stung
on tip of tongue
stuck to my roof
of horse-mouth,
wracked by words
wrought on wind,
spell-written,
twisted from bit,
wrung from bridle.

I trace his pace
with racing step,
with sudden fall,
braked.

Sigh-bitten,
known in his nose,
he passes by my sky-window -
my fleeting car riding by.
I stare out
at star-lit mane,
hushed
by his faltered rush.

Stagger foot.

Slow from fold,
slow bridle gate.
Bridal gait sloth,
now life-cut.
No mate.

He knew by their walk it led away,
He knew by their stealth, they stole him.
Stolen from stall, slackened slow,
His hoof-fall fell quiet.
He smelt on their hands the sweat of a fall,
He felt on the wind the breath of a stop,
He heard the train down a life-long rail,
on the tracks of unknown days,
the way he wondered why clop.

He nosed the rime-sighs of night
under heft of heavy riders.
He reared at their whispers,
at tones unknown.
Their hush-mumbles rang
in his marrow and bone.

Firesky smouldered
on eaves of wood
in the beams of dawn,
on edges drawn
in the margins of night.
He tracked the chart of days
on the footprint folds
where he danced
a horse trance,
stepped a last trot,
as lovers in Llanfihangel
careered and pranced
in red-fire hall
in the late dew
of a late Fall.                                

Nathan Paul Hillman, 24/25 October 2011

Monday 17 October 2011

COSMOGRAPH: The Alpenaxis

                I changed trains along the Rhine where it elbowed away from France along the north border of a weird country. I was next told to catch what people called the Gleitenbahn, the Glide Rail, all the way to The Academy, a long arm of a new UK university system. As a new non-British initiate, I was requried to matriculate upfront with my passport.
                 I walked dutifully down a long, sterile corridor – you know, the kind in airports that would hypnotise you or turn you into a Zenner if you weren’t so stressed about making your plane. By the time I reached the end of the wing, I was forced to walk through a narrow gap of opaque, bullet-proof dividers until I reached a British official’s desk. Each officer was dressed in dark blue – almost black like a bruise.  We did an heroic exchange of paperwork and I came away with an ornate visa stamped in my passport. The stamp was shaped like an octagon on an axis.
                When I exited into the night air, I craned my neck to see the tops of fir trees. Their rows blinded my vision – I reeled back and flung back my head, trying to see their tops. They were so blue-black they were schwarrrz. Yes, schwarrrz, the way a German lecturer once pronounced the word when he was describing the Black Forest. The trees hemmed in the Academy Campus, blocking my view.
                Then I looked south. I saw one silver top, a sharp peak. It began to spin on an axis. I stepped through the trees and into the high, black air. The stars glinted near my fingers. As if I’d the eyes of a satellite camera, I saw pinprick lights over a land of pinnacles. The land turned like a ragged wheel. It ran spinning up its own axis, then spun back down, then stood still. The national borders gleamed beneath me like a puzzle frame made of lazer, making the shape of one helluva cookie – Helvetia.
                She stood there still under the midnight, a gleam of icy lake and mercury mountains. Her land rolled out beneath me, then grew bigger and bigger until my feet stood firm. I bent over, fingered the groove of a valley, massaged a mountain peak, trolled my fingernails on the bottom of an icy mere. I crouched down to dip my hand in the southwest depths of the Bodensee, the Bottom Sea – Lake Constance. Then I sat down inside a stone amphitheatre as wide as the nation. Three sat in the audience. One, an Alemannian, got up and walked over to me. He spoke Switzer, High Alemannic – no French, no Italian, no Rhaeto-Romance.
                ‘Don’t you need a Bierhalle? Turn around.’
                 I obediently turned my back and saw a steep-gabled lodge of wood, high as a mountain, built on a plateau of sheer rock. A spire of mountain, like a conical helmet, spiked upwards from the top of the lodge. I strode to the west flank and stepped onto the plateau – one step. I stood hundreds of feet above. I gladly gripped the weight of the door. It was as thick as the length of my arm. Made of cherry maybe? I was possessed with a desire for red – red wood, red leather, red ale, red flesh, red faces.  I clopped over the planked floor.  My feet sounded like hooves. My face beamed. I looked at my hand – it was ruddy in the red light. The guests were fiery, but no one howled or bellowed. Instead, they droned in deep voices like instruments planted in the roots of the Beer Hall. They whispered like Finns in a sauna. They sang. Not like hoarse-skreaking sportsmen, or lung-belting soldiers:  They sang like wolves on the tundra.
                They weren’t quite Swiss – they were High Bavarians of the Silvretta Alps, skirting the interzone between Austria and Switzerland. Their hall was made wholly of wood and stone. They sat on benches, on tables, in seat-niches carven into the walls. The hall’s central axis was a black mountain, also shaped and shelved, filled with beakers, goblets, tankards, truncheons, flagons. Along the outer walls sat Gesellen – ‘hall companions’ – splayed over benches draped with deerhides. They sat in chairs built into recesses inside the walls, with seat-backs shaped like boars, wolves and stags. Whenever my eyes met theirs, the Gesellen would lean their upper bodies sidelong off their seats, crane their heads sideways, nod, shout my health, then sit down hard as they dashed their tankards on the wood.
                ‘Prost! I nodded, holding their gaze longer than the Anglo-American world allowed. I sat down in the human sway of the benches. The voices rose and fell like rivers, babbling to a trickle, at last to a single draught. The banter was poured straight down, fearless, straight up.
                My bench-fellow leaned his head toward mine. ‘What do you think, mein Bube? Want to join our firehood, our heartwood, our hot souls? Want to be raked over good hot coals?’
                I opened my passport and fingered my student visa. The Bavarian Geselle looked at me with wry amusement:
                ‘Ach, Akademie, Akademos - Of a Silent Place. Used to mean that, you know that. Your island Academy's silent - buckets of beer but no Biergärten. There's drink but no fellowship. You get drivel from the betters drunken by the lowers, the drunken lowers. There’s always an offish druid leering over his loud crowd. Silence above. Bellowers below. It's the loudness of ... Loud Silence. They scream about everything but each other. They know everything but each other.’
                At last I got up to leave. One of my companions stood up, set a weighty hand on my right shoulder, looked up the mountain and spoke out in strange Bavarian: ‘Du, hiar schraibmma Komerodschoft med gross’m K.’  Here we spell Kameradschaft with a Big K. A great big K.
                I went downstairs, beneath Beer Hall and deep inside Beer Hall Mountain. I walked into a living room parlour. A colossal Kachelofen, a tile stove, rose from ground to roof and spanned the height and bredth of a wall. Doors of cast iron opened at its mouth – the rest was tawny tile, smooth as marble. Its perimeters formed benches and seats. I sat down on the hot tiles to warm my middles. I peered through a tiny passage and saw a wide-hipped woman boiling water. She turned and stared at me where I sat near her kitchen. I fidgeted, and asked, ‘Entschuldigen Sie mir bitte, darf ich hier rein? Pardon me, ma’am, may I come in?’
                ‘Du darfst, You’re allowed.’

