Dixie Rhine Dialogue

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=gmail&attid=0.1&thid=136e5054b7434de6&mt=application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document&url=https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui%3D2%26ik%3Db115abb3cf%26view%3Datt%26th%3D136e5054b7434de6%26attid%3D0.1%26disp%3Dsafe%26realattid%3Df_h1f4fpwo0%26zw&sig=AHIEtbTE-tajDe2afBndTO0Tlzin8XvhFw&pli=1

Wolfbower, a Tale of 2008 a.D.

            I wanted everything uber-guestfriendly today. I wanted Oksana allured. A plan was planted for her to eat over, and my buddy Canten beguiled me with assertions that doe who stray to other stags' forests are sniffing them out as potential mates. Even if she was already mated, she had no secure nest. She was not deer enough to him. He was a cold hart. Canten’s words did not hinder me from microbeautifying every mite of territory I owned in preparation for her arrival. I tidied bits of my nest I’d never noticed before. Christians prepare for Christ's Return. I prepared for my girl guest.

          I gave my burrow the thrice over, gleaming up the wood and glassware, and making it natty and nuptial. It became the Natty Bower.

Not wanting to let the commune's officiated cook cook for my guest, I came out a gourmet chef and put my own dish with the communal meal. The house was full of food-loot as supplement to personal shopping. The sum result could beat out the finest restaurant in town. Here we could make a meal out of two hundred fresh ingredients at low cost – if we knew how. I produced a cream of onion-cum-peppers soup stocked with coconut milk, spices, cream cheese and tempeh. I made quinoa griddlecakes stretchy with eggs, topped with brambleberries and cream. Oksana’s a valiant vegevore - so I took out the fleshmeat and put in the flaunt.

          I would taunt her with the best tipple too. I stacked four flasks of mellifluous mead behind etymological dictionaries in my room –  hand-aged honeywine from my own honey vats. The golden barm had newly gone to bottle, and it frothed under the corks. The dew was rank and ripe. If you poured it, it made suds on top of the mug. Malt barley gave it bubbles, but honey gave it bite. I’d learnt the art from Vikings of the Orkneys and Shetlands. Norse girls would let their braids fall down – long maiden ropes wrapping their men. Óðinn had seduced Gunnlǫð the Giantess this way:  Three sips of bloody honey from a goblet. Good Glapsviðr Óðinn, Beguiler Óðinn, had bemused a fertile giant.

          I looked out with raven eyes as I slid over the ice. I was back from the store. The wolves pulling my sledge stopped and gave a hungry whine. I took off the cushions from my coach. I felt like a cateran specialising in conjugal conjury. I cut some runes off an ashen stave – they blew up in flakes. Letters fluttered in the air.

          At rare moments in my life, the shadows of images turn into real light and living skin. Perfectly minding my own business, I stooped over my cooking pot, head potted with projections, and turned and stared at her. At her herself. What on earth was she doing there, even then, even there? Had I séanced her out of the stovetop?

          She asked voluminously,

          ‘What are you cooking?’

          ‘A giant’s meal! What are co-ops for?’ We sneaked up to my room on the top floor. Her questions made me tingly. They kept me on my toes too.

          ‘Do you ever have conflict in your co-op? Do people mind you eating off alone in your room instead of communally? How do you govern twenty-seven people in one house!? How long have you been studying old Germanic languages and why did you start?’

          I was smitten by her questions – it took two hours to answer them. Whenever I looked at her, she never seemed bored. Her lips and eyes sucked it all in. If my mouth went dry, I poured in some burning liquid. Our honeymouths could say no wrong. Still, my diction seemed to drown the thoughts I wanted to say.

She often made long pauses, the kind a person makes who wants something but is afraid to ask. I fancied her hips grew heavy in her chair, freezing her there. She seemed almost pregnant, about to give birth. She could not look away, nor stop asking and answering. Normally very disciplined and orderly, she lost track of time. I looked at her tongue loll behind her cheeks. I saw what she wanted, but daunted. Demure for pretend.

The snow fell on the roads and on top of her car. She fidgeted. I saw her head sag and think, ‘How will I get back uptown?’

          Our faces sat flushed, hushed. The love-bower warped our time. A gust made an hour, a breeze made a sigh. Our tongues heated the air around us. Mouths melted. Discourse volubly enveloped a spell – mouth-spell, eye-spell, tell-spell. Locked in locution, we told our tales till night-spell, when winter-spells forced her goodbye, and our talk tolled Ten pm. Time told me a lie, left me lost in the last hour – what conjuror had shifted all the clocks?

          I watched her in her chair, how far and near she was. Had she moved closer? In trance, the object of observation will seem farther and nearer, and a person will forget who is looking at who, or who is saying what. Was she doing it on purpose – melting me into her – or was I doing that to her? Her face kept filling like a wine goblet. Her hips gave little heaves. I noticed I’d nudged forward the legs of my chair.

          Now and then she pulled herself up – she’s gonna leave, I thought. But then she’d slink down, sit even heavier in her seat. Maybe she wouldn’t go uptown after all, I fancied. Safety wasn’t everything – the strongest prison is pretty damn safe. Whereas I lived in this free-house of love and honey. Twenty-seven people are safer than two. Here we were all deer. All genders rutted.

          At her request, I stopped pouring mead into her glass. I left the leftover sizzling in the bottle, waiting to shoot off its cork another day. Firm in her will, torn from my tale, she planted her feet. She stood up like a tree. Frost covered her fingers and branches. Snow fell on her crown. Outside we glided to her icy metal box and its hot motor rolling. Howls came behind us, wolf-tongues lolling off my pets chained by the drive.

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.

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

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

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)

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.

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.

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]