-composed by Nathan Paul Hillman, 17 October 2011 & 14 April 2011

Monday 10 October 2011

Slitherworm

       I’m walking like a giant, a hill at a step. I step over valleys. Do not let me wound my bare feet on the biting twigs of trees. The plants slither far below. They crawl beneath my foot-fingers. The valleys grow wide – I can’t step over them. I touch down low the tips of my toes, then jerk my feet up, nervously, draw them up to the hill. I hunker on high ground, reclining.

     ‘Glass of wine? Reddest we have.’

      ‘Thank you’, says I. ‘If I spill, it won’t spoil your divan. It’s a pretty scarlet.’

     ‘Do you like my hill? It’s a blood-red couch above swarming holes below. Here we avoid infection by means of comfort. We fight cold with warmth, while you fight cold with cold.’

     ‘I’ve been stepping on snakes.’

     ‘They can’t hurt you if you learn the right walk. Walk on them right and they can’t bite. They can’t enter your body if you don’t commit your weight. Don’t get too carried away with gravity. If you dismiss gravity, that’s when you get carried away, and lifted up.’

     I look way down, down and nether-down, beneath the nest of couches on high to the nest of worms below. All my friends and family sit flushed and happy around me, cradled in the crook of the hill, the nook of their nest on high.

     Down below the earth moves in a filigree of flesh. The ground slithers, purple, green and blue. The valleys heave with worms. I step down, looking at greener hills further off and further north. Egypt – land of bread and sweets and soft lords – you’re no home to me.

     I’ve a long way to walk. But will I get to keep my legs? I use them - I wade into the river. It's muddy and brown, opening into ponds between rivers. Rivers and ponds. Slither.

     'Is it safe to wade, wade and drink?'

     'Don't fret, have at. Don't worry at the waters that go under. The underwaters will keep you. Don't defile our Nile!'

     I look into the water and see the depths slither. They teem with sinewy serpentine forms with heads like fanged puff adders, bodies like eels, mouths like lamprey mouths, bulbous eyes like toad eyes. I probe one with a long knobby branch - it sticks to the stick. I pull upward - the thing coils out of water, stuck to my rod, to my finger-tree. I recoil. ‘Those things are vicious’, says my uncle. ‘They’re called Fishstrikers and they’re killing all the fish.’ My father, trying to be an optimist, says in a calm, curious voice: ‘But have you seen their eyes? They’ve beautiful eyes. Beautiful eyes.’

     I walk on. I step to the music of the charmer - right on top of the worms. Worms in the bottoms of the hollows.

     I see a distant friend in the distance. He's far, closing in. He charges me, remarking, ‘If you want to avoid infection, all you need to do is get a pendulating lilting motion going between the rises and the dips. See here, watch me. Do as I do.’ And my friend goes off bounding, singing as he lopes, lunging up, falling back, care-free on his free feet. ‘Don’t get attached – get lost in the movement. Do you think I got snakes? I aint got a wormy beast in me.’

     I give it a try. I go on a long journey, up and down. Up and down. Down and up.

     I look at the veins in my forearm, the rivers of my flesh. I see blue under the membrane. Not the blue sky above – but the blue sky below. Something like a thousand tiny ribbons is moving through my blood, my blue blood. Larvae. Snake babies, sneaking into my Innermost In. Inn-vading the Inn-keeper. Won’t the worms grow until they burst the veins?

     The Egyptian princess sits on her divan, a toad for the nematodes. She’s afflicted by little dragons inside her. I hear her cry – ‘I walked too long in the valleys, tried too long to reach the hills. Now snakes are crawling out of my legs. My rotting legs. So amputated, how will I walk to Paradise?’

~~~Written by Nathan Hillman



My Influences in Fiction:

Kafka
Novalis
Sigmund Freud
George MacDonald
J.R.R. Tolkien
David Lindsay (Voyage to Arcturus)
William Morris (Well at the World’s End and The Roots of the Mountains)
G.K. Chesterton (Manalive)
James Joyce
Snorri Sturluson (Snorra Edda)
Elder Edda, Beowulf, Muspilli, Heliand, Anglo-Saxon & Old High German narrative poetry, Scots-English ballads, Danish & Swedish ballads, northern European folksong
Irish, Native American, Uralian, and Siberian mythology & narrative
Old and New Testaments
Tarjei Vesaas
Sigrid Undset
Knut Hamsun (especially Pan, Mysterier, Sult, Landstrykere)
E. A. Wyke-Smith

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


QUOTATIONS OF SOURCES BEHIND CREATIVE WRITING EXCERPT



Upon Corpse Strand, far from the sun,
she saw a hall – its doors open North;
Its roof shafts dripped with venom drops –
That hall’s wound with spines of serpents.
(Völuspá, ‘The Prophecy of the Seeress’, The Elder Edda, Strophe 38. Cōdex Rēgius, Iceland, 1270s)


‘Wrap the emerging end of the worm around a stick and slowly pull it out.’
(Ebers Papyrus, 1550 BC)



WORD LORE

Dracunculiasis: Latin, ‘affliction with little dragons’

Other names: Dracunculosis, Dracontiasis, Guinea worm infection, Medina worm, Serpent worm, Dragon worm, Pharaoh worm, Avicenna worm



DREAMS

My whole life, I’ve had dreams of snakes and worms that bite or burrow. The first dream I ever remember, at age 4 or 5, featured our garden shrub turning into worm-limbs with straining snake-heads like cobras.



GLIMPSE OF AN HISTORICAL WOMAN INFILTRATED BY ‘LITTLE DRAGONS’:

The Manchester Mummy Project (1980s – present): In the mid 1980s, a calcified male Guinea worm (Dracunculus) was found in the abdominal cavity of a royal teenage mummy girl (1000s BC, New Kingdom, Egypt). Her lower legs – the usual exit point of the female worm – had been amputated. It’s not easy to wind out the worm without breaking its spaghetti body – and there may be dozens more to grow and writhe out through the skin. The exit holes lead to gangrene & ulceration over time.




SOURCES


Clinical Microbiology Reviews. American Society for Microbiology: Dracunculiasis (Guinea Worm Disease) and the Eradication Initiative, April 2002. (http://cmr.asm.org/cgi/content/full/15/2/223#Morphology, 2011)

‘Dracontiasis in Antiquity’, P. B. Adamson. Medical History, 32: 204-209, 1988. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1139858/pdf/medhist00063-0093.pdf )

The Ebers Papyrus: A New English Translation, Commentaries, and Glossaries. Paul Ghalioungui. (Cairo: Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, 1987). (Quotation from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebers_Papyrus, 15 July 2011)

Edda. Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern. Gustav Neckel, ed. by Hans Kuhn (Carl Winter, Heidelberg: 1936, 1962, 1983).

The Imaging of Tropical Diseases: Guinea Worm Infection (Dracunculiasis). (http://www.isradiology.org/tropical_deseases/tmcr/chapter27/intro.htm)

Numbers 21:6. English Standard Version

Under Wraps: Rosalie David in Conversation. Interviewed 6 February 2001. A Publication of the Archaeological Institute of America. (http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/mummies/ , 2011)

Sunday 21 August 2011

The Table of the Tree

Dream, Aug 15, 2011: I climbed the flanking planks of the Great White Porch in Michigan(Patterson Rd) and reached a beech, wrapping my leglimbs around treelimbs until I was in the tree-crown along the roof and porch-eaves. Below me stood a table lit by bough-swung lamps hung from the tree, its trunk rippling up the middle of the porch floors. It twined and wound round the laden table as I scaled down its branches to sit with family over a heartening meal.

Monday 27 June 2011

Wolf Alive

Dream dreamt on Summer Solstice, 2011:

While out walking, I saw a huge, black, starving wolf bound to a steel cable in a garden. Vipers and cobras had been set out, guarding the length of the wolf's reach, to hem him in and cow his spirit. I brought the pining w(olf)lupus food and water day by day, using sticks and rubber snakes to push and bully the snakes into the tyrant sham-owner's house. Day after day, the wolf pawed and nosed me when I came back, until one day he laid his heavy feet on my chest while I rested next to his warm body. We lay weary side by side, lonely for touch, trying to regain our sapped strength. From this point we could not be separated. At long last, finally daring, I took off the wolf's chains and freed him from the line. As soon as he was free, a red collar of silk appeared around the black-fur neck. After a murmured exchange, I pulled myself onto his back and rode him like a horse to the house door.

Wednesday 18 May 2011

Dreams of Ascending and Descending

I fell asleep and dreamed that two middle-aged female folkdancers tried to trick me out of my debit card by seducing me into a hotel room adjoined to the dance hall. On their bed I found, in the nick of time, piles of old debit cards which they had pickpocketed from other dancers. I checked my wallet and stormed out of the room. The next evening during the same dance party, a food competition took place. The idea was to cook an appropriate, symbolic or favourite meal for the person you most loved or admired, place the ready meal on their bed pillow, and then have an event-wide taste contest for all the dishes. The winning dish would be paraded by the winning couple - either a new or an established romance. I went to my own bedchamber and found smack upon my pillow a large leafy 'Welsh Salad', and it was labeled as such in big letters. Runes had been scrawled on my blankets and walls, but when I read them I realised that the language and lettering had been bastardised. Some guests came by and I tried to explain to them how Anglo-Saxon and Norse worked ... to no avail. The same two female folkdancers appeared in my room, dipping their bare fingers into my Welsh Salad and putting the dressing covered bits into their mouths, licking their fingers, sticking their fingers back in the greens as they said "mm mmm mmmm!". They asked me why I liked Welsh things, Norse things, Irish things, English things. I began to give them a beautiful reply and then stopped: They were mocking me. Why should I tell them anything? The Welsh Salad wasn't Welsh food after all, nor made in my honour. They had not the slightest understanding of me, my devotions, passions, or timewoven branches of influence. [17 April 2011]
I dreamed that I walked in the sky with friends upon 'monkey bar bridges', connected by spiral stairways up & down. I decided to crawl along a sky-way by myself, going into a metal tube twisting & spiralling through the sky, big enough for one adult to inch through feet-first. The sky-tunnel was filled with children playing. I become claustrophobic, worried I won't get through, or that I'll get trapped by people somewhere in its long twisting length. [20 April 2011]

Two days later, I go on a 'history walk' in a German city. A railway with only one above-ground crossing courses through town. Cars & people must use underpasses. I go down into tunnels on the tour: the Guide takes us from room to room, in which a living history exhibit can be seen across all eras as if it's occurring in present time. 18th & 17th centuries seem most widespread. Period Germans sit around long banquet tables. Guide points out 'Königin Elisabet' & describes her reign. She sounds & looks a lot like *our* Queen Elisabeth I, I remark. ! We eventually come to a room entitled 'Scientific Racism' & the Guide cleverly points out how it is a far worse form of racism than that of any earlier period. A black man present interprets this as a novel idea: "Scientific racism must have led to unthinkable atrocities", he says. [22 April 2011]
The following day I'm in a Rem-Wisconsin work residence - a rather stuffy house, and I'm trying my best to support my client when my close friend (Pretton Finnskir) suggests I escape with him through the walls. We wind through passageways in the walls between the rooms until we find an opening onto the roof. At this point, he disappears. I'm left trying to find a way down from the roof. He roars up with a pickup truck pulling a wagging wagon. I motion for him to drive the wagon closer to the house eaves so I can safely jump down. He doesn't get it and stays put. I yell at him then to push the wagon closer. Still he doesn't do it. I yell again, putting it in the firmest, plainest words. He doesn't move. He's impossible, I think. I then notice the wagon is in free motion, distached from the truck, wheeling toward me. It makes a curve and swings lengthwise past the house. I leap down as it passes - using the wagon's own momentum to break my own fall. As I land, my feet push the wagon horizontally faster, and I crouch in it as it speeds away from the house. Escape from America? [23 April 2011]
Then five days after that I find food thrown away outside which I try to salvage by cooking. The food consists of gigantic beef hearts - and I look on all the meat with concern and value, and decide I will cook it, save it, eat it, thrive off it. I come upon a lame husky dog - the dog and friend of my childhood - whom I heal by raising him to walk beside me, and guiding him between two walking poles attached to a halter. Soon he is his prancing self again. Next I'm indoors in a room that looks like a hair salon and I witness overweight women giving each other 'grief therapy' by cuddling each other in big chairs. [28 April 2011]
In the same sequence of sleep, I go into a huge house-hotel where students have stuffed their papers, books & tp in the lavatories, blocking them from use. Dance parties move from room to room. Former Madison co-opers fill the parties, & none would engage me with dance or conversation. Many would not even brave human eye-contact. The event shifts to a German ball with German speakers talking to me and making steady, engaged eye contact. Their dramas and balls shift from room to room as in _Russian Museum_, & I have to work to follow them or dance with them. Then I find myself on a Jutland west coast watching eel fishermen stuff long eels into groundtanks accessible through small holes - just big enough to slide an eel into. The fishermen work for a while as I watch and listen to their Danish, able to understand bits and pieces. A huge wave rises up offshore. They call to me in Danish to help them build a stone wall to protect their catch. I lift big stones to help them as they speak in clipped Jutlandic in the wind.
The scene shifts to my mom & dad's Michigan pond - which is now a longer Oval with a bridge over an inflowing stream at one end, & a house veranda leading down to the bridge, the walkboards lined with marsh flowers, sedge & reeds. I look in the water & see the whole pond slither. It's teeming with long serpentine creatures: They have heads like puff adders with fangs, bodies like eels, mouths like lamprey mouths, eyes like bulbous frog eyes. I probe one with a long stick - it sticks to the stick, coming up out of the water with Gollum eyes. In fright, I put it back. Run inside to tell Dad & Dennis Hillman (my uncle). Dennis explains to me, "Those mean things are called "Longfang Fishstrikers" & are viscious, killing all the fish in the pond." Then Dad, diplomatic & stoic, trying to be optimistic, says: "But they have beautiful eyes. Beautiful eyes." ! A jarring, apocalyptic conclusion contrasting with my own reaction: They were the most ugly water animals I'd ever seen. :-/ [28 April 2011]

The next day, I was running up a steep green hill ending in a cliff over the open ocean. I knew I was dreaming, & laughed like there was no tomorrow. I could leap six feet uphill in a single step. Someone ran next to me: "Be careful", s/he says. I said I could wake myself up anytime I needed, but why do that? Just before I get to the brow up the sea-hill, I think I've really woken up: Instead, I am telling someone *in my dream* that I'd just been 'lucid dreaming'. [29 April 2011]

Now early in May I attended a 'Welsh concert' in a banquet hall *above* a forest. I climbed down through floorboards into trees by swinging my body down onto limb platforms that went lower & lower till I was in a passage-maze in the ground & roots. I walked down a corridor with party decour, saw a two-feet wide passageway to right where Mark Wilkins (Wales) operated on sound systems in the walls. [5 May 2011]
Twelve days later I was bouncing up & down hills & wet, snake-filled valleys. The hills turned into couches (fellowship spots), the valleys writhed with purple, green & blue snakes, worm-like, most venomous in the world. Antedote to bites, according to one witness (BMH), was to arc up & down the couches & dales bionic-man style. I leaped up & down pogo-like btw cosy sofas & snakey marsh. Then looked at the vessels in my arms - they were swimming with 'snake-larvae'. Won't they grow bigger & burst the veins? [17 May 2011]

Thursday 21 April 2011

Cosmographs - Dreams I, II, III and IV


COSMOGRAPHS


Dreamt 14 April 2011

I. Middle Europe: Glide-Rail, Hotel-Hatch, Girl Rescue, The Academy, Mountain Mapland, Alpenland, the Alpen Lodge


I fly over to Europe with A.S. and land in eastern France, catching a wind-surfing airborne train called the Glide Rail eastward to a placed called the Academy in Helvetica and Raetia – the Alpenland. It swished over some kind of rails without making contact, never backtracked, never went in straight lines or made angles. It moved in spirals, arcs, circuits. A.S., a former girlfriend, resurfaced as a life companion, and joined me on the eastward rail. We overnighted with my youngest sister in a town between France and Switzerland in a strange hotel-cubby attached to the railway station. It was in lieu of a hotel or b-n-b, affordable, and provided fold-out beds, fold-out microwave, wardrobes in the wall, and space enough not to feel suffocated. Its door was human-sized, no crawl-hole door (like the Asian variety), and the bed space was wide and commodious. As I wasn’t weary, I stayed up all night, went off walking in the town and returned around 5-6am, meeting A.K., a Madison friend staying in the same cubby, at 6 a.m. on a stairwell weirdly reminiscent of my Michigan parents’ stairs. He confided in me that our fourth companion had been physically aggressing toward A.S., forcing her to hug and kiss him under the covers. I remembered her fearful near-rape experiences in Russia, and dashed up the stairs to save and comfort her. I braced my shoulder and tucked in my head for a side-body slam against the door off the momentum of a running start. Why I thought this would effectively help anything in the dream, I'm not sure. I charged the hatch door, thinking to bash it down, but found my body moved slow, inched as in slow-motion, lost force and speed, and touched the door with a soft shove by the time my shoulder made contact. More determined than before, I walked backward, reared up, and charged back at the door, shoving my shoulder off a taut hip right before making contact. Again, my taut strength went loose and slack, and my muscles limp. I could barely push on the door. I reared back and charged again, again making soft touch. This time, the door opened on its own, swinging on its hinges, as if someone had pulled back the door and let me in at that moment. I saw A.S. with hands over her face in one corner of the hotel cubby, her knees on the bed, tears covered by her fingers. My sister Sara busied herself with her luggage at the opposite end. Not far from the door itself I saw the aggressor slinking, silent as a shadow, looking at no one thing, eyes empty, body still and poised. He seemed more demon than human. I rushed at him, told him to get out and never come back or I’d squash him like a slug. I bolted over to A.S., giving her my arms, and she drew me down into the bed, crying, relieved, confiding. She told me what had happened, and we kissed and kissed, lips soft and insistent, mollifying the nerves, brushing over our fluttering mouths. This went on a long time, for hours, deep in talk and affections, until we fell asleep. We slept into the following night. At morning and after packing, I saw A.S.'s stalker slinking outside the door, and we walked past him, not speaking a word, swiftly catching an air-rail (Glide Rail, Gleitenbahn) southeastward toward Switzerland. A.S. took a further train to Moscow, leaving me at Colmar or nearby, from where I railed along the Rhine to the heart of Alpenland.


Having to change trains along the Rhine border, I couldn’t fetch all my luggage off in one go, and had to make two trips. But the Air-Rail hummed off before I could embark again, and I wandered worriedly to an Inspector to report to him my case; he advised I take a high-speed omnibus to the air-rail’s next change-over stop near Basel, and weirdly this speed-bus got me there ahead of the train and thus I fetched my overload of gear. I carted my worldly possessions to the Intake and Immatriculation Desks which existed at the bottom of long hallways in the Academy just south of the highest Alps in the heart of Switzerland, which in the dream I named 'Austria', but a map showed it wasn't. In this Switzerland, there was no French, Italian or Rhaeto-Romanisch sections - the whole region was linguistically Alemannic. Why was I so sure it was Switzerland? When I stepped off my transport, I saw the whole map of the land and its boundaries before me, tiny and clear as a satellite photo from space. A midnight, lit by stars, gleamed overhead, and beneath me all was dark except for the glow of the mountain peaks, lakes and a luminous line making up the state boundary of Switzerland. The land rolled out beneath me as a miniature of the real thing, then grew bigger and bigger before it spun on its axis like a top. It wheeled around several times before halting in its usual north-south position. Or perhaps whatever enabled me in the dream to look down on the whole land was itself spinning? When I landed in a forest next to the Academy's doors, the trees towered above me, but the nearby mountains looked my own height, strokable, denser with distance. Far-off mountains appeared vast and huge, the normal size one would expect, but I stooped over their rocky foreland to inspect their deep ravines, as if I were a Giant from another world. The other Swiss around, visitor students included, were my equal in size. Were we all giants? One could walk from the south to north border in a day (or hour?) or two, if only one didn't get trapped in the rocky chasms, or reach out and touch far-off mountain tops as if you were a creator of matter, inspecting their contour and texture. Switzerland wasn’t smaller there than it actually is in our world - everything in the dream spoke of its vastness. But somehow the humans there had grown. They could zoom in and out, touch things upclose, or withdraw small and dwarfed again.


Next I had to check in to the Academy, and I walked down a long carpeted aisle to a row of separate desks, each with special queues for different citizens, and all ending face-to-face with someone to handle Immatriculation and Intake. The place wasn't crowded - I was one of two or three others around. When I got to the desk, a man with a British accent handed me skeleton keys, books, a map, and a ticket to something called the Alpine Tour. Outside, the trees towered over me, the tallest trees I’d ever seen. Their tops were hidden in clouds. About this time I pulled out my mobile phone to ring my parents a continent away; not surprisingly, the phone had an error message in red script straight across the screen. Then to my delight I realised the Academy had issued me a new one, but I don't remember ringing anyone on it. When I arrived at the Alpine Tour, I sat myself down in an amphitheatre made of smoothed stone terraces which made wide east-west semi-circles the whole bredth of the Alps. Stars stared down in silver shafts, making mountain peaks and pools glitter. I walked down the theatre steps to get in closer to the mountains' feet. I leaned over the tall peaks, touched their tops, fingered the grooves of their dales. Either I was a giant, had telescopic vision, or the whole land had been shrunk - but the latter did not at all seem believable. If anything, the vastness of the whole area seemed increased because I could make out how big it really was in once glance. I walked east and north a few paces to a lake, the biggest in the region; its dark waters glinted in the starlight. I reached toward it with my finger, wanting to dip it in the lake. I trailed it in the water, rippling it along the shore. I let my finger trail into the silt, and spotted a deep drop along the length of the shore. A great mountain rose up from the middle of the lake. It filled all the lake’s middle, and its slopes tapered sharply down into the depths, making the lake deepest along the edges. “Don’t you know den Bodensee?” asks a recognisable voice, waggish and sarcastic. I turn to the speaker and see Andrew Bohl, a German speaking friend. He’d made his way to the Academy as well. Allured as I was by the ‘Bottom Sea’, the German designation for Lake Constance, something else stole my attention as soon as I laid eyes on it. It was a timber-framed lodge, rising south of me high as a mountain, built on a mountain plateau and gabled on the tops. I turned around and walked in its door at mountain level, treading on the planked floor which ran in a circle around a mountain forming the lodge’s axis. It was a circular Bierhalle. Along the wall sat Gesellen (hall comrades) in booths, ornately carved, upon benches built into snugs in the wall with seat-backs made of carven stags, dark as darkest wood. When my eyes caught those of the Gesellen, they would lean their upper bodies off their seats, stretching their heads sideways and nodding, then dash their tankards on the wood tables to my health. “Prost!” I nodded, eyeing each one and pleased to the heart. I saw a side door at stair-head, and filed downwards to a lower floor. To my left spanned a huge hurley rink, but to my right another door, thick as a trunk and heavy with hardwood. It stood wide open and I walked through, straight into a living room parlour large enough to hold thirty guests. A painting ten feet wide hung above the divan; foxes, horses and hounds, hides all ruddy in an autumn sunset, ran along the forest eaves, lusting after hart and hind. Long rugs wrapped the redstained floor of wood; most were white & woolen but one was golden-maned with horsehair and fine-matted along its length. A colossal Kachelofen (tile-stove) rose from ground to ceiling on my right, and spanned the bredth of the wall. Cast iron doors of sundry size opened from its center, and its edges fell low into seats, all made of tile, one looming structure. One could sit along the tile benches to keep warm. The hearth section was made of tawny rough-hewn stone, but the tile seats were smooth as marble, hotwarm to touch. A further passage led off the parlour to the kitchen where a woman stood cooking along a long counter. She turned and looked at me where I stood in her kitchen. Seeing another door off the kitchen, I quickly spoke to her, pointing to the door, “Entschuldigen Sie mir bitte, darf ich hier mal durch?” “Excuse me please, may I go through this way?” She answered in German: “Gehen Sie am besten dadurch wieder hinaus. Eigentlich sollten Sie nicht hier sein, wissen Sie.” (“Go back out through it, that would be best. Actually you shouldn’t be here, you know.”) I nod to her apologetically, then dash out through the door, ascending back up to the Bierhalle.



II. The Runenstammtisch, the Four Corners of the Earth, Palm-Carving, and Ystvir the 'Loyalty Rune'

Hard on the heals of the previous dream, I now dreamt I met with German speakers in Wisconsin for converse in that language. My German Conversation Table colleagues had decided to meet outside on picnic benches along a lake. Stammtisch normally takes place in the Paul Bunyan Room across from Stiftskeller in Memorial Union, but this time we met in a somewhat mythical Tenney Park, high on a hill, ranged along a long long table. When I came there, I saw that all the members were carving insignia into one another’s palms, and the markings left were clearly runes, all straight angled and red with drying blood. The blade went round, and each new blade-wielder cut a rune into his neighbour’s palm, depending on which rune the World Chart chose for that person. This Chart, showing the Four Corners and Four Winds of Earth, went round with the blade, and came at last to my partner, a woman named Jo. She turned the chart round and round, it seemed to spin on an unseen axis, and it burst open in the air into a life-size realm, huge enough to walk inside. Soon it was beneath me and I was hovering over another world like a child hovers over a hand-held mirror beneath its chin, pretending the sky is beneath your feet. I let my gaze fall inside this expanding surface, and I hover-floated over the Earth from end to end. As I looked, I spied a great herd of bison grinding their feet into the dirt along the edge of he Pacific Ocean, making ready for a charge in one rumble east over the American Continent. Sky-high dust rose on the Great Plains, and thunder filled the air. Jo explained that the Native Americans had seen this apparition of might charge at them several times in their history, when the Buffalos first came to them from another world, and made a sound like the Thunderbird folding the world inside out with its wings. I looked then east over the Atlantic to the old North of the Occident, and I saw a red dragon flying over the northern tips of Scandinavia, swooping down upon Iceland, Faroes, Denmark, Germany, Scotland. The dragon stopped over Scotland, and the Chart spun round and round, counterclockwise against a clockwise spinning ring of letters, that wheeling opposite another ring of spinning letters, and that opposite another counter-spinning. When all wheels stopped their whirling, the adjacent letters printed a word across the land of Scotland - the word Ystvir - and the Ystvir rune (unknown to me) stood drawn next to its designation. I was very curious about the etymology and authenticity of this word, and doubted the 'random spinning' of the Chart. How do you know this is an authentic historical word? I asked Jo. She told me that Ystvir was the most ancient Germanic word for ‘Loyalty’, that I could look it up myself (I've yet to research its true meaning) and that this was the rune that the Fates had chosen to be carved into my palm and have me own up to. When I saw the blade she wielded, I told her I would not have that bloody knife cut me, but she must find a clean one, unused and razor sharp. “You don’t want it?” she asked. “I don’t want the bloody blade that’s carved all the others’ hands. You must find for me my own blade, an edge to be used upon me and me alone.” I fished in my own bags and (ironically given my former dream) drew out my Swiss Army knife, handing it to Jo. She took it and with it carved the Ystvir rune into my palm. I do not remember the shape of the actual rune, and (thankfully) found nothing carved into my palm when I woke later. Still it is curious; loyalty is not a virtue I've made very central to daily aspects of my life. I've been loyal to my closest friends and core vision since childhood, but that loyalty (or perception thereof) has meant treachery toward those who seem to defy the former. I've not been very loyal to other things that have come my way and which (in due course) seemed to lead me astray from my former convictions. But as it is for many visionaries, with greater integration of life purpose comes greater loyalty. I hoped it was a sign for me, a sign of broader, integrated loyalty to come.


Upon further reflection, I realise that Germanic dragons and Sioux bison carry a resonance of the same thing: the Apocalypse and the return to Eden's wealth. Dragons herald strife and change, and they hoard the wealth of the world that the humans try to win or keep from them. They also try to keep us out of Eden, while yet embodying fertility, as snakes do in most folk traditions. Bison provide and trample down, herd gently in Eden, or thunder over the wrack and ruin of the diseased Plains, ushering hard weathers and a sweeping Thunderbird. After they charge, a renewed earth can be born. If Ystvir means in Norse what I now think it might (were it an actual compound) - 'The Man Standing Outermost' - then it may be that my looking upon the globe from its edges and rims is of deep significance. I'm on the outside looking down and in. I wish to dart in and involve myself, but am still trying to guage where my place is. The fact that the Ystvir rune appeared on the Earth-Chart over the North Atlantic seemed only natural, given the lines of continuity already traced through my life, such as they exist.


Ystvir, in my sleephazy memory of waking life, could stand in for an actual rune of similar name: Yngvi. Let's follow that track a moment. Yngvarr is a Swedish Viking name, and the historical Yngvarr was a world-traveller. It's in some way built off the well-known god-name, Yngvi, which is ALSO the name of a rune - the rune for the -NG- sound - and is named for the Germanic god *Ingwaz (Norse Yngvi ). Ingwaz is a god of physical fruitfulness and prosperity. But naught to do with loyalty. Yngvarr ( 'Guardian of Yngvi') on the other hand.... ? Perhaps Yngvarr is meant to pun with Ystvir. But I've only guesses. The gods named most loyal/trustworthy are Tiwaz (Týr) and Thunar (Thórr).


Taking a more lexically literal approach, I note that Yst in Norse-Icelandic means 'outermost', and -vir is man or warrior or protector. 'Outermost man'? 'Far-out dude'? Then there is ysta, to curdle milk, make cheese.(!) Dream etymologies rarely pan out....



III. The Paranormal Party

In a third dream sequence, all these fat Danish men gorged on herring, rye bread, butter, sausage, pastry and tortes, and walked around me ten feet high. They drank strong ale and ate strong food all night. Some were thin and sinewy, with long sinewy strength and reach. Many others had bellies so large they had to stick to the couches because they could barely move, napping after every feed. I was tired myself, hadn’t slept much the night before, and slept most of the living day after the party on the couch next to some snoring Danes. The following night, the party continued, and Swedes were invited in as well, filling the second night with Gothland spells and witchery. The dream was all comic light and fun lusty Danes, and suddenly the mood shifts, and shadows wing across the room. Light and darkness shift back and forth. Lights in the rooms start switching on and off, off and on, and sudden darkness or light overtook us. I ran then to check my e-mail, and received a note from S.S. with the heading: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY ALERT. “Note: Paranomral activity will be far higher than usual from Thursday through Saturday night. Partiers beware.” And the party was wyrded out. The lightbulbs seemed to burn out one by one, even as people fell into sleeping stupors one after another. The next morning, I woke at work to find that it was my client's house in which all the partying had taken place. She was bewildered as to why the living room light didn’t work and asked me why not. “What can you expect after partying all night the way you did?” I throw at her teasingly.



Dreamt 15 April 2011

IV. The Four Poles and and the North Pole Dog

In this fourth cosmographic dream, I picked up a handheld map of the Earth. As I looked, the image grew more photographic than symbolic. The longer I stared, the bigger the map grew, until I was hover-floating over it, the real thing itself, straining my eyes to see all its edges, which wrapped under themselves like a fold of paper. Its outer boundaries formed a walkable Rim, a curving precipice one could lean over and peek under to catch the underside of the Ovalglobe. Between all its rims swirled a great ocean with no landmasses to be seen so far I could tell. As my vision widened, so did the Earth itself. I swooped in closer to Four Poles – North, South, East, West. The globe was stretched between four ends, and the wind whirled and gyred from each one. A long Ice Bridge connected all four poles. I set my feet down on the east-rim of this Earth and began walking upward (northward) on the Ice Bridge until I got within eye-sight of the North Pole. I came at it from a point that would have been south of the Bering Sea, and there I stopped short. At the edge of my vision I saw leaping toward me a rollicking Siberian Husky. He came in big trundling bounds, almost seeming to roll as he hurtled over his feet. I stood on a point at the edge of the Northern Ice, looking north, looking straight at him. To my left (West) eddied open ocean. When the dog was halfway between me and the Pole, I saw that it was Kodiak, the dog I had grown up with and so mirrored in mood and habit. He legged the final leg and bowled me over in a big forepaw leap off his hind legs, launched by a fervor of recognition and joy, landing with his armpits square on my chest and his paws at my ears. I reeled backward with his happy weight on me, torqueing my body to one side before we hit ground and rolled and rolled in a dog-man bundle over the expanse of ice.

Friday 8 April 2011

Claustrogyny

Claustrogyny


In Two-thousand-three,
early in Spring,
I had a dream.
I guested at the house
of a hoary woman.
My closest friends followed me there.
She lodged us in a loft,
high-vaulted, windowless.
In the dark above, the rafters ranged unseen;
the floor planks ran under cover of dark.
It smelt of hay and musty dust.
Dry as a bone, but wet on the ends.
Wide wooden columns reached up to the vault, lost in shadow.
Surroundng each pillar, and piled in each corner,
lay half discernable urns and bins,
wooden chests, stacks of hair,
matted and manged.

Thick stuck under heavy covers, she bedded us down on the floor.
Quick as a spider, the spindly crone snuffed out the lights.
She spun her threads.
Wire-wool blankets she spread on the walls. The air hung stuck on the pricks of stubble.
Her silkworm body slipped away in a crack; her white withers sank away in the black.
Gone, O Yes.
Instead of sleep, I began to snoop, what fun.
I ransacked the boxes and bins, cramming fat sacks with handfuls of grime.
With my hands I sliced the viscous air, squeezing the flesh of dust.
I stuffed the sacks as fast as I could, bulging with bird-bones and clodded dung.

With a twist of anger, she reeled around.
Her hands fell like flails, gripping the sacks, dumping the dust and thrashing the chaff.
She vanished with a whish and vampish whisk.
Then sudden return.
Four steps she took, four deadfalling notes descending.
Dank dour power.
With one fast push, she packed a pillow flush in the door.

I crouched and creeped, slunk over friends asleep in the dark.
I heard long pauses between their heaves, their slow lungs lifting their coma chests.
I fingered and felt the flow of the walls, their nooks and nicks, the ungrovelled grooves.
I groped onto hinges, long-line creases, the unseen frame of a door.
In a fit of defiance, I pushed on the wood.
The wall swung open,
the swinging doors of a mammoth mow.
I yanked at the bins, the boxes and bones.
I hurled in haste, heaving in handfuls.
Lifted tables and dressers, desks and chairs - crashed them on tarmac below.
They smacked and splintered far down hard. The wind blew eddies in the sunlit grit.

With troll-steps of wroth, she strode straight back.
My friends rubbed their eyes in the blinding light.
Get out! I bellowed like a billow of wind.
Whirring, a helicopter hovered at the doors. Ropeladders fell for my wobbly friends.
I stayed back, stalking.
In all her height she stood still, hard by a pillar.
I walked behind her, wrapped her,
folded her flanks,
fondled her silken belly,
blew into her ear.
Her head sank back, her ice-eyes shut.
Her anger went out in a pang of pain,
her silkwarm skin turned to snow and stone.